Domain Overview presents a range of overview metrics about a domain’s online visibility so you can quickly get a full picture of a website’s online presence. You’ll see the domain’s organic and paid search traffic, use of display advertising, and backlinks. From a Domain Overview, you can click on any of the data modules to jump into more specific reports on Semrush and continue your analysis further.
- A quick overview of any domain’s overall search engine presence - estimated organic and paid traffic, number of backlinks
- Instant analysis of a website’s top keywords - organic positions, recent position changes, advertising keywords, and more
- Options for analyzing global and mobile databases
- Collect previews of the deeper competitive research reports on Semrush
- Ability to research a domain, subdomain, subfolder, or URL
- Analyze a Growth Report of a domain's performance over time
Why should you use this report?
Domain Overview can provide tons of top-level insight into a competitor's domain in no time at all. With this info you can quickly assess your competition’s strengths and weaknesses, and then dive deeper into each area with the corresponding report on Semrush.
You can also use the report to query a URL or subfolder or subdomain that you’re interested in analyzing. Just type in the URL and select on which level you want to gather data.
Settings
Like all other Analytics reports on Semrush, this report can be adjusted by:
- Geographic database
- Device (desktop or mobile devices)
- Date (if you have access to historical data)
Top Metrics
The five main overview metrics at the top of Domain Overview are:
- Authority Score: This estimates how authoritative a site is, how much Google trusts them and how much SEO impact their links have when they send hyperlinks to another site.
Please note: Authority Score can measure a domain and a page but cannot measure a subfolder or subdomain’s authority at this time. If you are researching a subfolder or subdomain, this module will show the authority score of the root domain.
- Organic Search: This blue number shows the amount of estimated traffic the domain receives, per month, from organic search. Click on the number to open a more detailed Organic Positions report. This number will adjust if you query a subfolder, subdomain or URL.
- Paid Search: This blue number shows the amount of estimated traffic the domain receives per month from PPC ads. Click on the number to open a more detailed Advertising Positions report. This number will adjust if you query a subfolder, subdomain or URL.
- Backlinks: This blue number shows the total amount of backlinks Semrush found going to the domain. Click on the number to open up more detailed Backlinks reports. This number will adjust if you query a subfolder, subdomain or URL.
- Display Advertising: This blue number shows the number of display ads that the domain has run through Google AdSense. Click on the number to open up deeper Display Advertising reports where you can see more details about their advertising behavior.
Please note: If you are researching a subfolder, subdomain, or URL this module will show the display advertising metrics of the root domain.
- Traffic Engagement Metrics: These are global (not specific to one country) traffic behavior estimates from our Traffic Analytics database. If you don’t see this widget it could be because the website does not have enough monthly traffic to register in our Traffic Analytics database.
Please note: If you are researching a subfolder, subdomain, or URL this module will show the engagement metrics of the root domain.
Keywords by Country and Traffic Trend
The Distribution by Country widget can show you where most of a domain’s traffic comes from globally - for both organic and paid traffic. This could help you discover where a global competitor has a successful advertising campaign, or organic online presence for example.
Please note that the Distribution by Country widget can only measure on the root domain level.
The Organic Traffic and Keyword graphs tell you how much estimated traffic Semrush saw going to the domain over time. This graph will change when you change the query to a URL, subfolder, or subdomain so you can look into more specific trends in your competitor’s strategy.
Comparing up to 5 websites at a time
You also have the option of adding multiple competitors directly into the top of this report to benchmark your site’s top metrics against theirs.
From here you can compare all of your important metrics, analyze organic/paid traffic and backlinks trends, and get actionable data from a few widgets generated by the Keyword Gap tool.
Organic Search
The first part of the Domain Overview covers everything about a domain’s organic traffic. This ranges from top organic keywords to competitors and branded search traffic. If you are researching a URL, subfolder, or subdomain, all of these widgets will adjust to show specific data and trends of that scope.
- Top Organic Keywords - This lists the domain’s top five organic keywords in order of their traffic percentage. You can also see the keyword position, volume, and CPC.
- Organic Position Distribution - This graph shows the distribution of the domain’s organic rankings. You can see how many keywords the domain has rankings for in the top 3 positions, 4-10, 11-20, and so on.
- Main Organic Competitors - These competitors are ranked by how similar their keyword portfolios are. The number of common keywords and total SE (search engine) keywords are listed in the table. Click “view full report” to open the Organic Competitors report and get the full list of the domain’s organic search competitors.
- Competitive Positioning Map (organic) - The map illustrates the spread of a domain’s competitors based on the number of organic keywords and search traffic.
- Branded traffic trend - Branded search traffic is organic traffic coming from keywords that include your brand name. For example, Semrush counts traffic to Amazon.com from keywords like “amazon prime,” “Amazon books, and “amazon smile” as branded search traffic. If one month of the year had a higher density of branded searches, it will be shown here.
- Branded vs non-branded search traffic - This tells you how much of a website’s organic traffic comes from branded vs non-branded search.
Paid Search
The second section of the Domain Overview has previews of all the reports related to paid search. Again, if you are researching a URL, subfolder, or subdomain, these widgets will adjust to show specific data and trends of that scope.
- Top Paid Keywords - The domain’s top five paid keywords will be shown here, ranked in order of their traffic percentage. Traffic percentage represents the number of people that visit the website from clicking on an ad after searching that keyword. Click on “View details” to open an Advertising Positions report. This report can show you all of the top keywords your competitor bids on to bring traffic to their website.
- Paid Position Distribution - This chart shows the distribution of the domain’s positions for paid keywords. The more positions a domain has in the top 3, the more optimized their PPC efforts are.
- Main Paid Competitors - Show’s a domain’s top five paid search competitors. This list is based on the number of keywords for each domain, as well as the number of common paid keywords between both competitors.
Click on a number in the Common Keywords column to see the full list in a Domain vs Domain report. Click on a number in the Ads Keywords Column to open an Advertising Positions report for that competitor. Or, click on “View details” to open an Advertising Competitors report for your queried domain.
- Competitive Positioning Map (paid) - This illustrates the spread of a domain’s competitors based on the number of paid keywords and search traffic. The larger the circle, the more visibility a domain has across paid keywords.
- Sample Text Ads - This section shows samples of the domain’s PPC ads as they appeared in the results. Click on any ad to go to the landing page. You can also click on “View details” to open an Ad Copies report. There you can see all of the ads that Semrush found the domain bidding on during the last month.
Backlinks
The third part of the Domain Overview provides data on aspects of the domain’s backlink profile. This includes the total number of backlinks, ratio between follow and nofollow links, and top referring domains. Just like the Organic Search and Paid Search widgets, these widgets will adjust if you want to research a subfolder, subdomain, or URL.
- Backlinks - The first module in this section shows a preview of the domain’s backlink profile. Click “View details” to open up the entire list in the Backlinks report. From there you can evaluate the domain’s backlinks by metrics like Page Authority Score and number of internal/external links on the referring pages.
- Follow vs. Nofollow- This chart shows you the ratio of follow vs nofollow links. A “nofollow” link has a special HTML attribute that instructs search engine bots not to count this link towards influencing the target website’s authority and rankings. Meanwhile, a “follow” link just means a normal hyperlink without the “nofollow” attribute. These hyperlinks can benefit the target website’s SEO, while those with a “nofollow” attribute will have no additional SEO impact.
- Backlinks Type - This chart identifies how many links in the site’s backlink profile are text, frame, form, and image links.
- Top Anchors - The top five most common anchor texts in the domain’s backlinks will be listed here. This tells you how other websites refer to the domain when they link to it. It also shows you how many referring domains use each anchor, and how many backlinks use each anchor. Click “View details” to open up the complete list of anchor texts.
- Referring domains - The top referring domains will be listed here in order of how many backlinks they’re sending to the searched domain. Click on any of these domains to go to that domain’s Domain Overview. You can also click “View full report” to see the complete list of domains sending backlinks to your queried domain.
- Top indexed pages (by the number of backlinks) - The pages on the domain that have the most backlinks are listed here.
Display Advertising
Next in the Domain Overview is Display Advertising data. This data will tell you everything about your competitor's use of online display ads.
Please note that these widgets will show data at the root domain level worldwide (you can’t research Display Advertising related to a URL or subfolder or geographic region in the Domain Overview)
Publishers and Advertisers
Websites in Display Advertising reports are categorized in two ways: Publishers and Advertisers.
Publishers are websites that use Google Display Network to allow advertisers to run display ads on their site. Publishers receive money from Advertisers in return for the space on the site and traffic acquired from the ads.
Advertisers are websites placing ads on other sites in an effort to bring traffic to their website. Advertisers pay Publishers for the space to advertise on their site.
If a domain publishes more than it advertises, Domain Overview will present data about the website’s publishing behavior. The latest advertisers and samples of those ads will be shown.
If a domain advertises on external sites more than it publishes ads, Domain Overview will present data about the website’s advertising behavior. The latest publishers and samples of their ads will be shown.
- Latest Publishers (shown if the domain is more of an advertiser) - A list of publishers and the number of total ads are shown here. You can also see if they are publishing text or image ads. These can be clicked through to open a full report in the Display Advertising section.
- Top display ad landing pages - The most common landing pages tied to the domain’s display ads are listed here. They will be shown in order of most times seen by Semrush. Click “View details” to open up a full report in the Display Advertising section.
- Sample Ads - Sites that run ads on Google’s Display Network have the ability to run both text or image ads. This section shows samples of any image ads and text ads that Semrush found associated with the domain
The content of this section will depend on if the domain is more of a publisher or advertiser.
Click on one of the ads or the “View details” button to open up a full report in the Display Advertising section.