SEMrush Keyword Research

Organic Research Competitors

Another way to find more competitors is to use the Organic Research Competitors tab. Enter in a domain. In this example marquisyachts.com, you can see what websites are closely related and rank for common keywords.

Click the export button to download the data in a spreadsheet.

Now, sort the exported data by Organic Traffic. Most of the competing yacht websites have 5,000 to 10,000 organic traffic. Eliminate all sites well outside of the range; both above and below. Then sort and remove websites with only a few common keywords.

Highlighted in green are the websites of known direct competitors. Let’s take a look at some of the non-highlighted websites to find more relevant competitors.

Boatinternational.com does not appear to be a direct competitor. Prestige-yachts.com and searay.com are two new direct competitors.

Justluxe.com is a potential place to get a link, galatiyachts.com looks like a for sale website. Hmy.com is a reseller of multiple brands. Nauticexpo is not a manufacture. This is a survey site and this is a reseller.

Go ahead and clean up your list. Highlighted in red are indirect competitors and in yellow two new direct competitors.

Both of these competitors rank for yacht related keyword for example prestige-yachts.com ranks for yachts and searay.com ranks for sport yachts.

Export and Sort Competitor Keywords

Export all the keywords for your competitors. To save recording time, I will demonstrate how to export one and then pause the recording while I download data for the other 9 yacht websites.

After you have downloaded all of the files, combine all the spreadsheets together into one master keyword list. To save recording time, I will again pause the video.

On the combined keyword list do your best to remove all of the brand related keywords.

Now sort by search volume, largest to smallest and remove keywords with low search volume. Low is relative to your niche. In this example, I eliminated anything below 390 searches.

Then remove non-relevant keywords from your campaign. Use your best judgement. For example boat related keywords. I also decided to eliminate keywords related to cruiser because of the Cruiser Yachts brand. Marquis Yachts also wants to sell yachts, not rent them or conduct charters. Yachts for rent is a keyword we do not want to target, same with yacht charter.

Some of the keywords are duplicates. Use conditional formatting to highlight duplicate values. Continue to filter out any keywords you may have missed.

To remove duplicates click on the data tab. Highlight all data. Click Remove duplicates. Unselect all. I am only working with column A keywords, so check that box and click OK. This will remove all duplicate keywords. This leaves us with 23 keywords to drill down on.

Let’s take a look at Marquis Yacht’s offerings. We can see many of these are labelled sport yacht and some are a little bigger. I do not think any of these are mega yachts so I will eliminate these keywords.

Looking through the different brochures I did not see any prices listed so I eliminated the keyword yacht prices. I am unsure if keywords related to yachts for sale are valuable. This can only be answered through testing.

Organize the keywords into different categories. For example, broad keywords related to yachts. Buying and for sale keywords. Manufacture and company keywords. There are two keywords that need further investigation.

Another way to create categories is to divide them into the different stages of buying and research. A keyword that I may have missed or accidentally deleted was sport yacht which has a search volume of 590.

SEMrush vs Google Keyword Planner

Starting with the seed keyword yachts, I exported the relevant keywords into a spreadsheet. Then pasted in all of the keywords found during keyword research and competitive analysis. After highlighting duplicate values, it is clear that Google Keyword Planner missed several keywords.

SEMrush has a very powerful Keyword Research tool. Use the full search tab and enter in your seed keyword. In this example, yachts. Then click to export.

This spreadsheet has more keywords than Google Keyword Planner. As you can see, SEMrush found all of our potential target keywords. This is why you really need to use a paid tool to do keyword research instead of relying on Google Keyword Planner.

In the next video, you will learn how to determine Keyword Difficulty using offpage SEO factors.