How to Discover Competitive Density Secrets with SEMrush

Competitive Density Secrets with SEMrush

Are you competitive?

You may not be participating in the Olympics or World Series, but when you are in marketing, you are in intense competition for the attention between adverts (PPC) and free adverts (SEO) on the results pages. Main engines. will search engines find you? How are you, who are you competing with, how are you, and what can you learn from them? I recently used SEMrush to track and analyze my competitors. Here are six of my best tips on how to use the tool to uncover competitors' secrets.

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SEMrush is one of the best established and most advanced SEO tools for digital marketing with nearly 500,000 lifetime users. The tool continues to evolve as the team explores new ideas and updates the data. The data covers a variety of areas, including organic search performance, ad search, AdSense display advertising, Google Shopping Ads (formerly PLA), backlinks, keyword research tools, and ranking tracking. mobile and local results as well as audits for technical location references. There's no shortage of things you can do with SEMrush, including assessing your own SEO performance, comparing with your competitors, evaluating the performance of ads and organic payments, reviewing backlinks, and publishing brand reports, but in In this review, I wanted to share six of my best tips for using the tool to track your competition.

1. Identify your competitors in organic research
SEMrush continuously collects data on more than 106 million keywords and more than 45 million websites that are displayed on the two main Google pages for these keywords. This provides a collective source view of what is most popular and how the public looks for it. You can use the knowledge from this data set to examine your competition in organic and paid searches.

To find your competitors, simply go to the organic search competitors menu option and enter your URL. In this general example, I used Hubspot as the URL. SEMrush first provides you with a positioning map for the competition, which indicates where the website is in the competitive environment based on the number of keywords placed in the top 20 search results and the search volume for the domain. You can see the real numbers when you pass the site name on the map.

You may think you already know your competition in organic research, but you will be surprised. It is important to remember that the competing areas in research may not be commercial competitors, but can still steal some of the visibility. In the case of Hubspot, SEMrush has identified up to 54,000 sites that compete with the organic research site. In a useful way, the tool organizes the list by skill levels according to the number of shared (shared) keywords classified in the top 20 organic search results as follows.

Any site with many common keywords could be a potential competitor. In this case, Social Media Examiner and Hubspot have 2,400 common keywords. Therefore, the two websites are competitors in terms of SEO, even if they are not competitors in terms of the products and services they offer.

The SE Traffic Price column is often interesting. This is the estimate of the cost of using paid advertising (AdWords) to generate the same amount of traffic that was organically attracted. Keyword cost-per-click (CPC) is used to calculate the value of the terms and positions for which they are classified. Many SEOs justify their efforts by pointing out what it would cost to buy the traffic they attracted "for free". In this example, we see that Wordstream and Moz attract more organic search engine traffic (SE) among these competitors and therefore have the highest SE traffic prices. You can export the data to Excel and, for example, rearrange the data according to traffic prices and, for example, create a list of the 25 toughest research competitors to be investigated and tracked.

2. Analyze the performance of your competitors' keywords
If you click on the number of keywords used for a competitor in your list, SEMrush will give you a table with all the keywords that you and your competitor place in the top 20 search results. The following table shows a comparison of Hubspot and Wordstream.

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The table shows the relative ranking positions for frequently used keywords. For example, Wordstream is much higher for "the Keyword Tool". The table also shows you the monthly search volume (results), the current bid price (CPC) and the competition density (the number of advertisers with AdWords ads for the keyword). You can sort by one of these metrics to find, for example, low-competition keywords where your competitor is in a higher position. This can offer the opportunity to improve the ranking relatively quickly through useful strategies for content, optimization and link creation. Another strategy is to find keywords with high CPC and low competition to get higher conversion pages for a better return on investment.

3. See the keywords classified by a competitor, but not you
Using the graphics option, you can display the general keywords for which you have a ranking, but also the unique keywords that your competitor has placed in the top 20 without this being the case. In the following example, there are 10,000 keywords where WordStream is in the top 20 but Hubspot is not.

A competitor's unique and successful keywords can pose a threat. However, you can turn them into opportunities by clicking on the unique part of the VENN diagram, examining the keywords in detail, and exporting them for your own use. These may not be the keywords you’re targeting. With regular use, however, you can discover new and useful keywords, reducing the threat from competitors. Emerging companies and companies offering new products and services can use this information to quickly succeed, save time and effort by using terms that have already proven themselves in search engines and examine how big brands use them expressions.

You can track organic position history to check competition, examine potential customers, and help diagnose certain Google algorithm updates and sanctions.

You can search the URL of a domain in the home page window for a quick and comparative overview, or place multiple website URLs in the graphics tool to get a graphic representation of horse racing is SEO.

4. Examine your competitor's top performing keywords
This is a very useful feature of SEMrush. Just go to organic search positions and enter your competitor's URL. This will generate a report that shows the best-performing keywords and URL for the page ranking for that particular keyword.

You can sort your keywords by search volume to see the most frequently asked questions on Google (or Bing). A high CPC can be a valuable but very competitive keyword whose traffic can be recommended to encourage the use of SEO instead of paid ads. The percentage of hits determines which keywords generate the most motivated search engines for the side of their competitors. Clicking the URL shows what types of content promote organic search traffic from your competitors. You can open the website with the blue arrow to display the message, the format, the quality and the length of the content as well as the SEO elements of the page. With this knowledge, you can improve your own content strategy and even improve your conversion techniques.

5. Review your competitor's strategy for paid ads
SEMrush has the latest data on paid advertising and is one of the most powerful tools in advertising research. I'm just concentrating here on analyzing the competition. Simply go to the Ad Search section, select positions and enter your competitor's URL. SEMrush gives you an instant overview of your paid search campaign, including:

• The number of keywords that attract visitors to your website by searching pays off.
• The amount of traffic generated by paid ads.
• An estimate of the amount your competitor is investing in paid research.
• Your main competitor in paid ads.

Here is a general description of Marketo.

Long-term analysis is useful. In the previous example, I switched the graph to traffic costs and see that Marketo has recently started doubling its advertising spend.

If you scroll down, the table of paid research positions shows a lot of detailed and useful information. This includes paid keywords that drive users to your website, your copy of the ad, landing page URLs, CPC, ad rank, percentage of hits (percentage of hits directed to the site by keyword), trend analysis of competitive density ( Number of results for the keyword).

With this information, you can check whether your competitor has a landing page for your payment campaign, whether you are using benefit-related titles with keywords and how you structure the ad text, e.g. as keywords, benefits, incentives and CTA. Trends over time can be easily distinguished in the "Trend" column in order to quickly and intuitively record the seasonal budget changes of an advertiser.

6. Look at the ads that work for your competitors
As an author, I like the history of domain ads in SEMrush, which shows competitors' ads. We can assume that the ads that appear most frequently will work for the competition as they continue to invest in them. You can then zoom to see the copy of the current announcement. Here is an example of Hubspot ads. The number of keywords indicates the number of search terms that trigger the ad in paid search. If you know these keywords, ad managers can create ad groups based on the top performers' campaign structure.

And there is more ...
Here I just scratched the surface of what you can do with SEMrush. There is a whole area of ​​backlinks analysis that I have not covered where you can review the competition's backlinks, including areas and sponsorship opportunities. However, I hope that my six tips have been helpful and I want to know how to use SEMrush to track your competitors. More information about SEMrush can be found on the current website, on the blog and in the webinars.