Using SEMrush for Competitive Analysis: A UK SME Guide

Using SEMrush for competitive analysis only delivers useful results once you’ve switched to the right database and built your competitor list from real keyword overlap, not assumptions. This guide covers setup for UK and Irish markets, the Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap tools, and how to turn the output into a quarterly action plan.

What SEMrush Competitive Analysis Actually Tells You

Using SEMrush for competitive analysis means mapping your site against named rival domains across organic search, paid advertising, backlinks and content visibility. The output shows you where competitors outperform you and, more usefully, where they’re exposed.

For a UK or Northern Ireland business, the context matters more than the tool itself. UK search volumes sit well below US equivalents for most queries. A keyword showing thousands of monthly searches in SEMrush’s default US database might show a fraction of that once you switch to the UK dataset. Run your analysis without making that switch, and you’ll be chasing targets that are either irrelevant to your market or impossible to verify against your own traffic.

This guide walks through five phases of SEMrush competitor analysis: setup, keyword gaps, organic research, backlink gaps and advertising research. Each section ends with a specific action, not just a description of what the tool does.

For a business running this quarterly, the full cycle takes roughly half a working day. That’s a reasonable investment against the value of knowing exactly where you’re losing ground and why.

“A lot of SMEs look at SEMrush and feel overwhelmed by the data. The tool isn’t the challenge, knowing which numbers 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 becomes one of the most useful things you do each quarter.” Ciaran Connolly, Founder, ProfileTree

Setting Up Your Analysis for UK and Irish Markets

Two configuration steps make a real difference to the quality of what you will see before you touch a single competitor domain.

Switch the Database Before You Start

The database selector sits at the top of most SEMrush 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.

This single step is the most commonly skipped part of using SEMrush for competitive analysis. A default US database search for “accountant” might show tens of thousands of monthly searches. Switch to the UK database, and the figure could drop to a few hundred. Neither number is wrong; they are measuring different markets. Reporting the US figure to a Belfast client sets an expectation that the business will never see reflected in its own analytics, which is why so many SME reports end up citing numbers nobody in the business recognises.

Define Your Real Competitors, Not Your Assumed Ones

The businesses you consider commercial competitors may not be your competitors in search. Type your domain into the Domain Overview tool and scroll to the Organic Competitors section. SEMrush surfaces the domains competing for the same keywords you currently rank for. For a Belfast accountancy firm, that list might include national accountancy networks, comparison directories and local firms, not necessarily the practices you pitch against for clients.

Build your SEMrush competitor analysis from this list rather than from assumptions. It is worth revisiting every quarter too, since organic competitor sets shift as new sites gain traction or established ones lose ground. A competitor list built once and never updated will quietly go stale, and you will end up benchmarking against businesses that no longer matter in your market.

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

Finding Missing Keywords With the Keyword Gap Tool

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

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

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-built page within six to nine months.

“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.

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 become your targets for the next 90 days.

Organic Research: What Competitors’ Traffic and Content Reveal

Organic Research is the next tool to reach for once you are using SEMrush for competitive analysis beyond keyword lists. Enter a competitor’s URL, and you will see their top organic keywords, estimated traffic and the pages driving most of it.

Three views are worth examining for UK competitor research. Their top pages by traffic tell you which content format is working. Are they ranking primarily on service pages, blog content or location-specific pages? For a Northern Ireland business competing against local and national players, the answer often differs between those two categories and points to where your content investment should go.

Position history for shared keywords shows how a competitor’s ranking 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 are worth exporting in full. Review the content structure on any page ranking above position 10 for a keyword you’re also targeting. What is the word count? Do they have structured FAQs, comparison tables or video embeds? The structural difference between a page ranking third and one ranking twelfth is usually less about domain authority and more about content depth and clarity.

Actionable insight: Do not stop at noting that a competitor’s page is longer. Open it and check whether the extra length is genuine depth, such as worked examples, data or screenshots, or padding. A 3,000-word page built from filler paragraphs is not a template worth copying for your own SEMrush competitor analysis, even if it currently outranks you. The word count is a symptom, not the cause of the ranking.

Backlink Gap Analysis: Where Competitors Are Winning Links

Backlinks remain an important ranking factor in UK search, and the Backlink Gap tool is where using SEMrush for competitive analysis pays off most directly, surfacing 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 proprietary metric for domain quality, and work down from the highest.

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 regularly link to businesses they feature in local business news. 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 sits above 30, and the link appears editorially, within an article or resource page, rather than in a paid directory listing.

For businesses that want help translating competitive data into a structured link-building and content strategy, ProfileTree’s digital strategy services build competitor gap analysis into ongoing retainers.

Advertising Research: Reading Competitor PPC Signals

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. A competitor consistently bidding on a keyword is a strong signal that the term converts for them, which makes it a priority for your organic strategy too. Their ad copy shows which value propositions they’re leading with, useful context for your own service page messaging. Their landing pages often reveal how they’ve structured their conversion funnel, information you’d otherwise need to reverse-engineer manually.

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

Cross-reference the Advertising Research data against your Keyword Gap results. A term that appears in both, one where a competitor is paying to rank and also holding a strong organic position, is a stronger signal than either data set alone. It tells you the keyword converts well enough to justify spending, and that ranking organically for it is achievable, which makes it a sensible priority when you’re deciding where to focus limited content resources.

SEMrush for Local and Cross-Border Northern Ireland Search

Most guides on using SEMrush for competitive analysis are built for national and global markets. A business competing in Belfast, Edinburgh or a specific English region needs a few adjustments to make the data genuinely useful, and this is where most published SEMrush tutorials fall short.

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

Treat 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 that dominate the local pack. Add these to your Organic Research competitor list separately and respond with Google Business Profile optimisation, schema markup and local citation building rather than standard content production.

Businesses serving customers in both Northern Ireland and the Republic need two separate analyses, one with the UK database and one with the Irish database. Competitor sets, search volumes and keyword phrasing often differ sharply between the two markets. Treating them as one produces a competitor list that’s inaccurate for both.

This cross-border split catches out a lot of Northern Ireland businesses who assume “UK” covers the whole island. It does not. A search term that performs well in Belfast may barely register in Dublin, and the competitor ranking for it in each market is often a completely different business. Running both databases separately takes longer, but a single blended report will misrepresent both markets and lead to decisions based on the wrong competitor set.

ProfileTree works with SMEs across Belfast, Northern Ireland and Ireland on integrated digital marketing services that account for these cross-border nuances, from local SEO through to paid and organic content strategy.

Turning the Data Into a 12-Month Action Plan

The most common failure mode when using SEMrush for 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.

January to March: run the full competitor analysis. Domain Overview, Keyword Gap on both Missing and Weak filters, and Backlink Gap. Export findings to a spreadsheet and set tracking keywords in Position Tracking.

April to June: work through content gaps. Take the “Missing” keyword list and build or refresh the pages targeting them. Use Organic Research to model the content structure of pages ranking in positions one to three for each target.

July to September: focus on link building. Work through the Backlink Gap list, prioritising trade associations, regional publications and topically relevant directories. Track referring domain growth in the monthly Position Tracking report.

October to December: review and reset. Pull a fresh Keyword Gap report and compare it to the January baseline. Identify keywords where position has improved and build on those clusters. For areas with no movement, reassess whether it’s a content quality problem, a competition intensity issue, or a topic that needs a different angle.

What SEMrush Competitive Analysis Can’t Tell You

Using SEMrush for competitive analysis honestly means knowing the limits of the data. SEMrush estimates organic traffic and keyword volumes using its own panel data. These figures are directionally useful, not precise. A competitor showing 5,000 estimated monthly visits might be receiving considerably more or less in reality.

Use the platform for relative comparisons rather than absolute figures. If one competitor consistently shows three times your estimated traffic across a cluster of keywords, that’s a meaningful signal regardless of whether the exact number is accurate. If two competitors show similar estimated traffic, treat them as roughly equivalent rather than parsing the difference.

SEMrush’s Authority Score is a proprietary metric, not a direct measure of Google PageRank or domain trust. It is a useful proxy for comparing domains of similar size and age, but it does not account for topical relevance, which matters more to modern Google than raw link counts. Treat every SEMrush competitor analysis output as a starting point for investigation, not a finished verdict. The tool is very good at pointing you toward the right questions. Answering those questions properly still takes judgement, context and a working knowledge of the client’s actual market, which is where the analysis earns its value.

Conclusion

Using SEMrush for competitive analysis only pays off once the data changes what you do next. Switch to the UK or Irish database before you start, build your competitor list from actual keyword overlap rather than assumption, and work through the Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap tools on a quarterly cycle rather than a one-off audit. The businesses that get the most from SEMrush competitor analysis treat each report as a set of decisions to make, not a set of numbers to file away.

The tool itself will not write the content, fix the backlink profile, or rebuild the underperforming page for you. It tells you precisely where to point that effort next, which for most SMEs is the harder part to work out alone.

If you’d like support turning competitive research into a structured SEO strategy, ProfileTree’s SEO services can help translate the data into a working plan.

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