If you are looking at a good tool for doing your keyword research, you can’t do much better than SEMRUSH. I recently signed up for the free trial and ended up getting a subscription to it. Many keyword tools don’t have enough data in their databases to make them useful but this has over 80 million keywords and covers 38 million domains (as at 1st October 20110).

However there are a few other good reasons why I chose SEMRUSH over other tools.

1. It has a wide coverage outside US, in Europe and also Australia and Brazil. If you are marketing in UK for example, there is no point getting US only data, so this was a big advantage for me.

2. The tool is very intuitive, you don’t even need to read any manuals on how it works. You can gather all the keyword research you would need for a website in about an hour.

3. You can export your data into Excel at the click of a button.

So lets take a deeper look at what actually SEMRUSH does.

Keyword Research

I will take you through a typical scenario of how to do keyword research. Lets take an example of a company doing fire alarm system design. We want to find out what people are searching for. Yes you can do this on Google Keyword Tool, but bear with me and see why SEMRUSH can do so much more.

So just login to SEMRUSH and search for a key word or phrase relevant to your website, for example “fire alarm system design”, you will see the following…

The first thing you will notice is a bar chart showing the trend for that search term, along with the average CPC, volume of searches per month (for that region), relative amount of competition on Adwords for that term, and the number of search results, which is also an indication of the amount of competition in natural search results.

Under that you will see a phrase match report showing the same details for any search terms containing that phrase. And below that is the same information for related search terms.

What this tells me is the search volume for my main keywords is so low, only 140 per month, so to get any business I probably need to target a wider range of search terms such as “fire alarm systems”. SO let’s stop there one moment…

What we can do is see what our competitors are bidding on. If we scroll down the page we find the top organic search results, and under that, the top Adwords results… and this is where SEMRUSH becomes very powerful. We can see what our competition is bidding on, and how much of their PPC budget is allocated to each word they are bidding on.

….. and by clicking on each of the competition, you can see something like this… For each keyword they are bidding for you can also see the Adwords position they are ranking at, the search volume and avg CPC for that word, the landing page urls for the ad, the percentage of all their adwords traffic for each keyword, the relative cost of that keyword compared to all the keywords they are bidding on.

If I do this for each of my competitors, I can easily now add a number of other good relevant search terms to my campaign and also have an idea of how much I will need to bid for the clicks.

If I am researching a competitive niche, I will find competitors bidding for thousands of keywords, and with SEMRUSH I can export these into an Excel spreadsheet.

ADS Research

Now lets look at another feature.. you can also see what text your competitors are using in their ads. You probably would not want to copy them word for word, but you can get a good idea of what key selling points your competitors are focusing on, then use this information to either distinguish your own product/service to differentiate it from your competitors, or use the info to get some ideas on what the market is reacting to.

One other useful competitor research tool is being able to compare not only how much search engine traffic your competitors get, but also comparing the number of adwords they are bidding for, and the amount they are spending on Adwords. You can compare up to 5 sites as well as choose the region and the relevant time period.

SEMRUSH is great for companies which need to continually monitor their competitors or research keywords for their own campaigns. It is also great for SEO and SEM professionals who have a lot of clients, or who want to provide keyword research services to their clients or prospective clients. If you only have a small website you probably don’t need this for a whole year but you can still benefit by using it for a month to fully research your competitors and develop your ad campaigns.

You can trial SEMRUSH at http://www.semrush.com and see whether it suits your needs.