Are you wondering whether SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are worth their price tag of $100+ per month? After all, budgets are tight in 2024 and SEO tools are historically hard to try before you buy, especially without entering a credit card.
Good news! Semrush has a semi-secret free plan that allows you to explore a ton of important functionality. Take one of my favorite things to do on a regular basis: SEO competitor analysis. What’s more fun than pulling up a competitor’s web domain and seeing what organic keywords and content are resulting in a majority of their unbranded traffic? In this article, I’ll share how you can do that same competitor research for free in Semrush.
Getting started with free SEO competitor analysis
First you need to get set up on the Semrush free plan—not the free trial.
The Semrush site will try to guide you toward the free, 14-day trial, which requires a credit card number (and the risk of rolling into that $100 monthly payment).
The free version is free, forever. No credit card required.
The main difference between the two options is the number of credits that you’re provided. You can think of Semrush credits as actions, or requests, you're making in the web app.
The free account gives you 10 credits a day in perpetuity. After the 10 credits have been used, you’ll hit a pay wall and will need to wait another 24 hours. The paid trial gives you unlimited credits but requires a credit card. If you’re on a limited budget or just want to test things out without an expiration date, you can get some solid competitor research done with 10 free credits daily.
Get a free Semrush account
Follow these steps to get the free tier:
- Sign up for a Semrush account
- Skip the Trial offer (this is your escape hatch to Free)
- Skip adding your phone # (unless you want to be contacted by sales)
- Zoom through the onboarding questions
You now have access to the same interface as if you started a 14-day cc-required trial or paid account!
SEO competitor analysis checklist
To get started, go to "Domain Overview" in the Semrush interface and enter the company domain in the search bar. From there, I recommend checking and documenting the following things per competitor. (Note: You can research 2 competitors a day this way.)
1) View the traffic makeup of organic vs paid over time
- Understand how much of their monthly traffic is coming from organic search vs paid search.
- How to use this: Check out traffic volume across various competitors to get a sense of volume (often correlated to market share for internet companies) and how it's distributed between branded and unbranded keywords.
2) Check Organic Search Traffic -> Keywords
- See top keywords bringing in organic search traffic to the site and the content ranking for those keywords
- How to use this: Understand the split of branded vs unbranded search traffic and to understand the content topics resulting in substantial volume for your competitors
3) Check Paid Search Traffic -> Keywords
- See what keywords your competitor is bidding on and at what scale
- How to use this: Get a sense of paid search investment (and if it's increasing or decreasing), and to understand what topics your competitor likely believes correlate to eventual customer acquisition.
4) Check Backlinks -> Referring Domains
- See the top sites referring traffic to your competitor
- How to use this: Get insight into your competitor's referral traffic, and to develop your own backlink strategy that borrows from their most relevant referrers.
When to do SEO competitor analysis
There are several points in time that I think this research is particularly useful.
1) Before accepting a new job: It’s hard to know what you’re walking into when you accept a new job, but one thing that’s not a secret is how strategic a company has been about their approach to content on their website. I recommend doing this same exercise for your next potential company, and looking at their top 3 competitors, too.
2) At the start of a new job or engagement: At ércule, we kick off every client engagement with an analysis of a company’s top 3 (or more) competitors. This gives us a ton of context on the competitive landscape, competitors’ content strategy, and our own strengths and weaknesses as we build our strategy together.
3) To bring data into the conversation (and quell FOMO): When a competitor is distributing really solid content and getting a lot of traction in search or social, a lot of times your Slack notifications will light up with FOMO from fellow marketers or your boss. In addition to digging into the competitor data, take the time to research how frequently your competitor is posting, what topics they’re strategically targeting, and how they’re talking about topics. What can you learn? How can you differentiate? Use your research to build your response (and back up your own awesome strategy) with data.
SEO competitor analysis template
If you’re ready to dive deeper into SEO competitor analysis, we’ve built a free SEO competitor analysis template that will help you compare up to 3 competitors. You can think of our SEO competitor analysis template as a mini-SWOT analysis. It breaks up keywords you and your competitors are ranking for into a few categories:
- Strong: where you have position and your competitors don’t
- Competitive: where you’re going head to head with competitors
- Opportunities: where your competitors are investing and you haven’t (yet)
Our SEO competitor analysis template is a free Google Sheet, but it does require a paid Semrush account to populate—or you can reach out to us for help!
