SEMrush new features in May

We have 3 exciting new features to cover from last month’s updates – and they are already popular with the SEMrush users who have tried them.

Before we get into it, have you switched to the newly designed Main Dashboard for an easier way to add domains to analyze, and organize all your projects in one customizable table?

Traffic Analytics: Analyzing a Website’s Traffic Journey, and Audience Overlap Between 5 Domains

There are two significant updates here that allow users with the Competitive Intelligence (CI) add-on to draw even more data from Traffic Analytics.

Traffic Journey: Where Site Traffic Comes From and Where it Goes

The new Traffic Journey report in Traffic Analytics is the combination of previous Traffic Sources and Destination Sites tabs. Combining these two important tabs allows you to get a more complete picture of users’ journeys across a website, including which channels they use before and after entering the site in question.

The new chart, called Traffic Journey, visually shows top traffic sources and top destination sites, while the Traffic Journey Details table shows data on those previous and subsequent websites, including:

Traffic shares;
Total amount of traffic; and
Monthly changes.

What Does the Traffic Journey Data Give You?

In most cases, you will probably want to research your competitors in Traffic Analytics, but with Traffic Journey, you have more data at your fingertips. You can add up to 5 websites and switch between tabs to analyze your own domain against those of your competitors.

The deeper insights from a complete overview of your competitors’ Traffic Sources and Destination Sites will indicate the ways in which your potential buyers tend to think and act, which will help you devise a more informed traffic generation strategy for yourself.

You can understand which alternatives your customers consider, follow their decision-making process, detect trends in audience preferences, and identify the percentage of users who leave your site in favor of competitors, or for additional searching on Google.

Based on these insights, you might, for instance, arrange media placements on the same resources that generated traffic for your rivals, or hone your brand messaging, positioning, and image in order to improve your position in the market.

Discover more ways to generate business value from this data here: Attract More Customers Online with Knowledge of Any Website’s Traffic Journey.

Uncover Any Website’s Traffic Journey

Audience Insights: Audience Overlap Between up to 5 Domains

The Audience Overlap feature in Traffic Analytics allowed comparisons between 2 websites, and revealed the percentage and the absolute number of users that visited both of them.

The brand-new Audience Insights report has replaced the Audience Overlap tab to allow you to dig deeper and see the volumes of shared and unique visitors for up to 5 websites of your choice. This is also the case when you enter your own website into Traffic Analytics.

Using the Audience Insights, you can now:

See a list of websites with a similar audience;
Compare shared and unique audiences;
Analyze your competitive segment and multiple intersections between rivals in a clear and simple chart; and
Turn on Safe Mode to filter out adult sites.

What Does the Audience Insights Report Give You?

The report will help you identify touchpoints with potential customers, or broaden your reach to those who tend to favor your competitors by building new partnerships and gaining placements on new sites.

When working with an existing audience, you can choose the media with which you have the greatest audience share, and get a list of websites with a similar audience. This will help you better understand potential customers’ interests and values, and hone the message that will be more likely to resonate with them.

What’s more is that you can also monitor how the audience overlap changes over time, so you can pinpoint when potential customers start to lean towards or away from competitors.

You can use this insight to expand your reach, for instance, by acquiring placements on the sites with the greatest shares of the unique audience. You can also gain deeper understandings of audience appetite for a certain product or service before you launch it into the market.

Learn how to make the most of this new functionality here: Reach Your Target Customers with Audience Insights Research.

Capitalize on Knowledge of Audience Insights

Position Tracking: A New Keyword Cannibalization Report

Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages or posts on a single website compete against each other for positions in the SERPs for the same keywords. The result is that none of the pages succeeds in gaining a worthwhile position for the keyword in question.

It’s a problem of which all marketers should be aware, so, if you have a Guru or Business subscription with SEMrush, we’ve now made it possible for you to identify any such competition between pages on your website with our new Cannibalization report in Position Tracking.

The report gives you a Cannibalization Health score, which updates as you progress with eliminating the revealed conflicts between pages.

If you view by Keywords, you will see a list of which ones were indexed for more than one page during a given timeframe.

With this insight, you can analyze the trend of how the pages were ranking over time, determine which page is more relevant to the keyword, and identify a more accurate query for the second page. From there, you can decide how to edit the content to better fit your other target keywords.

You can also consider the option of combining two pages into one and implementing a 301 redirect, or using a rel=”canonical” tag if you want to keep similar pages, but let Google know which one to rank.

If you need recommendations on how to optimize your website for target keywords, upload both pages with their corresponding unique keywords to the On-Page SEO Checker tool — you can find the workflow on this topic in our Knowledge Base.

The view by Pages shows a list of URLs that rank for a number of keywords.

Here, you can check the list of keywords and analyze each page’s relevance to them. If it’s off-topic, you will want to make sure that a relevant page exists, and check its ranking using the Pages tab.

Find out more here: Position Tracking: Cannibalization Shall Not Pass

Check cannibalization on your site

Domain Overview: Subfolder, Subdomain, and URL Analysis with the Compare Mode

We have significantly expanded the functionality of our most popular tool for the instant collection of domain statistics in Domain Overview. Now, if you have any SEMrush subscription, you can get the data not only for the top-level domain, but also for any subfolder, subdomain, or URL beneath it.

You can instantly discover competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and, if you need details, delve deeper into the report through any of the widgets.

The data for a single domain looks like this:

Thanks to the update, you can now add up to 5 domains to the Domain Overview to get instant comparisons between, for example, your own website and 4 of its competitors.

As well as saving time with the ability to analyze everything on one page with Compare Mode (available with a Guru subscription, or higher), you will be able to access:

Authority Score and SEMrush Rank;
Organic and Paid Search Traffic;
Number of Organic and Paid Keywords;
Number of Backlinks and Referring Domains; and
Dynamics of changes in Organic Traffic, Paid Traffic, and Backlinks.

In addition, widgets within the tool will show you the overlap of keyword portfolios among the competitors, and the best keyword opportunities for your site, so you get a fuller picture of the potential of your domain.