Tear down a competitor's top pages

A competitor's top pages are a free content strategy: the topics and formats that already work in this market, ranked by how much they earn. The job is to read the pattern, not to copy the pages.

Steps

1. Confirm the competitor. If the user has not named one, ask. Search competitors (the sites that outrank you) are often not the business competitors the user has in mind.

2. Pull their top pages. ahrefs.top_pages with the competitor's domain as target, limit: 100, order_by: "traffic:desc". Each row has the URL, estimated traffic and value, ranking keyword count, and the lead keyword with its volume.

3. Classify each page. From the URL and lead keyword, assign a format (guide, comparison, listicle, tool or calculator, template, glossary entry, product page, pricing, case study) and a topic. Fetch their top ten pages with your browsing to confirm the format and note structure, length, and whether the page is updated regularly. State that formats below the top ten were inferred from URLs.

4. Find the pattern. Aggregate traffic and value by format and by topic. The finding is usually one sentence: "sixty percent of their organic value comes from comparison pages on topic X". That sentence is what the user needs.

5. Map their pages against the site's coverage. google_search_console.query with dimensions: ["query", "page"] over 90 days ending 3 days ago, rowLimit: 5000. For each of the competitor's top 25 pages, search this result for their lead keyword. Three outcomes: the site ranks for it under position 10 (covered), the site ranks above 20 or gets impressions on an unrelated page (weak answer), or the keyword is absent (no answer).

6. Compare the shape, not just the size. ahrefs.top_pages for the user's own domain with the same settings. Compare how concentrated traffic is in the top ten pages for each site, and how the format mix differs.

7. Report. Their top 20 pages (URL, traffic, value, lead keyword, volume, format, and the site's answer: covered, weak, or none). The format and topic breakdown with the one-sentence pattern. Then five recommended pages to build, each with the format that wins for the competitor and the query it targets. Say which of their pages you are not recommending an answer to, and why.

Gotchas

• Ahrefs traffic and value are modelled. They rank pages against each other well; they do not measure anyone's revenue. The user's own Search Console numbers are measured; the competitor's are not.
• Their homepage and brand pages inflate the list. Strip pages whose lead keyword is their brand before computing the format mix.
• Copying a page that ranks does not make yours rank. The recommendation is the format and the topic, plus what would make the page better than theirs.
• Formats are market-specific. What wins in developer tools loses in consumer retail. Read the pattern from this competitor, not from a general rule.
• Lead keyword is one of many. A page with 400 ranking keywords is not "about" its lead keyword alone. Check ahrefs.organic_keywords for the page URL before writing a brief around it.
• For the links behind those pages, continue with competitor-new-backlinks, which shows who is linking to them and how each link was earned.