How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis with SEMrush and Ahrefs

In the dynamic world of digital marketing, staying ahead of your competition is essential to maintaining and growing your online presence. Competitive analysis allows you to better understand your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and tactics. By leveraging powerful SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, you can gather the insights needed to develop a more effective SEO strategy and optimize your content to gain an edge in search engine rankings.

In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through how to conduct a competitive analysis using SEMrush and Ahrefs. These two tools provide rich data that can help you identify opportunities, track your competitors’ performance, and create a strategy tailored to outsmart them in the search rankings.

1. What is Competitive Analysis in SEO?

Competitive analysis in SEO refers to the process of identifying your competitors in the online space and assessing their digital marketing strategies. By understanding how your competitors rank, the keywords they target, the content they produce, and their backlink profile, you can uncover valuable insights and apply them to improve your own online marketing efforts.

The key goals of SEO competitive analysis include:

• Understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
• Identifying opportunities for improvement and differentiation
• Gaining insights into your competitors' backlink strategies
• Discovering the keywords that drive their organic traffic
• Benchmarking your performance against theirs to measure success

Both SEMrush and Ahrefs are excellent tools for competitive analysis. Each platform offers unique features that complement one another. Together, they can give you a comprehensive overview of your competitors’ SEO efforts.

2. Why Use SEMrush and Ahrefs for Competitive Analysis?

Before diving into the specifics of how to use SEMrush and Ahrefs for competitive analysis, it’s important to understand why these tools are considered some of the best for SEO research.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit, offering a wide range of features for SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media management. For competitive analysis, SEMrush excels in the following areas:

• Competitor Keyword Analysis: SEMrush allows you to track which keywords your competitors are ranking for, helping you find untapped opportunities.
• Domain Comparison: You can compare the performance of multiple competitors in one glance to understand how your site compares in terms of organic search traffic, backlinks, and more.
• Traffic Insights: SEMrush’s tools offer detailed data on your competitors’ traffic sources, which can guide your content and SEO strategy.
• Paid Search Research: SEMrush also helps you identify paid keywords your competitors target, revealing potential opportunities for paid search campaigns.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO toolset known for its powerful backlink analysis capabilities. It is a go-to platform for those focused on organic search. For competitive analysis, Ahrefs offers:

• Backlink Analysis: Ahrefs boasts one of the largest backlink databases, enabling you to analyze your competitors’ link profiles in great detail.
• Content Gap Analysis: This tool identifies keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t, allowing you to create content to target those gaps.
• Site Explorer: Ahrefs’ Site Explorer lets you explore any website’s organic search performance, top-performing pages, and more.
• Rank Tracking: Ahrefs allows you to track the rankings of your competitors and compare their performance over time.

By using SEMrush and Ahrefs together, you can gain a deeper understanding of your competitors and apply this data to optimize your own SEO strategy.

3. Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting Competitive Analysis with SEMrush and Ahrefs

Step 1: Identify Your Competitors

Before you start using SEMrush or Ahrefs, you need to identify who your direct and indirect competitors are.

• Direct competitors are businesses or websites that offer similar products, services, or information and target the same audience.
• Indirect competitors may not directly compete with your offerings but still target the same keywords or audience in some way.

Once you have a list of competitors, it’s time to start analyzing them using SEMrush and Ahrefs.

Step 2: Analyze Competitor Keywords in SEMrush

SEMrush provides detailed insights into the keywords that your competitors are targeting. Here's how to use SEMrush to identify and evaluate competitor keywords:

1. Enter a Competitor’s Domain: Start by entering the URL of a competitor into SEMrush’s Domain Overview tool. This will give you an overview of their organic search performance, including their top keywords, organic traffic, and more.
2. Review Top Organic Keywords: SEMrush will provide a list of the top organic keywords your competitor is ranking for. These are the keywords driving traffic to their website. You can sort the list by search volume, keyword difficulty, and position.
3. Analyze Keyword Gap: To identify keywords your competitor is ranking for that you are not, use the Keyword Gap tool. Enter your domain and your competitor’s domain(s) into the tool to see the keyword overlap and gaps. This tool helps you uncover valuable keywords that your competitors are already ranking for, but you might not be targeting.
4. Filter by Keyword Difficulty and Traffic Potential: When analyzing competitor keywords, filter them based on difficulty and traffic potential. This allows you to focus on high-value, achievable keywords that can bring in traffic.

Step 3: Dive Deeper into Competitor Backlinks with Ahrefs

Backlinks play a crucial role in SEO, and Ahrefs is a powerful tool for analyzing your competitors’ backlink profiles. Follow these steps to evaluate competitor backlinks:

1. Enter a Competitor’s URL in Ahrefs: Start by entering a competitor’s website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool.
2. Explore Backlink Profile: In Site Explorer, navigate to the Backlink Profile section to see the total number of backlinks, referring domains, and the quality of the links.
3. Analyze Top Pages and Backlinks: Ahrefs will show you which pages on your competitor’s website are attracting the most backlinks. These are often their most authoritative pages and can give you insights into the type of content that resonates with their audience.
4. Check for Link Building Opportunities: Ahrefs lets you explore backlinks your competitors have acquired from other websites. Use this information to identify opportunities to build similar links from the same or similar sources.

Step 4: Evaluate Competitor Content with Ahrefs

Ahrefs also offers a Content Explorer feature, which allows you to analyze the content your competitors are publishing. Here's how you can use it:

1. Search for Competitor’s Content: Enter your competitor’s domain or a specific keyword into the Content Explorer. Ahrefs will show you the most popular content related to that keyword, as well as your competitor’s most successful articles.
2. Review Social Shares and Backlinks: Ahrefs shows you how many backlinks and social shares each piece of content has received. This can help you gauge what content is resonating with your competitor’s audience.
3. Identify Content Gaps: Use the Content Gap tool to identify topics your competitors are covering but you are not. This helps you find new content ideas that can attract traffic and improve your SEO.

Step 5: Track Competitor Rankings with SEMrush and Ahrefs

Both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer powerful rank tracking tools that allow you to monitor your competitors' keyword rankings.

• SEMrush: Use the Position Tracking tool in SEMrush to monitor the keyword rankings of your competitors. Enter the keywords that are important to your business and track your competitor’s rankings over time. SEMrush will show you if they’ve gained or lost positions for certain keywords.
• Ahrefs: Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker allows you to track the performance of your competitors' keywords as well. You can compare keyword rankings over time to see who is making the biggest strides in your niche.

Step 6: Analyze Competitor Traffic Sources with SEMrush

SEMrush’s Traffic Analytics tool is invaluable for understanding where your competitors are getting their traffic. Here's how to use it:

1. Enter Competitor’s Domain: In the Traffic Analytics section of SEMrush, enter the domain of your competitor.
2. Analyze Traffic Breakdown: SEMrush will provide a breakdown of traffic sources, including organic search, paid search, direct traffic, referrals, and social media.
3. Identify Traffic Opportunities: By reviewing these sources, you can identify which channels are driving the most traffic to your competitors. This can guide your content strategy, allowing you to target channels that your competitors may be overlooking.

Step 7: Identify and Exploit Competitor Weaknesses

After completing your analysis, look for weaknesses in your competitors' strategies. Perhaps they’re underperforming for certain keywords, lacking backlinks, or have content gaps. Here’s how to exploit those weaknesses:

• Target Content Gaps: Create content that fills the gaps your competitors have overlooked.
• Build Better Backlinks: Focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks that your competitors might be missing.
• Focus on Low-Hanging Fruit Keywords: Use SEMrush’s Keyword Gap tool to find keywords your competitors rank for but are not optimized for.

4. Conclusion: Using SEMrush and Ahrefs for Effective Competitive Analysis

By combining the power of SEMrush and Ahrefs, you gain access to a wealth of data that can help you develop a more effective SEO strategy. These tools allow you to analyze competitor keywords, backlinks, content, and traffic sources in a way that uncovers valuable opportunities and insights.

Conducting regular competitive analysis is key to staying ahead of the curve in the highly competitive world of SEO. By understanding what your competitors are doing well and where they’re falling short, you can apply these insights to outperform them and drive more traffic to your site.

With the right strategies and tools, you can elevate your SEO game and create a digital presence that outshines the competition.