In this guide, we are going to talk about analyzing your competition SEO secrets and strategy and how to get benefit from it.  

You tried all SEO strategies that experts recommended like creating Great Headlines, Adding Keywords in  Titles, Meta Descriptions, Updating Images with Alt Text, and implemented all solutions and SEO tools recommended and still not getting traffic?

What is the best place than finding your competitor SEO strategies to boost your traffic?  In this post, We are going to find what is working for your competitor

• Organic Traffic of your competitors and traffic distribution around various sources
• Keywords they are ranking and estimated volume
• Keyword gap – What keywords you not targeting but your competitors are
• Paid Traffic – Competitors Paid Traffic and Exact Ad copies they are running. ( This probably best thing you can get )
• Backlinks – Your Competitor backlink source and How to get some for you
• Backlink Gap — What backlinks you are missing your competition has
• Social Shares – Competitors highly shared posts and stats

We are going to use a ToolKit recently launched by the SEMrush team called Competitive Research Toolkit which makes finding and tracking competitors SEO strategies of Competitors relatively easy.  It provides a lot of data and graphical representation of data of competitors.  You can also map relative positions of competitors with respect to your website.

This tool gives you the research 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. Reveal their marketing strategies from every angle – Organic Search, SEO, Advertising, Content and PR, and Social Media.

If you don’t have SEMrush yet, you can get a 7-day free trial to try out the things.

We will look at various tools offered by Competitive Research Toolkit on SEMrush to do competitor analysis:

To get into Competitive Research Toolkit on SEMrush, login to SEMrush and select ‘Competitive Research Toolkit”.  If you don’t have a SEMrush account, you can sign up for a 7-day free trial. This shows tools that are provided in this toolkits namely  

• Traffic Analytics
• Domain Overview
• Market Explorer
• Organic Research
• Keyword Gap 
• Backlink Analytics
• Backlink Gap  
• Advertising Research 
• Display Advertising 
• PLA Research 
•  Brand Monitoring 
• Topic Research 
• Post Tracking 
• Social Media Tracker

SEMrush Competetive Research Toolkit Features

Here are some of the data  that can collect with Competitive Research Toolkit on SEMrush:

Traffic Analytics

Traffic Analytics offers insights into the competitor’s website traffic and visitor engagement metrics. With this tool, you can see where a website’s traffic comes from and how much their visitors engage with the site. The reports can help you evaluate potential affiliate partners, prepare for pre-sales, and collect data for entering new markets. Below are some of the areas we can get data for:

• Learn the volume of mobile and desktop web traffic of any company in the market
• Reveal your competitors’ marketing mix by their traffic sources — direct, search, referral, paid and social
• Locate the countries where traffic comes from
• See the websites that are visited before and after your competitor’s site

In Traffic Analytics we get data for  Traffic Source overview, What are the top pages, Traffic by COuntries, Traffic by Subdomains, etc.  All this information can be used to evaluate potential affiliate partners, prepare for pre-sales, and collect data for entering new markets. The tool provides a graphical representation of all data for easier analysis.

Traffic Analytics provides data about Visits, Unique Visitors,  Pages/Visit, Avg Visit Duration, Bounce Rate. 

Below is the screenshot of Traffic Analytics which provide traffic by each competitor domain:

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Traffic Journey:  This screenshot provides Incoming and Outgoing links for a particular domain.

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Traffic Sources/Countries. The below screenshot shows Traffic sources by country.

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Domain Overview, Market Explorer

Domain Overview, Market Explorer tool will provide data on top pages on Competitors’ website

• Reveal your rivals’ top web pages, including cart, trial, and checkout success pages
• Spot new landing pages that competitors promote
• See your competitors’ most popular products, service, and categories

Domain Overview is one of the best places to start research on SEMrush. The report displays a domain’s number of organic and paid keywords, backlinks, and display ads. From here you can quickly get an idea of a domain’s strengths and weaknesses on search before looking into the details.

Domain Overview gives authority score, Organic Search Traffic and Paid Search Traffic, Backlinks, and Display advertising details. This gives an overview of the domain to dig deeper into details. 

Below is the screenshot of domain overview:

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This screenshot shows Top Organic Keywords,  Organic Position and who are your competitors and competitive positioning map.

Ad Research shows Top paid Keywords, Pasi position distribution, Main Paid Competitors, and Competitive position map.

Sample Ads: Here is a list of Competitors Sample Ads. Very useful info to find out what target keywords to bid for.

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Market Explorer allows you to fully dive into a niche market in order to better understand the target audience. This gives you the chance to benchmark your site with your industry and evaluate the demographics and characteristics of a market. By doing this you can better understand the opportunities in the market that you want to make money in.

Screenshot of Market Explorer and it provides who are leaders and game-changers in the market:

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Organic Research, Keyword Gap, BackLink Analytics, and Backlink Gap

Organic Research, Keyword Gap, BackLink Analytics, and Backlink Gap tools provide data on rank positions, keywords, and backlinks data to assess your competitor’s traffic.

These tools allow you to uncover your competition’s SEO strategies that give them organic visibility and traffic from search. 

• To What they rank for in Google and you don’t
• What keywords they use and you ignore
• What backlinks they have and you are missing
• What competitors’ pages made it to the top 3 and top 10 of Google’s SERP compared to your positions

Organic Research breaks down your competition’s keyword rankings for you. You’ll be able to see all of the keywords where they get organic traffic, their recent position changes, and more.

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Keyword Gap compares the keyword rankings of up to five competing domains side by side. This will show you what keywords your competitors have that you don’t cover as opportunities to boost your own ROI.

Here is a screenshot of Keyword Gap tool:

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Backlink Analytics reports allow you to see where your competition gets their backlinks from.

• Backlink data for your domain like referring domains, Referring Domains by Authority score, backlink types.

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Backlink Gap can compare the backlink profiles of up to five domains side by side. This method can help find the websites in your niche that are linking to your competitors but not you.

• Backlink Gap tool provides backlink data of competitors and discovers untapped backlink opportunities.

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Display Advertising, Advertising Research, PLA Research

Display Advertising, Advertising Research, PLA Research tool which provides data on rivals paid traffic, actual ad samples.

• Gain insight into your competitors’ paid advertising, discover their keywords and live ad examples
• Analyze the texts and banners of other display ads
• See the Product Listing Ads of your competition and unveil your Google Shopping rivals
• Display Advertising, Advertising Research  tool which provides data on rivals paid traffic, actual ads 

Advertising Research tool which provides data on rivals paid traffic, actual ads 

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Display Advertising will tell you how much a website publishes or advertises media and text display ads through Google Ads and AdSense. 

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PLA Research lets you analyze the competition for advertising products on the Google Shopping Network.

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Brand Monitoring, Topic Research, and  Post Tracking

Brand Monitoring, Topic Research, and  Post Tracking tools will Analyze the top content and social media engagement

• Find the articles that generate the most organic traffic
• Uncover the topics that generate the most mentions and backlinks
• Monitor your competitors’ social media audience growth
• Compare social media engagement metrics of several players

Brand Monitoring tracks the mentions for any branded word or phrase on the Internet. Set this tool up with your competitor’s brand name to find blogs or news sources that mention your competitor.

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Topic Research can help you find other websites that cover the same topics as your site. Enter a key phrase into Topic Research to explore all of the related sub-topics covered on the web by your competitors! You can even specify a competitor’s domain to see which topics they’ve covered.

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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.

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Social Media Tracker

The Social Media Tracker can track your top competitors on the five most popular social media channels. This tells what types of social media engage your target audience the best. Use it to uncover your competitor’s social strategy and improve your own SMM strategy wisely. Here are the data points you get from this tool:

• Benchmark yourself against the whole industry to find room for improvement
• See companies’ digital market shares to determine who leads the competition
• Spot the industry seasonal ups and downs to prepare for future challenges
• Identify the in-market audience demographics and interests to optimize strategy

Social Media Tracker  you can track all your social shares and post comments with this.

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If you don’t have SEMrush yet, you can get a 7-day free trial to try out the things.

Conclusion

With the tools provided in the SEMrush, you can easily get data for competitor strengths and weaknesses and use it to improve your market position. There is a lot of features this tool provides. You can try for free for 7-day and explore the full list of Competitive research kits.

If you are interested to review full features of SEMrush product, check SEMrush product review.

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