Deep Competitor Analysis

What You Get

A prompt that takes 3-5 competitor URLs and breaks down their marketing strategy — what they’re doing on content, SEO, social, email, and positioning — so you can find the gaps they’re missing and the angles they haven’t tried.

Most people look at their competitors and see a wall of copy. You’re about to see the strategy underneath.

The Prompt

I'm doing a competitive analysis to find marketing opportunities. Here's what I need you to reverse-engineer.

**About my business:**
[What you do. Who you serve. One sentence each.]

**My 3-5 competitors:**
[Paste their URLs here. At least one should be a competitor you find annoying because they rank above you.]

**What I want to analyze:**
[Pick all that apply: positioning & messaging, content strategy, SEO signals, social presence, email/lead capture, pricing & offers. Or tell me you want everything.]

**My biggest frustration about competing with them:**
[What's working for them that isn't working for you? What do they seem to know that you don't?]

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For each competitor, analyze:

**Positioning & Messaging** — How do they describe what they do? Who do they say they serve? What's their core promise? Look at their headline, hero section, and navigation. What's different about their framing compared to the others?

**Content Strategy** — What topics do they cover? What formats (blogs, guides, videos, case studies, podcasts)? How often do they publish? Are they going deep on one audience or shallow on many? What's their content pillar structure if you can see it?

**SEO Signals** — Look at title tags, meta descriptions, H2s and H3s on their key pages. What keywords are they targeting? What's their blog structure? Do they have keyword clusters or is it all scattered? What's the density of their main topic areas?

**Social Presence** — Which platforms are they actually active on? What kind of content do they post (educational, promotional, behind-the-scenes)? How often? What gets engagement? Are they building community or just broadcasting?

**Email & Lead Capture** — How are they asking for emails? What are they offering in exchange (guide, webinar, template, free trial)? Where's the capture point on the site? How aggressively are they asking?

**Pricing & Offers** — If visible, what's their pricing structure? What's the lowest entry point? Do they offer payment plans, freemium, packages? What's their anchor offer?

**Gaps & Weaknesses** — What are they NOT doing? What audience are they ignoring? What format are they avoiding? What topic should they cover but don't? Where's the moment they lose you?

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**Output Format:**

Create a comparison matrix with competitors as columns and the analysis categories as rows. Fill it in with what you find.

Then write a **"Your Opportunity"** section with 3-5 specific, actionable things you can do that they aren't. Not "have better content" — actual things. Like: "They own the B2B angle but none of them speak to solopreneurs. They all use case studies but no one does narrative storytelling. They focus on the tool but ignore the psychology. They're all on LinkedIn but none on Threads."

**Most important:** Don't just tell me what they're doing. Tell me what it means and where the real opportunity is for my specific business.

How to Use It

Step 1: Pick your competitors carefully. Don’t just analyze the ones you admire. Include the ones who make you mad — the ones ranking above you on keywords that matter, the ones your prospects mention when they say no. One admirable competitor, 2-3 that frustrate you. Mix matters.

Step 2: Run the analysis. Paste the prompt above into Claude with your business details and competitor URLs. Let it pull apart their strategy piece by piece. The analysis takes 5-10 minutes depending on how detailed you want it.

Step 3: Focus on the gaps, not the tactics. The gold isn’t in what your competitors are doing. It’s in what they’re NOT doing. Every competitor has blind spots — topics they’re ignoring, formats they’re not using, audiences they’re not speaking to, emotions they’re not touching. That’s where you win. Read straight to the “Your Opportunity” section. That’s your roadmap.

Pro tips: Run this quarterly because competitors change fast. Paste actual competitor homepage copy and blog posts into the chat for better analysis. Pair this with the SEO Keyword Cluster playbook so you know which gaps are worth filling.

Example Output

Here’s what a partial analysis looks like in the “AI marketing tools for solopreneurs” space.

Positioning & Messaging:

Email & Lead Capture:

See the pattern? Competitor A has reach but wrong messaging. Competitor B has the right audience but incomplete offer. Your opportunity: reach + positioning + complete solution + follow-up. That’s the gap.

Tips

Don’t analyze the wrong competitors. Analyze the ones who’re winning the keywords you want and the customers you want. Admiring a competitor is different from being beaten by them.

Update this quarterly. SEO landscape shifts. Competitors add product lines, rebrand, change their content strategy. What’s true in April might be wrong by July. Make this a habit.

The “Your Opportunity” section is the only part that matters. Everything else is context. Read that section three times. It’s your competitive roadmap.

If you find yourself copying instead of finding gaps, you’re doing it wrong. The goal isn’t “be like them but better.” It’s “do something they can’t or won’t do.” Different. Not derivative.

Want help building yours? Book a Build Session — $350 for a 90-minute working session where we map your competitive landscape and build a content strategy that actually differentiates you.

Built with Claude. Every prompt in this playbook library has been tested in the latest Claude model.