SEMRush, Adwords Spy Games

 

Welcome back Rankers! I’m back from India where I had a wonderful time. Jim’s travel tip: If you ever get the chance to visit a place called Fort Kochi in India, go. It was simply awesome. Hello to all my friends over there.

So on the flight home I was sitting next to a bloke from Melbourne who runs a manufacturing and import business out of Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Anyway, this gentleman posed an interesting question. “Jim,’ he asked, “Can you find out what keywords your competitors are buying?” “Yes you can!” I replied. And this is how I do it.

SEMrush

I use a tool called SEMrush. I know many of you are familiar with SEMrush and you’ve probably played with other keyword tools that spy on your competitors, well this is one of them. So if you’ve ever wondered how much your competitors are spending on AdWords, or which AdWords they’re buying, or even what their ads look like, well you can do it with this tool.

Now, like many things on the Internet it’s not 100% accurate (sorry conspiracy theorists) due to using robots and scrapes. Averages come into play. Let’s be honest though, even Google’s own tools aren’t completely reliable when it comes to keyword research.

I posed several questions to Olga, the social media person for SEMrush in Russia. You can read the questions and answers below.

How does SEMrush collect its ad research data?
SEMrush analyses the top 100 Google search results in US, UK, AU and IT and top 20 results in other countries for each keyword we have in our database. For every keyword, we take a snapshot of SERPs. And we then see what domains rank for which keywords.

Are the cpc and volume taken from Google keyword planner tool?
We calculate the CPC and volume ourselves. The algorithm is based partially on publicly available data and partially on our internal resources.

How does SEMrush decide to add domains?
We pick the domains when they show up for the keywords we have, however domains with rare TLDs are not being included.

I also asked Olga very nicely for a coupon code for our viewers. She’s working on it at the time of writing. If you see a coupon code floating in front of my face in the video, rejoice! Otherwise, sorry, I tried.

HURRAH! Here it is! Expires on 20/5/2016

Spy Games

We’ve been using this tool for about four years now, and it’s one that I normally use for competitor analysis. It’s contains many features, which I won’t be covering here today otherwise you’d all need to settle in for hours. I just want to show you the top-level features I use when I’m trying to get an idea of spend, particularly for clients or their competitors.

So I’ve got Officeworks here as an example. (For those that don’t know, they are a large retailer, both online and off for office supplies, as you’d probably guess.) Looking at Australia only, it’s telling me that the highest volume keyword they are buying is their brand – Officeworks. It’s quite cheap. The figures that SEMrush are displaying show the estimated traffic, plus how much they would estimate Officeworks would be spending. I personally think the expenditure would be far greater.

I’ve found the cpc’s to be quite accurate, as well as the keywords. I think the budget figures are inaccurate though, based on the fact that SEMrush uses robots and scrapes to build up that number. I think it would be higher.

I like to see what businesses are spending the most money on. As you can see from the graphic

the cost-per-click is quite extraordinary. For Officeworks, one of the keywords is ‘USB drives,’ specifically ‘mini USB drives.’ $32 per click is insane! You can double-check this with Google Keyword Planner tool amongst others to see if that’s an accurate cost-per-click.

I found for the most part that the numbers displayed are fairly accurate. Some of the keywords they are buying are quite amazing. Some I wasn’t even sure existed! ‘Adult colouring books,’ for example. At first I thought it was a Not Suitable For Work KFC campaign or something, but it’s not, it’s an actual thing. (Our Content Manager has since informed me that he has been working on his Game of Thrones one since Christmas, and that their popularity has been causing coloured pencil shortages in some areas – Go figure!) When I looked at Google Trends there was ‘adult colouring books.’ Apparently it’s some therapy thing, which explains why our Content Manager has one as he’s been in dire need of therapy for years.

Go Against The Flow

So we can see that SEMrush is accurate as Officework’s ad is at the top of the page, but look where they’re not advertising. They’re not advertising in Google shopping or the product listings ads. Unfortunately for Officeworks their competitors are. It’s a common theme with them and there’s lots of Google shopping traffic they could be gobbling up, but they’re not.

This tool will go into product listings ads as well and show you Video Advertising, Display Advertising, and Research. This is useful to see what sites your competitors ads are appearing on. I’m not sure Officeworks knows that some of their display ads are appearing on ‘seemore-vegan.blogspot.com,’ or ‘nullarbornet.com.au.’ I’d say Officeworks is wasting a fair chunk of money as they’re buying unnecessary things, in lieu of Google shopping ads or Google AdWords.

There are also some organic ranking tools with SEMrush. I can see the keywords Officeworks rank for, mostly brand related. Items such as ‘HDMI cable’ will show rough traffic from that keyword over time. I did a site audit for them a while ago, so I know firsthand that they were spending money on phrases such as ‘sole trader software’ that would be better found through content. iPad Air 2 they have the top ad for, but the viewer will always be drawn to the attractive images in Google shopping ads. And they are nowhere to be found in that section.

You can also use it to find out how difficult a keyword might be to target. In organic research, for instance, you’ll see a KD tag, which stands for ‘Keyword Difficulty.’ The higher the number, the more difficult it will be to rank for. For instance, Officework’s most difficult keyword to rank for is ‘iPads Gumtree.’ That’s because they’re trying to win on two brands, neither of which they own. Always going to be a tough one people.

You can export the data into a spreadsheet and sort between keyword difficulty and volume. You can then highlight anything over 100 searches per month and compare with difficulty. You can then target keywords based on strong volume and low difficulty.

Hopefully that’s helpful. Hope you saw a coupon code appear on the video. If there wasn’t, subscribe to the newsletter at stewartmedia.com.au and I’ll make sure you get access to the coupon code as soon as we get it. Thanks very much. See you all next week. Bye.