toolkit

Scenario · The bigger jobs

How do we compare to the practice down the road?

“Why are they above us on Google?”

"Why are they ranking above us" arrives as a grievance and is answerable as a comparison — but only some of the gap between two practices is actually fixable. This separates what can be changed — a slower page, weaker internal linking, thinner content — from what can't, like a competitor's fifteen years in the market or their advertising budget, so the resulting plan is a list of real work instead of an argument nobody can win.

What to ask for

SEMrush researchOptional integration — SEO-research client for the SEMrush Analytics API.On-page SEOOn-page SEO scan — reads a page's delivered HTML and checks the head, meta and heading signals search engines use: title presence and length, meta description, rel=canonical, meta robots (noindex), Open Graph tags, viewport, html lang, and exactly one H1, plus a structured-data summary.Internal link graphInternal link-graph audit — given a site's URL universe, fetches each page, extracts the internal links, and builds a directed graph of how the site links to itself, then grades the signals rankings depend on: ORPHAN pages linked from nowhere, pages unreachable from the home page, pages buried too many clicks deep, thin single-inlink pages, generic anchor text, and exact-match over-optimization.Performance (Core Web Vitals)Core Web Vitals and performance scan for a live page.AI search visibilityAI Search Visibility report — measures how visible a business is inside AI search answers (ChatGPT, Gemini and other engines) and builds a client-ready report.

See it work

A real run of Internal link graph:

REVIEW — 4 internal link(s)
  [warn] 4 internal link(s) use generic anchor text ("click here", "read more", …) — non-descriptive anchors pass no keyword signal

  report: ./out/internal-link-graph-internal-link-graph.html
  json:   ./out/internal-link-graph.json

The captured report, exactly as a run hands it to a client —open the full report ↗

The question arrives as a grievance and is answerable as a gap analysis. What makes it useful is separating the differences that can be acted on from the ones that cannot.

  1. Pin down who the competitors actually are. The ones the practice names, and the ones actually ranking for its terms — frequently not the same list, and the second one is the real one.
  2. Pull the comparison. The research client gives the organic picture: which terms they rank for that we do not, what their visibility looks like, where the overlap is. Read the term gap, not the headline traffic number.
  3. Compare the pages, not the domains. For the handful of terms that matter, grade their ranking page and ours side by side on on-page SEO, and on speed. A competitor beating us with a faster, better-structured page on the same term is an actionable finding; one beating us with fifteen years of links is not.
  4. Look at internal linking. The link graph shows how our own site distributes authority. A service page nothing links to is competing with one hand tied, and it is the most common self-inflicted version of this problem.
  5. Check the AI answers too. Increasingly the comparison a patient makes is not a results page but a chatbot’s recommendation. The AI visibility check reports whether we are named and cited against these competitors, which is a different ranking with different causes.
  6. [manual] Write the answer in two lists. What we can change — pages, structure, speed, internal links, missing content. What we cannot — their age, their backlink profile, their spend. The second list is the honest part, and leaving it out is what turns this into an endless project.

Estimates are estimates

Every third-party number about a competitor is modelled from sampled data. It is fine for ranking priorities and useless as a fact to quote back to a client. Steps 3 and 4 look at things that are directly observable — their page, our page, our link graph — which is why the recommendations should come from there rather than from the headline figures.

What this does not cover

Their business. A competitor may rank because they have been there fifteen years, because a hospital system links to them, or because they spend more — none of which is a fault on our side to fix. Third- party estimates of their traffic and keywords are estimates, not their analytics, and treating them as fact is how a comparison becomes a fiction everyone then plans against.

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