You will find out what competitor research is, why it's worth conducting, and how it can benefit your brand.
0:22 Intro to competitive analysis
0:52 Competitive research
1:41 SEMrush Competitive Research Toolkit
2:19 Big picture data
2:29 Certain areas data
3:06 Traffic Analytics
4:23 Market Explorer
4:45 Growth Quadrant: Niche players, Game Changers, Leaders, Established Players
6:18 Summary
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You might find it useful:
Apply your newly acquired knowledge by practicing with SEMrush and build up your real-world skills.
Go to Traffic Analytics:
Go to Market Explorer:
Learn how to carry out competitive analysis with the help of SEMrush tools in our free course:
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In the first lesson of our course, we'll cover the following:
The value of conducting competitive research
Outlining the various applications of competitive analysis
A brief overview of the Competitive Research Toolkit
What goes into a competitive analysis?
We all have competitors, and if you're like the average company, you're keeping tabs on at least 5 to 7 competitors at any given time (some of you go as high as 40)!
Competitive research can help you understand your brand's probability of profit in a given market, as well as what the roadblocks to victory will be.
To conduct competitor analysis, you're likely checking auction insights in your Google Ads account, doing manual searches to see what queries they're coming up on, doing deep dives into your competitors' landing page experiences… spending hours doing ad preview and diagnosis to see which regions they're in, logging into multiple platforms to see competitive referring domains…
That's a lot of work to fall on anyone's shoulders, especially if you represent an international brand.
How to conduct competitive analysis
SEMrush allows us to have a single source of competitive research: saving us valuable time on the road to brand domination!
Whether we're looking to assess a new promotional partnership, expand into a new market, or borrow brilliant strategies for our own profit, we need those valuable insights found in the Competitive Research Toolkit.
At a high level, the Competitive Research Toolkit provides data for all areas of competitive research that are critical for companies actively working online, starting from the big picture (market overview, competitive landscape, online presence strategies and tactics) to certain areas like website traffic, paid ads, organic performance, social media, content and PR. It also helps you understand your market, as well as prepare you for new markets.
We'll dive into greater detail of these features in later lessons, but I wanted to take some time to introduce you to Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer! This is just an introduction — we'll review their use cases as well as some of my favorite success stories in later lessons.
How does Traffic Analytics work?
Traffic Analytics sits at the top of the Competitive Research Toolkit's menu.
It is designed to check any company's website traffic and details of their online presence, including top destinations, best traffic sources, top pages, and visitor behavior.
In the tool, you'll be able to see important metrics, including:
Visits
Unique Visitors
Pages Per Visit
Bounce Rate
Traffic Sources
Geo Distribution
Top Pages
You'll also be able to segment the data by:
Device type — Mobile vs Desktop
Subdomains
Location
Period
The best way to think about Traffic Analytics is as your best friend who knows everything about everyone, and is willing to share, but doesn't have a motive in mind. Asking which pages are performing the best, where your audiences overlap, and where their traffic comes from doesn't inherently mean you want to 'steal' their strategies. You might be looking for insights on which media channels to partner with, or whether it makes sense to invest in a paid campaign.
In short,Traffic Analytics is about getting unbiased estimates, not suggestions, on your competitors' direct, referral, search, social, and paid traffic.
How does Market Explorer work?
Let's switch over to Market Explorer — you can find it right below Traffic Analytics.
With this tool, you'll be able to see how you stack up against brands SEMrush sees as relevant to your industry AND those you select yourself! All you need is to type your website name into the search bar — and off we go!
#CompetitiveAnalysis #TrafficAnalytics #MarketResearch #SEMrush #SEMrushAcademy