As a business owner seeking more visibility and traffic for your website, knowing your competitors is crucial—like finding water holes for survival. Understanding your competitors gives you valuable insights into what works in your industry, helps you spot market gaps, and enables you to create data-driven strategies to attract your target audience and outshine your rivals.
Semrush, a popular all-in-one digital marketing platform, offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help you do just that.
Learning how to use Semrush can be overwhelming for beginners due to the sheer number of tools available. However, this guide will focus on a key component of SEO—competitor analysis—and show you how to leverage Semrush’s powerful features to gain a competitive edge with future-proof SEO strategies.
Getting Started with Semrush
To get started with knowing how to use Semrush, you’ll first need to create an account and choose a subscription plan. Semrush offers a variety of plans to suits different needs and budgets, ranging from the free plan to a comprehensive Business plan.
Sign up for a Semrush account
When you click the sign up button on the Semrush website, there are a number of options to choose from. You can cnontinue using some limited features for free or you may find it more beneficial to subscribe to any of the paid plans.
- Free: With the free plan, you’re allowed limited use of Semrush’s features, including keyword research and a site audit for 100 pages. The number of reports you can generate each day and the number of results displayed are limited. Also, export and metrics update features are not available.
- Pro: Priced at $139.95/month, the Pro plan offers a broader range of features, such as being able to generate up to 3,000 reports per day. And each report can contain up to 10,000 results. It’s a plan suitable for freelancers, startups, and SMEs with limited budgets
- Guru: starting at $249.95 per month, the Guru plan has even higher usage limits. Subscribers to this plan can create up to 5,000 reports per day, with each report accommodating up to 30,000 results. It is designed for growing agencies and businesses with expanding marketing needs.
- Business: this most comprehensive plan starts at $499.95 per month and it allows for full access to all Semrush tools and features. You can create up to 10,000 reports per day and up to 50,000 results per report. Only very large agencies would find it useful.
In addition to these plans, there are several add-on packages that you can purchase regardless of your subscription tier, such as Semrush Local, Semrush Trends, the social media management tool, Agency Growth Kit, ImpactHero, and more.
Set up a Semrush project for your website
In Semrush, a project is like a container that holds data and settings for a specific website you want to analyze. So, when you create a project, you can choose which Semrush tools to activate for that website and configure their settings. The advantage of this is that it allows you to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts in one central location.
Follow the steps below to set up a Semrush project correctly:
- Go to the Projects Dashboard: After logging in to your Semrush account, locate the “Projects” section.
- Click the “Add new project” button in the top left-hand corner of your Projects Dashboard to create a new project
- Enter the domain name of the website you want to analyze in the dialogue box that appears. Make sure to enter the root domain (for example, “example.com” rather than “www.example.com”) so as to capture all subdomains and pages within the website.
- Choose the tool you want to use. Semrush provides a variety of tools to track and monitor website performance. These include tools for site audit, position tracking, on-page SEO, backlink audit, organic traffic insights, and more.
- After selecting the tool(s) you want to activate for your project, take some time to configure the settings for each tool. This may involve specifying your target keywords, location, competitors, and other parameters depending on the specific tool.
- Once your project is set up, Semrush will start collecting data. You can then access your project dashboard to monitor your progress, track your rankings, and review the insights and recommendations provided by Semrush.
Identifying Your Competitors Using Semrush
The advantage of knowing how to use Semrush is that there are a variety of tools and features that help you analyze your competitors from various perspectives. In this section, we highlight a few of these tools and features.
Domain Overview
The Domain Overview tool, true to its name, provides a high-level overview of a website’s online presence. You can use it to quickly assess your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in areas like organic and paid search, backlinks, keywords, and social media.
It also offers insights into a domain’s growth over time, allowing you to track their progress and identify any significant changes in their online visibility.
Organic Research
If you are interested in drilling down into which keywords are driving traffic to your competitor’s website, then this is the tool for you. It provides in-depth information about a website’ s organic search performance, including their top keywords, ranking positions, and estimated traffic.
A good use case for this information is to identify valuable keywords that you might want to target and then find opportunities to outrank your competitors in search results. You can even see your competitor’s recent ranking changes and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Paid Search Competitors
If you’re running or planning to run paid search advertising campaigns, then this is an essential feature for you. With it, you can identify your competitors in paid search and analyze their ad strategies.
Insights you would be able to see include their top keywords, ad copy, estimated budget, and more, all of which can help you create more effective campaigns. Ultimately, understanding your competitor’s paid search strategies helps you to identify opportunities to improve your bids and optimize your ads for better performance.
Backlink Gap Tool
The Backlink Gap tool in Semrush allows you to compare your backlink profile to that of your competitors, revealing backlink opportunities you might be missing out on. Maybe you want to identify websites that are linking to your competitors but not you; use the Backlink Gap tool to find that out.
You can then use information from the tool to develop targeted link-building outreach campaigns or enhance current campaigns. The tool also offers a visual representation of your backlink profile growth over time, making it easy to see how you stack up against the competition.
Market Explorer
Sometimes, you may need a broader perspective on the competitive landscape of your industry. This is where the Market Explorer tool comes in. It allows you to identify the key players in your market, analyze their market share, and understand the overall competitive dynamics.
Market Explorer also provides insights into audience demographics, interests, and online behavior, enabling you to refine your target audience and tailor your marketing messages more effectively.
Arm Yourself with Insights: Outshine Your Competition
By learning how to use Semrush, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors’ strategies. This beginner guide helps you uncover their keywords, SEO tactics, and more, giving you the edge to improve your own online presence and stay ahead in the market. Keep the momentum going by following StartUp Growth Guide for more insights and actionable advice tailored specifically for leaders like you to outsmart the competition and achieve lasting success.
Featured Image by Semrush
About The Author
