SEMrush Find Out Where Competitors Are Getting the Upper Hand in the SERP

Find Out Where Competitors Are Getting the Upper Hand in the SERP

So far, you've managed to identify your top organic search competitors, find all the keywords they rank for, identified their top-performing content, and unearthed loads of potential long-tail keywords to target.

So what’s next?

In this step, you're going to find all the common keywords where your competitors are ranking higher than you in the SERPs.

In SEMrush:

1. Select SEO Toolkit. 
2. Select Organic Research from the sidebar menu.
3. Enter the domain – e.g. “thewirecutter.com” – you want to analyze.
4. Click the Competitors tab:

Scroll down the page to the Organic Competitors table and click on the Common Keywords for one of your competitors – e.g. techradar.com:

A new window/tab opens in SEMrush, with the Keyword Gap details pre-populated:

Scroll down the page to the results table listing all the keywords both Wirecutter and their competitor TechRadar are ranking for in the Top 100 search results:

But, to narrow the selection, let’s add a filter, so we only see the results for TechRadar ranking in the Top 10 results:

Now you have a list of results that you can target:

For example, TechRadar ranks in position #5 for the keyword “Chromebook”, while Wirecutter is just outside the first page in position #11. This looks like an excellent topic to target and improve as the gap is small.

Other keywords might need a lot of work. For example, the keyword “new iPhone” shows TechRadar in the top spot with Wirecutter way down in position #77.

ACTION ITEM:

Export and/or filter the data (as above) to show your competitor's top-ranked common keywords.

This view will show you all the keywords where your competitor is ranking highly, but you are not. These are immediate areas of potential growth.

Click on one of the common keywords and identify which content they are using to rank for it.

Click through to the post and analyze the content.

Are there any glaring signals pointing to why this page ranks and yours doesn't?

• On-page SEO?
• Level of detail?
• More up-to-date?
• Number of referring domains/ backlinks?

Take these insights and start optimizing your existing competing content to gain quick wins in the SERPs.

Here are a couple ways to sort the data to get some valuable insights:

• Sort by competitive density to uncover low competition keywords where your competitors rank in the Top 10. Re-visit your on-page optimization and link building strategy to see if there are opportunities to improve content. You can climb the rankings for low competition keywords very quickly with a couple of quality backlinks and some basic on-page optimization.
• Sort by CPC to find high commercial intent keywords that you can use to attract more bottom-of-the-funnel traffic.
• Sort by search volume to find keywords that are bringing your competitors a lot of traffic from the SERPs. Often, you'll come across several keywords you had never considered, but could easily be ranking for.