Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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Introduction to Semrush: Setting SEO/SEM Strategies with Critical Insight

 Semrush is a valuable tool to manage and optimize your digital presence. Teker (2016) defines Semrush as “an SEO tool that does your keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition, runs an SEO audit of your blog, looks for backlinking opportunities and lots more.” Creating a project within Semrush helps you stay organized and highlights the key improvements to be made across your site. As Tietbohl (2022) points out, “most activities in digital will involve three steps: measuring, improving, and reporting. SEMrush can assist with all of these.”

As a digital marketer, I am familiar with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. 

So how does Semrush compare to Google Search Console?

Semrush (n.d.) explains the difference as “in broad terms, Google Analytics is strictly an internal analytics tool for understanding the user behavior on one website at a time (the site you own or operate). Meanwhile, Semrush is a suite of tools that handles both internal analytics (the site you own or operate) AND competitive research and analysis (your competitors’ sites).”

Figure 1.  Chart comparing features of Semrush and Google Analytics. By SEMRush. (n.d.).

Therefore, it’s yet another tool to help arm you with data to make informed data-driven decisions to lead to better optimization and digital dominance, which in turn impacts your market share.

SEMRush Project Attributes

As mentioned above, Semrush has multiple attributes available to you from the dashboard once you set up a project. The following categories are featured on the project dashboard:

  • Site Audit
  • Position Tracking
  • On Page SEO
  • Social Media Tracker
  • Social Media Poster
  • Brand Monitoring
  • Backlink Audit
  • Link Building
  • PPC Keyword Tool
  • Organic Traffic Insights
  • And Content Analyzer

You can see a sample dashboard of a new project below:


Figure 2.  Example of dashboard in Semrush. By Akers. (2022).

Each of these categories provides analysis by scanning the root domain of your website and giving you a dashboard within each category. Almost every category is useful, but for planning purposes and optimization of time, I believe they can be broken down into main buckets of focus within a strategy as time progresses.

For example:

Site Audit, Position Tracking, Backlink Audit, On Page SEO Checker, and Content Analyzer provide a great base to start with. Through these categories the majority of time can be spent developing a plan to fix errors within the site and getting rid of toxic domain linking, understanding ranking for keywords and how the company compares to competition, and developing an understanding and plan for how pages and content can better be optimized for keywords.

Once those issues are fixed and a plan set for making content changes, then the categories of PPC Keyword Tool, Link Building, Brand Monitoring, and Social Media Tracker can then be leveraged better and prioritized to help develop a more comprehensive SEM strategy with a budget and identifying better link building opportunities while monitoring how the changes optimized in the first half are performing.

Benefits to Semrush

The Site Audit analysis provides an overview of the health of your root domain. You can choose to crawl as many pages of your site as you would like (within the limits of your account level) and can decide if you want it to crawl like Google would. It then provides the number of errors, warnings, and notices as well as reports on site performance, crawlability, internal linking, and core web vitals. Basically, this all means that it points out the number of priority fix broken links you have, how your site health compares to industry averages, and reports on medium severity warnings. This is helpful as you set a strategy of planning out improvements based on priority level and then benchmarking those improvements based on how you started. What’s more, each report drops down further into featuring top improvement recommendations that you can build into your plan. For example, I knew going into this through using the Google Search Console that there were some discrepancies I needed to plan a focus on this year.

However, using Semrush gives a more in-depth analysis such as in the Core Web Vitals report that lists out the top improvement categories and the affected pages in each:

Figure 3.  Dashboard within Semrush platform showing Core Web Vitals. By Akers. (2022).

Another benefit to Semrush is that can set up projects based on the root domain to get an idea of your entire sites performance as well as projects based on certain paths, or across desktop vs mobile. Semrush (n.d.) explains the ability to set up a mobile Position Tracking project importance “as the world of mobile search only continues to grow, you're likely seeing a lot of potential traffic coming from mobile users. In order to know where your website stands on mobile and local results, Position Tracking is a must.” It’s incredibly helpful to be able to compare the difference between desktop and mobile as well as split out landing pages if you are tracking for just certain campaigns.

One last benefit to point out is the ability to create and export simplified reports. This is key for presenting to leadership and involving other team members. As Ahamed (2021) points out, “no longer need to manually enter data from Google Analytics and create your own reports in a spreadsheet-SEMrush creates simple reports that your entire team will love and understand!”

Moving Forward: Initial Action items in Semrush

Semrush does show you broken links and errors which is incredibly helpful. But you need to go in and fix those errors in your website and then figure out why these errors are happening. Therefore, it takes further questions and actions needed outside of the program. However, it does make sure you have enough insight in order to ask the right questions and collaborate with the right web people to tweak code.

Based on the site audit at the beginning of my project I will be prioritizing fixing broken links and investigating why so many of the blog articles generate multiple broken hyperlinks with a “category”.

Figure 4.  Dashboard in Semrush showing broken link URL’s in Site Audit. By Akers. (2022).

Semrush Conclusion

Tietbohl (2022) emphasizes that “the main objective of online marketing is to position certain content, products and services in front of potential customers and, ultimately, persuade them to make a purchase. Since search engines serve as a storefront for the most visible Internet content, it’s important that marketers know how search engines work as well as what they like and dislike.” Semrush gives marketers the tools and insight to make sure your company or product is at the forefront of SERPs, and therefore at the digital fingertips of your target market.

 

 

References

Ahamed, A. (2021, June 8). What is Semrush? Benefits of Semrush? Semrush features and pricing? LinkedIn. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-semrush-benefits-features-pricing-ashif-ahamed/

Akers, A. (2022). Semrush project. Unpublished internal company dashboard.

SEMRush. (n.d.). What’s the difference between Semrush and Google Analytics? Knowledge Base. Retrieved February 13, 2022 from https://www.semrush.com/kb/1048-difference-semrush-google-analytics

SEMRush. (n.d.). Position tracking. Knowledge Base. Retrieved February 13, 2022 from https://www.semrush.com/kb/32-position-tracking

SEMRush. (n.d.). Configuring site audit. Knowledge Base. Retrieved February 13, 2022 from https://www.semrush.com/kb/539-configuring-site-audit

SEMRush. (n.d.). Managing a project. Knowledge Base. Retrieved February 13, 2022 from https://www.semrush.com/kb/243-managing-a-project#7

Teker, I. (2016). 12 great reasons to use SEMRush to supercharge your content marketing. Semrush Blog. Retrieved from https://www.semrush.com/blog/12-great-reasons-to-use-semrush-to-supercharge-your-content-marketing/

Tietbohl, M. (2022, February). Week 5 lesson: SEO - on-page optimization and technical SEO, introduction to SEMrush. Ecampus. Retrieved from West Virginia University, IMC 642.

 




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