Semrush competitor analysis guide

All about Semrush competitor analysis guide

Find out below how you can use Semrush to conduct in-depth competitor analysis and improve your digital marketing strategy.

Semrush is one of the most comprehensive competitor analysis tools for SEO and PPC with a database of 20 billion keywords, 20 million ideas for a keyword, 142 geographic databases, and approximately 808 million domain profiles.

Official statistics of Semrush

Official Seamarsh statistics as of February 2022

Used by freelance digital marketers and small businesses to large enterprise agencies, Semrush competitive analysis tools offer invaluable data on your competitors’ websites, including their top keyword rankings, backlinks, traffic levels, and more.

This post explains how to conduct a Semrush competitive analysis and how you can use its tools and features to improve your SEO and online marketing strategy.

Displays the table of contents.

What is Semrush?

Semrush is a popular SaaS platform for managing online visibility, content marketing, SEO, and PPC efforts. Key features include keyword research, rankings, competitive analysis, backlink monitoring, website audits, and a report builder.

This platform provides useful tools to perform competitive research to better understand your competitor’s websites on Google Search and Google Ads.

Check out my full Simrush review to know more about its features and pricing plans.

What is competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis is the process of identifying competitors in your industry and researching their marketing strategies.

By understanding your competitors’ strategies, you can use this information to assess your company’s strengths and weaknesses relative to each competitor.

10 Ways to Analyze Your Competition with Simrush

Here are 10 ways you can conduct competitor analysis using the Semrush platform:

1. How to identify your competitors.

Let’s see how you can identify your top competitors in Google search using Seamarsh’s Domain Overview feature under Competitor Research in the sidebar.

• Domain overview search bar in Seamrush
• Domain overview search bar in Seamrush
• To get started, enter your website’s URL in the domain overview search bar.

• The following domain overview page shows insights about your website, such as:

• A domain authority score is based on a variety of link and traffic metrics.
• The monthly trend of organic traffic generated by the website.
• The monthly trend of paid search traffic generated by the website.
• A total number of referring domains and backlinks.
• The monthly trend of organic keywords over time.
• Top organic website rankings based on traffic estimates.
• A website’s main organic competitors are sorted by keyword competition.
• Note: If the site is new and lacks content and links, data may be missing.
• The widget labeled Main Organic Competitors is where you can find your top competitors and the ability to dive deep into competitive analysis with Seamrush.
• Scroll down a bit to find this widget next to the Competitive Positioning Map widget.
• Organic Competitors and Positioning Map in Simrish Domain Overview
• Organic Competitors and Positioning Map in Simrish Domain Overview
• If you scroll down a bit, you can see your main paid competitors based on Google paid search results (Google Ads).

Paid Competitors and Positioning Map in Simrush Domain Overview

Paid Competitors and Positioning Map in Simrush Domain Overview

Clicking View Details takes you to an in-depth table of all identified competitors.

This competitor list is based on the number of competitors’ keywords and the number of common keywords of the competitor’s domain in relation to your domain.

Here, you can also get an estimate of the organic traffic that each competitor site generates each month, and check their organic and paid keyword rankings as identified by Semrush.

• Example List of Organic Competitors in Semrush
• Example List of Organic Competitors in Semrush

Now that you know your main competitors in Google search, let’s see how you can analyze your competitor’s keyword rankings and top pages driving traffic.

2. How to Check a Competitor’s Top Keyword Ranking

Continuing with the list of organic competitors above, click on the domain of one of your competitors. For this example, I’ve clicked on ahrefs.com.

This will take you to the organic research competitors report for your selected site.

1. A review of organic research in Semrush
2. A review of organic research in Semrush
3. Now, you’ll get a deeper insight into the domain’s organic keyword trends, as well as its top organic keywords, top position changes, and top pages.

• To view all keywords, click the View All Organic Keywords button or click the Positions tab located above the keyword chart to view all organic search positions. Organic search positions in Semrush.
• This table lists your competitor’s keyword rankings as identified by Semrush.
• 3. How to Check a Competitor’s Top Organic Pages
• To check your competitor’s top organic pages with Semrush competitive analysis tools, click the Pages tab above the keyword filtering options on the Organic Research Report for your competitor’s domain.

Organic Pages in Seamrush

Organic Pages in Seamrush

Pages are initially ranked by how much estimated organic traffic they generate.

You may be wondering, how does Simrush calculate traffic percentage?

To get traffic estimates for each page, Semrush looks at the page’s keyword ranking to determine the potential CTR (click-through rate) based on each keyword’s position on the Google SERPs, and then Multiplies by the keyword search volume and divides by 30. (number of days in a month).

Other page insights shown with traffic include:

• The total number of organic keywords that each page is ranking for.
• A visual showing search intent for keywords ranking in Google’s top 20.
• The total number of paid keywords that brought users to the page through Google Ads.
• A total number of backlinks pointing to the page URL.
• The option to filter by URL is useful for checking whether your competitors have pages on a particular topic and how many are based on the keywords found in the page’s URL.

• For example, if you were focusing on SEO as a topic, you could check to see how many pages include SEO in the page’s URL to gauge the underlying strength of the domain. are

• To check a page’s keyword ranking and traffic, click on the traffic or keyword value shown in the table for that particular page.

• Similarly, clicking on a page’s backlinks value takes you to the backlink analytics tool to analyze the page’s links in more detail.

4. How to compare your keywords with competitors.

• You can analyze up to five domains using Semrush’s Keyword Gap Tool and generate a list of all common and unique keywords.
• Setting up competitors to compare with Simrush’s Keyword Gap Tool
• Setting up competitors to compare with Simrush’s Keyword Gap Tool
• Compare keywords based on keyword type, which is organic on Google search, paid search, or product listing ads (PLA).

• You can mix and match keyword types for different analyzes of SEO and PPC efforts.

5. How to check competitor rankings for tracked keywords.

Semrush’s position-tracking tool lets you add up to 20 competitors to your position-tracking campaign to compare the rankings of your tracked keywords with those competitors.

Rival Settings for Simrush’s Position Tracking Tool

Rival Settings for Simrush’s Position Tracking Tool

Once your competitors are added, you will be able to compare the daily ranking fluctuations between you and your competitors under the Ranking Distribution tab.

Competitive rankings for keywords tracked with Simrush’s position-tracking tool

Competitive rankings for keywords tracked with Simrush’s position-tracking tool

The Rank Distribution report is useful for evaluating whether you or your competitors are trending up or down for your target keywords and gaining or losing any rankings.

The position tracking tool also provides another way to discover multiple competitors and related sites under the Competitor Discovery tab.

Competitive discovery in Seamrush’s position-tracking tool

Competitive discovery in Seamrush’s position-tracking tool

The last competitor analysis report we’ll see in Simrush’s position tracking tool is under the Featured Snippets tab.

Use this report to find opportunities for featured snippets.

Featured snippets report in Simrush’s Position Tracker tool

Featured snippets report in Simrush’s Position Tracker tool

This is a great report that gives you a quick scan of the keyword search volume for a featured snippet, the estimated traffic potential of the snippet, and the URL of the page currently featured in the snippet. Enables.

It eliminates the semash competitive analysis of competing keywords and top pages. Next, we explore how to check your competitors’ backlinks with Seamrush.

6. Check the competitor’s backlink profile.

To analyze a competitor’s backlinks, click on Backlink Analytics in Semrush’s left-hand sidebar under the Link Building category.

Overview of Backlink Analytics in Seamrush

Overview of Backlink Analytics in Seamrush

The backlink analytics tool provides a ton of data related to the backlinks of the analyzed domain including:

• Total number of referring domains pointing to the site.
• Total number of backlinks pointing to the site.
• Outbound domains that the analyzed site is linking to.
• Trends in new and lost referring domains and links.
• Anchor text used in backlinks.
• Authority score of referring domains and backlinks.
• Top pages based on the number of referring domains pointing to them.
• A list of domains with a backlink profile similar to the analyzed domain.

what’s this?

SEMRush is part of the Competitive Research Solution SEO Toolkit. It allows you to find out the strengths and weaknesses of any website.

It consists of various devices:

• Domain Overview
• Traffic Analytics
• Organic research
• Keyword difference
• Backlink Gap

Researching your competitors helps you better understand the industry, learn what’s working and what’s not, and use that analysis to beat them.

• When should you use competitive research?
• If you want to use competitive research tools:

• Showcase your competitors’ most popular products, services, and content.
• Analyze any website traffic.
• Identify their best performing channels.
• Determine the difference in your marketing strategy.
• See the organic performance of your competitors
• Effectively reach a new market based on audience interests, demographics, and overlap.
• Look for growth opportunities.
• Competitive research tools provide you with actionable data to make informed business decisions.

Specific use cases

To learn more about how you can use the competitive research tool in SEMRush, check out the following posts:

How to Find Competitors’ Keywords and Steal Their Traffic: A Step-by-Step Guide

SEO Competitive Analysis: Find Your Real SEO Competition.

Competitive analysis is the process of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. In competitive analysis, you analyze each competitor’s marketing, pricing, promotion channels, market share, and other details to learn more about their marketing strategies.

• A competitor analysis can help you:
• Understand your industry and competitive landscape.
• Define your unique value proposition.
• Display actionable benchmarks to evaluate your progress.
• Identify competitors’ success strategies.
• Optimize your marketing strategy to maintain a competitive edge
• You can use your results to create benchmarks, evaluate your current marketing strategy, and even develop a new strategy.

• How to do a competitor analysis (template included)
• Below, we’ve broken down competitive analysis into four basic steps:

• List the competitors
• Create competitor profiles
• Identify competitive products, pricing, placement, and promotional strategies.
• Identify best practices and create an action plan
• img-semblog
• Pro tip: Before you begin, make sure you know how to find all the data your analysis will reveal. We’ve created an easy-to-use template that you can use to follow each step of our competitive research workflow.

Step 1: List the competitors

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If you’ve never done a competitor analysis before, the first step is to make a list of all the major players in your niche. This list tells you who you’re competing with for your audience’s attention and gives you an idea of ​​who to focus on in your competitor analysis.

You can start by making a list of competitors that you are familiar with. These will likely be businesses in your location and city that offer similar products or services.

To see your competitors, you can try building your list with the Market Explorer tool.

First, select “Find Competitors” and enter your domain. It will automatically generate a list of major players in your niche. If you already know your competitors, you can choose “Create List” instead and enter them manually.

The Growth Quadrant widget will show you who you’re competing with online on an overview report. It will also visualize their relative market positions, audience sizes, and growth rates.

img-semblog

The Growth Quadrant chart does this by breaking you and your competitors into four basic categories:

• Niche players: New or small companies with small audience sizes and low growth rates
• Game Changers: Emerging companies that have a relatively small audience size but are growing rapidly.
• Leaders: Companies with both large audiences and fast growth rates.
• Established players: Companies with large, established audiences
• Note where each competitor stands and how their audience and traffic growth compares to yours. Which players occupy the same quadrant as you? What are you most worried about?

• Once you’ve identified your main competitors, the next step is to research their online presence through organic, paid and local searches.

• Automate your competitive analysis

• With Kompyte by Semrush

• Try it now →
• Example of ADS
• Find your organic competitors.
• Next, identify your competitors in organic search. These are the people who appear with you in search results for the keywords you’re targeting. You can find them by manually researching each of your desired keywords or by using the Organic Research Competitor Report.

• First, open the organic research tool and enter your domain. Then click on the “Competitive” tab. Here, you’ll find a competitive positioning map, which illustrates how powerful each competitor is in your niche, based on the amount of traffic and keywords they rank for.
• You can help you connect with your customers while also creating products and services that effectively meet their needs.

• You can do your own research for this step through customer questionnaires and surveys. Or you can learn the basics about your market audience more quickly with the Market Explorer Demographics Report.

• The Demographics report provides a high-level overview of the audience demographics in your niche. This includes:

• Age and gender ratio
• Social media preferences
• hobbies
• Later, you can use this data to create audience personas.

Next, find out how your audience compares and overlaps with your closest competitors. You can do this in the Audience Insights report in Traffic Analytics.

The audience overlap graph will show you how your audience and competitors compare to each other. Here, you’ll be able to see relative audience sizes as well as where each overlaps with the competition.

You will also get a list of popular websites in each segment of your shared audience. Make a note of any relevant websites that you are not competing with, as these may be good places to advertise or partner with.

• Next, go to the Traffic Sources report. Here, you can find:
• What channels each competitor is using to drive traffic.
• High traffic sources driving the audience to each competitor

What websites are audiences most likely to visit after leaving a competitor’s domain?It can tell you how your audience finds your competitors, where they’re looking for products or services, and what other companies may be collecting on some of their customers.

Create your competitor profiles

Now that you know more about your competitors’ audience and market share, it’s time to complete your competitor profiles by filling out basic company information. It provides context that can help you analyze your results and create a more competitive marketing strategy.

For example, let’s say one of your competitors has only been around for a few years and has half the number of employees and has raised millions in funding rounds. In this case, they may be a bigger threat than a larger established company.

• You can find basic information about your competitors in the company information section of the traffic analytics overview report. This includes what categories they operate in, the amount of funding they have, and how many employees they have.
• You can also consider manually searching for more details such as:
• When they were founded and important milestones
• How are they formed?
• What differentiates them from the pack?
• Where they work.
• If possible, try to maintain consistent information for each competitor, to make comparisons and analysis easier. However, if you find an important detail that really stands out, don’t hesitate to add it to your profile.

Step 3: Identify your competitors’ products, pricing, placement, and promotional strategies

Once you have all the initial insights, it’s time to get down to the “4 Ps” of marketing: Product, Pricing, Placement, and Promotion. Exploring these will give you a deeper understanding of your competitors’ marketing strategies.

• Identify top product and pricing strategies.
• First, take a list of your competitors and start a deep dive on each of them.

• Take some time to explore and identify their sites:

• Which products or services are prominently featured?
• Their pricing strategy, including sales or discounts
• Additional promotions such as referral schemes, free trial offers, or other additional incentives

Your competitor’s site may have hundreds of products. Probably, only a small number of them act as major audience drivers. To identify your competitors’ top products, use the Top Pages report in the Traffic Analytics tool. To do this, you need to enter your competitor’s domain.

The Top Pages report tells you which pages on a website generate the most traffic. By identifying the most popular product pages on a competitor’s website, you’ll identify which products are likely to be the biggest audience drivers.

Once you’ve identified your competitor’s top product pages, take a closer look at the products themselves. Because each offer is unique, it can be difficult to directly compare them. Instead, note down all the important features of each. Then ask yourself:

• Are these products successful?
• Are any of these products an established, market leader?
• Has my competitor invested heavily in new product launches?
• Are they discontinuing any products or offering substantial discounts?
• If you want to know more about how your competitor advertises their essential products, enter their domain into the advertising research tool. Then analyze their ad copy for specific prices, promotions, and the type of language used to communicate with them.

Repeat this process for each of your competitors. As you do, pay close attention to the types of products or services that are most successful for each competitor, and compare that information to your own. Do you see a trend? If so, make a note of it.

AI-powered competitive intelligence

• With Kompyte by Semrush
• Example of ADS
• Identify competitors’ advertising and placement.
• Next, analyze your competitors’ promotional channels to see how they are reaching their audience. Not only can this help you understand their promotion strategy since your audiences likely overlap, but it can also tell you which channels resonate with them.

• Here are some of the results you can draw from each channel:

• Direct: If your competitor relies on it, they probably have strong brand awareness. Users already know the brand name to navigate directly to your site. They will also be doing offline marketing.
• Reference: Your competitor likely has a strong backlink profile or places banner ads on other sites. They probably have strong digital PR and are probably posting content on other platforms.
• Find: Your competitor focuses on technical SEO and content optimization on page. You can analyze their content marketing and identify their top pages.
• Social: Your competitor likely has a solid social media presence with an engaged audience. It might be a good idea to research which platforms they use the most.
• Paid: Your competitor probably has a strong advertising budget, especially for paid search. You may want to investigate this,

Understanding how your competitors are using content to engage their audience and increase interest in their products or services can help inform your own content marketing approach

Even if you’re new to content marketing, taking the time to compare your efforts to your competitors can help you stay on top of trends. You can also discover new ways to capture your audience’s attention using content.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to conduct a competitive content analysis step-by-step. We’ll also show you how to identify your content’s strengths and areas for improvement. We will discuss:

• What is competitive content analysis?
• Why do competitive content analysis?
• How to Analyze Competitive Content
• How to turn your competitive content analysis into action.
• What is competitive content analysis?

Competitive content analysis is the process of systematically analyzing your competitors’ content strategies. By breaking down the analysis into steps, it’s easier to uncover your potential competitors’ top-performing content and weak spots and identify your competitive advantages.

Why do competitive content analysis?

There are many reasons to conduct a competitive content analysis, but the main purpose of the exercise is to help you:

Benchmark Your Efforts: Understand how your content marketing efforts compare to others in your industry. You’ll see what kind of content your target audience expects from you and how they prefer to engage with it.

Find Content Differences: Identify your competitors’ high-performing and underperforming content. Understand what your target audience likes (so you can do it better) and which content approaches don’t get much traction (so you can avoid them).

Keep your content fresh: Find new ideas to push the creative spin, and make sure your content efforts stand out from the crowd.

How to Analyze Competitive Content

Ultimately, competitive content analysis will help you stay one step ahead of your competition. This will ensure that any content you create is unique and valuable to your target audience. And analyzing competitive content isn’t as difficult as you might think. In fact, we’ve created a free downloadable competitive research template that’s all you need to get started.

• You can make a copy of this template and use it as you go through each step below.

• Get your free competitive content analysis template.

• Organize your competitive content research and use it to improve your strategy.

• Download now →
• Example of ADS

List your competitors.

When starting a competitive content analysis, start with a list of your direct and indirect competitors.

Your direct competitors are any brand, business, or person that offers the same products or services that you do.

Your indirect competitors are any brand, business, or person that offers products or services that are different from yours but can meet the same customer needs. They can solve the same problem that your product or service does.

You can also review media publications. Online magazines and blogs that create content on the same topic as your brand can be a useful way to get content ideas and find potential partnerships.

Case Study: Casper

Let’s use Casper, a company that sells quality mattresses directly to consumers online, as an example.

Casper has many direct competitors that sell the same product. Examples include Tuft & Needle, Leesa, Purple, Helix, and Nectar. Even Walmart and Amazon, which have both launched private “mattress-in-a-box” labels, could be considered direct competitors to Casper.

Meanwhile, brands that don’t sell mattresses but offer other products or services to help people sleep better would be considered Casper’s indirect competitors. For example, pillow company PlutoPillow, apps like Calm and SleepCycle, or even wearable brands like RemRise, The Nue Co., and Moon Juice. These businesses also aim to fulfill the same customer need: a better night’s sleep.

You will want to gather a list of your direct and indirect competitors. All of them will have different content strategies for you to analyze.

Pro Tip: Use Searush to help you list your competitors. Type your domain name into the organic research tool, and go to the ‘competitions’ tab.

Competitive Content Analysis – Identify competitors.List of organic competitors for casper.com

Step 2: Assess your competitors’ business focus and positioning.

Starting with your direct competitors, you’ll want to gather basic information about them so you can better understand their goals and target audience.

Take a look at their homepage title and meta description. You can manually look for it in Google search results or use the SEOquake Chrome extension to scrape it from any page. Also review their homepage copy. How do they define who they are and what they do?

Step 3: Analyze Key SEO Metrics

A proper competitor’s content analysis also includes looking at key SEO metrics to identify any potential gaps in your site’s content compared to your competition. For example, you may find that a lot of people are engaging and sharing your competitor’s videos. This may mean that there is also an opportunity for you to create more video content.

In this step, your goal is to understand how much traffic and engagement to expect with content in your niche. It’s also important to understand which of your competitors are doing a good job of creating that content.

Monthly organic search traffic

Collecting monthly organic search traffic numbers on your competitors can help you benchmark your brand against them. You’ll need an SEO or analytics tool to do this, and there are several options. If you are using Searush, go to Domain Overview. Type in your competitor’s website, and you’ll be able to see their organic search traffic.

• Competitive Content Analysis – Organic Search
• Organic search traffic for Casper competitor tuftandneedle.com – 241.8K as of June 2021 (Source: Domain Review Report at Seamarsh)
• You can also use Google Analytics to find the organic search traffic numbers on your site by going to Acquisition > Overview > Organic Search. Be sure to set the correct date range.

Domain Authority Score

Domain Authority Score is another metric you can use to gauge the overall effectiveness of your competitors’ content marketing efforts. Use it to benchmark against your content and SEO strategy.

Many SEO tools generate their own version of this score. Semrush Authority Score shows the overall quality and SEO performance of a domain or web page. It is based on multiple metrics (such as organic search, website traffic and backlinks data) that demonstrate trust and authority, using neural networks and machine learning to ensure maximum accuracy.

If you are using Semrush, go to Domain Overview > Overview > Authority Score. Check this score for your competitors and your site.

Authority Score

• Authority score for Casper competitor tuftandneedle.com: 55 as of June 2021
• Top country by traffic
• Depending on your product or service, you may need to localize your content to appeal to your target audience. If you’re competing with other brands or businesses in a certain area, you’ll want to analyze where their traffic is coming from.

• You can use Google Analytics to find this information for your website. You need to create a segment of all traffic coming from organic search (where medium = organic). then go to Audience > Geo > Locations). To analyze your competitors, you can use Semrush (Domain
• Competitive Content Analysis – Countries
• Traffic distribution by country for tuftandneedle.com as of June 2021
• Average time on site
• Another important engagement metric is the average time users spend on a site. This will help you understand whether people are actually enjoying or engaging with your competitor’s content.

First, check how much average time users are spending on your own website. You can use Google Analytics (Audience > Overview) making sure to set the correct date range.

If you are using Semrush to find an estimate of this metric for your competitors, go to Domain Overview > Overall Overview > Average. Duration of visit.

Average visit duration for tuftandneedle.com: 08:18 as of June 2021 (Source: Traffic Analytics Tool by Semrush)

Estimated number of top keywords

Next, you can see how many keywords your competitors are ranking for on the first page of organic search results. This list of keywords can help you identify which of your competitors have the strongest SEO and content strategies. You will be able to learn from them and try new content ideas.

If you’re using Searush, go to Organic Research > Positions > and select Pos: Top 10 in the first drop-down menu.

Number of organic keywords that Turf & Needle was ranking for in the top 10 as of June 2021

Estimated number of backlinks

Knowing which of your competitors generate a lot of backlinks can help you find more link magnet ideas and link building opportunities.

Pro Tip: Semrush allows you to compare your brand vs. your competitors for these key SEO metrics at a glance. Here’s a look at the comparison of authority scores, organic traffic, backlinks, etc. for Casper vs. Taft & Needle.

Competitive Content Analysis – Comparing Domains

Domain Comparison Review: tuftandneedle.com vs casper.com (May 2021)

Abstract

As you analyze each of these SEO metrics for your competitors, try to identify their strengths and weaknesses and ask yourself:

Are any of your competitors having issues with organic traffic?

What forms of content seem to have the most engagement for them? Which is less busy?

Is there specific content that generates unusual attention and/or backlinks?

Try scoring each of these elements from 0 to 10 based on your own opinion and what you feel is quality content.

Length of content

Estimating the average length of your competitors’ content will help you set goals for your content. Use tools like WordCount Plus Chrome extension to measure the word count of a specific web page or blog post.You can also take advantage of the SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant, which offer suggestions for optimal content piece length based on top competitive pages.

Searush SEO Content Template Tool suggests the best content length based on your keywords, among other things.

Text length recommendations for keyword “best mattress for side sleepers” in SEO content template

Key Content Formats

Now is the time to list the content formats your competitors are using. Some examples of content formats you may find include:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Webinars
• Infographics
• Case studies
• eBooks
• Reports
• Data visualizations
• Interactive content
• Quizzes
• The podcast
• Be sure to check out their blog as well as other pages on the site, such as testimonials pages, FAQs, etc. This will help ensure that you are not missing anything.Competitive Content Analysis – Content Formats.

“

12 Answers to Your Top Concerns About Buying a Mattress Online

Infographic at tuftandneedle.com

Listing the key content formats your competitors are using will help you understand how much time and resources they invest in content marketing. You’ll also be able to see how often they create different types of content.

Once armed with this information, you can identify ideas to replicate or learn how to differentiate your content strategy.

User acquisition

Many businesses create a lot of content but forget to include a call to action to help convert their readers or website visitors into leads. Therefore, it is a good idea to check what tactics your competitors are using to get potential customer contact information on their sites.

Check for things like newsletter signup forms, banners or pop-up windows, gated offers, and other similar tactics.

Competitive Content Analysis – User Acquisition

Newsletter signup form at tuftandneedle.com

You can start to see a pattern in the tools and types of calls to action they use. This can be a good indicator of what works in your niche.

Influencers and thought leaders

Nowadays, many businesses also work with influencers and partners to help them create content and engage with their audience. If you see your competitors working with or promoting content created by influencers, list their names and the type of content they’re creating. This way you can reach them too.

Competitive Content Analysis – Contributions.

• Partner Program at tuftandneedle.com
• Pro tip: Using the Simrush brand monitoring tool, you can find all the positive mentions about your brand and partner with influencers and non-competing brands.
• Bonus: The content team
• If you want to grow your content team, check out your competitors’ team pages or LinkedIn company pages. This will help you better understand the size of their team and their role.

• Looking at each team member’s job title can also reveal where your competitors are investing their resources. For example, is there more than one person working on video marketing? Or do they have a strong social media team?

• On LinkedIn, you can go to “People” on your competitor’s company page. Once you’re there, search for specific keywords like “marketing” or “content.” At Casper competitor Tuft & Needle, we can see that 38 people have the keyword “content” in their job title or description.

Competitive Content Analysis

1. Taft & Needle’s ideal characters include:
2. Head of Content
3. Head of email
4. Content Manager
5. Senior Multimedia Producer
6. Heads of affiliation and influence
7. Video editor

Step 5: Turn your competitive content analysis into action.

Now that you’ve gathered all this information on your competitors’ content strategies, the final step is how you can improve your content. Base it on their (and your own) strengths and weaknesses.

• Additionally, you will now have everything you need:
• When it comes to content marketing, identify the competitors you should be watching closely.
• Generate new content ideas (topics, themes and formats)
• Try new tactics to generate leads with your content.
• Determine your weak points.
• Test new methods to improve your overall content strategy.

After analyzing your direct competitors, you can repeat the process for your indirect competitors as well. Remember, it’s okay to skip certain steps if you don’t find them suitable for one of your competitors. The process and our free template are flexible and customizable to meet your specific business needs.

Competitive analysis is the cornerstone of growing any business. Without understanding what your competitors are doing to drive traffic and customers to your site who ultimately buy their products/services, you will struggle to catch up.

Thankfully, in the last 5-7 years many tools have come to market that can provide us with the data we need to research our competitors to find out what they are doing online. . In this particular article we’re going to walk you through competitive analysis using SEMrush, although you can do it to varying degrees with other industry-approved tools like Moz and Ahrefs.Credo is a SEMrush affiliate, and therefore they are offering you a free 14-day trial when you use our exclusive link.

So let’s explore how to use SEMrush to do competitor research using their keyword/rank database, their keyword and backlink gap tools, and projects.

Why Use SEMrush for Competitive Analysis?

As we explained in our guide to keyword research using SEMrush, SEMrush has a database of 5.8 billion keywords worldwide, including 780 million keywords in the United States alone. They have millions in many countries and tens of millions in others (full list):

You can leverage this data, no matter which country you are in, to see your competitors:

• The exact keywords they are ranking for in the organic search results.
• the features of the search results (such as featured snippets and images) they are earning;
• The keywords they are bidding on in Google Ads (formerly AdWords).
• Although SEMrush is only a tool and doesn’t work for you to leverage your knowledge, if you strategize beyond that knowledge, use their data to grow your business. can go.

• SEMrush competitor analysis using their keyword database
• The easiest way to use SEMrush to do a competitive analysis is to first identify your competitors.

• Hopefully you know who your main business competitors are. It’s the people who sell the same services as you that people see as your direct competition. If your potential customer doesn’t sign a contract with you or buy your product, that’s why they might buy from you.

• You also have search results competitors. Your direct business competitors may do a bad job of SEO and thus not rank with you, or they may rank better than you and it’s worth knowing.

• To identify your search competitors, go to your SEMrush dashboard and enter your domain:

• When you land on your domain overview page, scroll down to the Main Organic Competitors section to find the top 5 keywords you already rank for:

• Click on a title to be taken to a full list of your search competitors based on the keywords you’re already ranking for:

From here, I recommend manually verifying sites that are more relevant to your business than those that are primarily your direct competitors. In the above example, looking at Amazon will only give me a ton of data that isn’t useful for my business, but BackCountry, OutdoorGearLab, and Switchback Travel are all sites I should look at more closely because they are industry sites. are out of and write. Gear reviews such as Single Gear:

Click on the Competitor’s SE Keywords link here to see a similar view.From here, you can do one of two things:

• Download all their data to save for later in Excel.
• Use SEMrush’s filters (filter by keyword) to narrow down a list to any keyword with keywords like “review” or “best”, then export that data.
• Do this with all of your competitors and you’ll have a lot of data to analyze. What you will specifically look for is:

• High volume keywords also cost more (cost per click) because that means the keywords can be profitable enough for you to rank well.
• Keyword trends. Maybe your long-established competitor with a lot of traffic is using “best” or “review” or “2018” as a modifier.
• Space. Are they preferring one sport but not the other? This might be your chance to rank and gain traffic and brand recognition in the short term.
• All the data in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t turn it into insight, but you can do a lot better when you do it based on opportunity and prioritization.

Identify competitors through keywords

What if you’re investigating a new vertical or you haven’t done any SEO on your site and thus you don’t rank for anything? The above strategy will not work for you much.

We need to identify competitors based on keywords.

1. SEO competitive analysis is the process of identifying your and your competitors’ SEO strengths and weaknesses.

• As with a typical competitive analysis, you’re working to find any gaps between you and your competitors. But instead of focusing on marketing strategy, you will focus on SEO strategy.

• A competitor analysis can help you:

• Benchmark your current SEO performance.
• Identify areas of improvement in your SEO strategy.
• Reveal any competitive gaps or weaknesses.

Discover your competitors’ winning strategies.

Why SEO Competitive Analysis is Important

Running a competitive analysis allows you to evaluate your overall market, competitors, and how the current search landscape performs for key keywords.

Even if you’re already ranking at the top of the search results for your most important keywords, you’ll need to monitor your SEO performance to make sure you’re on the right track. Don’t lose your edge over competitors.

How to Run an SEO Competitive Analysis

There are no hard or fast rules for conducting an SEO competitor analysis, but here are a few steps you can incorporate into your process:

Find your competitors.

Start by making a list of who you consider to be your competitors. (If you’re working with a client, ask their marketing team or stakeholders to contribute.) Try to focus on websites that are relevant to your main target keywords and any additional keywords. Rank high or often for keywords.

If you are working on a new website, you may not know in advance who your competitors are. You can try building your own list with the Market Explorer tool. Select “Find Competitors” on the tool’s landing page, then enter your domain.

This tool automatically lists the top players in your market along the growth quadrant:

• The Growth Quadrant chart organizes you and your competitors into four basic categories:
• Niche players: New or small companies with small audience sizes and low growth rates
• Game Changers: Emerging companies that have a relatively small audience size but are growing rapidly.
• Leaders: Companies with both large audiences and fast growth rates.
• Established players: Companies with large, established audiences
• Hover over each entry to see their direct traffic, search traffic, and more. You can also see this information in the All Domains tab.

If you already know your competitors, you can use the Market Explorer tool to find them by creating a list. Select “Create List” on the tool’s landing page, enter your and your competitors’ domains, then name your list:

• With SEO competitor analysis, it’s important to remember that your biggest competitor may not always be the one occupying all the top rankings.

• You’re also competing with other sites for long-tail or branded keywords, so don’t be afraid to include those keywords in your review. If you focus solely on generic keywords, your keyword analysis can be skewed or ultimately unhelpful.

You should also consider the competitors in your overall market segment. For example, we can see in the Organic Research Tool’s Organic Competitors report that Home Depot’s organic search competitors include other hardware stores like Lowe’s, but also other stores that sell tools, like Sears or Amazon:

Finding unknown competitors in competitive analysis.

Limiting Home Depot’s analysis to other hardware stores would have caused considerable variation in their results. They will also need to consider other stores that offer similar products or services, even if those stores are not in their specific market.

Deciding who not to compete with.

Not every competitor above you in the SERPs will be a real competitor. In the same vein, trying to leave some sites behind may not be as necessary or even feasible.

To identify which sites are not your competitors, consider factors such as current rankings, resources and time invested.

Sometimes it’s not worth trying to outrank sites like Wikipedia or Pinterest for specific keywords. Or you may need to put more effort into outranking sites that are too big or too established, which can affect your overall strategy.

Instead, focus on the competitors who can influence your traffic the most. These will likely be the websites that contribute the most to your lost traffic.

Analyze your competitors’ top pages.

It is also important to identify the most popular pages of your competitors.

• Which pages rank for the most keywords?
• Which pages have the most traffic?
• Which pages have the highest percentage of overall traffic?
• Sometimes the competitor is on a particular page or page.

Identify strengths and weaknesses.

What are the differences in strengths and weaknesses between you and each of your competitors? Where do they excel that you don’t?

Every website will have at least one weak point, even large e-commerce sites like Amazon or eBay.

If you’re struggling to determine weak areas of your site, ask employees what they see, especially if they’re up front, and deal with customers who have voiced complaints. You can also create customer surveys.

Even your strengths may need a little tweaking. If you and your competitor have a common strategy or tactics, try to determine the ways in which your competitor’s actions differ from yours.

Identify the strengths and weaknesses of each of your competitors by considering these factors:

power

• How authoritative is your site compared to your competitors?
• Do they have many important inbound links to the site?
• Are they from a reputable brand authority?
• If your competitors have a higher authority than your site, you’ll have a hard time outranking them for the most competitive keywords. This is important to see the difference in keywords.

• Look at less popular terms that still see a decent amount of search volume, or look at long-tail queries that you can target specifically but aren’t targeting. As you build your authority, you may find more success targeting some of these popular and competitive keywords.

Content

• Do they have the best quality content?
• Is their content thin and less complete?
• Do they only focus on product pages and have no support pages?
• Do they create only one type of content or many?
• Manually review each competitor’s content to list any strengths or weaknesses you see. Look for any gaps in their content that you can exploit yourself.

You can also use a content analyzer to assess the strengths or weaknesses of your content. This tool examines the pages of each site subfolder that you specify for important metrics such as total clicks, total impressions, and any relevant search queries. After connecting to Google Search Console, it can also tell you if a page’s metadata, titles, or body content needs improvement.

To get started with the Content Audit tool, select the subfolders you want to audit. If necessary subfolders or URLs are missing from the list, you can link the tool to your website’s sitemap or upload a sitemap in .txt, .xml, or .csv format.

Google Site Search

After the audit is complete, you can review the results by content set or table. Content sets categorize each URL according to the desired enhancement type. You can also create your own custom content to organize your content.

Select each URL to review its metadata and metrics, then take notes or take actions to improve the page.

• Google Site Search
• E-commerce

• Look at their product pages for e-commerce sites and drill down to see if their product pages are performing better than yours.

• Do they have product guides or links to support?
• Do they have a lot of ways to relate to the product?
• Are they recommending related, similar products or products that are often purchased together?
• How are they showing their ratings and reviews for products?
• How easy is it to buy their products compared to yours?
• Technical SEO
• Are there any technical issues on their site hindering their search performance?

• If you both suffer from the same technical SEO issues or you have coding issues that make it difficult for Google to crawl pages efficiently, these improvements to your site may result in higher visibility. Is

• Don’t forget to check the page speed as well. As sites grow, they can be bogged down by legacy code or large scripts that can slow down.

You likely won’t have access to the technical SEO of your competitors, but you can use a site audit tool to stay ahead of yourself. Site Audit Tool is a high-powered website crawler that checks over 120 sites, including:

• Duplicate content
• Broken links
• Implementation of HTTPS
• Ability to crawl
• Indexing
• Use the tool to set benchmarks and regularly monitor your site’s health.

Visit each competitor’s site from a mobile phone, and visit their most popular sections or pages. Sometimes you’ll find flaws in your competitor’s mobile site that you can take advantage of with your strong mobile presence.

Having a technically sound website makes it easier to focus on other issues with ranking wins, like optimizing content.

Internal linking problems

Internal linking and site rankings help Google crawl, index and rank. Site architecture is an essential aspect of SEO. As with technical issues, if an area doesn’t have a strong internal linking structure, you can benefit from it if you have a solid one of your own.

Review how competitors set up their sites.

Breadcrumbs / URL structure

Using breadcrumbs and a strong URL structure can help Google understand the content hierarchy within the site and rank accordingly.

If you make sure that you are strong, and without any technical issues, this can give you an advantage over a competitor lacking in this area. While this should be part of your overall competitive analysis for each site, it’s also important to look at how it relates to the specific pages you’re trying to rank highly for.

Content and keywords

• How are your competitors using your keywords in their content?
• Are they using some of the same keywords that you should include in your content?
• What about the quality of the content itself?
• Do your competitors use more or fewer words than you?
• Is your readability score significantly different from other competitors in the market?
• These are all things to consider when choosing keywords and creating content. Below you can see the recommendations provided by the SEO content template. It will provide related domains from competitors, semantic keywords to consider, readability information, and more.

• Data provided by SEO Content Template
• Review backlinks.

Backlink analysis is an important part of competitive analysis. When a competitor has a significantly better backlink profile, especially high-quality backlinks from well-known websites, it will mean that you will have a much harder time competing against them. That you don’t create a similar backlink profile.

It’s also important to distinguish between high-quality backlinks versus low-quality backlinks.

Since Google changed how they handle low-quality links with the Penguin update, if you see that a competitor has a large number of low-quality links, they may The links are not helping them.

If you follow in their footsteps and go for quantity over quality with links, you can hurt your SEO. Since you can’t see what your competitor’s disavow file is, be careful not to copy competitors directly when it comes to spamming links.

High quality backlinks

You want to focus on high quality backlinks, such as essential news sites, high profile sites, or experts in your market areas. When looking at competitor backlinks, consider these questions:

Have they gotten press in major news outlets? If so, is there a way you can include yourself in similar stories?

Are they a recommended source on high-profile but non-commercial sites in your industry?

How can you make yourself part of these recommended resources?

Nofollow vs. followed backlinks — both can be good.

You may also want to check nofollow vs. followed links. Although Google doesn’t technically use nofollow links for its algorithm, they don’t necessarily help from an SEO perspective.

However, they can be an important source of traffic that builds awareness of your brand, increases traffic and results in conversions. So don’t ignore high quality links just because they are nofollow. While the SEO value may not be there, all of these links can have a lot of non-SEO value.

Backlink Gaps

You want to look for significant gaps in your backlinks, especially links that multiple competitors have from the same page or site. If they’re linked to many of your competitors, it’s often easier to get yourself listed as well.

Don’t forget to check the backlinks of your competitors’ strong internal pages as well. Many people only consider homepage links for competitive analysis, but links to internal pages can be just as important. Some of their strongest performing internal pages may have incoming links which are a key factor in these pages ranking well.

Analyze content types.

How do you stack up against your competitors with different types of content?

For e-commerce sites, product pages are the primary page to compare and see the supporting content each competitor has and how well they are ranking against yours. This includes news content, blog articles, help/support/how-to content, videos, images, etc. Check anything considering the content ranking in the search results.

Identify areas where you are lacking compared to competitors.

• Do they have a regularly published blog that gets lots of shares and links?
• Are they making videos?
• Infographics?
• Popular live streams?
• The podcast?
• When you identify competitors that are significantly better for those content types, you can then explore whether you need to add those content types to your site, but you should Want to make sure they add value to your site?

If your competitor has a podcast, yet you see only a handful of downloads, then either your market area doesn’t need a podcast, or they’re doing a crappy job at it. have been.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve analyzed every aspect of your competitors’ content marketing strategies, you can outline areas to optimize your own content funnel and boost your content performance. This will help you find ways to spend your resources more efficiently.

It’s also important to remember that doing a competitive content analysis should be a regular part of your overall content strategy. Businesses come and go – and your competitors are also adjusting their content strategies to keep up with trends and ever-changing consumer behavior. It’s a good idea to check in with your competitors and do a competitor analysis on a quarterly or yearly basis. This will help you uncover new content ideas and assess your own performance.