Using SEMrush for competitor analysis is a very smart thing to do.
Analyzing competitors is crucial for anyone who plans to start a blog and rank on Google. Why?
Well … because if you put in the time and effort to write a quality piece of content, you want people to read it, right?(1)
Of course you do. So, if nobody finds your content, then you wasted your time.
In case you didn’t know, more than 70% of all search traffic in the world comes from Google. Therefore, it only makes sense to take advantage of it.
Many years ago, when I created my first blog, I was so excited. My first article was titled “How To Lose Weight Fast”.
I’ve spent many hours trying to write the perfect post. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out too well.
Good luck trying to rank for that, right? Well, yes.
But I had no idea that I literally had no chance to rank on the first page of Google.
Fast forward to today, I’ve built and sold multiple successful blogs. With the right tools, you can do that too.
So, if you’re here to find out how to do competitor analysis using SEMrush, then you’re in the right place!
By the end of this article, you will know everything to look out for when analyzing your competitors. Let’s jump right into it.
SEMRUSH FOR COMPETITOR ANALYSIS?
If you’ve read my SEMrush keyword research article, you know that there are billions of keywords in the SEMrush database.
So, it makes sense to take advantage of that and find out what your best options are in regards to ranking on Google.
It’s important to note that all these tools, including SEMrush, do their best to provide accurate data in regards to SEO. So, they don’t show you absolute truths.(2)
But, it’s much better than blindly write content hoping it will rank (like I did when I first started).
SEMRUSH COMPETITOR ANALYSIS WITH THE KEYWORD MAGIC TOOL
In order to see who you’re competing against, you first need to make a list with your keywords that you want to rank for.
This is the easiest way to find out who your competitors are. You probably already have an idea who you’re competing against.
For example, if you are selling T-shirts with Hello Kitty, you’re competing against everyone else who is selling the same thing.(3,4)
This is not a bad thing. You can actually outrank most of your competitors if you optimize your website correctly.
I suggest you type in your domain name in the SEMrush dashboard as shown:
After that, look for the “Main Organic Competitors” dashboard in order to see you’re most important competitors.
SEMrush will show you the websites that are ranking for the same things as you’re currently ranking.
After you found the competitors, I suggest you analyze their websites one by one. Why?
It’s possible that you don’t directly compete with some of these websites. Take the previous example with the Hello Kitty T-shirts.
You might run into a website that is selling all kinds of clothes, some of which being Hello Kitty T-shirts. You don’t really compete with that website if you’re selling ONLY Hello Kitty T-shirts.
After you established your direct competitors, you should download a list with the keywords they’re ranking for.
You should now have a huge list of keywords. My advice is to sort the keywords by volume. This is a very good thing to do, as you’ll see what keywords can get you the most traffic in your niche.
Also, if you have a new website, I suggest you ignore the keywords with a difficulty higher than 15. That’s because it will be very difficult to rank for those keywords.(5)
Now you should have a list of keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. It doesn’t really get better than this.
You can start producing content around these keywords, and you should start ranking higher on Google in a couple of months.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Hopefully this was helpful. I tried to oversimplify things in case you’re a beginner in SEO.
You shouldn’t really overwhelm yourself with information. Just start producing content around low KD keywords that you’re competition is ranking for.
After you start ranking for those, you can start producing content around keywords with a higher difficulty and so on. It’s kinda like taking a “bottoms up” approach.
You first go after the low hanging fruit, and after you start gaining some traction, you can target the more competitive keywords.
I’ve used this approach many times for all of my websites. It works very well and you should stay consistent.
- Consistency is key in SEO, as well as in any other online business model. I suggest you start a 7 day trial, so that you can get more familiar with the tool.
