The Competitive Research Toolkit on SEMrush gives you the ability 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 and reveal their marketing strategies from every angle - Organic Search, SEO, Advertising, Content and PR, and Social Media.
Big Picture
These tools give you a big-picture look at a competitor or potential partner’s market presence and performance. Traffic Analytics offers insights into the competitor’s website traffic and visitor engagement metrics. You’ll be able to analyze a site’s performance in regions, most effective channels (social, search, direct, referral, paid), and estimate market share. The reports can help you search for and evaluate potential affiliate and comarketing partners, prepare for pre-sales and collect data for entering new markets.
Domain Overview displays a domain’s number of organic and paid keywords, backlinks, and display ads. Unlike Traffic Analytics, which uses clickstream data to provide traffic analysis on various channels, Domain Overview introduces all of the data that SEMrush has related to a website in its main database of keywords, backlinks and display ads. From here you can quickly get an idea of a domain’s strengths and weaknesses and click through widgets to deeper reports on SEMrush.
SEO
These tools allow you to uncover your competition’s SEO strategies that give them organic visibility and traffic from search. Organic Research reports break down your competition’s keyword strategies for you so you can see all of the search queries they get their organic traffic from.
Keyword Gap compares up to five competing domains side by side to identify your competitors’ target keyword you’ve overlooked and uncover keyword opportunities to boost your own ROI.
Backlink Analytics reports allow you to see where your competition gets their backlinks from, and Backlink Gap can compare the backlink profiles of up to five domains to help you find and evaluate the websites in your niche linking to your competitors but not you.
Advertising
These tools show you how your competition spends their advertising dollars and what keywords they target in their various advertising strategies. Advertising Research reports can illuminate your competitor’s PPC strategy, showing you their paid search campaign’s top keywords, landing pages and even copies of their ads. Display Advertising reports tell you how much a website publishes or advertises media and text display ads through Google AdWords and AdSense. PLA Research lets you analyze the competition for advertising products on the Google Shopping Network.
Content and PR
These tools allow you to follow where and how often a competitor’s brand name is mentioned online, compare the performance of competing articles or webpages, and brainstorm new ideas for a content marketing plan. Brand Monitoring tracks the Internet mentions of any branded word or phrase so you can find blogs or news sources that mention your competitor.
Topic Research is an excellent tool for competitive research if you want to find other websites that cover the same topics as your site. Enter a topic in the search bar of this tool to gather ideas from the related topics and subtopics covered on the web by your competitors! You can even analyze a specific competitor’s domain to see which topics they’ve already covered on their site.
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.
Social Media
The Social Media Tracker can track all of your top competitors on five of the most popular social media channels so you can learn what types of social media engage your target audience the best. Use it to study the competition and improve your own SMM strategy wisely.