Why weight the factors instead of just scoring them?

Because an unweighted table quietly says every factor is equally important, and it never is. If domain authority matters four times as much to your situation as social following, an unweighted average hands the win to whoever posts most. Making the weight explicit forces the argument to happen in the open, before the ranking is produced rather than after somebody dislikes it.

Where do I get the numbers to put in the cells?

Wherever you already look: your rank tracker, a backlink tool, the competitor's own pricing page, or a stopwatch and a browser. The template is deliberately source-agnostic because the useful comparison usually mixes measurable things with judged ones, and a scorecard that only accepts API-sourced metrics ends up measuring what was easy to fetch.

How many competitors should I score?

Between three and six. Below three you are not comparing, you are describing. Above six the exercise turns into data entry and the scores drift, because by the eighth row nobody remembers what a 7 meant on the first one. Pick the ones you actually lose deals to.

Can I score my own site in the same table?

You should, and the template treats it as an ordinary row. The output of the exercise is not the ranking, it is the gap between your row and the top row on the two or three factors carrying the most weight. That is your quarter.

Competitor Analysis Template — score competitors on the factors you choose

What a weight actually decides

An unweighted comparison table makes a claim it never states out loud: that every column matters the same amount. It almost never does. If you are losing deals on implementation time and winning on price, a table that scores both equally will tell you that you are doing fine, and it will be arithmetically correct and strategically useless.

Assigning a weight forces that judgement into the open before any scores are entered, which is the only order in which the exercise is honest. Weights chosen after the scores are visible are not weights, they are a way of arriving at the answer somebody already wanted.

Choosing factors that can be scored

A good factor is one where two people looking at the same evidence would land within a point or two of each other. "Domain authority" qualifies; you both read the same number off the same tool. "Brand strength" does not, and it is the factor most likely to be quietly scored as "how much I like them".

When a fuzzy factor genuinely matters, split it into things you can observe. Instead of brand strength, score referring domains, branded search volume, and review count separately. Three defensible numbers beat one impression, and if the three disagree you have learned something the single score would have averaged away.

Reading the output

Do not read the ranking. Read your own row against the top row, on the two factors carrying the most weight. Everything else is context. A competitor beating you by four points spread thinly across nine factors is not the same problem as one beating you by four points concentrated in the single factor you weighted highest, and only the second one tells you what to do on Monday.

The other thing worth doing is a sensitivity check: change the heaviest weight by one and see whether the ranking moves. If it does, your conclusion rests on a judgement call rather than on the evidence, and that is worth knowing before it goes in a deck.

Where the numbers come from

Rank trackers, backlink tools, the competitor's own site, and your own sales notes. For the technical factors — whether a competitor's pages are actually readable by search engines and AI assistants, what their structured data claims, how fast the pages are — the free checkers on visibility100x.com run against any public URL, which is the part that cannot happen inside this tab.