Watch our latest video: How to Go Viral on Quora https://bit.ly/ViralOnQuora1

Subscribe to our YouTube channel! http://smr.sh/KdD


In this lesson, you'll learn how to study your top competitors and compare their performance with yours by using SEMrush.
Watch the full course for free: https://bit.ly/3e3pVkK

0:31 Gap analysis
0:37 Benchmarking
0:43 Two tools offered by SEMrush designed for gap analysis
0:50 Keywords gap report
2:31 Backlink gap report
2:52 Summary

✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹
You might find it useful:
Apply your newly acquired knowledge by practicing with SEMrush and build up your real-world skills.
Go to Keyword Gap:
➠ https://bit.ly/36mIy0j
Go to Backlink Gap:
➠ https://bit.ly/2ZtRb8a

Learn how to begin and build competitive analysis and research in our free course:
➠ https://bit.ly/2LMGPYZ
✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹

There's no doubt that you and your SEO teammates do your best in order to maximize the organic performance of your or your client's website, but you should remember that there's always room for improvement too.

To allow you to see what you're probably missing out on and where, you need to compare your actual performance with potential performance, or, in other words, do a gap analysis.

As a step of competitive research, gap analysis involves benchmarking, or studying your best-performing competitors.

SEMrush offers two tools that are designed to help you carry out a gap analysis:

Keyword Gap
Backlink Gap
The Keyword Gap report allows you to:

Compare up to 5 domains head-to-head to see common and unique keywords
Discover the matches and differences across mobile and desktop keywords as well as organic, paid, and Google Shopping keywords
The results of your research are illustrated by Venn diagrams that show intersection between sets of discovered keywords.

Keyword Gap
Let's explore the Keyword Gap tool. Type your competitor's website in the first box and then yours in the second box.

Choose the Unique to the first domain's keywords filter and apply it. As a result, you'll see the list of keywords your competitor is ranking for that you are not.

It's highly likely that you'll find some valuable keywords for your campaign among them. There's one more use case to help you find terms you should put more emphasis on, to top the Google rankings.

Change the intersection type to Common keywords, then expand the Advanced filters tab, click Add one more, choose your website's positions in the dropdown menu, then select Greater and type 10 in the box to the right.

Then add a new filter, this time selecting Less than and typing 21. Add another filter, choose your competitor's position, then select Less than and type 11.

This way, you'll find keywords your competitor ranks for on page 1 that you rank for on page 2.

This is potentially the most profitable strategy, because getting from the second to the first results page will lead to a notable traffic boost.

You can always add all of your findings to the Export manager, or export them to an Excel or CSV file.

Backlink Gap
Another tool that will help you to carry out gap analysis is the Backlink Gap tool. With the Backlink Gap report you can:

Compare up to 5 domains for common and unique backlinks
Get insights on link building and outreach
Pick the best referring domains with the most authority.

#SEO #SEOtoolkit #SEMrush #CompetitiveAnalysis #KeywordResearch #SEMrushAcademy