Why learn How to use SEMRush? When improving SEO or Search Engine Optimisation it’s important to do competitor research. A key part of this is knowing how much traffic a competitor’s website gets. As well as what keywords they are using, and where they are getting their backlinks. You might just be curious or you might want to use this information to formulate a plan to get more users to your website. In this post, we’ll go through the best ways of finding out how much traffic a website gets!
SEMRush – A website traffic analysis tool
There are a number of tools on the internet that help you figure out how much traffic gets. SEMRush is one of these tools, you simply input the website you want to investigate, select the correct country and press go! This tool will help you see where a website’s traffic comes from; how their audience engages with their site; what devices visitors prefer to use; how multiple websites’ audiences overlap and much more. We use SEMRush a lot to keep track of our backlinks to the site, as well as keep up to date with our SEO competitors. An SEO competitor is a website that has similar search engine rankings, this might not necessarily be a business competitor!
Getting found on search engines (more specifically Google) is the number one most important thing for your website. You can have the best website in the world but if no one can find it, what’s the point! How can you effectively use SEMRush to increase your website traffic? SEMRush has a lot of tools that are available for completely free. Just input your website and you will be given a huge amount of information to take in.
Using Google to find keywords from your competitors | How to use SEM Rush
Searching for the keywords that your potential customers might search to find your website is a good place to start. For example, if you are a professional window cleaner you might search “best window cleaner in kent”. This then returns all of the window cleanings that meet these search criteria. You can use this to find the top positioning websites for this search term.
When searching this, the top websites will normally be from places like Checkatrade or Yell, however, once you get past these the top result is Deluxe Window Cleaning’s website. So now we know who has the top position. We can then put this website in SEMRush! It’s also a good idea to look around the site and see what they are doing right. You’ll probably see lots of pages with lots of writing that contains tonnes of keywords. Google crawls these sites with lots of relevant keywords, so they rank them higher on the rankings.
How to read the report that SEMRush generates
As you can see from the results, there is a lot to take in! The image below, shows we have done a search for the window cleaning business we found. The Authority Score is a score given as an overall grading for SEO, this is generated by SEMRush. 17 is actually pretty low, which gives some hope to us if we want to rank high, as the highest-ranking website isn’t even that well optimised. This means we can optimise our website better and probably rank higher! Organic Search Traffic section refers to the amount of traffic a website gets every month, this again is fairly low, but, that’s good for us! Backlinks are potentially the most important factor in this website’s ranking, 1300k backlinks are great! The Display Advertising section tells us if there is any paid advertising being used on this website, you don’t need to worry about this!
The next section shows a nice graph of organic traffic. Although this doesn’t give us too much information, it does show what country the traffic is coming from, in this case mostly the UK. But more importantly, it shows a timeline of the increase in traffic. We can see that around October 2020 their traffic started to increase. This could be for a number of reasons. Maybe this could be down the 2020 Pandemic appearing more around this time so people want more cleaning services. Or they just focused on improving SEO.
The information shows a lot of data! We’ll take you through what each part means.
Top Organic Keywords
Starting from the top left, you can see “Top Organic Keywords”, this is one of the most useful pieces of information in this report. It shows you what keywords and phrases this website is ranking for! We can see in this case this website appears on position number 1 for the key phrase “Delux Window Cleaning” which is great because this is the name of the business! But its probably not what they are aiming for. They are also number one for “window cleaning long eaton” this is referring to the area. So if anyone in the location Long Eaton, googles “Window Cleaner Long Eaten” this website will appear on the first page of Google which is amazingly useful! How can you use this information to your advantage? If your competitor is ranking for a keyword or phrase that would be useful to you, you can “copy” and improve what they are doing on the website page to outrank them. Be careful not to exactly copy them because Google does not look kindly on plagiarism! We suggest you create your own web pages and text and improve upon it.
Organic Position Distribution
This is a useful graph, it shows the average position that this website ranks for on Google. It’s normal for this graph to look like this as not all pages are going to be top of the search engines. You can see here this website ranks fairly high for around 10 percent of its pages, the rest is between the position 51-100. This could be improved. But you can use this information to look through the site to see what the pages are, and then learn from it.
Main Organic Competitors
This is another very useful piece of information, it shows this website’s main competitors in terms of organic search traffic. Meaning, the websites shown is ranking very similarly to this website in terms of the amount of traffic they get and keywords they rank for. You can use this information to look at your competitors and simply do it better than them. Using more keywords, faster site speed, and more SEO boosting techniques. If you want to learn more about how you can rank higher visit this page on our website to see all of our SEO tips https://developerrocket.com/category/seo-tips/.
Competitive Positioning Map
This gives a better visual representation of your competitor’s rankings. We can see from this graph that the business, Plum Tree Window Cleaning, gets more traffic but for fewer keywords. This probably means they have focussed more on a few keywords to rank higher for only them. Whereas the business Delux Window Cleaning, gets less traffic but ranks for more keywords. This might mean they haven’t focused on specific keywords but have grown organically by keeping their website up to date and adding to it. They need to think about what words they want to rank for and focus on them.
In this next section, it talks about Backlinks. These are a massive part of SEO and it definitely shouldn’t be ignored. What are backlinks? They are basically websites that link to yours. The more backlinks you have the more you are telling Google you are a trusted website. There are two different kinds of backlinks, Follow Links and Nofollow Links. Nofollow links don’t really have a purpose in terms of Google’s algorithm. If you make a link and set the link to “nofollow” it tells Google not to count this in their ranking. They did this for things like links in comment sections as a forum or Youtube video (as an example) can’t count towards a backlink as these websites will get flooded with people doing this. However, it does not stop people from clicking on the link and going to a website.
A follow link or dofollow link directly affects search engine rankings. It tells Google you are a trusted website. The more of these you have the better, but a higher authority site is more significant to helping rankings. This can also be said for black-listed sites. If you have a dofollow link from a dodgy site it may affect your rankings, so be careful!
What is domain authority? This is a generic score given to websites to tell us how well they rank. A very high domain authority site is a very high ranking site in Google that appears on the top page of Google a lot, a site like Wikipedia meets these criteria. If you get a good, Dofollow link, then it will be amazing for your SEO.
We can see in this analysis of our Delus Window Cleaning case study a few backlinks, where they came from, and what links are present there. We can see they are appearing on a website called deluxwindowcleaning franchise, I imagine this is their own site, so it doesn’t really count too much. But we can see they have backlinks for sites like “3 Best Window Cleaners in Coventry”, they may have organically been put there by the site admin or, more likely is that they paid to be on this website. This is can be a great thing to do, just make sure you arent getting ripped off and it will actually benefit you!
We can also see that many of this website’s backlinks are coming from images. They may have created an image to add to the website or maybe they have a great image that is working well for them as a backlink.
Conclusion – Using SEMRush yourself
We hope you have found this post useful. Signing up to SEMRush is completely free but you get a limited amount of searches on a free account. But it’s still a super useful tool to use to help you outrank your competitors. Finding keywords and phrases this way is excellent for coming up with blog post topics or headings for your pages.
Please get in touch if you would like any more information on this topic, we have lots of blog posts that can help you with your website!