Here’s a more concise step-by-step guide to conducting competitor analysis with SEMrush:
- Identify Competitors: Use SEMrush to find competitors in your industry by entering your domain or relevant keywords.
- Analyze Organic Search: Review your competitors’ organic search traffic, top organic keywords, and their positions in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Explore Paid Search: Investigate your competitors’ paid search advertising strategies, including their top paid keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.
- Examine Backlinks: Analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles to identify their strongest backlinks and potential link-building opportunities for your own site.
- Assess Content Strategy: Look at the type and performance of your competitors’ content, including their top-performing pages, blog posts, and social media content.
- Monitor Social Media: Track your competitors’ social media presence, including their follower count, engagement metrics, and top-performing posts.
- Evaluate Traffic Trends: Use SEMrush’s traffic analytics to understand your competitors’ overall website traffic, traffic sources, and user behavior.
- Track Changes Over Time: Continuously monitor your competitors’ digital marketing activities and track any changes in their strategies or performance.
By following these steps, you can gain valuable insights into your competitors’ digital marketing strategies and identify opportunities to improve your own campaigns.
Competitor Analysis with Semrush Certification Exam Answers
Question 1: How many competitors can you compare in the audience overlap widget in the Traffic Analytics?
- 5
- 2
- 3
Question 2: In the Top Pages report, you can learn:
- Which pages are ranking in the top 5 organic placements on Google.
- Which pages are getting the lion’s share of traffic.
- Which pages are generating the most revenue for a competitor.
Question 3: What metrics govern the Market Explorer categories (Niche Player, Established Player, Game Changer, and Leaders)? Choose two answers.
- Traffic Growth
- Geographic Spread
- Traffic Volume
- Content Output
- Revenue
Question 4: If you see an Established Player has neglected Facebook and Instagram as a channel, what does that teach you?
- The channel must not be worth much since an existing giant isn’t bothering with it.
- The channel must be overly complicated and will require a lot of time and monetary investment to do well.
- The channel represents an opportunity to gain market share with limited resistance.
Question 5: Which SEMrush tool can help you to benchmark your campaigns against the competition by exploring your competitors’ best-performing pages and finding insights on which media channels to partner with?
- PPC Keyword tool
- Position Tracking
- Traffic Analytics
Question 6: True or False: With the help of the Keyword Gap tool you can optimize your organic and paid search efforts by seeing which terms you and your competitor are ranking for.
- False
- True
Question 7: What can the Topic Research tool teach you about your competitors? Choose two answers.
- The frequency with which they produce the content on a given topic.
- Content they produce that has high and low search volume.
- The subtopics of a queried topic that they have and have not covered.
Question 8: If you don’t know which competitors to focus on, which SEMrush tool can help you get the lay of the land?
- Brand Monitoring
- Market Explorer
- Traffic Analytics
Question 9: True or False: A competitor with low audience overlap should be ignored.
- False: They might represent a partnership expansion opportunity or a future threat.
- True: They don’t interact with my people and I need to focus on defense.
Question 10: True or False: In order to gain competitor insights on social campaigns, you need to connect your own social channels first.
- True
- False
Question 11: Why might it make more sense to model your strategies on Game Changers than Established Players?
- Established players hide their secrets, and Game Changers are too naive to know to do that.
- Game Changers have high traffic growth and could overtake Established players who have begun to stagnate.
- Life is always changing, and keeping up with new players helps future proof brands.
Question 12: How does assessing the traffic distribution of your competitors help you build a marketing strategy?
- It doesn’t, it just makes you feel better about your choices.
- You can identify neglected channels, and achieve easier wins.
- You can see what the Internet is.
Question 13: How can the Bulk Analysis tab in Traffic Analytics help a brand, with known competitors, create benchmarks for their marketing?
- That’s not the best use of the Bulk Analysis tab. It’s better to use the tab to discover new competitors.
- It allows you to upload your data to get in-depth information about marketing strategies you should develop.
- The Bulk Analysis tab allows you to see traffic sources, core metrics, and other useful information on up to 200 competitors.
Question 14: If you need to understand how a given brand is interacting with a market trend, how can you use the SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool to accomplish this task?
- Track their known competitors to see how often they come up in other brand mentions.
- Track the brand without filters so you can see everything.
- Use keyword filters in Brand Monitoring to get more targeted updates.
Question 15: What can a competitor’s referral and direct traffic teach you about content strategy?
- They might have an analytics error and paid traffic is getting attributed as direct.
- What content is so compelling that brands link to it and users bookmark it to go back directly.
- Nothing, competitors have nothing of value to teach a brand as mighty as yours!
Question 16: True or false: the competitors shown in Market Explorer will always be the most direct competitors.
- True
- False
Question 17: What’s one benefit of presentation mode?
- This function doesn’t exist.
- You can co-work in SEMrush while presenting on a different computer.
- You can show important metrics in a digestible format.