By James Chittenden
Your website is beginning to show traffic but needs more traffic in order to boost sales. To do that right now will require you to evaluate and compare your web traffic against successful competitors, so that you can learn what they are doing right.
Enter Semrush . Semrush provides market insights, which help you to compare your web traffic against competitors and improve your own online visibility. Certainly Google provides analytics so that you can measure your own site traffic, but Semrush provides data from your competitors’ websites.
Semrush helps marketers who use any of the following tactics: PPC (pay per click), SEO (search engine optimization), keyword and competitive research, SMM (social media marketing), PR (public relations) and more.
Who should use Semrush?
Anyone who is looking to use any of the above tactics should strongly consider Semrush. Semrush is especially a good fit for PPC campaigns. Use their tools to find CPC (cost per click), ad copy found in the ad campaigns of competitors, and keyword trends. Plans begin at $99.95 per month with a seven-day free trial available.
What else does Semrush do?
There are three main steps for digital marketing success: measuring, reporting and improving. Semrush provides five toolkits for those purposes.
- The SEO Toolkit contains tools and reports to help with every area of your site’s SEO. You can research competitors, keywords, links, and track website rankings.
- The Advertising Toolkit is where you can plan a complete Google ads campaign. Here, you can study competitors’ campaigns as well.
- The Social Media Toolkit allows you to create posts and monitor their performance, as well as compare your social media performance to competitors.
- The Content Marketing Toolkit helps to plan content for your site, as well as fill “content gaps”; opportunities to fill a void in content in a particular topic.
- The Competitive Research Toolkit provides insight into the marketing strategies of your competitors.
In the following example, we used Google to search for “entrepreneur help in Dallas”. The Dallas Entrepreneur Center is a hub and education center for startups, as well as a growth accelerator for established small businesses located in Dallas, TX. They are currently at the top of organic search results, and this is a Semrush overview of the performance of their site.
Semrush Competitors
Google provides free tools. You can always use Google Analytics to evaluate your own traffic and Google AdWords Keyword Planner to obtain the value of keywords. This is a pricing tool for keywords for PPC purposes. The price of a keyword is an indicator of the demand for that keyword; the higher the price, the more it is used in search. The Google Adwords Keyword Planner is free, however you are required to have a payment method on file.
Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest helps analyze keywords used by competitors. It does provide search volume, CPC, and competition for paid searches. Ubersuggest plans start at $29 per month. As you can see, the results are more specific than Google, but less so than Semrush.
Semrush may be the most expensive, but offers deep analysis tools that others don’t. The competitive advantage of a Semrush report in the hands of a trained strategist will more than pay for the subscription.
And finally…
Welcome to One Click Advisor! We would be remiss if we didn’t give you a brief tour of the site and what it can do for you. The free Business Builder is a consulting session, solving your business plan questions in minutes. Your challenges and opportunities can be sorted into one of three areas.
Marketing, because it brings in the customers. Start or continue that plan here.
Operations, because it keeps your customers. Start or continue that plan here.
Finance, because it is the scoreboard. Change the “score” and explore financing here.