This Simple Trick Will Help You Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

How To Do Competitor Research With Semrush
In this insanely actionable post, I will teach you, step by step, how to identify exactly which keywords every page of your competitors websites are ranking for and how to create better content to outrank them.

Seriously, this is even too powerful that I’m a bit hesitant to share with you in the first place 🙂

Step 1. Identify Targets

Before we get started, I need you to prepare a list of 5 – 10 established competitors websites that you want to target.

You can either search for your keywords on Google and take the top 10 root domains (not URLs) or do your own research.

For the purpose of this post, let’s assume Smart Passive Income is your competitor.

Step 2. Extract The Data

Now enter smartpassiveincome.com (no www) into SEMrush.

How To Do Competitor Research With Semrush

If you’re not familiar, SEMrush is an online competitor research tool that provides you with massive amounts of SERP data for 106 million keywords and 94 million domains.

Although it’s a paid product, I swear by and use this tool everyday so I highly recommend you to try it. Actually, You can get free access to the product for 2 weeks by using this special link:

[wpsharely id=”1862″]

https://www.semrush.com/uk/product/order/136.html?promocode=CLOUDLIVING-1WC6R743[/wpsharely]

Click the “Export” button then select the “CSV” option.

How To Do Competitor Research With Semrush

Once you have the CSV file downloaded, open it. Here’s what it’d look like:
How To Do Competitor Research With Semrush

Step 3. Analyze The Data

First, highlight and delete all the columns except for Keyword, Search Volume and URL.
Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

Select all the content under each column (including the header)
Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

On the Ribbon tabbed toolbar, navigate to “Data” then click on “PivotTable”.
Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

Once the pivot table is generated, drag the fields on “Field Name” to the areas underneath. Make sure they are in the same order as the image.
Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

Click on the blue filter icon, a grey popup will show up. Click “By value” and select “Greater than or Equal to” then enter “3000” to filter out all the URLs that have less than 3000 total searches per month for all ranking keywords.

Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

This ensures that you will only focus your money and efforts on ranking for keywords that get enough search volume.

Your final CSV should look like this.
Steal Your Competitors Content Marketing Strategies and Rankings

Step 4. Create New & Improved Content

Now that you have the list ready, just pick any URL and create a better piece of content incorporating similar keywords to publish on your site.

Make sure that your content is better than your competitor’s or you won’t be able to generate more social shares, links and traffic.

Here are some resources to help you create amazing content that gets shares:

Conclusion

This technique has proven to work on any niche. All you need to do is to follow the steps explained above using SEMrush and the CSV file you extract.

Once you have the data ready, make sure to spend your efforts on both creating and marketing high quality content.

Feel free to leave any thoughts or questions you may have.

Tung Tran

I’ve built and sold a bunch of highly profitable internet businesses since 2010. After selling my last one in November 2020, I decided to go all... [Read full bio]