Data-Driven Market Research

and Competitive Analysis

with Semrush .Trends
A Guide for Marketing Practitioners
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Table
of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 03 Uncovering Your Competitors’
Researching New Markets and Niches .................................. 04 Top-Performing Pages ................................................................................................................................. 29
Researching a New Market ........................................................................................................................................ 05 How to Uncover Your Competitors’
General Market Overview ............................................................................................................................................. 06 Top Products or Services ................................................................................................................................................... 31
How to Estimate the Size of a New Market .......................................................... 06 How to Estimate Your Competitors’
How to Detect General Market Dynamics Conversion Rates ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 35
and Trends ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 07 Sidenote: What is a Good Conversion Rate? ................................................. 37
Competitive Landscape Overview 11
......................................................................................................... How to Optimize Your Customer Journey
How to Identify Market Leaders 11
.................................................................................................................... With Semrush 38
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................

How to Overview a Niche Searching for Gaps and Insights .....................................................................40

and Measure Competitor Market Share .......................................................................... 13 How to Compare Competitors Against Each Other
Strategic Audience Insights ..................................................................................................................................... 15 and the Market Overall ..............................................................................................................................................................41
How to Leverage Audience Data Selecting Relevant Competitors ............................................................................................................ 42
for Strategic Decisions ............................................................................................................................................................. 15 Industry Trends and Growth Potential ................................................................................ 44
Analyzing Your Competitors’ Analyzing Competitor Traffic Sources ............................................................................... 46
Marketing Strategies .............................................................................................................................................. 17 Benchmarking Your Competitors’
How to Evaluate Your Competitors’ Products and Services .............................................................................................................................................................. 47
Website Performance ................................................................................................................................................................... 18 How to Understand User Behavior
How to Reveal Competitors’ Traffic Sources and Gain Customer Insights ................................................................................................................................. 49
and Traffic Generation Strategies .................................................................................................... 20 How to Enhance Your Strategy Using Gaps
How to Outperform Rivals in Organic Search ............................................ 22 in Your Rivals’ Content Coverage ....................................................................................................... 50
How to Benchmark Your Rivals’ Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 53
Beneficial Partnerships 24
......................................................................................................................................................... About Semrush .Trends ............................................................................................................................. 54
Which Paid Advertising Tactics Work Best? ...................................................25
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Introduction
In today’s highly competitive environment, For senior marketing personnel, this level
accurate and timely data can be the key of insight and information can be invaluable.
difference between keeping tabs on,
getting ahead of, or being left behind the Powered by advanced Big Data technologies
competition. and machine learning algorithms, Semrush
.Trends also gives you the opportunity
This is why we developed Semrush .Trends, to assess your rivals’ marketing strategies
a powerful market research and competitive and tactics from all angles, as well as to
analysis toolkit. Consisting of the Traffic qualify leads, evaluate prospective partners,
Analytics and Market Explorer tools, and gain an understanding of demand and
it allows you to: competition in your target market.

• Collect information quickly and easily; That’s a lot of marketing power, so in this
• Have an all-encompassing awareness guide, we will explain how the toolkit works,
of the market or niche you are interested in; and how it can be leveraged to help you
• Better understand potential audiences; achieve your business goals.
• Set up more targeted and efficient
marketing activities. Let’s begin!

How To Use This Guide

The structure of this ebook is designed

to be flexible. You can read all
the chapters in the order they are
presented, or go straight to a particular
section of interest using the clickable
content list on the previous page.

03
Researching
New Markets
and Niches
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Researching
a New Market
When it comes to business growth, two scenarios are popular:

• Expanding into a new market.

• Broadening your existing product range.

In either case, you first need to understand the kinds of opportunities that exist in these
new markets, and whether or not they are viable. Semrush .Trends can help you to do this.
To run a thorough market analysis at this stage, you will need to tap into the three key areas
of research:

• Market: growth, demand patterns, and emerging trends.

• Competitors: top players, growth rates, and general traffic generation strategies.

• Audience: geo, size, and characteristics.

05
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

General
Market Overview
How to Estimate the Size of a New Market
Before you invest any serious time and money into conducting in-depth research,
identify whether there is sufficient demand in that market.

In the online space, traffic equals market size, so this can be done by analyzing the
performance of your competitors in your target region or country.

To do this, go to Market Explorer, enter your domain (if you’re already within that market)
or a big market player’s domain, and select the ‘Industry Competitors’ option (see below).
You will then be presented with an extensive industry overview.

06
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Estimate the Size of a New Market

The Market Traffic report will reveal the overall amount of traffic your target market has
been getting over the last two years:

Straight away, this will give you a good idea of whether or not there is sufficient
size and growth rate to proceed further with market research.

How to Detect General Market Dynamics and Trends

Once the new market passes the initial size check, it’s time to explore more granular
market dynamics and trends.

Many of these are discussed in major business publications, or in industry reports

from the likes of PwC, McKinsey, and Deloitte. At the end of each year, you can
expect these analytics firms to cover what they call megatrends.

However, given the ever-changing nature of the market landscape and the factors
that affect it, you can hardly wait for the reports to come out. What you need is
a reliable source of both historical and real-time market data to spot upcoming
trends before everyone else.

Semrush .Trends will allow you to signpost emerging trends

and demand patterns almost in real-time.

07
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Detect General Market Dynamics and Trends

A good place to start is with the Total Traffic Trends widget in Market Explorer.

For instance, in the example below, we can see that the US market traffic
for sporting goods has increased in the last two years by around 21%, which
would suggest a relatively healthy growth rate.

You can also explore which countries are seeing the biggest rises (and falls)
in the global market share by referring to the Geo Distribution widget, and selecting
the ‘Top Changes’ filter.

As we can see below, Germany may not have anywhere close to the biggest market
share, but we can see that it is the fastest-growing market for sporting goods.

08
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Detect General Market Dynamics and Trends

If we were interested in looking more closely at that German market, we could use
Market Explorer’s intel to also assess the key demographic trends and dynamics.

For instance, if we were to enter Germany, we would have to market to females

between the ages of 18-24 and 45-54 and males between 25-34. And if social media
is a channel we’d place our bet on, we can also see the social media preferences
of the potential target audience:

Once the market trends part is clear,

move on from general market patterns
to competitor-specific ones - to better
understand their product/service
and traffic generation strategies.

09
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Detect General Market Dynamics and Trends

If you select the Top Pages tab in Traffic Analytics, you can see your competitors’
most popular pages for the previous months.

Top Pages 1-50(654) Filter by page

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

adidas.com/us 1.8M 1.2M 713.6K 168.5K 563K 4.5K 119.2K

adidas.com/us/search 469.7K 369.5K 34.1K 3.6K 2.7K 10.8K 0

adidas.com/us/yeezy 175.7K 139K 55.6K 20.6K 16.1K 0 0

adidas.com/us/account-login 167.6K 129.7K 18.8K 0 2.7K 0 0

adidas.com/us/men 154.2K 141.8K 17K 18.8K 49.3K 0 5.4K

adidas.com/us/social-login 143.4K 89.6K 896 110.3K 0 3.6K 0

adidas.com/us/ultraboost 117.4K 98K 17.9K 1.8K 32.3K 3.6K 15.2K

adidas.com/us/men-shoes 113.8K 84K 24.2K 2.7K 42.1K 0 9.9K

adidas.com/us/my-account 112.1K 88.6K 16.1K 0 1.8K 0 0

adidas.com/us/order-tracker 105.8K 78.4K 74.4K 2.7K 0 0 0

adidas.com/us/shoes 108.1K 104.6K 2.8K 0 9.5K 0 32.2K

You can then compare this against last year’s data (or for however long you want
to go back), and get a better idea of the most popular product pages and services
amongst their audiences.

Top Pages 1-50(392) Filter by page

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

adidas.com/us/yeezy 4.4M 1.3M 1.6M 9.1K 2.5M 6K 0

adidas.com/us 1.9M 1.4M 538.2K 60.5K 786.1K 24.2K 63.5K

adidas.com/us/cart 816.3K 526.1K 87.7K 9.1K 48.4K 0 0

adidas.com/us/account-login 547.3K 326.4K 69.5K 3K 12.1K 0 0

adidas.com/us/order-details 526.1K 215.5K 332.6K 0 0 0 0

adidas.com/us/search 523.1K 421.5K 21.2K 18.1K 33.3K 0 0

adidas.com/us/men 338.6K 304.2K 39.3K 0 51.4K 0 6K

adidas.com/us/my-account 335.6K 196.5K 33.3K 3K 6K 0 0

adidas.com/us/delivery 302.4K 234.5K 3K 0 15.1K 3K 0

adidas.com/us/payment 238.9K 196.5K 9.1K 0 6K 3K 0

adidas.com/us/yeezy 4.4M 1.3M 1.6M 9.1K 2.5M 6K 0

For instance, we can see that the designer Yeezy product range was attracting 4.4m
visits in April 2020, but only 175k in April 2021. As a result, you might deduce that
there is now far less interest in expensive designer sportswear in this market.

You can also use this access to historical data to track seasonal offers and trends,
allowing you to build an even more complete picture of your market and the seasonality
that affects it.

10
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Competitive
Landscape Overview
How to Identify Market Leaders
This kind of more granular market and competitive analysis is not possible to run if you
don’t know who your direct competitors are. And if it’s a totally new vertical or geographic
region, you may not even know who the top players in that field are.

It’s crucial to have this information not just for benchmarking purposes but to gain a more
thorough understanding of your target industry and get a better grasp of its consumer base.

So, let’s look at how Semrush .Trends can help:

• To build a list of the top companies in the market, go to Market Explorer and enter the
most prominent industry website you can think of. For instance, if you are selling coffee
beans, enter Starbucks’ website.

• At the top of the page, set the dropdown menu selection to ‘Industry Competitors’.
You can also change the location if required.

• Look at the Semrush Growth Quadrant.

The Semrush Growth Quadrant is a powerful and highly valuable tool that allows
you to visualize your competitors’ market positions, and assess their current audience
size and growth rate.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Identify Market Leaders

In the case of our coffee example, we can see the following:

Starbucks, as expected, has a significantly higher level of traffic volume than everybody
else, although Home Barista has the highest growth rate. So, what does that mean?

In general, the Growth Quadrant can be read using the following table:

Online market share Growth

Game Changers Small Fast

Niche Players Small Slow or negative

Leaders Big Fast

Established Players Big Slow or negative

12
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Identify Market Leaders

Starbucks’ high traffic volume and medium growth rate clearly identify it as the market
leader in the US, but Nespresso and Keurig are well placed to evolve. Home Barista
is growing quickly, but it is struggling to attract traffic volume anywhere close
to those companies.

You can toggle this quadrant to get the top 10 or even 20 biggest market players,
giving you a clear indicator of who the top-performing companies in your niche are.

How to Overview a Niche

and Measure Competitor Market Share
The next step of your market assessment is to see how strong your potential rivals are.
Semrush .Trends can help you to identify what kind of market share they actually have.

By researching several competitors, you will see regional market trends and be able
to make informed decisions on any planned expansion.

Benchmarking top players against each other also helps you to discover the most
effective traffic acquisition strategies in your new market.

When it comes to measuring the market share of your competitors, the Growth Quadrant –
mentioned previously – is highly revealing. If you want to dig deeper into the exact
numbers involved, though, you should consult the Share of Visits widget, also found
in the Overview section of Market Explorer.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Overview a Niche

and Measure Competitor Market Share

This feature also allows you to dig much deeper into each individual competitor and even
break down their share of visits by traffic type. In addition, you can measure each of these
competitors against the overall market for the following metrics:

• Growth by sources (direct, referral, social, search, and paid)

• Traffic generation strategy (direct, referral, social, search, and paid)
• Audience (age and sex)

14
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Strategic
Audience Insights
How to Leverage Audience Data
for Strategic Decisions
Now, once you know who the industry’s top players are and where they stand
in terms of audience share, you should assess how much their audiences overlap.

Traffic Analytics’ Audience Insights report is a very handy tool for this.
There are two key data points you can dig out from this report:

• If you’re already within the given market, you can input your competitors into the report
and get an idea of how much overlap your audience has with those competitors.

• If you don’t yet compete in the niche, this report will also be of interest to you.
You can enter up to 5 prominent market players and see how much their audiences
overlap - to assess the maximum audience potential within the niche and pinpoint
more direct rivals in the future.

15
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Leverage Audience Data

for Strategic Decisions

Below the Audience Overlap report, you will see a list of domains that represent the highest
shared audience percentages in those overlaps.

Once you know where your collective audience spends most of their time, you can formulate
a better audience acquisition strategy and directly target users on those platforms with your
remarketing campaigns.

16
Analyzing Your
Competitors’
Marketing
Strategies
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Evaluate
Your Competitors
Website Performance
Once you’ve researched the market and identified your competitors, the next step
is to evaluate them. You may know all your rivals by name, but still face difficulties
assessing their websites’ traffic and traffic channels, audience interests,
and regional representation.

The Traffic Analytics tool is designed to help you get a handle on these figures, and more.

The quickest and easiest way to evaluate your competitors’ website performance
is to simply open the Overview tab of Traffic Analytics and put their root domain
into the search bar. You will then get key information about that competitor’s
overall traffic, their key visitor engagement metrics, and their monthly dynamics.

• The Visits and Unique Visitors reports give an idea of the size of the competitor’s
website audience.

• Pages / Visit, Average Visit Duration, and Bounce Rate are engagement metrics
that indicate the effectiveness of the user flow and quality of the user experience
on the website.

• Market Share is the percentage of the site’s traffic to the traffic of all market domains
(for that month).

• Market Traffic is the total number of visits to all market domains (for that month).

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Evaluate Your Competitors’

Website Performance
The Trends widget allows you to analyze the above metrics based on two factors:
by device, and by time period.

If you are interested in a specific location, you can also choose it from the list
at the top of the report.

For a more general outlook, use the Geo Distribution tab to get an immediate
overview of the markets that your rivals are targeting – and their level of success there.

19
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Reveal Competitors’

Traffic Sources and Traffic
Generation Strategies
After a more high-level competitor overview, you have to get down to dissecting their key
success tactics.

One of Traffic Analytics’ most valuable features is that it enables you to access data about
your competitors’ traffic sources and audience acquisition strategies. Given that you cannot
view their internal traffic data directly, this kind of insight can be massively helpful.

For instance, you can see how your rivals set up their traffic acquisition priorities, and
analyze their breakdown of direct, referral, search, social, and paid traffic.

As you can see in the example above, Etnies has a strong brand presence as indicated by
the high percentage of direct traffic, but it doesn’t attract a lot of visitors from social media.
If your company has a strong and engaging presence on that channel, you could potentially
outperform this competitor there.

Indeed, by looking at where competitors stand against your site in terms of traffic sources,
you can identify your marketing strategy’s weakest and strongest areas, and fine-tune
them accordingly.

20
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Reveal Competitors’ Traffic Sources

and Traffic Generation Strategies
But traffic does not only have to do with a given brand’s efforts. Insights from
their audience’s traffic journey can also inform your traffic generation strategy.

Traffic Analytics’ Traffic Journey widget reflects which platforms and sites your
rivals’ audiences visit before and after landing on their site.

On the Overview tab, enter four competitors that you wish to benchmark
your business against. Then, take a look at the Traffic Journey widget.

These insights can help you make better decisions about more efficient media placements
and marketing partnerships.

Alternatively, you can follow your competitors’ visitors to their next destinations, and divert
user attention by placing your ads there.

21
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to
Outperform Rivals
in Organic Search
If you see that your rivals are placing a big bet on SEO and get a lot of search traffic, you
may want to compete with them for this organic attention.

The Organic Research tool gives you a quick overview of any website’s organic search
visibility, allowing you to enhance your own strategy.

In the Overview tab, you will find a wealth of useful information, including:

• the target website’s total number of keywords, with organic positions

in Google’s top 100 results (as well as position changes);

• the expected monthly traffic from those keywords;

• SERP features data;

• the ratio of branded and non-branded traffic;

• the top pages and subdomains for organic value.

22
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Reveal Competitors’ Traffic Sources

and Traffic Generation Strategies

This information can help you increase your own rankings and conversions by allowing you
to focus on the most successful keywords, especially if you use the tool in conjunction with
our other keyword research tools.

23
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Benchmark
Your Rivals’ Beneficial
Partnerships
If your competitors are getting solid referral traffic shares, you may want to outsmart
them with your link-building and PR strategy.

In the Overview tab of Traffic Analytics, input your competitor’s domain (and up to four
other rivals, if required). Then, go to the Traffic Journey tab and scroll down to the Traffic
Journey Details report. Select ‘Referring Sites’ and filter the report by Traffic Share;
note the top websites that refer to your competitor.

By uncovering the sites that refer to your competitor the most, you can identify their
most beneficial partnerships on the web and try to replicate their success.

24
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Which
Paid Advertising
Tactics Work Best?
Referral traffic assessment can also help inform your advertising strategy. Online
advertising, however, is not only about finding the right platform for ad placement.

Look at your competitors’ practices and adopt some time-proven solutions

to save budgets and maximize your ROI.

In this regard, the Advertising Research tool offers full coverage of your
competitors’ advertising tactics.

Go to the Positions tab to find:

• the number of keywords the domain is bidding on;

• the estimated traffic coming from these keywords;

• traffic cost estimation.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Which Paid Advertising Tactics Work Best?

When supplemented with data from the Ad History tab (featuring all of the paid keywords
that the target domain ranked for in the past year), this information lets you gain a clear
understanding of your competitor’s advertising habits.

To dig deeper, click on any of the blue cells. This allows you to see the actual ads for the
12-month period, and check if your competitor experimented by changing any parts of their
ads (as well as whether the experiment was successful).

26
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Which Paid Advertising Tactics Work Best?

In the Ad Copies tab, you will also see all of the headlines and CTAs that the competitor
used in their ads, along with the keywords and landing pages they are directing their
paid traffic to.

To focus on Google Shopping or Display ads, switch to the PLA Research or Display
Advertising reports respectively.

The information in the Display Advertising Overview tab will let you analyze the distribution
of your competitor’s GDN ads around the globe, and allow you to understand which markets
you should be targeting and how. Specifically, you can see reports on:

• Audience targeting (gender and age);

• Top audience interests;

• Top publishers;

• Ad types (image, HTML, and text);

• Breakdown of ads by country and device.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Which Paid Advertising Tactics Work Best?

You can also see sample ads for each type.

Meanwhile, in PLA Research, the PLA Copies tab features your competitor’s best-performing
PLA ads (as well as the keywords that triggered them to show up in search results).
You can also get a summary of the target domain’s presence in the search results.

With all of this information, you’ll be able to analyze the pricing for your target segment,
optimize your ad creatives (in terms of keywords, titles, and pictures), and fine-tune your
ad spend for maximum ROI.

28
Uncovering
Your Competitors’
Top-Performing
Pages
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Uncovering
Your Competitors’
Top-Performing Pages
There are a lot of competitive intelligence benefits to knowing what your rivals’ top-
performing pages are. The most obvious is that you can estimate their number of customers
(by looking at the number of visitors to their basket, checkout, and checkout confirmation
pages), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

As touched upon already, you can also:

• Understand what the top products or services of your rivals are.

• Discover the maximum possible reach for your new product or service.

• Break down your competitor’s audience and prominence in different geographic locations.

• Identify wider trends in your competitors’ campaigns.

• Pick up on any significant changes in a rival’s consumer strategy, target audience,

or product range.

• Unearth hidden landing pages (that don’t even appear on Google) that can serve as
inspiration for your own efforts.

So, how do you go about doing all of these things – and more?

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Uncover
Your Competitors’ Top
Products or Services
Input your competitor’s domain into Traffic Analytics, and then go to the Top Pages report.
You will be presented with a full list of that domain’s pages, which you can rank in order
of your preferred metric.

Traffic Analytics: converse.com

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

converse.com 752.6K 527.3K 228.1K 38.9K 237.2K 5K 129.4K

converse.com/shop-cart 170.5K 111.6K 27.3K 0 827 0 0

converse.com/country-language-selector 150.1K 115.6K 47.8K 17.5K 43.7K 365 0

converse.com/es 134.8K 102.9K 23.8K 18.8K 49.3K 0 29.6K

converse.com/shipping 123.5K 101.9K 6.7K 0 0 0 0

converse.com/c/limited-edition/virgil-off-white 114K 40.6K 29.8K 0 61.4K 827 0

converse.com/shop/mens-shoes 109.4K 101.3K 4.1K 3.4K 6.7K 0 0

converse.com/us 108K 85.2K 5.5K 7.4K 0 0 0

converse.com/uk 105.4K 93.7K 25.5K 10.3K 28.2K 0 17.7K

converse.com/shop/limited-edition 102.9K 90.9K 6.2K 1.7K 3.3K 5.8K 827

converse.com/size-chart-guide 102.2K 89.9K 4.7K 827 28.6K 0 0

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How to Uncover Your Competitors’

Top Products or Services
To get an idea of how many customers they have, for instance, filter the report with
keywords such as “cart”, “checkout”, and “basket”, and see how much traffic these
pages generate.

Top Pages: 1-10 (10)

cart

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

converse.com/shop-cart 170.5K 111.6K 27.3K 0 827 0 0

converse.com/es/cart 55.9K 38.8K 10.6K 0 0 0 0

converse.com/fr/cart 35.3K 36.9K 0 0 0 0 0

converse.com/uk/en/cart 29.2K 21.6K 7.2K 0 0 0 0

converse.com/on/demandware.store/sites-converseus-

site/default/braintree-checkoutfromcart 12.5K 11.3K 0 0 0 0 0

converse.com/de/cart 12.1K 10.3K 0 0 0 0 0

converse.com/nl/nl/cart 8.6K 5.7K 2K 0 0 0 0

converse.com/pt/cart 5.5K 3.4K 1.4K 0 0 0 0

converse.com/it/it/cart 4K 4K 0 0 0 0 0

converse.com/de/en/cart 3.7K 2.3K 878 0 0 0 0

Top Pages: 1-2 (2)

confirm

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

converse.com/order-confirmation 69K 71.7K 827 0 0 0 0

converse.com/uk/en/checkout-confirmation 4.5K 5.1K 0 0 0 0 0

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How to Uncover Your Competitors’

Top Products or Services
When scrolling through the pages, also pay attention to those that represent specific
products or product categories for your competitor. For example, say you sell men’s
sports shoes and you are exploring the website of Converse – one of your main rivals.

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

converse.com 752.6K 527.3K 228.1K 38.9K 237.2K 5K 129.4K

/shop-cart 170.5K 111.6K 27.3K 0 827 0 0

/country-language-selector 150.1K 115.6K 47.8K 17.5K 43.7K 365 0

/es 134.8K 102.9K 23.8K 18.8K 49.3K 0 29.6K

/shipping 123.5K 101.9K 6.7K 0 0 0 0

/c/limited-edition/virgil-off-white 114K 40.6K 29.8K 0 61.4K 827 0

/shop/mens-shoes 109.4K 101.3K 4.1K 3.4K 6.7K 0 0

Direct 28.94% 4.1K

Referral 23.86% 3.4K

Entrance Sources, Desktop
Search 47.19% 6.7K

Social 0% 0

Paid 0% 0

For the men’s shoes product category, click on it and look closely at which traffic sources
your rival is using to attract visitors to this page. With this information, you can formulate
your own marketing approach more carefully.

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How to Uncover Your Competitors’

Top Products or Services
Finally, take note of any special offers, categories or pages too. You can use this data
to consider adding similar products or offers to your own campaign or, alternatively,
focus on the promotion of the rest of your product range.

Top Pages: 1-27 (27)

offers

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

cibc.com/en/special-offers/smart-cash-offer.html 20.7K 19.4K 1.3K 1.3K 4K 0 2.6K

cibc.com/en/special-offers/international-student-gic.html 12.7K 8K 0 0 0 0 11.4K

cibc.com/en/special-offers/cash-back-mortgage.html 11.6K 6.3K 2K 0 5.8K 0 3.8K

investorsedge.cibc.com/en/special-offers.html 11.4K 8.7K 0 0 1.3K 0 3.1K

cibc.com/en/personal-banking/bank-accounts/youth-banking-offers.html 11.2K 9.1K 2K 0 659 0 0

cibc.com/en/special-offers/global-money-transfer.html 11.2K 5.9K 3.3K 2K 2K 0 0

cibc.com/en/special-offers/visa-debit.html 7.3K 7.2K 659 0 659 0 5.3K

cibc.com/en/special-offers/journie-gas-rewards.html 6.6K 5.9K 2K 2.6K 0 0 0

cibc.com/en/special-offers/fall-savings-promotion.html 5.9K 4.6K 0 659 0 0 0

cibc.com/en/special-offers/low-fee-equity-trading.html 5.9K 3.3K 0 4.6K 0 659 659

Make sure that you view the traffic sources for these pages to see how these offers
are being promoted (i.e. through paid campaigns or social media).

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Estimate
Your Competitors’
Conversion Rates
As discussed in the previous section, it’s possible to estimate the number of a competitor’s
customers by filtering for basket, checkout, and checkout confirmation pages.

However, you can also use this information to estimate the competitor’s overall
conversion rate.

To do this, open the Top Pages report for your target domain in Traffic Analytics, and filter
for keywords such as “confirmation”, “cart”, and “checkout” as discussed.

Top Pages: (1)

confirm

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

waterstones.com/checkout/orderconfirmation 38K 37.9K 853 0 0 0 0

In our example, we can see that Waterstones’ order confirmation page had 42.6k unique
visitors in April 2021. An order confirmation page is a certain indicator that purchase or
conversion has been made, so we can safely conclude that Waterstones completed 42.6k
online transactions during that month.

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How to Estimate Your

Competitors’ Conversion Rates
To get the conversion rate, we would then find out the number of unique visitors
for Waterstones’ home page.

Top Pages: 1-50 (114)

Filter by page

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

waterstones.com 371.2K 258K 120.4K 14.3K 195.8K 1.4k 0

We can see that this number is 258k for April 2021, meaning that the conversion rate
would be:

42.6k / 258k = 0.1651 = 16.5%

You can use this approach for each of your competitors, and then calculate an average
conversion rate between them. This gives you a benchmark that you can use to measure
your own expectations and performance against.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Sidenote:
What is a Good
Conversion Rate?
This is a notoriously difficult question, and often the answer will depend on the industry (or
even the individual product). This is why it’s a good idea to work out the average for your
own circle of competitors.

However, over a 2-year period, we used Traffic Analytics to analyze the number of unique
visitors to Amazon’s site* and measured it against the number of users that landed on
a “thank you” page* (a clear sign of conversion or completed purchase). As a result, we
discovered Amazon’s average 2-year conversion rate to be somewhere around 9.6%, which
is a pretty decent benchmark to go up against.

*The page-by-page user count data is taken from the Top Pages report
within Semrush’s Traffic Analytics tool.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Optimize
Your Customer Journey
With Semrush
Improving your customer experience helps you to deliver maximum value, which in turn
drives conversions and increases loyalty. Analyzing user interactions with a competitor’s
website is a good starting point for this process, as it allows you to see what they
are doing well – and what you can learn from it.

So, how can this be done?

The first thing we need to understand is what your potential customers are looking for
so that you can promote those products and services more actively. To do this, open
Traffic Analytics and input your competitor’s domain. Then, go to the Top Pages tab.

Start filtering the data by product/service keywords (e.g., shoes) to see what
product pages drive the most traffic.

Top Pages: 1-50 (442)

shoes

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

adidas.com/us/men-shoes 135.8K 99.7K 29.6K 5K 51.6K 0 10.2K

adidas.com/us/campus-80s-south-park-towelie-shoes/gz9177.html 101.2K 87.1K 7.5K 7.1K 51.1K 5.4K 0

adidas.com/us/shoes 68K 64.4K 2.7K 0 4.5K 0 13.4K

adidas.com/us/women-shoes 54.4K 31.7K 15.5K 0 18K 1.8K 5.4K

adidas.com/us/4d-shoes 43.3K 33.3K 5.4K 896 6.6K 2.1K 1.8K

adidas.com/us/stan-smith-shoes/fy5460.html 38.3K 31.6K 7.1K 5K 10.8K 896 896

adidas.com/us/adidas-ultraboost-dna-x-lego-plates-shoes/fy7690.html 37.3K 30.6K 5.4K 6.5K 6.3K 11K 0

adidas.com/us/men-running-shoes 34.2K 30.7K 896 0 9K 0 1.8K

adidas.com/us/bad-bunny-forum---easter-egg-shoes/gw0265.html 23.7K 21.5K 2.5K 0 5.8K 2.7K 0

adidas.com/us/men-shoes-new_arrivals 23.6K 18.6K 17.2K 0 1K 0 0

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Optimize Your

Customer Journey With Semrush
Once you have this data, you might want to:

• Consider promotions in similar product categories.

• Increase your efforts in whichever is the primary traffic source for that category.

• Adapt your site design to the biggest device source for that category.

• Check where these popular pages are located on your rival’s website, and ensure
that your similar products are just as easy to find.

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Searching
for Gaps
and Insights
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Compare
Competitors Against Each
Other and the Market Overall
Competitive benchmarking is important because it helps companies to evaluate their
own performance, highlight the best industry practices, and adopt those practices
to stay ahead of their rivals.

The process is split into three segments:

• Process benchmarking: Using your competitors’ internal processes

to optimize your own.

• Strategic benchmarking: Using your competitors’ business models

to strengthen your own.

• Performance benchmarking: Using your competitors’ KPIs to measure

your own victories and losses.

It’s also pertinent to identify the exact metrics you’re going to use for your comparisons.
Generally, it’s recommended to focus on:

• Growth assessment
• Ranking improvements
• Social media reach
• Product success
• Brand awareness and share of voice

Now that you know what competitive benchmarking is and how it can be measured,
how can Semrush .Trends help you to carry out this important process?

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Selecting Relevant Competitors

The first step is to identify your market competitors, which we covered earlier on.

As a quick reminder, though, open Market Explorer and enter your domain in the search bar.
In the Overview tab, you will see the Growth Quadrant report, which gives you a list of your
top 10 or 20 competitors.

Of course, you might have your own idea of who your top industry competitors are, and you
can list up to four of these in the report. On the whole, though, it is best to narrow down
your selection to one of three competitor groups:

• Your closest competitors. These are the companies that are similar to you in terms of
size and market positioning. Semrush .Trends can help you identify immediate opportunities
for gaining a competitive edge against these businesses.

• Key industry players. This is a useful strategy because it allows you to gather insights
into their success. This in turn can help you to replicate some of their winning strategies and
tactics without aiming to directly compete with them.

• Industry disruptors. These are the businesses that are changing the face of your niche
through the introduction of innovative strategies and products. They are well worth keeping
an eye on.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Selecting Relevant Competitors

In the example above for the Daily Mail (a UK newspaper and online news service), the
‘Niche Players’ would be considered our closest competitors, with the BBC taking the role of
a key industry player.

While Yahoo and Twitter have huge web presences, they could be considered disruptors in
the online news sector. This is because online news is not their traditional vertical, but they
are rapidly positioning themselves as popular sites for this purpose.

The Growth Quadrant is a fairly high-level overview, so let’s see how we can break down the
benchmarking process further.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Industry Trends and Growth Potential

Once you know who you are comparing yourself against, you need to measure general
traffic trends in your industry and identify where there may be growth potential for
your business.

The Total Traffic Trends report (also found in the Overview tab of Market Explorer)
gives you a good idea of this.

As we can see above, the wider online UK news market has grown over the last 2 years,
and the Daily Mail is well placed to keep pace with that growth. What about its competitors,
though?

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Industry Trends and Growth Potential

If you hover over each competitor in the Growth Quadrant, you can see their traffic growth
rate over the last 6 months, 1 year, or QoQ/YoY. In the example below, we can see that the
rate of The Guardian’s traffic growth actually decreased by 4.7% YoY, which doesn’t compare
favorably to the Daily Mail’s 2.7% YoY growth. The Express and the Sun have suffered even
bigger decreases, meaning that the Daily Mail is well placed ahead of its direct competitors.

On the flipside, if you were an online marketer for the Sun or the Express, you would likely
want to dissect the Daily Mail’s strategies and tactics to try and emulate them.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Analyzing Competitor Traffic Sources

The next step is to dig deeper into what your more successful competitors are doing well.
A big part of this is understanding where they are getting their traffic from.

You can find an overview of this information in the Traffic Generation Strategy report
(found in the ‘Benchmarking’ tab of Market Explorer). You can also tweak the report for
up to four competitors at the top of the page.

The overall traffic trend in this instance is fairly consistent across each brand.
Clearly, direct and search traffic – thanks to brand awareness and good SEO – are key
channels that attract audiences to these sites, although referral traffic is also significant
(unsurprising, given these are news websites).

In the Daily Mail’s case, search traffic is the lowest of the five sites listed here and
is well below the market average. This suggests that it should consider strengthening
its SEO performance to attract a larger organic share, and rely less on direct traffic.

Once you identify which channels you should be investing more resources in, you can
create an action plan for how to proceed.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Benchmarking Your Competitors’

Products and Services
You can also benchmark your company against your rivals’ product and service offerings
by reviewing their key traffic magnets and comparing them against your own.

This process is the same as in the previous section of the ebook, but to recap, you should
go into the Traffic Analytics tool and enter the domain of one of your competitors. Then,
select the Top Pages tab, and you will be presented with a list of that domain’s top-
performing pages by unique visitors.

Top Pages: 1-50 (1,000)

Filter by page

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

bbc.co.uk/news 102M 9.3M 56.1M 2.8M 13.3M 61.5K 0

bbc.co.uk 48.3M 6.6M 36.4M 2.5M 2.1M 54.4K 0

bbc.co.uk/sport 41.9M 4.5M 15.4M 1.1M 1.8M 19.1K 0

bbc.co.uk/sport/football 29.2M 3.5M 13.4M 558.9K 1.6M 12.2K 0

bbc.co.uk/iplayer 22.9M 6.1M 11.4M 842K 4.1M 36.2K 0

bbc.co.uk/weather 11.2M 2.9M 1.7M 1.7M 94.3K 1.2K 0

bbc.co.uk/news/uk 8.1M 1.8M 1.7M 353.4K 589.9K 15.8K 0

bbc.co.uk/news/world 7.5M 1.5M 997.2K 52.9K 100.6K 21.9K 0

bbc.co.uk/sport/football/scores-fixtures 6.8M 1.7M 970.2K 36.3K 952.2K 0 0

bbc.co.uk/news/business 5.9M 934.6K 698.7K 29.4K 15.8K 1.2K 0

As we can see in the example, three of the BBC’s top 10 pages are related to sport
(and football in particular), suggesting that this is a highly efficient audience magnet.

47
 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Benchmarking Your Competitors’

Products and Services
We can also see similar trends for two other competitors: the Sun and the Guardian.

Top Pages: 1-50 (1,000)

Filter by page

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

thesun.co.uk 10.9M 1.2M 6.7M 270.6K 3M 14.9K 0

thesun.co.uk/sport/football 1.3M 206.1K 514.4K 943 129.9K 1K 0

thesun.co.uk/news 1.2M 193.3K 114.6K 6.1K 863K 6.5K 0

thesun.co.uk/sport 314.6K 94.1K 42.3K 1.1K 1.1K 0 0

thesun.co.uk/news/uknews 216.8K 60.4K 45.5K 0 25.6K 0 0

thesun.co.uk/dear-deidre 184.4K 71.7K 27.3K 0 9.6K 0 0

thesun.co.uk/fabulous/puzzles 174.9K 36.1K 47.9K 1.1K 17.4K 0 0

thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz 174.7K 69.9K 10.3K 1.4K 26.6K 1.1K 0

feeds.../puzzles/crossword/crossword-two_speed.html 155.4K 21.1K 28K 0 23.4K 0 0

savers.thesun.co.uk 143.7K 25.1K 92.3K 1.2K 40.9K 0 0

thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews 141.1K 27.2K 1.2K 0 21.7K 0 0

Top Pages: 1-50 (1,000)

Filter by page

Page Unique Pageviews Unique Visitors Direct Referral Search Social Paid

thegurdian.com/uk 28.4M 2.5M 21.8M 386K 2.8M 35.4K 0

thegurdian.com/international 12.7M 1.6M 9.3M 44.4K 1.8M 7.4K 0

thegurdian.com/us 6.9M 881.5K 5.5M 62.5K 496.2K 0 0

thegurdian.com/au 3.3M 327.5K 2.5M 10.7K 494.4K 1.4K 0

thegurdian.com/football 3.3M 449.5K 1.2M 10.6K 138.9K 0 0

thegurdian.com/uk/sport 2.5M 635.7K 489.2K 794 16.5K 1.6K 0

thegurdian.com/uk/culture 1.9M 466.3K 106.6K 794 3.5K 794 0

thegurdian.com/uk-news 1.5M 300.5K 622.7K 5.2K 426.7K 0 0

thegurdian.com/uk/lifeandstyle 1.5M 368.2K 90.2K 0 4K 0 0

thegurdian.com/uk/commentisfree 1.3M 416.9K 134.3K 0 7.2K 2K 0

As these pages are seeing the largest shares of competitor traffic, it means that they
generate the highest audience interest and attract the biggest optimization or advertising
efforts. As a result, the Daily Mail should be looking to target this audience as part
of their own strategy.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Understand
User Behavior and Gain
Customer Insights
It’s one thing to understand what drives audiences to competitor sites, but you have to also
unearth whether these users stay engaged with your rivals’ content.

When thinking about user experience, there are several things to consider:

• If the website delivered on its promises (denoted by a sizable average visit duration)
and even converted visitors into customers (i.e. payment services are on the top of all
destination sites);

• If the on-page experience left users disappointed (denoted by a higher bounce rate).

Traffic Analytics uncovers the competitors’ key user behavior indicators. If you compare user
engagement signals of the strongest rivals, you can immediately pinpoint who does a better
job at creating content that addresses the audiences’ needs and aspirations and make note
of their success tactics for your own content marketing strategy.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Enhance Your

Strategy Using Gaps in Your
Rivals’ Content Coverage
The easiest way to enhance your PR and content marketing strategies is to pick out the
channels, resources, keywords, and topics that will attract the most profit with the least
effort. Simple, right?

Here’s how Semrush .Trends can help you achieve this:

• Discover the least-used traffic sources among your rivals. If there is no competition
within a certain channel, it might make a perfect stage for you to stand out.

• As you can see, there is a lot of potential here to attract audiences through paid
campaigns and social media.

Compare different publishers with your and your competitors’ websites using Audience
Overlap. If a part of your target group is not yet covered by some media, consider trying
to get a placement there to capture the attention of those users.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Enhance Your Strategy Using Gaps

in Your Rivals’ Content Coverage
• Go to the Semrush Backlink Gap tool to easily find gaps in your rivals’ coverage,
and start using them for your own benefit.

In the example above, brightcove.com immediately stands out as a high-AS site that
all the Daily Mail’s competitors have links from, so that could be a good place to start.

• Reach out to the resources that are linking to your competitors but not you. You can send
any viable-looking prospects to the Link Building tool, and begin your outreach from there.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

How to Enhance Your Strategy Using Gaps

in Your Rivals’ Content Coverage
The Keyword Gap tool is also likely to come in handy during the development
of your content marketing strategy. With the help of Keyword Gap, you can perform
a side-by-side comparison of all the similarities and differences between the organic,
paid, and PLA keyword portfolios of up to five competing domains.

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 A Guide for Marketing Practitioners

Conclusion
When gathering data to support your marketing decisions, you need to ensure that it serves
to address your toughest business questions - from researching a new market or niche and
analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies to uncovering their most popular products
and identifying potential gaps.

Semrush .Trends is an invaluable source of insights for helping you go smarter

(and more efficient) about the digital race. As a solution that comes on top of Semrush’s
all-encompassing digital marketing intel, Semrush .Trends is the very first step
in embracing a growth mindset for your business.

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About
Semrush .Trends
Semrush .Trends provides instant market overviews and competitive digital insights
for those who are looking to grow their business. It enables an in-depth exploration
of market realities and trends for creating a growth-driven marketing strategy.
Semrush .Trends provides insightful data for any website, industry, or market
across 190 countries and regions.

“Semrush Market Explorer gives a detailed understanding of markets, leaders, traffic

share, top countries, audiences, and more. A 360° view is important!”
Himani Kankaria, eComKeeda

“From uncovering competitors’ traffic generation strategies to insights on the most

beneficial web partnerships, Semrush Traffic Analytics turns traffic data into smart
ideas that can scale your business.”
Jason Wu, unitQ

“Semrush continues to provide valuable insights across my digital marketing practice.

From competition and sector research, to content insights, to link building and SEO,
I use it as an invaluable daily tool.”
David Erickson
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