SEM Rush Search Marketing Research - Review of SEMRush.com

What is SEM Rush?

A sweet new competitive research tool by the name SEMRush has hit the market. It can be seen as a deeper extension of the SEODigger project (adding PPC data and tracking AdWords keywords), and a competitor to services like Compete.com and SpyFu (which recently launched SpyFu Kombat).

SEM Rush vs Compete.com

The big value add that SEM Rush has over a tool like
Compete.com is that SEMRush adds cost per click estimates (scraped from Google's Traffic Estimator tool and estimated traffic volumes (from the Google AdWords keyword tool near each keyword. Thus, rather than showing the traffic distribution to each site, this tool can list keyword value distribution for the sites (keyword value * estimated traffic).

Normalizing Data

Using these estimates does not provide results that are as
accurate as Compete.com's data licensing strategy, but if you own a site and
know what it earns, you can set up a ratio to normalize the differences (at
least to some extent, within the same vertical, for sites of similar size,
using a similar business model).

One of our sites that earns about $5,000 a month shows a
Google traffic value of close to $20,000 a month.

5,000/20,000 = 1/4 = 0.25

A similar site in the same vertical shows $10,000

$10,000 * 0.25 = $2,500

Disclaimers With Normalizing Data

It is hard to monetize traffic as well as Google does, so
in virtually every competitive market your profit per visitor (after expenses)
will generally be less than Google. Some reason why..

1. In some markets people are losing money
   to buy marketshare, while in other markets people may overbid just to
   block out competition.


2. Some merchants simply have fatter profit
   margins and can afford to outbid affiliates.


3. It is hard to integrate advertising in
   your site anywhere near as aggressively as Google does while still
   creating a site that will be able to gather enough links (and other
   signals of quality) to take a #1 organic ranking in competitive
   markets...so by default there will typically be some amount of slippage.


4. A site that offers editorial content
   wrapped in light ads will not convert eyeballs into cash anywhere near as
   well as a lead generation oriented affiliate site would.

SEM Rush Features

Keyword Values & Volumes

As mentioned above, this data is scraped from the Google
Traffic Estimator and the Google Keyword Tool.

Top Search Traffic Domains

A list of the top 100 domain names that are estimated to be
the highest value downstream traffic sources from Google.

You could get a similar list from
Compete.com'sReferral Analytics by running a downstream report
on Google.com, although I think that might also include traffic from some of
Google's non-search properties like Reader.

Here is a list of sites that rank for many of the same
keywords that SEO Book ranks for

Overlapping Keywords

Here is a list of a few words where Seo Book and SEOmoz
compete in the rankings

Compare AdWords to Organic Search

These are sites that rank for keywords that SEO Book is
buying through AdWords


And these are sites that buy AdWords ads for keywords that this site ranks for

Entry cost is so low that a lot of great tools are going to
get made in short order, but it is hard to win by sitting on a good idea. ;)