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Writer's pictureFahad H

How to Use SEMRUSH to Help You Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Most Profitable Keywords


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SEO and different tactics used organically are all great to help you build a competitive website that can rank against your adversaries. On the flip side, what if I told you there was a much more efficient to do this with real data and key terms? Wouldn’t you want to use that in conjunction with your plan? SEMRush is the perfect service to help you find competitive data results that will honestly put you light years ahead of the game. If you have someone in your niche that dominates, you can slowly but surely take them apart by filling the void in the market. Get keen insight into your competitors’ strategies and some reasons why they rank so well. Here’s a brief step by step guide on how you can reverse these results to benefit your own brand.

Finding Someone in Your Niche and Implementing The SEMRush Test

Let’s say you have a website based in cocktails. Of course, your biggest competition may be DrinksMixer, but there’s still a gap you can fill in that they haven’t quite touched. You can still edge out  this realm by coming up with a better plan for your smaller niche that entices a specific audience to view your page. This is where ecommerce marketing becomes handy. Take a look at the picture below for a few key details:


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After putting the URL in the domain overview we see some key things that you can take. For example, the organic search says there’s 28.1K traffic. Out of that, they are ranking for 1.5K keywords. Additionally, you’ll see their budget for the traffic which is roughly $44.1K. If you look to the right, you’ll see the amount of backlinks (1.6K) they have for the site. Of course, when you type it without the http://, the results are a bit different showing more full range and traffic cost over time.


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This is just from the desktop point of view. The mobile site has completely different results. This can give you a good gauge on what to expect when you deal with your competition. Of course, bigger sites will have more backlinks, but how about the quality? We will take our search a bit further with the organic research below.

Finding Out Exact Keyword Ranked in Organic Research

This is where things get a bit more cut and dry — finding out the strongest keywords that your competition ranks. Take a look at the picture below at some of the keyword ranking for DrinksMixer.


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So, the cost per click for these particular keywords are pretty high. For example, you have fermentation, vodka and gatorade, neutron bomb, and snake alcohol as top key terms. These are either specialty brews, specialty cocktails, or specific shots. Obviously, these are high priced due to the “special” nature of the drinks. The good thing is you can change the cost per click to measure things that are low to medium priced. For a high powered site like DrinksMixer, it may be good to follow their formula but put some unique spin on it. Maybe search for the same kind of specialty look, but in different places like Asia or other parts of the world. It may not be a bad idea to also see what lower ranking sites profit from. If your site is higher quality, then you know you can profit off those same keywords as the lower ranking site. In any case, it’s always good to have a balance of both but it has to make sense with your own content.

How Does This Affect Your Site’s Plan

It’s very simple. Although you want your own identity, it’s never a bad thing to bend the rules a bit in regards to seeing how your competition dominates. Let’s say you are right there in the middle but you still want to drive more traffic to your page. Take a lesson from your competitors and gauge the trends from the month. In the picture from the last section, there was a trending section to let you know how the traffic either fell or rose in time. You can view this same data but even more delineated in the traffic section where it shows keyword ranking for different time periods.


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See the scattered plot to the right? If you wanted to run a quick comparison of how one month or year ran between another, this is the portion you would take a look at. You can give this data to your team and maybe even your writers to help them rank for these keywords. Also, certain things run seasonally (a special recipe you write or even an item you sale), this is great data to see what works and what doesn’t. You can even view it’s main competitors to see how evenly or unevenly they match.


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You can view some of the top notch organic competitors right here. This is VALUABLE. You can compare and contrast each of the sites and see how it can effectively help you rank. Use this to your advantage to create some kind of  reverse engineering to beat out your competitors. A great organic campaign is only as good as the research that goes into producing results. Ultimately, you want a balance of your own content as well as knowing how to fill the void of your competitor’s prospects/customers. Having these two work hand in hand will certainly put your site on another level.


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