Hi there! This is SEMrush.
In a series of videos, we’ve been going through various parts of our comprehensive and powerful suite -
SEO, Content Marketing, Advertising and Social Media.
And now it’s time to introduce you to Competitive Research,
an overarching set of tools that helps you build a bigger picture
of the competitive landscape within any given niche.
SEMrush is all about giving you data-driven insights on different aspects of digital marketing.
And for that reason our Competitive Research toolkit is built to power up the most important part
of your digital marketing and client prospecting strategy!
In fact, SEMrush gives you the verified information
to make data-driven marketing decisions based on the strategies of your competitors.
Which will help you find solutions to be a step ahead of your competitor
or make tactical suggestions to improve a partner’s performance.
You'll be able to explore your competitors' marketing strategies from every single angle -
SEO, Advertising, Content, and PR as well as Social Media.
In other words, the Competitive toolkit allows you
to fully scope out your competitors’ marketing strategy and tactics.
Now, there are a couple of things you need to know about your competition.
First of all, how successful are they in attracting and converting their audience.
Then, how big is their audience, where does their web traffic come from,
and what is the extent of their presence in different regions.
That’s what Traffic Analytics tool is for.
Basically, this is Google Analytics for competitors.
Using our tool, you can look at the the various metrics
that can uncover insights regarding your competitors' audience and traffic acquisition.
The reports can even be broken down by traffic sources
from direct to search, to referral, to social, to paid
with information about location whether the source originated from a mobile phone or a desktop
All of that allows you to see exactly where your competitor’s traffic comes from
and how much their audience engages with their site.
And then being on that you can benchmark your competitors’ site performance against others -
just add up to five competitors in Traffic Analytics
and compare their key metrics.
And don't forget you can play around with various filters –
for example historical data, location, and device.
You can also locate your competitor’s most lucrative channels
and dissect your competitors' traffic sources and sort them
by referring sites, search engines, and social networks.
Now, once you’ve looked at the overall online presence of your closest competitors,
it’s time to zoom in on the details.
SEMrush can help you review their overall search strategy
by looking at their top keywords and organic search positions,
evaluating changes in organic traffic,
and getting an overview of their backlink portfolio.
On top of that, SEMrush’s Gap Analysis
can even help you uncover missing opportunities.
With the Traffic Analytics, you already have a general understanding
of your competitors' website performance,
but what about the numerous aspects of it?
Organic Research will help you analyse your competitors' sites
and identify the keywords they rank for.
You can choose which part of the site you’d like to look at –
the entire domain, subdomain, or even a particular URL.
In the Positions tab, you’ll find a comprehensive table
that shows the list of keywords your competitor is ranking for.
To make sure that all of your organic search rivals are on your radar
use the Organic Competitors report to run a quick scan
of your competition in the locations you are targeting.
Competitors are selected based on the number of common keywords
and a total number of organic keywords.
Keyword Gap also gives you an option to compare your domain
against ones of your competitors for any common or unique keywords.
Just pick five of your biggest rivals and use the chart view.
The charts display both mutual and unique keywords for the competing domains.
Pay attention to the section that describes unique keywords
to uncover missing keyword opportunities for your search strategy.
In Booking.com’s example, you can see
they could enrich their keyword strategy with the following keywords.
Keyword Gap doesn’t just cover your organic keywords –
you can also look at paid or PLA keywords as well.
After we released the Keyword Gap tool,
we thought that the same gap analysis logic
could be applied to backlinks.
So, we rolled out the Backlink Gap tool.
Enter your competitors’ sites to Backlink Gap,
see who’s linking to their website,
find gaps in your rivals’ coverage
and use them to get ahead of your competition
or reach out to the resources
that are currently linking to your competitors but not you.
If you want a more granular view of your competitors’ backlink profile,
use Backlink Analytics.
Enter your competitor’s domain in the search bar
and begin collecting insights
into competitor’s most recently built links,
overall backlink profile portfolio
along with their most important partnerships and top referring domains.
You can also enter your domain
to compare your site’s backlink portfolio against that of your competitors.
Knowing what your competitors are up to with their organic strategy is great,
but there’s more bases to cover.
You should also research how much resources they are investing in online advertising.
SEMrush will help you uncover your competitors’ overall advertising strategy
by looking at how and when they run their advertisements,
which keywords they use and how much traffic it brings them.
Find out how they appeal to their audience by looking at each ad individually.
Let’s see how you can do that.
Advertising Research will help you analyze your competitor's advertising strategy
by looking at their site across multiple levels –
domain, subdomain, and URL.
Just pick the location, the time and the device.
The Ad Copies report will help you look
at particular ads that your competitors are running.
You can see their headlines and Call-to-Actions they use in their ads,
along with the keywords they’re targeting,
and the landing pages they’re directing paid traffic to.
To see your rivals’ advertising strategy for the past year in its entirety,
go to the Ad History report and look at how and when they run their ads,
which keywords they use and how much traffic it actually brings them.
Pay special attention to those ads that have been running for a while –
if a competitor has been using it for more than a couple of months,
it must have earned them a lot of business.
And if it is the Shopping Ads, or PLA, that you are looking for,
go to our PLA Research tool.
Here, you can discover what competitors’ product listing ads
showed up for different keywords,
which products they advertise there,
how they describe them to engage with the audience
and what is their overall pricing policy.
Display Advertising is another interesting area to consider.
Some businesses skip PLA and use Display Advertising instead.
SEMrush has a tool for that as well.
Display Advertising shows you competitor’s activity
when it comes to display advertising,
and what kinds of audience they target with their campaigns.
You can analyze the site both as an advertiser and as a publisher.
Make your search results country- or device-specific
to see how their display advertising strategy changes
in relation to various locations and devices.
The Ads tab will allow you to dissect each ad individually.
Find actionable insights by looking at the type of ads they are using the most,
how they localize their ads in various countries
and ways in which they approach creatives and CTA.
Publishers Report can track down your competitors’ biggest publishers
and help you seize the opportunity to feature your ads as well.
Chances are - organic search and advertising
aren’t the only ways for your competitors to establish their online visibility.
You should be on a constant lookout for competitors’ approach to seizing PR opportunities.
Research their past PR and content marketing strategies,
current promotional activities and their distribution channels
To do that, navigate to the Content marketing part of our Competitive Research toolkit.
Let’s start with the Topic Research tool.
There are two ways to use it for competitive research –
it allows you to pinpoint whether your competitors
are covering the same topics as does your site.
Additionally, it helps you identify your competitors’ best performing content for a specific topic
Just enter a target keyword you want to look at
and select the location you want to analyze,
and Topic Research will collect ideas from the related topics
and subtopics covered by your competitors!
The tool displays the most popular subtopics
(we look at popularity in terms of the number of search queries per keyword).
To dive deeper, just open the card with the subtopic
and get a list of the most popular headlines for a topic –
check if your competitor has anything to do with the most popular headlines.
To analyze a specific competitor for the purpose of getting inspiration for your content strategy
or to identify any missing opportunities,
just enter their domain and all the topics covered by your rival will show up in green.
If specifics don’t worry you that much,
and the only thing you really care about is your competitor’s PR strategy from A to Z,
then you can track who talks about your rivals with Brand Monitoring.
You can use this tool to pinpoint the most relevant media outlets
that mention your competitor
and uncover how much PR coverage they are actually receiving.
The tool gathers data from across the web, including Twitter
and allows you to separate different sites
that mention your rivals by traffic, domain quality and sentiment.
And if you need a more thorough analysis
of your competitors’ Social Media strategy,
SEMrush has created yet another handy tool.
Social Media Tracker helps you discover
what social media channels your competitors’ are focusing on,
how active they are online
and how it impacts their audience growth.
Don’t forget to identify the top performing content across your competitors’ accounts
and check how they motivate their audience to take action.
So, that’s the gist of it.
With SEMrush’s Competitive Research toolkit
you can handle every aspect of your competitive analysis –
from looking at competitors’ sites and their performance,
to uncovering their organic and paid search strategy,
to pinpointing their strengths and weaknesses
in Social media, in PR or content marketing.
But before you go and try it for yourself,
there’s a section of SEMrush you will most certainly benefit from,
whether you are using competitive research for your own business advantage
or want to approach a new client.
Creating a report is not always a piece of cake,
but SEMrush’s My Reports will make your reporting job much easier.
Here’s a tip – if you are using SEMrush’s Competitive research for client prospecting,
My Reports is the tool to use.
Here’s how you can benefit from it:
after reviewing your prospect’s domain alongside their top competitors,
you can create a PDF that benchmarks them against their competition
and indicates the areas that could use the most improvement.
If they are behind their competitors on advertising,
you could suggest to shift gears with display ads campaign, and so on.
Whether you want to document your findings on the competitive landscape,
keep them automatically updated
or “sell” your findings to a prospective client.
My Reports can help you summarize the data
you get from different SEMrush tools
in a concise document that will let you
highlight your findings and achievements.
With My Reports, you can create a custom report
that connects data from various tools - SEMrush and Google.
You can also use our pre-defined templates if you’d like.
You can choose between a branded or white-label report,
and simply add those widgets you want to include in your report.
Once your report is ready, you can send it directly to your client
as a way of tracking progress
or schedule it to go out on a regular basis.
If you’d like to send this kind of report to different clients,
you can turn your newly configured report into a custom template
So, that’s it! Now you are fully equipped
to use the power of SEMrush’s Competitive Research Toolkit.
Once you start using the tools,
you’ll find out how truly flexible our toolkit is
and that there are myriads of ways you can use SEMrush tools
and its data to your advantage.
But if you aren’t an ardent explorer
and need a more traditional guidance
to ensure you are making the most of your experience with SEMrush’s toolkits –
be it SEO, Advertising, Social Media, or Content Marketing –
go to SEMrush Academy
that offers a full course dedicated to each and every of our comprehensive toolkits.
To make things official, you can take a test
and get a SEMrush certificate acknowledging your achievements
in every area of online visibility that we offer.
Ladies and gentlemen, no question will ever be left unanswered!
Visit our Help page whenever you need assistance.
From manuals and FAQs to precise workflows and tool descriptions,
you can find it all under one roof.