The Competitive Research Toolkit on Semrush gives you the research to make data-driven marketing decisions based on the strategies of your competitors. You’ll find solutions to oversee the big picture of a competitor or potential partner’s performance. Reveal their marketing strategies from every angle - Organic Search, SEO, Advertising, Content and PR, and Social Media.
To analyze the big picture of a competitor, start with Traffic Analytics, Domain Overview or Market Explorer.
Traffic Analytics offers insights into the competitor’s website traffic and visitor engagement metrics. With this tool, you can see where a website’s traffic comes from and how much their visitors engage with the site. The reports can help you evaluate potential affiliate partners, prepare for pre-sales, and collect data for entering new markets.
Domain Overview is one of the best places to start research on Semrush. The report displays a domain’s number of organic and paid keywords, backlinks, and display ads. From here you can quickly get an idea of a domain’s strengths and weaknesses on search before looking into the details.
Market Explorer allows you to fully dive into a niche market in order to better understand the target audience. This gives you the chance to benchmark your site with your industry and evaluate the demographics and characteristics of a market. By doing this you can better understand the opportunities in the market that you want to make money in.
These tools allow you to uncover your competition’s SEO strategies that give them organic visibility and traffic from search. Organic Research breaks down your competition’s keyword rankings for you. You’ll be able to see all of the keywords where they get organic traffic, their recent position changes, and more.
Keyword Gap compares the keyword rankings of up to five competing domains side by side. This will show you what keywords your competitors have that you don’t cover as opportunities to boost your own ROI.
Backlink Analytics reports allow you to see where your competition gets their backlinks from. Backlink Gap can compare the backlink profiles of up to five domains side by side. This method can help find the websites in your niche that are linking to your competitors but not you.
These tools show you how your competition spends their advertising dollars and what keywords they target in their various advertising strategies. Advertising Research will show you your competitor’s top paid search keywords, landing pages and even copies of their ads. It’s a great way to uncover a rival’s PPC strategy.
Display Advertising will tell you how much a website publishes or advertises media and text display ads through Google Ads and AdSense. PLA Research lets you analyze the competition for advertising products on the Google Shopping Network.
Our Content Marketing and PR tools allow you to follow your competitor’s online efforts with ease.
Brand Monitoring tracks the mentions for any branded word or phrase on the Internet. Set this tool up with your competitor’s brand name to find blogs or news sources that mention your competitor.
Topic Research can help you find other websites that cover the same topics as your site. Enter a key phrase into Topic Research to explore all of the related subtopics covered on the web by your competitors! You can even specify a competitor’s domain to see which topics they’ve covered.
Post Tracking lets you compare the success and engagement of different content pieces (from different websites) side by side. Use it to track the performance of your competitor’s articles across the web. You can measure any article's social engagement, backlinks, and even keyword rankings with this report.
The Social Media Tracker can track your top competitors on the five most popular social media channels. This tells what types of social media engage your target audience the best. Use it to uncover your competitor's social strategy and improve your own SMM strategy wisely.
With everything in this toolkit, you’re fully equipped to make competitive analyses in your market.