SaaS SEO
How I Do Competitor Analysis for SaaS SEO in 2026
Kamaraj Mathiarasan
|
02 February, 2026
SaaS SEO
Kamaraj Mathiarasan
|
02 February, 2026
Let’s be honest with each other for a minute here. You have to ask yourself why most SaaS founders and marketers actually do competitor analysis for SaaS SEO. I’ve sat in these meetings, and if we look at the industry standard, it usually comes down to one thing: “what are we missing”?
It happens all the time. We look at a competitor, we see their traffic graph going up and ours is staying flat, and we panic. We just panic. We want to know what keywords they have that we don’t. We want to know why they are ranking number one and we aren’t.
But here is the hard truth I have to tell you. Most competitor analysis reports I’ve seen are a waste of time.
I mean it. They are a total waste. Why? Because those reports focused on vanity metrics. It focused on volume instead of value. It focused on who has the most blog posts rather than who has the most customers. And that is a massive difference.
In this guide, I want to walk you through the exact process we use at PipeRocket Digital. We are going to focus on one thing and one thing only: How are your competitors turning search traffic into actual dollars?
When I sit down to analyze a SaaS competitor, I am looking for a blueprint. I have to dig into the competitor’s traffic to identify the specific pages that are bringing in traffic and co-relate it with revenue.
Think about major players in the SaaS ecosystem or huge global players like Zoho. When you look at them from the outside, they seem like giants. But, thanks to tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, we can see their traffic sources.
When we look inside these tools, our goal isn’t just to look at the “Top Pages” report and sort by volume. That’s a rookie mistake. High-volume pages are often low-intent blog posts that bring in readers, not buyers. Instead, our goal is to verify which pages are driving conversions. We need to find the pages where the credit card comes out.
One thing I’ve noticed in almost every client meeting is the massive disconnect in how different teams view competition. It’s actually pretty crazy when you see it happen.
It usually looks like this:
The Founder or the Developer view is specific. They look at a competitor and ask, “Do our features match theirs?”. They are obsessed with the product. If a competitor has a “one-click payroll” feature, the founder wants to build it too. They believe the product with the most features wins.
Then you have the SaaS SEO competitor analysis view. Us SEO’s and marketers don’t care as much about the feature itself, but we care about the language used to communicate to the potential customers. We look at integrations, feature lists, and specifically the terms the market uses to describe them.
Here is why this matters: You might have a better product than your competitor. You might have better code, faster load times, and a cleaner UI.
But if your competitor has aligned their content with the market’s search behavior and you haven’t, they will win every time. Every single time.
If you just scrape everything blindly without this “Revenue First” filter, you’ll end up with a mess. You’ll realize that you have the same features and benefits as they do, but they are winning because they aligned with the user’s search intent better than you did.
This is the step where most internal marketing teams get it wrong. They really struggle here. They have a list of five companies that the Sales team hates losing deals to, and they focus 100% of their energy on them.
While conducting SaaS SEO competitor analysis, you cannot lump everyone into one “competitor” bucket. You just can’t do it. You have to split them into two distinct categories: Direct Competitors and SERP Competitors.
If you treat them the same, your strategy will fail.
These are the companies you talk about in your board meetings. They offer the exact same product, service, and features as you. For example, if you are Slack, then Microsoft Teams is your direct competitor.
Why we analyze them is simple. We look at them to understand the “Money Page”. We need to know exactly how they are selling the product, the messaging, the features, the pricing tiers, and the unique selling propositions (USPs).
But here is the trap. Do not blindly copy their SaaS SEO strategy. Often, direct competitors rank purely because of brand power, not because their keyword research is good. If you copy the structure of a giant brand, you might fail because you don’t have their domain authority.
Now, I want you to open an Incognito window and search for your target keyword. Let’s say, “Best Payroll Software for Small Business”. Who is ranking #1?.
Often, it could be your direct competitor….or not. It might be G2, another company’s blog, or a massive aggregator site.
Why we analyze them is also different. They are directly stealing your traffic and they are ranking based on SERP Intent. The goal is different here too. We analyze them to copy their ranking strategy.
We ask:
Here is the SaaS SEO competitor analysis we use for our clients at PipeRocket Digital. We don’t choose one or the other. We use a mix of both. Here’s what you need to do:
First, use recognized market terms for your product features and take sales arguments from your Direct Competitor. Then take the content structure and depth, and other SEO elements from the SERP Competitor.
When you combine the persuasive sales logic of a direct rival with the structural blueprint of a SERP winner, your page performance boosts automatically. You are giving Google exactly what it wants (structure) and giving the user exactly what they need (product details).
Through years of conducting SaaS SEO competitor analysis, I’ve found that high-quality leads consistently come from five specific types of pages. So, keep this one in your SaaS SEO checklist. When you are running a SaaS competitor analysis, look for these five. If they have them and you don’t, you are leaving money on the table.
These are pages that explain how the software solves a specific problem. Instead of a generic “Features” page, you have a page titled “Automate Employee Onboarding” or “Simplify Expense Tracking”.
Why they work is simple: Users search for solutions, not features. If I have a problem with onboarding, I search for “onboarding automation software,” not “HR database with upload capability”.
These are solutions tailored for specific sectors. For example: “HR Software for Small Business,” “CRM for Real Estate,” or “Project Management for Agencies”.
Why they work is about connection. These pages scream relevance. If I am a real estate agent, I am much more likely to convert on a page written specifically for me than on a generic “CRM software” page.
These are absolute gold mines. These are pages targeting keywords like “Slack vs Microsoft Teams” or “Salesforce vs HubSpot”.
Why they work is timing. The user searching for this is at the very bottom of the funnel. They already know the problem. They already know the potential solutions. They are just trying to decide who is the best provider. If you can intercept this traffic, the conversion rate is incredibly high.
These are pages targeting keywords like “Alternatives to Zoho” or “Best ClickUp Alternatives”.
Why they work is psychology. This captures users who are unhappy with your competitor or looking for competitors similar to these products. It is the easiest sale you will ever make because the user is already frustrated with the status quo.
These are usually blogs that aim to list down SaaS products in a particular segment, for example, “Best Payroll Software” and “Top 10 CRM tools”. They provide digestible and easy-to-compare type content for the readers. Here’s an example of our SaaS SEO agencies listicle.
Why do they work? Even if you are a product company yourself, you can write these lists. You place yourself at #1 (obviously) and objectively review the others below. This allows you to capture the high-intent traffic that usually goes to G2 or other directories.
We create a mind map of these pages using the competitor data and prioritize them. We don’t care about their “How to solve the X problem” blog post right now. We care about these five buckets.
Once you have a list of pages ranking for your target keyword or the list of keywords your competitors are ranking for (that you’re yet to target), we analyze their:
Heading Structures:
Technical Terms:
Content Depth:
If we scrape the structure of the top 3 results, our content becomes powerful because it reflects what Google already prefers.
To beat them, we have to add a refreshing angle or your personal takes and experiences to it. Think about angles like:
Timeliness: Can we update the content for “2026 Models” or “2026 Regulations”?.
Localization: Can we target region-specific keywords that the global competitor missed?.
First-hand experiences: Can we add first-hand experiences with the pain-points or how we solved a problem for this topic?.
Let me give you a real example of how this applies to copy. We had a client who wanted to rank one of their core business keywords.
The Problem: They were ranking poorly for that keyword, stuck on page 2 or 3.
The Diagnosis: When we analyzed the intent of the top-ranking pages, we realized our client’s page was too academic. It was talking about “methodologies” and “frameworks.” The users, however, were searching for a solution to a mess.
The Fix: We changed the landing page copy to address the Intent immediately. We switched the structure to a strict Problem -> Solution framework.
Old Copy: “We are an X firm with Y years of experience…”.
New Copy (First Fold): “Struggling with X? We specialize in designing scalable solutions that help you with [X] in weeks, not months”.
The Result: Within a couple of days, the page went from page 2 to first page, 2nd position of the SERP – with a 30% increase in traffic.
This didn’t happen because we bought backlinks. It happened because we analyzed the SERP intent and fixed the copy to solve the user’s problem immediately.
You can have good content, but if someone else writes better content who Google also trusts, they’ll easily outrank you.
This is the hardest part of competitor analysis because you can’t just “write” your way out of it. You have to build it.
You cannot just write one random blog post and expect to rank. You must cover the topic completely. And if your competitors have an in-depth blog and yours covers just the basics, your competitor will easily outrank you.
If you are writing about “Recruitment Software”, check the SERP for that keyword to see what Google expects you to also write about in that blog. For example, you might find your SERP competitors also including sub-topics like:
If you cover the entire cluster, Google tags you as a “Subject Matter Expert”. If you only write one sales page for a non-salesy keyword, you look like a spammer.
Check the external links of the top-ranking people. If the #1 result has 100 quality backlinks and you have 10, ranking will be difficult.
Note: Quality backlinks refer to backlinks that are attained from relevant websites. You can have 100 backlinks, but if they are from sites that aren’t even close to each other, then they are not worth it.
The Strategy: We look at where they are getting links. Are they from tech magazines? Integration partners? Podcasts?
The Boost: If a competitor has 10 backlinks and we get 20 relevant backlinks from high-authority sites, our page boosts automatically. We appear more relevant to the “internet world”.
Google is aggressively filtering for quality. You need to audit your pages for these signals:
Author Bio:
Freshness:
Social Proof:
When an expert writes content, Google sees it as “helpful content.” When a faceless admin writes it, Google is skeptical.
I want to share a strategy that has worked wonders for us recently. We wanted to rank for a very competitive listicle keyword.
We were competing against G2, Capterra, and massive blogs and here’s how we ranked in the top 3 for that keyword:
We added a comparison table of the top 10 tools at the start of the blog, making it easier for the readers to pause and compare the competitors.
When it came to pricing details for each competitor, we directly took them from any available source (competitor pricing page, G2, user reviews).
Then, we added a clear disclaimer right below:
“Note: We gathered this pricing and feature data from [Competitor Website] and [G2 Reviews] as of [Date]. We strive for accuracy, but please verify with the provider”.
Why this works:
This kind of honesty is rare in SaaS B2B marketing. When you use it, you stand out.
Competitor analysis for SaaS SEO can be a rabbit hole. You can spend weeks analyzing data that doesn’t matter. To stay focused on revenue, you must know what to ignore.
Navigational Traffic: Ignore keywords like “Zoho Login” or “Slack Sign In.” That is existing customer traffic. It looks huge in the traffic reports, but it is useless for lead generation. We only care about Organic Non-Brand Traffic.
“Study Mode” Traffic: We want users in “buying mode”. Ignore queries that look like students looking for definitions (e.g., “History of payroll systems”). Focus on queries that imply a business need.
Minor Pages: Don’t waste time analyzing their Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, or About Us page. They don’t drive revenue.
We built PipeRocket Digital specifically because the B2B SaaS landscape was full of people chasing “vanity metrics” that looked great on dashboards but didn’t pay the bills. We believe that for a software company, SEO should be a revenue engine that must be aligned with your actual sales pipeline.
We follow this specific revenue-led workflow because:
We specialize exclusively in B2B SaaS: Unlike generalist agencies, we understand the complexity of long, multi-stakeholder sales cycles. This “Revenue First” approach is designed to capture qualified decision-makers exactly when they are evaluating solutions.
We prioritize “Money” over “Volume”: We’ve seen too many brands drown in noise. By focusing on high-intent “Money Pages”, we help our clients lower their CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) while scaling their pipeline.
We believe in “Outcome over Output”: As I’d like to say “Most agencies execute tasks. We own outcomes”. This means that we audit your entire funnel to ensure the traffic we generate has a clear path to conversion.
We use data as our North Star: Every strategy we implement is backed by rigorous experimentation and real-time performance tracking. This ensures your growth is predictable, repeatable, and sustainable for the long term.
If you’re looking for someone who can help you scale your SEO efforts or build one from scratch, our contact page is one click away.
If you take nothing else away from this guide, remember this workflow to conduct competitor analysis for SaaS SEO:
When you align your content structure with SERP intent and your product messaging with what the market is actually buying, you get traffic that turns into revenue.
Now, go check your competitor’s “money pages,” strip them down to their skeleton, and build something better.
You can’t just export keywords; you need a strict workflow. First, split your rivals into Direct Competitors (to steal product messaging) and SERP Competitors (to copy ranking structure).
Next, ignore their generic blogs and hunt for the “Money Pages”—specifically Use Cases and Comparisons. Once identified, scrape the “skeleton” of the top-ranking page—its headings and word count.
Finally, take your business rival’s persuasive sales arguments and inject them into the SERP winner’s structural blueprint. That is the complete revenue-focused process.
The guide emphasizes that you cannot rely on surface-level reports or vanity metrics; they are a waste of time. To do this analysis correctly, you need specific tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to actually see the traffic sources.
You need to verify which pages are driving conversions and where the credit card comes out, rather than just seeing who has the most blog posts. Since the core requirement is analyzing live traffic data to correlate it with revenue, you need data tools, not just text generators.
You need to ignore the “How to solve X” blog posts. Instead, look for the five “Money Pages” where the credit card comes out.
We look for these five specific buckets immediately:
This is the massive disconnect between the Founder view and the SEO view. You might have better code, faster load times, and a cleaner UI.
But if your competitor has aligned their content with the market’s search behavior and you haven’t, they will win every time. It’s not about the features; it’s about aligning with the user’s search intent.
The best practice is to not choose one competitor type over the other, but to use a mix.
You take the sales arguments and market terms from your Direct Competitor. Then, you take the content structure and depth from the SERP Competitor. When you combine the persuasive sales logic of a direct rival with the structural blueprint of a SERP winner, your page performance boosts automatically.
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