Whatever your business is, there's always going to be a time where you need to understand how you are stacking up with your competition. Even when you think you’re running a tight ship, there's going to be something you can improve.
The easiest way to find these areas for improvement is by comparing yourself with the leaders in your market. Follow these steps for quick ways to compare online competitors using various Semrush tools.
Analyze Your Competitors’ Traffic
Even if you know who your closest competitor is, it's still important to see which of your rivals is objectively the strongest online.
To find this information, turn to the Semrush Traffic Analytics Overview reports.
Enter up to 5 competitors to compare in the input fields at the top of the report.
With this report, you’ll get an immediate view of their traffic patterns. The graphs show you which competitors have enjoyed the largest amount of visitors over the recent months, as well as how much they’ve engaged with each site. This is a great way to estimate which competitor is actually getting the most visitors and the highest quality visits on a monthly basis.
Check For Your Rivals Overlap
No matter how big of a competitor you’re comparing there's going to be a good chance that you fight over the same audience.
Use the Audience Overview tab of the Semrush Traffic Analytics tool to see where your audience overlaps with your competition.
- See which companies attract the same users to their websites
- Analyze how much of your target audience is still uncovered.
- Use the location filter and time period filter to find out if there are any regional or seasonal gaps in your competitors’ activity. These low seasons could be the best time for you to step up to gain those users.
Identify Strong and Weak Points in Your Competition
One of the ways to compare yourself with your competitors is to see the places where they’re performing the weakest. Once you understand this information, you can leverage it for your own gain by targeting these areas.
Go to the Traffic Journey tab to find out where they fall behind compared to their other sources. If you notice a rival has issues with attracting traffic from social platforms, it can be in your best interests to run more focus on these channels where you can pull ahead.
Utilize What has Previously Worked
Oftentimes you will find that some of your competitors are already performing really well when it comes to bringing referral traffic to their site.
In cases like this, you don’t need to completely overhaul your own strategy. Simply look at what they’re doing and mimic it!
Find out what domains are bringing this traffic to your competitors by using the Backlink Gap.
- Enter the top 4 of your competitors and enter them into the Backlink Gap to see how your backlink profile compares.
- Filter the referring domains by the competitor you want to model your strategy from.
- Look for the domains with the highest authority score and choose these for your outreach campaign.
See How Your Competitors are Being Mentioned
A great way to get insight into how your competitors are performing online is to take a look at how they are being mentioned across the web. This works extremely well when it comes to their social media platforms.
- Set up a Social Tracker for your domain and add competitors
- Go to the Twitter Mentioner report
- Analyze how you and your competitors are being mentioned on twitter
Pay attention to the follower count of each mentioned as the more followers a user has the more authority they have over your reputation.
Stay up to Date with New Organic and Paid Competition
Companies and industries are constantly evolving, so naturally, your competitors will change along with it. Luckily you are able to constantly remain up to date with your competition.
Utilize the Semrush Competitors reports to see if any new competitors have crept into your sight. These reports are available for Organic, Paid, and PLA competitors. You can read more about these reports here.