Using SEMrush for Competitive Analysis: A Practical Guide for UK SMEs

Using SEMrush for competitive analysis gives small and medium-sized businesses a structured way to understand where they stand in search, what their rivals are doing differently, and where the real opportunities lie. That’s the short version. The longer version is what this guide covers: how to move from raw SEMrush competitive data to decisions that actually change your rankings.

Most tutorials on using SEMrush for competitive analysis explain which buttons to press. This one focuses on what to do with what you find, with specific attention to the UK and Irish markets where search conditions differ meaningfully from the global data you’ll see by default.

“A lot of SMEs look at SEMrush and feel overwhelmed by the data. The tool isn’t the challenge, knowing which numbers actually matter for your business is. Once you filter out the noise and focus on a handful of clear signals, competitor research stops being a chore and starts being one of the most useful things you do each quarter.”, Ciaran Connolly, Founder, ProfileTree

What SEMrush Competitive Analysis Actually Tells You

SEMrush competitor analysis is the process of using the platform’s tools to map out how your site compares to rival domains across organic search, paid advertising, backlinks, and content visibility. The output is a picture of where competitors are outperforming you and, more valuably, where they’re exposed.

For a UK or Northern Ireland-based business, this matters more than it might seem. UK search volumes are substantially lower than US equivalents for most queries, which means a keyword showing 5,000 monthly searches in the US might show 200 in the UK database. Running your analysis without switching the database to the UK gives you targets that are either irrelevant to your market or impossible to verify.

Phase 1: Setting Up Your Analysis Correctly

Before touching any competitor data when using SEMrush for competitive analysis, two configuration steps make a significant difference to the quality of what you’ll see.

Switch the database. In SEMrush, the database selector sits at the top of most tools. Change it from “US” or “Global” to “United Kingdom” for most UK businesses, or “Ireland” if your primary market is the Republic. Northern Ireland businesses often need to run both, since organic search intent and competitor sets differ across the border for many industries.

Define your actual competitors. The businesses you consider your competitors commercially may not be your competitors in search. Type your domain into the Domain Overview tool and scroll to the “Organic Competitors” section. SEMrush will surface the domains competing for the same keywords you currently rank for. For a Belfast-based accountancy firm, that list might include national accountancy networks, comparison directories, and local firms, not necessarily the practices you pitch against for clients. Work from this list, not your assumption.

For UK SMEs looking to sharpen their broader online presence alongside competitive research, ProfileTree’s digital marketing services cover strategy, implementation, and ongoing analysis for businesses across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK.

Phase 2: The Keyword Gap Tool, Where the Real Intelligence Lives

The Keyword Gap tool is the single most useful part of SEMrush competitor analysis for a business that wants to grow organic traffic. It shows you the keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t, sorted by traffic volume and difficulty.

How to use it: Go to Keyword Gap, enter your domain, then add up to four competitor domains. Set the filter to “Missing” to see keywords where all your competitors rank but you don’t appear at all. Then switch to “Weak” to see keywords where you rank but far lower than your rivals.

What to look for in UK markets:

Start with the “Missing” filter at a difficulty score below 50. These are keywords where multiple competitors have found ranking traction and you have no foothold. A keyword difficulty under 50, combined with UK search volume above 100 per month, is a realistic target for a well-constructed page within six to nine months.

The “Weak” keywords often hold faster wins. If you rank on page three or four for a term that three competitors rank on page one for, the gap is usually a content quality or internal linking issue rather than a domain authority problem. A focused refresh of the existing page is often enough to close it.

The “so what” question most guides skip: Once you have your list, sort by opportunity rather than volume. A keyword with 300 monthly UK searches and a difficulty of 25 will deliver more realistic traffic than a 3,000-search term with a difficulty of 70. Build a simple scoring column in a spreadsheet: divide monthly volume by difficulty score. The highest numbers are your targets for the next 90 days.

Phase 3: Organic Research and Traffic Analysis

SEMrush competitor research through the Organic Research tool gives you a full picture of any domain’s search visibility. Enter a competitor’s URL and you’ll see their top organic keywords, their estimated traffic, and the pages driving most of that traffic.

For UK competitor research, three specific views are worth examining:

Their top pages by traffic. This tells you which content format is working for them. Are they ranking primarily on service pages, blog content, or location-specific pages? For a Northern Ireland business competing against both local and national players, the answer often differs between those two categories and suggests where your content investment should go.

Position history for shared keywords. Identify keywords you both rank for and check how their position has changed over the past six months. A competitor losing ground on a keyword where you’re currently on page two is a signal to invest in that topic now, before someone else fills the gap.

Their top landing pages. Export the top 20 pages by traffic. Review the content structure on any page ranking above position 10 for a keyword you’re also targeting. What’s the word count? Do they have structured FAQs, comparison tables, or video embeds? The structural difference between a page ranking in position 3 and one ranking in position 12 is usually less about domain authority and more about content depth and clarity.

Phase 4: Backlink Gap Analysis

Backlinks remain a significant ranking factor in UK search, and the Backlink Gap tool surfaces opportunities your competitors have exploited that you haven’t.

Enter your domain alongside two or three competitors. Set the filter to show referring domains linking to competitors but not to you. Sort by Authority Score, SEMrush’s metric for domain quality, and work down from the highest.

What to do with this data: The most actionable backlink gaps are industry directories, trade associations, regional business bodies, and news publications that have covered your competitors but not you. In Northern Ireland and Ireland, regional publications like the Belfast Telegraph, Business Eye, and The Irish Examiner regularly link to businesses they feature. These are attainable targets, not the national broadsheets that dominate a US-focused backlink list.

Prioritise referring domains where:

• The site is topically relevant to your industry
• The authority score is above 30
• The link appears editorially (within an article or resource page) rather than in a paid directory listing

For businesses who want help translating competitive data into a structured link-building and content strategy, ProfileTree’s SEO services include competitor gap analysis as part of ongoing retainers.

Phase 5: Advertising Research for Competitive Intelligence

Even if you’re not running paid search, the Advertising Research tool is a useful part of using SEMrush for competitive analysis. It shows the keywords competitors are bidding on, the ad copy they’re using, and the landing pages they’re sending traffic to.

This matters for three reasons. First, if a competitor is consistently bidding on a keyword, it’s a strong signal that keyword converts for them, which makes it a priority for your organic strategy too. Second, their ad copy tells you which value propositions they’re leading with, which is useful context for your own service page messaging. Third, their landing pages often reveal how they’re structuring their conversion funnel, information you’d otherwise need to reverse-engineer manually.

For UK SMEs specifically: Pay attention to seasonal patterns in competitor ad spend. UK retail, legal, and financial services businesses often shift their PPC focus significantly between September and November ahead of the end-of-year period. If your competitor’s paid visibility spikes on certain terms in Q4, that’s the window when organic investment in those terms pays off most.

Turning SEMrush Competitive Data Into a 12-Month Plan

The most common failure mode in competitive analysis isn’t pulling bad data, it’s not connecting the data to decisions. Here’s a quarterly workflow that keeps the process manageable for an SME without a dedicated SEO team.

Q1 (January–March): Baseline audit. Run the full competitor analysis: Domain Overview, Keyword Gap (Missing and Weak filters), Backlink Gap. Export your findings to a spreadsheet. Set your tracking keywords in Position Tracking.

Q2 (April–June): Content gaps. Take your list of “Missing” keywords and build or refresh the pages targeting them. Use the Organic Research tool to model the content structure of pages ranking in positions 1–3 for each target.

Q3 (July–September): Link building. Work through your Backlink Gap list. Focus on trade associations, regional publications, and topically relevant directories. Track referring domain growth in your monthly Position Tracking report.

Q4 (October–December): Review and reset. Pull a fresh Keyword Gap report and compare to Q1. Identify keywords where your position has improved and build on those clusters. Identify areas with no movement and reassess the strategy, whether that’s a content quality problem, a competition intensity issue, or a topic that needs a different angle.

SEMrush Competitor Analysis for Local UK Markets

One area where most guides on using SEMrush for competitive analysis fall short is local search. The platform’s tools are built primarily for national and global analysis, which means a few adjustments are needed to make the data useful for a business competing in Belfast, Edinburgh, or a specific English region.

Use Position Tracking with location settings. When setting up a Position Tracking campaign, you can specify a target location down to city level. For a Belfast-based business, tracking your ranking positions specifically within Northern Ireland gives you a more accurate picture than national averages, which can dilute local performance data.

Identify local directories and aggregators as a separate competitor category. For many service businesses, the real competition in local search isn’t other service providers, it’s directories like Checkatrade, Bark, or regional listings that dominate the local pack. Add these to your Organic Research competitor list separately and treat them as a category of competition requiring a different response (Google Business Profile optimisation, schema markup, and local citation building) rather than standard content production.

Cross-border search in Northern Ireland. Businesses serving customers in both Northern Ireland and the Republic need to run two separate analyses, one with the UK database and one with the Irish database. Competitor sets, search volumes, and keyword phrasing often differ significantly between the two markets. Treating them as one market will produce a competitor list that’s inaccurate for both.

ProfileTree works with SMEs across Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Ireland on integrated SEO and content strategies that account for these cross-border nuances.

What SEMrush Can’t Tell You

Honest SEMrush competitor analysis includes knowing the limits of the data. SEMrush estimates organic traffic and keyword volumes using its own panel data, these figures are directionally useful but not precise. A competitor showing 5,000 estimated monthly visits in SEMrush might be receiving 3,000 or 8,000 in reality.

Use the platform for relative comparisons, not absolute figures. If one competitor consistently shows 3x your estimated traffic across a cluster of keywords, that’s a meaningful signal regardless of whether the exact numbers are accurate. If two competitors show similar estimated traffic, treat them as roughly equivalent rather than parsing the difference.

Similarly, SEMrush’s Authority Score is a proprietary metric, not a direct measure of Google PageRank or domain trust. It’s a useful proxy for comparing domains of similar size and age, but it doesn’t account for topical relevance, which matters more in post-2024 Google than raw link counts.

Conclusion

SEMrush competitor analysis is only as useful as what you do with the data. If you’d like support turning competitive research into a structured SEO strategy, contact the ProfileTree team to discuss how it fits into a broader plan for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions