The Mapplinks Digital Marketing Show · Rishabh Dev

Competitor Research: Full Walkthrough Using SEMRush and other tools L-19

·27 min·1 clip
Start with one competitor. Rishabh keeps the walkthrough close to the ground: find an agency doing roughly the same thing, put its site into the tool, and see what the numbers say. The working example is a similar email and SMS marketing agency, with Swati following along as SEMRush comes into the picture. First up is authority score. The competitor sits around 27, while theirs is roughly 23 or 24, and Rishabh does not overplay it. Mostly vanity, he says. You can work on rankings, keywords, and traffic, but authority score is not something to treat like a direct growth lever. Organic search traffic is more useful here. The competitor shows about 2600 monthly visitors, which gives them a clearer comparison point. Paid search stays outside the lesson because paid optimization is not the job right now. Rishabh stays with organic search and the keywords bringing in that traffic. Those keywords are clues. If a competitor gets visits from certain search terms, those terms can guide your own pages and optimization work. Then the lesson widens a bit. Growth marketing is channel diagnosis, not a reflex where every competitor problem becomes an SEO problem. Maybe search is tiny. Maybe social brings in far more traffic, and most of that traffic comes from ads. In that case, the next move is probably performance marketing, not more SEO. Tools should follow the signal. Rishabh's point is simple: open the specialist tool that matches the channel, instead of pushing every question through one dashboard. Swati gives the episode its useful little before-and-after. She says she used to skim competitor websites in a surface way, but now she can collect data and turn it into a real deep dive. The close is repeatable: run the process for more competitors, compare rankings and traffic sources, and let that list turn into marketing work instead of another round of guessing.

As heard by us

A practical SEMrush-based framework for turning competitor clues into sharper marketing bets.

The piece treats competitor research as a practical first step for an e-commerce marketing agency, using Maplings and Froyim to show how to size up a rival before chasing traffic or message wins.

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Why you'd press play

See how to size up a real competitor before you guess at growth.

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