Marketers spend hours on routine tasks, and monthly reports are no exclusion. On average, companies track from 5 to 7 competitors on an ongoing basis. Collecting stats for each of them from various sources sounds like a lot of work, even with tools like SEMrush.
If only there was a solution that would gather all these petabytes of data in an instant report…
That’s what we thought.
To speed up the monitoring process and make your professional life easier, we’ve created the Monthly Competitor Analysis template. It automatically gathers all the metrics needed for regular competitive research in one place, saving you time and effort each month.
This means you can check on your competition just like you would do in the SEMrush interface but faster and hassle-free.
Read on to learn about the automated solution that will provide you with data for your marketing decisions.
How to Use the Template
- In the My Reports section, pick the Monthly Competitor Analysis template from the gallery. If you are new to our reporting tool, check out our guide on it.
- Enter competitor websites, choose the required projects (if you don’t have them yet, you are welcome to set them up and go back to the report), and press the “Create report” button. You can equally add your own domain as a competitor to understand how your business measures up.
- The tool will provide you with automated research based on data from all SEMrush toolkits and present the best available knowledge about your competitors.
What Is Inside the Report?
The template shows you the bigger picture first, making use of the main features of SEMrush Traffic Analytics, and then gives you a glimpse of the marketing channels analyzed with other SEMrush tools. Let’s see what exactly will be included in your report (the titles are given as they are in the template):
Website Traffic and Visitor Engagement — this is the main data on competitors’ web traffic for all countries and all devices. Use it to estimate the scale of competitors’ marketing in general. Benchmark them against up to 4 companies, including yours, to see which brand leads online.
Organic Search Performance — check all the metrics around competitors’ SEO to see if their efforts pay off and, thus, if their tactics are worth looking at.
Link Building Performance — if a competitor has recently got stronger thanks to backlinks, you should know it. If they seem to outperform you, consider one of the best link building strategies recommended by digital marketers.
Comparing Link Building Performance to Other Competitors — absolute values are great, but in relative terms, a better example of link building may reveal itself.
Advertising: Paid Search — learn everything from paid traffic volume to ad keywords and sample ads for the past month.
Advertising: Display Ads — analyze your competitors’ Google Display Network campaigns, latest publishers, and promoted landing pages.
Content Marketing & PR Performance — here, the insights will be based on the projects you have set up in the Brand Monitoring tool. Figure out what real users say about the products in your niche and see if there are any signs that your competitors are planning a twist in their strategy.
Social Media Performance — choose the networks where your competitors (and, probably, you) are present and see if they are as effective for your goals as you imagined.
Comparing Social Media Performance — don’t forget to check if the picture you’re seeing on social media is common for the market. Is your example an overnight success or an unexpected failure? Find out.
Tune the Report to Your Unique Needs
When creating the report, you’ll get your data with default settings. However, you can always customize the report by changing the time period for analysis, choosing target countries, and filtering by type of device.
Also, feel free to remove or add any new widgets — just drag and drop them from the menu on the left.
Now you’ve customized your perfect template for comparing competitors’ metrics to one key rival (or your own company). What if you need to reuse the template for comparison?
For this, the “Quick Clone & Modify” feature will be useful. If you hit this option in the settings gear, you can copy a report from your list and jump right into modifying it with a different domain or keyword data.
Automate the Report
Every company needs competitive intelligence to be more efficient, develop new products and services, and understand market trends. Yet no company wants its employees to spend too much time on it.
The solution? Automate your competitor analysis through scheduled emails. A PDF with the report (1 in the screenshot below) can be sent to any email you indicate (2). You can also set when and how often you want to receive the report (3). It can be sent out to you on any day of the week and set to a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. Note that data in the automated report is updated as often as in the interface tools — for example, new stats from Traffic Analytics become available once a month, while Position Tracking makes information updates every 24 hours or less.
To finish with the settings, press “Generate & Send” (4).
How to Further Enhance Your Competitor Analysis Report
You’ve already got your competitor analysis formalized, customized, and regularized with the Monthly Competitor Analysis template. Could you make it even better?
There are some more stats that you could add to your report, such as detailed metrics on Top Pages, Traffic Sources, and Audience Overlap. And how about total market trends that you could use for comparison? All of these are available for paid users of the SEMrush Competitive Intelligence Add-On. So, if you’d like to make the most of Market Explorer and Traffic Analytics in an automated way, you know what to do.