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You’ve probably heard of SEMrush before. In fact, you’ve probably been told that it’s a treasure trove if you want to improve your SEO. Here’s the thing: powerful tools like SEMrush can be tempting, but they can also be expensive. However, SEMrush has a hidden feature that’s free to use and can help you understand your competition better.
If you don’t have SEMrush, then this article is perfect for you. You’ll be introduced to the platform without having to spend any money at all, and you’ll gain a permanent way to conduct SEO and Paid Search Competitor Research, every single day for free.
If you do have SEMrush already, this article might still be of use to you if you aren’t using SEMrush to its full capacity. Perhaps you’re still learning and want to see how we recommend starting out when conducting competitor research.
Either way, whether you’re an avid user or new to the software, this article is for you if you’re interested in finding out more about your competition.
How to Unlock SEMrush’s Free Plan
In the world of digital marketing, tools like SEMrush loom large, offering invaluable insights into website performance, competitor analysis, and keyword optimization. However, the prospect of shelling out $100 or more per month for such a tool may seem daunting to many.
The good news is that SEMrush provides a free plan that allows you to tap into its powerful features, especially for competitor research. Surprisingly, this free plan is not prominently advertised but is accessible with a few strategic steps.
Here’s how you can get started with SEMrush’s free plan:
1. Sign Up for a SEMrush Account
The first step is to create a SEMrush account.
Visit the SEMRush website and sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. It’s a straightforward process that requires your basic information.
2. Skip the Trial Offer
As you progress through the sign-up process, SEMrush may offer you a trial period for one of their paid plans. While tempting, this is not the path to the free plan. You’ll want to skip this offer for now.
3. Skip Adding Your Phone Number
SEMrush may also request your phone number for verification purposes. It’s entirely optional, and you can choose to skip this step if you prefer not to share your phone number.
4. Zoom Through the Onboarding Questions
During the onboarding process, SEMrush may ask you some questions to tailor your experience. You can quickly navigate through these questions without providing extensive details. Your objective is to get to the dashboard.
Voila, you’ve now successfully accessed SEMrush’s free plan, which grants you access to the same user interface you’d encounter with a 14-day trial or a paid account.
In the next section, we’ll delve deeper into the functionalities and features of SEMrush’s free plan, specifically focusing on competitor research and how to make the most of your 10 daily credits.
What’s Included on the SEMrush Free Plan?
Here’s a breakdown of what you can access with SEMrush’s free plan:
- Domain Overview
- Gain insights into any website’s performance, including its traffic sources, top organic keywords, and paid search details
- Access valuable data on the organic and paid search traffic of a domain, helping you understand its online visibility
- Organic Research
- Analyse your competitors’ organic search positions and discover the keywords they rank for
- Access detailed information about your competitors’ top-performing pages and the keywords that drive traffic to their site
- Keyword Research
- Get access to SEMrush’s extensive keyword database
- Discover valuable keyword insights, including search volume, keyword difficulty, and related keywords
- Identify long-tail keywords and phrases to optimise your content and improve search engine rankings
- Backlink Analysis
- Explore a domain’s backlink profile to understand its link-building strategy
- Access data on referring domains, backlink types, and anchor text distribution
- Identify potential backlink opportunities to enhance your website’s authority
- Site Audit
- Conduct basic website audits to identify technical SEO issue
- Get recommendations for improving your website’s on-page SEO, including issues related to crawlability, indexability, and site speed
- On-Page SEO Checker
- Receive on-page SEO recommendations tailored to your target keywords
- Optimise your content for search engines by addressing issues like missing meta tags, keyword usage, and content length
- Position Tracking
- Track your website’s search engine rankings for specific keywords.
- Monitor your performance and identify opportunities for improvement
- Social Media Tracker
- Monitor your social media performance and track your competitors’ social media strategies
- Gain insights into your audience engagement and content effectiveness.
- Brand Monitoring
- Keep an eye on mentions of your brand or specific keywords across the web.
- Monitor your online reputation and respond to mentions as needed
- Content Analyser
- Analyse the performance of your content and identify areas for improvement
- Get recommendations to optimise your content for better search engine visibility
These features, available in SEMrush’s free plan, offer a comprehensive toolkit for digital marketing and SEO professionals.
Limitations of the SEMrush Free Plan
While it may seem like the SEMrush Free Plan has a lot of features, it does also have some limitations, in particular in relation to credits.
Think of credits as the currency that powers your actions within the SEMrush web app. With the free plan, you receive 10 credits daily, which you can utilise to gather data and insights.
Each action you perform within SEMrush consumes a certain number of credits. It’s important to manage your credits wisely to ensure you get the most out of your daily allowance.
The allocation of credits for different actions is as follows:
- Domain Overview: This action consumes 3 credits
- Organic Research: You can use 3 credits for this action
- Keyword Research: Each keyword-related action costs 1 credit
- Backlink Analysis: This action uses 3 credits
- Site Audit: Conducting a site audit consumes 1 credit
- On-Page SEO Checker: This action also uses 1 credit
- Position Tracking: Tracking one keyword in one location uses 3 credits
- Social Media Tracker: Tracking one social profile uses 1 credit
- Brand Monitoring: Each brand or keyword monitoring action costs 1 credit
- Content Analyser: Analysing one page consumes 1 credit
Other than this limitation, there are also some feature limitations, however these won’t stop you from conducting competitor research. Here’s a full breakdown of the SEMRush subscription limitations.
Pro Tip: For keyword research, use Google to first kick-start your process. Let Google guide you in the right direction, and then use SEMrush to validate your suspicions.
Now, let’s explore how you can use these credits effectively for competitor research.
How to Conduct Competitor Research on the SEMrush Free Plan
Go to “Domain Overview” and enter the company domain. Select your country and then hit the search button.
From there, you can check out some key things for 4 of your 10 credits. That means you can conduct research on two competitors every day using SEMrush’s free plan.
Here’s what you want to check out:
- Traffic Makeup of organic vs paid over time
- Organic Search Traffic
- Paid Search Traffic
- Backlinks
Let’s delve into each one.
Traffic Makeup of Organic vs Paid Over Time
This allows you to examine the traffic makeup of organic versus paid traffic over time. This is invaluable for understanding the sources of your competitor’s traffic and how it’s distributed between branded and unbranded keywords.
Here’s the data you’re going to want to focus on for this:
Organic Search Traffic
Explore the “Organic Search Traffic” and “Keywords” sections to discover the top keywords driving organic traffic to your competitor’s site and the content that’s ranking for those keywords.
This information helps you gauge the split between branded and unbranded search traffic and identify the content topics delivering significant traffic.
With this knowledge, you can:
- Find organic keyword search opportunities
- Find keywords they’re not ranking well for
You can access this information from the same Domain Overview section. Simply scroll down until you see the below tables:
Paid Search Traffic
Want to know which keywords your competitor is bidding on and the scale of their paid search efforts?
Head to the “Paid Search Traffic” section in the same Domain Overview section.
This reveals valuable insights into their paid search investment and provides clues about their customer acquisition strategies. You’ll learn what keywords you might want to use, as well as what keywords other competitors are ranking for.
Here’s the data you want to look out for:
If you click ‘View Details’ it will show you a full list, just like the below:
Pro Tip: Click on the ‘Ad Copies’ header at the top (as you can see in the above image) to see the ad copy your competitor is using.
Backlinks
Dive into the “Backlinks” section to identify the top sites referring traffic to your competitor. You can access this from the same Domain Overview section.
This is a goldmine for understanding their referral traffic sources and developing your own backlink strategy based on their most relevant referrers.
Here’s the data you want to look out for:
If you click on ‘View Details’, you’ll see a report like below:
So, What’s Next?
Now, even with the free plan, you’ll be able to conduct competitor research using SEMrush. Next, learn how to improve your SEO using these 20 tips:
🔎 Read: 20 Tips on How to Improve Your SEO Even If Nothing Else Is Working
