Competitive Research Tool | Web Box Online

Competitive Research

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals is crucial for marketing success. Your business does not exist in a vacuum and is always threatened by competitors. You have to constantly look over your shoulder and carefully research the competitive landscape. And it will work to your advantage: you can learn from your opponents’ mistakes, study their best practices, and spot opportunities.

All of this is obviously applicable to the development of the SEO strategy also. But fighting for clients in the digital space has its own set of rules and methods. Even if you are lucky enough to not be directly challenged in your niche, someone from another industry can easily outrank you in search engine results. To stay ahead you need to continuously track and check your rivals. Here are the SEMrush assets that can help you research your competition quickly and easily:

Content

• Competitors Report
• Overview and Positions Report
• Keyword Gap
• Backlinks Competitors Reports and Backlink Gap
• Traffic Analytics

Competitors Report

A good place to start studying your rivals is with the Competitors Report in Organic Research. By simply entering a domain you will get a list of websites competing for the same keywords. Besides discovering your competitors you will also get some nifty details. First, you need to pay attention to the Competition Level. The report is automatically sorted by this metric, and it shows your closest competitors.

Competition Level is calculated based on the total number of keywords your competitors are ranked for and the percentage of keywords they share with you. So, if a website is ranked for a large number of keywords but only a small number of them are in common with yours, it will not come up as a relevant result. For example, Wikipedia and YouTube will almost certainly rank for some of the keywords that you are targeting, but quite often they are not your competitors.

Spot the domains that have the largest amount of search engine traffic and the most keywords in common with you. These rivals should be first in line for analysis. Keep in mind that you can look for competitors on mobile platforms as well as on desktops.

Overview and Positions Report

Start off your competitor analysis with the Overview Report, here you will be presented with a bird's-eye view of your competitors’ performance. Enter the rival domain you want to investigate in the search field, select the country and the device you want to target. At the top of the report you will see statistical information:

• Keywords – The overall number of keywords from our database that the domain is ranked for in the top 100 positions. 
• Traffic – The estimated monthly traffic these keywords can bring.
• Traffic Cost – The estimated cost of running a Google Ads campaign for every keyword. 
• Branded Traffic – Search traffic that comes from branded keywords.
• Non-Branded Traffic – Search traffic that comes from non-branded keywords.

The graph shows changes over a period of time in keywords or traffic; you can switch between these metrics and select the time range. There are also notes at the bottom of the graph. Google icons pinpoint the dates when we notice changes in Google’s algorithm. These modifications can influence websites’ rankings, and you can see the details by clicking on a note. You can add custom notes to the graph as well as seeing when SEMrush Sensor detects high volatility on SERPs, or when SEMrush updates databases; all these marks will have red diamond icons. You can select the notes that will be shown by clicking on Notes above the graph and ticking the boxes in the menu.

The SERP Features widget shows the percentage of each special search result that is triggered by the keywords the targeted domain is ranked for. Clicking on any of these SERP features will filter the Positions Table for keywords with that feature on the SERP.

Note: All SERP features are divided into two sections:

• Linking to the domain for features that have a link to the domain. Filtering for those results will show you all keywords that the targeted domain has a feature for.
• Not linking to the domain for features that do not have a link or for which SEMrush does not analyze the links. Filtering will show all keywords with a certain feature on the SERP.

Filtering for SERP features, among the variety of other filtering options, is a great asset for exploring your competitors’ presence on SERPs, and their keyword strategies.

For further competitor analysis, you can switch to the Positions Report in Organic Research. Positions Table is the heart of this report. It lists the keywords that the targeted domain is ranked for, and as well as filtering allows you to sort them for various metrics. Use the arrows next to the column name to sort the table in ascending or descending order. Use the ‘Manage Columns’ button to hide or display your columns.

Here is the keyword data you can gather from the report:

• Pos. Shows the position of the URL ranking in the SERP for a given keyword in the selected time period (the number shows the previous position).
• Volume is the average number of searches in the chosen database per month (calculated over the last 12 months).
• Keyword Difficulty (KD) estimates how hard it would be to rank well in organic results for a given keyword.
• CPC (Cost-per-click) is the average price of a click for a Google Ads campaign.
• URL is the URL displayed in search results for a given keyword
• Traffic - The hare of the total traffic driven to the website from the keyword over the specific time frame.
• Costs - The total cost of all traffic driven to an analyzed domain with a given keyword over a specific period of time.
• Comp. Competitive Density of advertisers using the given keyword for their ads.
• Results show the number of URLs displayed in the search results for the given keyword.
• Trend presents the changes in interest for the given keyword over 12 months.
• SERP Gives a snapshot of the SERP source where SEMrush found the result.
• Last Update The time when the given keyword was last updated in our database.

Keyword Gap

Now it is time to compare your website’s performance with that of your competitors in Gap Analysis and to see if your keyword strategy is somehow deficient. Keyword Gap tool allows you to compare up to five domains and find out the keywords that these domains have in common, or the unique sets of keywords for each domain. You can also set the intersection type to Unique to the first domain’s keywords, and get the keywords that only the first domain is ranked for.

Keywords that are unique for your competitors are probably the ones that you have missed and need to incorporate in your content. To overcome the content gap with ease you can employ SEMrush’s SEO Content Template.

Keywords that are common amongst you and your competitors can be used to find where you are outperformed and need improvement. For example, you can apply filters to include keywords that your competitor ranks for on the first page (less than 10), and you are on the second page or deeper (include your domain with the positions set to greater than 10).

This way you will get the scope of keywords you need to shift your focus to. Tweaking your content for these keywords can help you get to the first SERP, which will undoubtedly pump up the visibility of your domain. Keep in mind that as well as comparing the Organic Keywords in the Keyword Gap you can also select Paid keywords and PLA keywords for each domain. And if you want to get a graphic representation (Venn diagram) of the report you can click Enable Charts.

Backlinks Competitors Report and Backlink Gap:

Backlinks are a very important ranking factor, especially when they are coming from trusted resources in your industry. The Backlink Gap tool will help you to easily uncover the link building opportunities that you are missing based on your competitors' backlinks. The Backlink Gap tool will automatically provide you with four of your top competitors to analyze. Use the Backlinks Report, if you need to identify more of your backlinks rivals. The lineup might differ from your keyword competitors since your organic opponents most probably have varied backlink profiles. Enter your domain in the Backlinks Report and switch to the Competitors tab.

Your competitors in the report are automatically sorted by the Competition Level. This metric shows competition closeness and is calculated in the same manner as Competition level in Organic Research, except instead of the number of keywords it uses the number of common referring domains in relation to the total number of referring domains.

You can sort the table by the number of Common Referring Domains, the number of Total Referring Domains, or the number of Backlinks. You can also sort by the Authority Score - a compound metric that shows the overall strength and popularity of the domain

To expose domains that are linking to your competitor but abstain from linking to you, click on the number of Common Referring Domains. This will take you to the Backlink Gap where you can type in up to five domains including yours. Select your domain in the menu right above the table to filter for websites that have no links to you. Voilà – you’ve got yourself a list full of targets for your backlink strategy. This list is automatically sorted by the Authority Score. Also, you can choose to sort by the number of matches amongst the analyzed domains.

Traffic Analytics:

It is a good idea to monitor and analyze your competitors’ traffic sources to discover if you need to expand or adjust your marketing strategy. You certainly can’t access your competitors’ analytical data to get the exact numbers, but you can use SEMrush Traffic Analytics and get an accurate estimation based on the clickstream data from third-party providers, which is sufficient to evaluate your competitors. Simply type in the domain you want to analyze and start absorbing the insights.

Start with the Traffic Overview tab to get a quick snapshot of competitors’ p performance in terms of driving traffic. Determine where the greatest share of their visitors is coming from, whether it is direct, referral, search engine, or social media traffic. Find out exactly which referring websites, social networks, and search engines bring the most traffic to your competitor. Look at bounce rates and average session durations to learn which of your competitors have the most engaging websites, then carefully study the strongest contestants. You need to understand why they attract visitors and how they compel them to stay. The longer the client lingers on the website, the higher the chance of a conversion.

Go to the designated tabs to get more detailed information on audience overlap, traffic sources, top pages of the researched domain, geographical distribution of traffic shares, and traffic distribution across subdomains of a targeted website. You need to be a paid user of the SEMrush Traffic Analytics add-on to get full reports, otherwise, you will get sample information for three domains: ebay.com, amazon.com, and searchengineland.com.

The Audience Overlap report will shed light on how many users visit the websites of two (or more) competitors. You can also compare readerships of several media to decide on the most interesting placement. This information will help you target your audience more precisely, and discover partnership opportunities.

The Traffic Sources report provides a comparison function for several competitors at once. This way, you can estimate marketing budget shares for each of the digital channels. 

The Destination Sites tab can also give you some food for thought - it shows the list of websites that users visited right after the analyzed domain.

The recently added Top Pages report will be of use if you are curious about your competitors’ top content or conversion funnels as the list of the most visited URLs may include checkout, trial, and thank you pages.

Last but not least, you can filter historical and regional data in the tool - provided you’ve got a paid SEMrush Traffic Analytics subscription, of course.