SEMrush is a popular Search Engine Marketing tool, with an enormous focus on competitor analysis. The domain pulls out valuable data such as traffic, backlinks, competitors, competitor’s advertising, organic vs. ad-driven traffic breakup etc., on any website of your choice. The SEMrush toolkit is one of the high priced SEO tools in the market. However, it provides in-depth insights into “things that are working for you and your competitor”, and ways to outmaneuver the competition. SEMrush is a package deal, in the sense that if you intend to make use of one of its tools, you have to buy the subscription for the entire toolkit. The toolkit pulls out copious amounts of data on your competitor and is incredibly extensive. For a good understanding of the tool, it is better to check its free trial. To get you started, a brief glimpse has been provided here for your reference.
Organic Research
With this module you can pull out the rankings of the keywords that are in the first two pages of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) for any given domain. You can check the competitor’s keywords that are ranking in the top 20 search results in search engine results. You can also check the potential buyers and competitors who are targeting the keywords of your interest. In other words, this module fetches the entire content marketing strategy of all your competitors in one go.
Advertising Research
This module provides a comprehensive report on the digital advertising strategy of your competitors. The reports contain estimates of overall expenditure on Adwords, position of ads in search results page (position 1, 2, 3 etc.), ad block position (up, side & bottom of search result page) and even the “competitor’s actual text ad” for any particular keyword of your interest. Moreover, the report also provides a list of competitor websites that are buying PPC ads for keywords of your interest.
SEMrush penetrates so deep into a domain’s data that you can obtain all the keywords that a competitor has used for advertising for the past 12 months. Not only that, you can also get their PPC budget breakup for the individual URLs under their domain.
Display Advertising (Adsense Reports)
This module captures the top 30 advertisers and publishers of ads via Google Adsense. If you are looking to get information regarding a publisher domain, you get all relevant advertising data, such as ad types, examples of ads and even landing pages of the respective ads hosted on the publisher’s site.
The module also reveals the various techniques employed by an advertiser, such as landing pages, calls to action and other visitor engaging efforts, to promote their products. So when you need to promote a particular domain, this module suggests various ads-publisher websites that are relevant for your strategy.
Backlinks
Using this module, SEMrush conducts a deep link analysis of any domain of your choice and finds all the links on the internet that drive traffic to it. The module enables you to conduct a competitive analysis of a domain’s backlinks and obtain data such as the linked URLs, target pages, the authority of the domains referring the site, anchor texts and so on. It lets you compare the weight of the inbound links to a competitor’s domain.
Keyword Research
This tool has multiple uses in both SEO and PPC focused strategies. The report gives you the distribution of CPC structure for any keywords and its phrases, the competition for the purchase of that keyword in search engines, search volume and much more. It provides a list of matching keyword phrases being used in searches. Furthermore, the report also generates relate keywords that are driving traffic for other sites in the same industry.
The most interesting aspect of this tool is that it gives a list of all advertisers who bid for a given keyword and also fetches their respective Adwords keywords. A neat calendar based layout gives you an idea of the ads that were functional in any given month.
Product Listing Ads
This is a powerful tool for an eCommerce retailer. If you are an eCommerce retailer, you are not new to using Product Listing Ads (PLA). You also know that the cutthroat competition in such business requires that you stay ahead of your competitor’s game. First of all, using this tool you can analyze whose PLAs are competing with yours in the search results page. Subsequently, you can check for the keywords that are triggering your competitor’s PLAs. The ability to find the PLA keywords that you have in common with your competitor enables you to form a better PLA strategy. Although the tool can also provide an estimate of your competitor’s expenditure on PLAs, it may not be very reliable.
Keyword Difficulty
A poorly drafted search engine marketing strategy, often focuses on keywords that are very difficult to target. Such efforts not only lead to large expenses, but also fail to achieve the intended goals. The Keyword Difficulty tool allows you to accurately analyze the efforts required to promote your domain in the top 20 search results for a particular keyword.
You can search a keyword or a phrase and this tool provides a difficulty score (in percentages) that gives an idea of how easy it is to topple your competitor’s organic position in the search engines. This way it also helps you find those other keywords that can be easily targeted.
Domain vs. Domain
Using this tool you can obtain competitive intelligence on a maximum of 5 domains in one go. This tool gives easy access to see the keywords that are driving traffic to both you and your competitors’ domains. You can check the ranking of each of these domains in the SERP for each keyword. That way, you can modify your strategy to either defend your position or improve it. Furthermore, this tool also finds you the unique keywords that your competitor is using that could be useful for you too.
Charts
This section comes very handy when you are looking at a large amount of data. The tool is similar to other modules discussed above, in the sense that it gives almost the same data on your competitor. However, the advantage of using this tool is that it gives you a visual picture of yours and your competitors’ behavior in a way that makes it very easy to understand and empowers you to take actions readily.
Position Tracking
SEO and PPC are great methods to generate traffic to your domain. But are your strategies really working? The Position Tracking tool allows you to monitor your position in the top 100 search results in Google in both paid as well as organic categories. This analysis can be extended to include your competitors and find the keywords that you should focus more for better performance.
Perhaps the best feature of this tool is that is allows you to analyze your position in the location of your choice. Considering the fact that most businesses are location specific, this tool provides you a solution to monitor your performance against your competitor’s on search engines, in any particular town, city or a larger region.
Site Audit
For higher ranking on the search engine, a good SEO strategy has to be reinforced with an SEO-optimized website. Any occurrences of broken links, presence of duplicate content, absence of Meta tags etc. will make it difficult for the search engine crawlers to index the webpages. The result is poor rankings of the web pages in search engines. The Site Audit tools crawls through your entire website and reports the errors and issues with the webpages. It suggests improvements that will make it easy for the search engines to index your webpages and make it easy for visitors to find your website.
