Semrush competitive analysis is an excellent tool for researching your paid or organic competition. The tool provides you with data-driven insights and strategies to help you stay ahead of your competitors online.
It is equipped with a variety of features that can help you enhance your online visibility, optimize your marketing campaigns, and step ahead of your competition.
In addition, this tool enables you to gain a thorough understanding of what strategies your competitors are using as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
Furthermore, it provides insights into which keywords your competitors are targeting, their search volumes, and how competitive the keywords are.
There is more to Semrush’s competitive analysis than that. No matter if you are evaluating keyword strategies, ad campaigns, SEO tactics, backlink profiles, or social media activities, Semrush can help you to make informed decisions and achieve sustainable growth.
Explore our comprehensive analysis of Semrush here
Table of Contents
Semrush Competitive Analysis Tool Explained
With Semrush Competitor Analysis Tool, you can gain insights into your competitors’ strategies and tactics. With this tool, you can analyze your competitors’ Top Organic Keywords, Top Position Changes, Keywords’ Intent Segments, Top Pages, Top Subdomains, and Main Organic Competitors.
The Competitive Research Toolkit is one of four sections of the SEO Dashboard. It includes the following analysis tools:
- Domain Overview
- Traffic Analytics
- Organic Research
- Keyword Gap
- Backlink Gap
Besides a brief overview of each tool, we will discuss how it can be used to enhance performance.
You can find Semrush’s competitive analysis section by clicking “SEO” on the left menu and choosing competitive research.
Let’s start by checking out the Domain Overview tool. By adding your competitor’s domain and preferred market, you can gain a quick overview of the Domain, Visitor Location, Paid and Organic Traffic, Organic Keywords, Organic Competitors, Keyword Intent Percentage along with their Traffic, Top Paid Keywords, Main Organic Competitors, and Main Paid Competitors.
Additionally, you can compare up to five competitors within one report, analyzing their Organic and Paid Traffic, Backlinks, and SEO Progress over a specific period of time: three months, a quarter, six months, a year, or a season.
Taking a look at the keyword intent percentage can help you see how much your competitors spend on transactional keywords versus informational and navigational keywords. If you believe your competitors are successful, you may want to test their approach when structuring your account.
Moreover, the Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic Report allows you to see what type of keywords your competitors are targeting.
Study your competitors’ organic and paid competition to see what you can incorporate into your campaign based on their success.
By looking at your competitors’ text ads, you can come up with ideas for your own ads, and you can also test similar Call-To-Actions.
Using Semrush’s backlink tool, you can view a comprehensive list of backlinks, including the Number of Referring Domains, Anchor Text used, Link Quality, Number of DoFollow and NoFollow Links, Number of Outbound Links, Type of Backlinks, and Domains Referring to the Link.
Moreover, it provides a list of the most valuable backlinks, which can help you boost your website’s ranking.
You can also view the Traffic Analytics of your competitors in the Competitive Research section, which is similar to viewing their Google Analytics. You can view their Visits, Unique Visitors, Pages per Visit, Average Visit Duration, and even the Bounce Rate. Comparing yourself to your biggest competitor will help you decide how well you are doing.
Further, you can see Traffic Shared by Devices and their Top Pages, which will help you determine whether you are providing the right content.
Within the competitive research section, we have our Organic Research tool, which focuses on organic competitors of yourself and your competitors.
This report provides an overview of your website’s Organic Keywords, Organic Traffic, Top Pages, and Main Organic Competitors.
Click the “Organic Competitors” tab to see all the sites competing with your site for the same keywords.
By clicking on any of the organic competitors, you can see detailed information about their Top Organic Keywords, Top-Ranking Pages, and Position Changes.
To see your competitors’ Top Organic Keywords, click the “View all organic keywords” button under the “Top Organic Keywords” section.
Adjust the filters as necessary until you find the most relevant keywords.
The report allows you to view Search Volume, Keyword Difficulty, and Competition Level for any keyword.
Another tool, the Keyword Gap, lets you compare keywords you rank for with those of your competitors.
It is possible to enter the domains of up to five competitors, including subdomains, folders, or exact URLs, in addition to your own domain.
There will be a full report segmented by keywords type (Organic, Paid, and PLA) showing your Shared, Missing, Weak, Unique, and Strong keywords.
Maintain an edge over your competition. Determine which of your competitors has the strongest set of best-performing keywords. Identify the winning keywords and create a list.
With the Backlinks Gap tool, you can compare your own Backlinks (referring domains) with those of your competitors. The tool also displays the domains that are shared between you and your competitors, as well as your weak, strong, and unique referring domains.
Enter your domain and that of your competitor. Using this tool, you can analyze the backlink lists of these websites and identify potential backlink opportunities.
The best backlinks domain list includes backlinks to your competitors, but not to your domain. You should also check out this list and make use of them.
In addition to SEO and advertising tools, Semrush offers tools to optimize Content Marketing and social media marketing.
Content ideas can be generated using the topic research tool located within the content marketing section. Just enter your topic, select a market, and click on “get content ideas”.
An Overview report will open with four views (Cards, Explorer, Overview, and Mind Map). In the Card view, ideas are viewed as cards. Upon clicking the “show more” button, you can see card metrics, such as Volume, Difficulty, Topic Efficiency, and Topic Sources (articles) that you can open for detailed information.
Different view options provide different but useful information, for instance, the Overview view shows backlink ideas. The Explorer view provides ideas for Facebook content and resources that can be used for this purpose. Mind Maps helps you create content maps if you wish to cover all aspects of your seed keyword. Also, all the information can be exported as an Excel sheet and managed externally.
The Social Media Tracker also allows you to monitor your competitors’ social media growth and engagement.
The following steps will guide you through the process of tracking social media:
Social Media > Project > Set up > Social Media Tracker > Add competitor
If you enter your competitor’s brand name or domain into the search box, Semrush will automatically find their social media pages.
If you’ve enabled social media posting on Semrush, your social media pages will be included automatically. If you haven’t already, type your website address in the search box and click “Set as your company” next to your brand name.
You can add up to 20 competitor brands and track up to 100 social media pages.
Click the “Start tracking companies” button once your competitors’ social media pages have been added to get an overview report about their Social Media Engagement, Audience, Posts, and Top Content.
Afterward, you will find a comparison of the performance of your social media with that of your competitors.
In addition to identifying content trends and engaging content types that resonate with your target audience, Semrush’s Social Media Tracker also tracks audience growth, activity, and engagement.
How to Do a Competitor Analysis in Semrush?
A major advantage of Semrush’s competitive research tool is that it offers valuable insights and features that facilitate competitor analysis and provide examples of ad copy.
Here’s how to use the Semrush tool to run competitor analysis and get ad copy examples:
Begin by identifying your key competitors in your industry or niche. You can find detailed information about their online marketing performance using Semrush’s Domain Overview tool.
Semrush’s Organic Research and Advertising Research tools allow you to analyze your competitors’ keyword strategies. You can access Organic Research to find out which keywords your competitors rank for in organic search results, whereas Advertising Research gives you information about their paid advertising campaigns.
The Semrush Advertising Research tool allows you to view examples of your competitors’ ad copy. You can then view their actual text ad to gain a deeper understanding of how they position their products and highlight unique selling points, call-to-action phrases, and promotional offers.
Additionally, Semrush provides data on ad performance metrics. Check your competitors’ ads for click-through rates (CTR), ad positions, and estimated traffic volume to determine how effective their ads are.
The Advertising Research feature of Semrush lets you view the landing pages that your competitors’ ads link to. Observe how their landing pages look, how they are laid out, and what content they contain to get a better understanding of their conversion optimization strategies.
Through the Semrush Advertising Research tool, you are able to monitor changes in the advertising strategies of your competitors. To remain competitive, pay close attention to the changes they make to their ad copy, landing pages, and overall campaign approach, and tweak your ad campaigns accordingly.
Semrush provides performance metrics that determine how your ads compare to those of your competitors. Find out where you excel or lag behind your competitors by comparing your ad positions, CTR, and other relevant metrics.
How to Boost Your SEO Ranking with the Semrush Competitive Analysis Tool?
Here are the steps you can take to improve your SEO ranking using the Semrush competitive research tool:
Start by identifying your biggest competitors on search engine results pages (SERPs). Find out your top competitors’ success strategies by analyzing their organic rankings, estimated traffic, and backlink profiles using Semrush’s Domain Overview tool.
Discover what keywords your competitors are ranking for using the Organic Research tool. Consider their keyword positions, search volume, and keyword difficulty as you determine valuable keywords for your website to target.
You can compare your website’s keyword rankings with those of your competitors using Semrush’s Content Gap tool. Identify keywords for which your competitors rank higher than your site, and create high-quality, relevant content for those keywords.
Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles with Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool. Assess their high-quality backlinks and link-building strategies, in order to develop a backlink strategy that will acquire relevant backlinks for your site.
You can monitor your website’s keyword rankings and compare them with those of your competitors using Semrush’s Position Tracking tool. Monitor the progress of your SEO efforts and identify areas for improvement.
Use Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker to detect broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags on your website. Taking care of these issues will improve the crawlability, user experience, and SEO ranking of your website.
Semrush provides notifications regarding major changes to search engine algorithms. Stay up-to-date on these changes and adjust your SEO strategies accordingly. Keep an eye on your competitors’ ranking after algorithm updates to learn from their successes or failures and make the necessary adjustments.
Semrush provides a comprehensive set of website performance metrics, including organic search traffic, visibility, and engagement metrics. Maintain a close eye on these metrics to determine the impact of your SEO efforts and to identify areas for improvement.
Follow these steps and use the Semrush competitive research tool effectively to get insight into your competitors’ strategies, identify optimization opportunities, and improve your SEO ranking.
What is Semrush Competitor Link Analysis?
The Semrush competitor link analysis tool allows you to analyze the backlink profiles of your competitors.
Having backlinks from other websites pointing to your site plays an important role in search engine ranking. When you take the time to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile, you will be able to gain insight into their search engine optimization strategy as well as identify high-quality backlink opportunities for your own website.
Semrush’s competitor link analysis provides statistics on each backlink, including the referring domain, link type (follow or nofollow), anchor text, and URL of the page where the link is located.
Furthermore, this tool allows you to track new and lost backlinks over time, so you can identify changes in your competitors’ link-building strategies. You can use this insight to improve your rankings in search engines and acquire valuable links.
Conclusion: Should You Try the Semrush Competitive Analysis Tool?
Semrush’s competitive analysis provides a powerful tool set for running effective digital marketing campaigns. It empowers you with data-driven insights, allowing you to strategize better and outperform your competitors online.
Semrush ensures that you make informed decisions whether you are evaluating keyword strategies, optimizing ad campaigns, tracking SEO metrics, analyzing backlink profiles, or monitoring social media activities.
Are you ready to capitalize on Semrush’s competitive analysis tools to increase your online revenue and enjoy sustained growth? The key to your success lies here with Semrush’s platform.
Interested in scaling up your SEO game with Semrush? Check out their pricing page to see which plan best suits your needs.
