Discover your competitors’ marketing strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and products effortlessly with Semrush’s competitive research tools.
Your digital marketing, advertising, and social media engagement effort are not isolated. You are participating in a competitive market. Hence, you must find out what the competitors are doing as a part of their marketing or website publishing strategies to outcompete your rival websites and apps.
While a few online tools offer limited market intelligence about the competitors, Semrush is a suite of tools purposefully built for this service.
Various small businesses operating online globally use this set of tools to outperform their rivals. Also, successful digital marketers rely on this set of tools from Semrush. Keep reading to know more.
What Is Competitor Research?
When you search for similar online businesses, websites, and apps that compete in the online market for revenue and profit, that is known as competitor research.
This process is indispensable in website publishing, social media marketing, and digital marketing. If you can do it the right way, you will discover the secret recipe of success that your rival businesses are following.
A competitor analysis project will reveal much information, including the following:
- Data to understand the competitive landscape in the industry
- Explore various types of business competition
- Data to understand the audience and market
- How to benchmark your business against your rivals
Now, let’s discuss the competitive research feature offered by Semrush.
Competitive Research Features From Semrush
As explained earlier, competitive research is a mighty tool in the digital and content marketing ecosystem. However, you must use the right tools and features to seek success in a competitor analysis project.
While there are some free tools available online for low-level competitor analysis, that is not sufficient to create a professional strategy for a digital business. You need a collection of apps and tools in one package.
This is exactly what Semrush competitive research provides you. All the necessary competitive research tools and apps are in one place. That is not all! The Semrush subscription also opens the door to various whitepapers, case studies, and templates for competitive research and market intelligence.
Competitive research is a complete suite of apps under the SEO tool kit of Semrush. Though the section shows five individual modules for competitor analysis, there are many more other tools you can use.
The required tools and features for competitor research project depends on your strategy. Hence, you are not confined to using a specific set of tools in Semrush. Instead, you can improvise and utilize any tool that serves the cause.
Competitive Research Apps From Semrush
Apart from the tools provided with the Semrush subscription, there are some add-on apps in the Semrush app store that you can use.
Simply go to the Semrush AppCenter and then navigate to the Competitor Analysis section to reveal the currently available competitor research apps. Here are some common and useful apps you may want to try from here:
- AdClarity – Advertising Intelligence to explore your rival digital business’s ads, ad strategy, ad spend, ad impressions, and so on.
- E-commerce Keywords Analytics helps you discover high-performing keywords from top online seller domains.
- Instant Keyword Research for Amazon lets you find product descriptions and other content keywords that Amazon top sellers use.
- Semrush .Trends to discover marketing trends and produce marketing insights to create a high-performing marketing strategy for your web publishing or app marketing business.
- Traffic Insights for Amazon empowers you to understand how a rival seller gets traffic from external channels so you can also do the same.
- Competitor Tracker for Amazon lets you monitor competitors frequently.
- You can use the Social Tracker app from Semrush to know the social media strategy of the rival business.
Competitive Research Tools From Semrush
Now that you know the features and apps from the Semrush subscription useful for competitive research, find below the tools you can use for your marketing intelligence projects:
#1. Website Competitor Research
If your rival is doing business online, you can know granular details about their website, social media, and app presence using this set of tools from Semrush. It comprises the following subfeatures:
- Traffic Analytics
- Organic Research
- Advertising Research
- Social Media Tracker
#2. Market Explorer Tool
If you are starting a new website or working for a new online business client, you can use the Market Explorer tool. Simply type the business domain name on the tool and hit the Find Competitors button.
It will fetch the following details that will, in turn, help you create a market competition summary report either for your employer or the client:
- Market Summary
- Growth Quadrant
- Top Keywords
- Domain vs. Market Dynamics
- Market Geo Distribution
- Market Traffic
#3. Keyword Gap Tool
This tool lets you create a keyword profile for up to five competing businesses in a side-by-side table. Thus, you can get at a glance view of the keywords your rivals are ranking for. If you are not covering these keywords, you get the chance to cover them immediately.
Its notable data outputs are:
- Quick SEO competitive research between top competitors and your business
- Know the unique keywords that your rivals are ranking on, but you are not
- Keyword overlap between sites is shown as a visual chart
- Get a valuable comparison between desktop and mobile keywords
- Advanced keyword research filters
#4. Content Analyzer
Content Analyzer tool empowers you to pinpoint how specific content from your rivals is performing on the internet, social media, etc.
This granular data insight tool offers specifics like the following:
- Sessions
- Average session duration
- Page views
- Average time on page
- Bounce rate
- Search queries
- Clicks
#5. Backlink Analytics Tool
Backlink helps you understand where your rival websites and apps are getting referral traffic. High-quality backlinks are cornerstone elements for any website or content page. Google SERP values such links to improve your website or content page’s authority and popularity.
If you want to know the backlinking strategy of your rivals, then try this tool available under the Link Building section of Semrush. The report offers the following data insights:
- Authority Score
- Authority Score Trend
- Network Graph
- Referring Domains
- Backlinks
- New and Lost Referring Domains
- New and Lost Backlinks
- Categories of Referring Domains
- Top Anchors
- Backlink Types
- Link Attributes
#6. Domain Overview Tool
This is a great tool for competitive research because it reveals the following competitor data in an easy-to-understand report:
- Rival website’s authority score
- Find out its organic search traffic
- Also, find out its overall paid search traffic
- Know the total backlinks the website is getting
- Also, discover the geolocation-based distribution of the organic and paid traffic
How to Take Advantage of Semrush Competitive Research
You must create a holistic view of top competing websites and apps using the following tools of Semrush:
- Domain Overview
- Traffic Analytics
- Organic Research
- Keyword Gap
- Backlink Gap
Once you create a bird’s eye view of the top rivals, you can incorporate their marketing and promotion strategies into your own marketing projects. Also, if you are more into organic traffic and marketing, then you can follow the SEO strategy of the rival website or app.
Here, you must note that you should create a project to cover all the unique keywords on which your competitors are ranking. Also, if possible, get do follow or follow backlinks from the same high-authority websites as your rivals.
While following competitors’ strategies, do not forget to create unique content and brand marketing strategies by following resources in Semrush Academy.
Benefits of Semrush Competitive Research
Semrush competitive research primarily benefits your digital business by helping you scrub competitor business intelligence from the web. Other benefits that you could enjoy are as follows:
- If you are a brand-new business in the digital ecosystem and want to make an impact quickly, you must have a unique selling proposition (USP). To know the rivals’ USPs and how you can craft yours, you must utilize Semrush competitive analysis tools.
- Fill the market gaps by offering unique products, services, or service add-ons, by analyzing the customer reviews of the rival businesses.
- Create a benchmark for your brand and market the outcome on various online channels to improve your footprint and reputation.
- If you are in a competitive hiring ecosystem, you can use Semrush competitor analysis to reveal what talent your rivals are attracting.
- A competitive research project also helps you uncover potential market threats, challenges, etc., that can negatively impact your business revenue.
Final Words
So far, you have discovered the advanced tools and apps that Semrush offers you for competitive research.
You have also explored the underlying concept of these tools so that you can use this array of online marketing intelligence tools to grow the revenue of your website or app.
Next, check out Semrush: the ultimate guide to the platform’s killer features.