How to Outrank Your Competitors Using SEMrush

Why leave your website traffic and conversions to competition? Don’t risk your time and effort any more. Here’s the chance to outrank your competitors for best organic keywords with the help of SEMrush!

Have you ever thought about the fact that it is very likely that your customers are someone else’s customers as well?

Since the last decade, a huge expansion in the market has been witnessed throughout the world, no matter what the business niche maybe. With the growing market, there now exists a struggle for every business within the niche about how to outrank your competition on Google!

This scenario has given birth to many strategies of marketing. The marketing experts have provided countless solutions as to how to manage, maintain and improve this status online. Every business owner is looking for ways to find an ideal competition rank tracker which could assist him in figuring out the best strategy keeping in view the competitors’ practice. While all these efforts and investments are valid, people are missing out on understanding a small detail. Everyone is trying to do the same thing and still eyeing for the number one spot on their desired search engine!

Step by Step Guide to Outrank Your Competitors Using SEMrush

While almost everyone is searching for the Holy Grail of the Search Engine ranking, there are few who know what it takes to make it to the ultimate branding heights!

Also read: SEMrush Review: Why is SEMrush So Effective?

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Reading further, you will understand the steps for outranking your competitors by adopting new strategies. If your search results are going down despite your time and investment, then you desperately need to learn how to use SEMrush.

Let’s Check!

Before you start making strategies, it is important to know where your existing business portfolio stands in the search engine. How? Well… Just Google yourself! You will be amazed to find that there are others that rank even higher on the list than your company name. This is because the keyword competition may be higher than you expected.

There is no need to fret. The best thing about marketing online is that there is free and fair competition. Any business can fight and steal away that first spot from its competitors easily. All you need is just smarter techniques. This is where SEMrush benefits you!

SEMrush is an amazing software that can help you outrank your competitors online. It offers exclusive data insights into your market competition, prospects in lead generation while enabling you to audit what your own content is lacking to get ranked.

No, it is not another promise but a genuine solution…

01. Find the Right Keywords – Keyword Research

As we all know that the website’s content serves as the core element in the ranking algorithms of the search engines.  Keyword research is all about those specific keywords that the target audience will be expected to use while searching for their desired product or service online. After figuring out how to use SEMrush, you can minimize the difficulty level in keywords by keeping them simple but relevant. You can even use keywords that match exactly with the buyer’s intent.

SEMrush offers a keyword difficulty tool to enable you to understand whether your choice of keywords is the ideal choice to increase the overall readability as well as has the power to by getting crawled by the google spiders seize a competitor’s top position. It is proprietary calculation hence it is not going to be exact, therefore you need to use the results accordingly. You can compare the difficulty levels and volumes to formulate your strategy.

Sounds interesting? Click here and get yourself a free 30-day trial of SEMrush pro account.

You will not be disappointed!

How to do keyword research with SEMrush

SEMrush is a great tool for keyword research and competitor analysis. Our 30-day free trial helps you to do keyword research with ease. In additionally to SEMrush, Microsoft Excel or another similar program.

Follow this simple 6 step process on how to use SEMrush and conduct a successful keyword research.

Step 1: Search your main keyword in the search bar

Log in to your SEMrush account and search your main keyword in the search bar. When you enter a keyword into SEMrush search box, SEMrush generate a keyword overview report. In this report, you will see number of search volume, amount of results, CPC value, trend, phrase match and related keywords.

Step 2: Navigate to Phrase Match Report to identify the best long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are the keywords with 3 or more phrases with less keyword competition and are easy to rank. Click the “Phrase Match” under the keyword analytics from the left menu.

Now, you will see a list of phrase match keywords along with the other data such as search volume and keyword difficulty.

Step 3: Apply filters for Keyword Difficulty

You should focus on long tail keyword with low keyword difficulty. For this, use SEMrush filtering function. In my case, I’m using keywords that have less keyword difficulty value than 75.

Click advanced filters and include keyword difficulty less than 75.

Step 4: Export the filtered list to XLS

You now have generated an easy to rank keyword list. It’s time to save these keywords into an Excel file. Later, combine these keywords with upcoming reports to create a master keyword list.

Click on the “Export” button, select Excel from file formats and click save.

Step 5: Find the Related Keywords for more topics

SEMrush Related Keywords report shows a list keywords based on the relevancy.

As shown above, here you should use filters such as related % and Keyword difficulty. Select the best keywords after applying filter and export via an Excel file.

Step 6: Combine the exports into a Master Keyword List

The next step is to combine all of your exports into a single document – your master list. In these exports, there should be columns for keyword, volume, keyword difficulty, CPC value, competition score, number of results, and trend. You essentially need the keywords, keyword difficulty and competition score. Copy these keywords into a new Excel file or spreadsheet. After all, master keyword list could be anywhere from under 50 to over a few hundred rows. If you find duplicate keywords, use the Data tab and select Remove Duplicates to clean out your list.

Also, you can use Conditional Formatting to colorize the metric columns. Highlight the column you want to format and go to Home tab > conditional formatting.

After the successful keyword research, you have list of keywords waiting to rank. So, let’s move to second step.

02. Find the Top Important Search Competitors for Your Keywords

This research is the most important of all, as by this you will understand what your competitors are doing right, to get ahead of you. You may bid on a competitor’s brand name through PPC, but you need to know about the ranks of those particular keywords in organic online search first. Another factor to consider is whether you should compete directly for their chosen keywords. You can go for the former but using direct competition as a strategy may turn on you; since the most obvious problem to arise would be lack of conversion. Most customers may have a transactional intent and therefore your credibility and your rank may reduce.

You may also like: SEMrush Traffic Analytics Tool Review: Is This Competitive Research Tool Worth the Price?

So, the question is, how to find my competitors? The simplest way to do this right is to select your key keywords and look them up on Google to find your competitors. For e.g., in a search for the keyword, “sprinting shoes without spikes”, these are the listed top competitors.

Read: SEO Strategies for Bloggers – A Guide of SEO Best Practices

03. Analyze competitors’ top organic keywords

Once you have conducted the research about your top competitors in the market, it is time to analyze their top organic keywords. If you are relying solely on a keyword research tool, you are making a mistake. You can do these two ways – either by purchasing data from a specialized service provider or by using SEMrush that provides a great platform to do keyword research and competitor analysis.

Using SEMrush, you will not only be able to analyze your competitor’s organic keyword selection within seconds, but would also get to know about several other crucial insights. As you know that keyword competition is the core element based on which the future of brand and its rank rests. This competitor analysis is important for the following reasons:

• Helps you to increase your website traffic
• To find keywords that have not been targeted yet and one’s that have high search volume
• To gather those keywords that result in the greatest ROI for your competition
• Finally, to do the following steps and outrank your competitor

Explore your competitors’ territory

Go to competitor’s web page and right click. Select “View Page Source” to review the source. Search for “Meta title”, “Meta description” and “Meta keywords”. Make sure that the information is organized well with keywords placed into relevant categories that relate to your service or product. It is critical to keep it structured and relevant for current and future SEO projects.

Especially, you can use this information to create article title and meta description.

Expand your own territory

After the categorization, it is time to work on the desired results and create organically winning keywords by using keyword research tools. Carefully analyze your competition, CPC metrics and monthly search volume while exploring keywords for a new project or while updating the old one. Low competition, low search volume and high keyword difficulty come with lower CPC; therefore, they may not result in conversions.

Finally, this will strengthen:

• Your messages, and they would appear sharper and highly effective.
• The click-through rate because the content will be finely tuned to the intent of your audience / buyers.
• Your ROI and competitive edge

The entire journey from understanding the keyword research, competitor analysis and keyword competition, to coming up with solutions is based on four basic phases:

1. Awareness – Informational
2. Consideration – Navigational
3. Conversion – Commercial or Transactional
4. Loyalty – More customers

How to use SEMrush to find out what keywords your competitors are using?

You just need to generate a domain overview report for each URL. Then click in the top left tab in SEMrush that says ‘Overview’ and click the following: Top organic keywords > View full report.

Here is how it looks:

Finally, create a list of keywords with low keyword difficulty and high volume. Also, add these keywords to the master keyword list.

04. Use SEMrush SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant to create well-crafted SEO-friendly content

After all, you have gathered enough keywords to get started. The next step is to create a SEO content template with SEMrush.

SEMrush SEO Content Template – create well-crafted SEO-friendly content

SEMrush SEO Content Template helps writers craft web-friendly content by providing an SEO template with recommendations that are drafted using target keywords. Once you enter a specific keyword or a phrase, the template will automatically provide you with a recommended length of text, semantically related keywords, readability score, potential backlinks and much more.

SEMrush SEO Content Template helps you outrank rivals for target keywords on the search engine. This way you will be able to create fully optimized content and build links. Once you are done with the template, you can easily export the template to a doc. file (MS Word). It will list everything from page title and Meta description to rival’s URLs, text and backlinks.

Read: How to Write Quality Post to Meet All SEO Needs

SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant – Check if your content follow SEMrush best SEO recommendations

SEMrush also includes SEO Writing Assistant that allows the writers to keep a check on the originality and the SEO potential of the content. All of this is done in real time and less time is wasted in the writing and publishing of the content. The SEO Writing Assistant (SWA) is accessible as an add-on on Google Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari browsers for Google Docs. It is also accessible as a plugin through WordPress.

When you have generated a template, the SWA will provide you with recommendations on target keywords based on the top-performing rivals displayed in Google’s top 10 list. As you make changes to your text, you will see the metrics altering in real-time since they are interactive. It will also show the number of words, target keywords, recommended keywords and readability of your content.

Sounds interesting? Click here and get yourself a free 30-day trial of SEMrush pro account.

05. See how your competitors are building backlinks

Other than the significance of the quality of the content and targeted keywords with low difficulty, the one other thing that carries importance is building your own backlink strategy. Paying attention to your rivals’ marketing efforts can help you discover the secrets behind their ranking.

Once you have established your online competitors, you can use SEMrush to track your competitors’ link building activities and backlink profiles. There is a reason they are on top and it is because they meet and may even exceed expectations of the search engine, therefore their efforts are rewarded with a prime position.

Let’s get into it right away:

Do not go for the top 10, or even the top 5, since they may have over 100 backlinks and it can be scary to see all that work at once. Just go with the top 2, biggest competitors and track their activities through SEMrush for your link building.

Read: How to Check the Total Number of Backlinks for a Website

How to easily find Your competitors backlinks with SEMrush

Through a competitor’s backlink profile, you will understand how your competition today focuses on resource pages, interviews and their own marketing efforts rather than press releases, blog commenting, directory links etc. Learn about the low and middle-tier websites as well as authoritative websites along with high-tier magazines. You then need to find out about any spam websites and anchor text in your profile that you need to remove or disavow to improve your standing in SERPs. Go for ones that have the highest HAD (Domain Authority) as well as PA (Page Authority).

You can even use Google PageRank to evaluate the authority and quality of a website. Sites with a score of 10 out of 10 have the highest possible page rank. However, do not just rely on PR because it is not ‘The Factor’ that Google singles out to evaluate your quality and credibility. Do the following:

1. Check whether the website is indexed by Google.com – Sites that do not show are either facing penalty or is a dead link, therefore STAY AWAY from these!
2. Then, conduct an audit of the link profile of the competitor’s website REGULARLY – You will end up with a list of healthy backlinks.
3. Create a master file… Probably a spreadsheet!
4. Replicate backlinks: A key factor of the link building process – This means, using same techniques your competitor has used to get the links. For example, you found a useful post on Quora that is relevant to your website, therefore just reply to the post with a link to your website.

SEMrush offers a full report on your competitors; it allows you to export those backlinks and track your competitor’s’ moves. In SEMrush, you can follow this path to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles:

SEMrush domain overview > Backlinks > View full report.

 Create a list of referring domains with anchor texts.

06. Start an effective link building campaign

As mentioned earlier, there is no specific method to start an effective link building campaign. You need to follow a series of steps while using a complete SEO suite like SEMrush to generate rewarding backlinks. The most effective method to date is the “Competitor Backlink Analysis Method” as described in the earlier step. The top 4 competitors you noted down in step 4 now need to be analyzed for their backlink profile and strategies that you can adopt to outrank your competitors.

You will find two type of competitors – One will be your domain level competitors and the second will be your page-level competitors. For an effective link building campaign, you can use the following methods:

1. Uncover potential link opportunities by following your competitors’ homepage links.
2. Find your rivals’ guest posts and write for the same websites.
3. Find competitors’ “Super Fans” and build relationships with these people.
4. Spot easily-duplicable link opportunities by finding websites that have Links with more than one competitor.
5. Nab links from page competitors – Create something better!
6. Track your rivals’ new backlinks and jump on the new opportunities.
7. Find your rivals’ broken links and use them.

There are several other ways to build backlinks. Internet is a pool of ideas, you will definitely find many relevant to your goal, if you pay close attention. But, the significance of aiming to create value for the potential customers cannot be stressed enough.

07. Start a social media campaign

A social media campaign is not pointless. Ignoring social media links means ignoring a big chunk of your potential customers and automatically losing the market to your competitor.

Taking Facebook for instance, the ultimate goal for the majority is to gain enough likes and shares so that they become popular, but your goal as a focused businessman should be different. You should focus on the content, its originality and your keywords. Focusing on generating engaging ideas to attract potential customers is also important and so is the overall graphical appeal of your social media content. One more thing that you need to focus on is the consistency and continuity of your social media posts. Without this, you may build interest at one point, but you will lose your audience later in time when you stop scheduling posts.

SEMrush offers a Social Media Poster tool to help you schedule posts, create drafts and get content ideas. This way, you do not need to worry about your social media account since SEMrush will do all the work for you. You can make this situation ideal by hiring a dedicated social media specialist if you do not have free time on your hands.

08. Use SEMrush on-Page SEO Checker to get the suggestions for your content

SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker works to bring out the best in web pages. Search engine optimization is extremely important if you want to boost your online presence. Without the use of specialized tools and techniques, you may be left behind in this fierce race of popularity, indexing and ranking.

On-Page SEO Checker works by analyzing factors that lead to Google ranking and improve your website’s performance. It also provides actionable recommendations on the data collected from an SEO audit or other means. Finally, it also carries out in-depth comparative analysis of the top 10 performers on Google to help uncover all the nitty gritty that have led to their top ranking.

SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker offers the following ideas:

• Strategy Ideas
• Content Ideas
• Semantic Ideas
• Backlinks Ideas
• Technical Ideas
• User Experience Ideas

09. Continually monitor the changes for the top competitors

The final step is to stay vigilant online and monitor how your competitors are strategizing to maintain their ranking in Google and other search engines. Remember, tracking your competitors is a never-ending task. More specifically, you need to keep up with the following practices:

1. Scan if the rankings have increased or decreased.
2. See if your competitors’ websites are expanding, and how quickly.
3. Stay up-to-date on their new backlinks.
4. Check if major updates from Google are affecting their websites.

It is time you stay on the right side of the modern era. Choose SEMrush to outrank your competitors. Click here and get yourself a free 30-day trial of SEMrush pro account.

You will not be disappointed!