Competitor Discovery, Keyword Gaps, and Compare

Three ways to analyze competition

StretchSEM gives you three complementary competitive tools, each 1 credit per run:

• Competitor discovery — for a keyword set, find who actually co-ranks with you.
• Keyword gap — for you vs one competitor, find the topics they rank for and you don't.
• Compare — a side-by-side of two domains: health, keyword overlap, and mutual gaps.

Competitor discovery

Your real competitors aren't always who you think — they're whoever ranks alongside you. Competitor discovery fetches the SERP for each of your keywords (up to 10) and tallies which domains keep showing up.

1. Open the competitor tool and enter your domain and a keyword list.
2. Run. For each keyword, StretchSEM records your position and the top results.
3. The result ranks co-ranking domains by appearances, with:
- overlap % — the share of your keywords they also rank for.
- avg position and best position.
- the shared keywords you compete on.

Cross-vertical noise (social networks, Wikipedia, Amazon, Reddit, government/education sites) is filtered out so you see real business competitors, not directories.

Keyword gap

Keyword gap reads a competitor's homepage to infer the topics they optimize for (their title, headings, navigation anchors, and meta description), then SERP-checks both domains for each topic.

1. Enter your domain and a competitor domain.
2. Run. StretchSEM extracts up to ~10 candidate topics from the competitor's homepage and checks each.
3. Results split into:
- Gaps — topics where the competitor ranks in the top 10 and you don't (or rank poorly). These are your content opportunities, sorted by how strongly the competitor ranks.
- Shared — topics where you both appear.

Each gap is a ready-made brief you can hand to Content Briefs and StretchBAS to write the on-brand fix — the "find the gap, then generate the answer" workflow.

Compare

Compare puts two crawled domains side by side (both must be crawled in StretchSearch). It returns each domain's SEO health score, page count, and top keywords, plus three keyword sets:

• Keyword overlap — terms you both target.
• Your gaps — terms the competitor surfaces that you don't (target these).
• Their gaps — terms you surface that they don't (your edge).

A realistic example

A B2B software company runs competitor discovery on crm software, sales pipeline tool, and lead tracking. The tally reveals a scrappy rival, nimblecrm.example, co-ranking on all three with 100% overlap and an average position of 4 — a competitor they hadn't been watching. They then run keyword gap against that rival and find gaps for pipeline forecasting and sales cadence software, both in the rival's top 10 and absent for them. Those two gaps become their next content briefs.

Tips

• Start with competitor discovery to learn who really competes, then run keyword gap against the strongest co-ranker.
• Keyword gap works best against competitors whose homepage exposes clear titles, headings, and navigation.
• Feed gap results straight into Content Briefs, then generate on-brand drafts in StretchBAS.
• Use Compare when you want a quick health-and-overlap read on two crawled sites.

Troubleshooting

Keyword gap returned no gaps. The competitor's homepage may be blocked, thin, or lacking readable on-page signals. Try a competitor with a richer homepage, or use SERP checks on specific keywords instead.

Compare says there's no content. Compare reads both domains from the crawl index. Crawl each domain in StretchSearch first, then re-run.

Competitor discovery returned few competitors. Your keywords may be very niche or the SERPs were dominated by filtered noise domains. Add more representative keywords and re-run.