Finding what topics drive your competitors’ success shouldn’t be a guessing game.
Recognizing the need for more precise insights from our user community, Semrush introduces the new Topics Report in Organic Research for both the Guru and Business subscription plans.
Based on your feedback, we’ve developed this tool to let you instantly uncover the high-traffic topics powering your rivals’ SEO with just a few clicks.
Let’s look at how the new Topics Report transforms your competitor research.
What’s New: Topics Report in Organic Research
Using Semrush’s extensive proprietary keyword database and AI machine learning algorithms, the Topics Report identifies and groups a domain’s top-ranking pages and their associated keywords into coherent topics.
These topic groups reflect how Google perceives the domain thematically, providing a clear view of its content strengths and focus areas.
This delivers immediate visibility into your competitors’ content strategies and topic performance. From here, you can take a screenshot, export it to a spreadsheet, or click on any of the page tiles to explore further.
Key Features and Benefits
The Topics Report unlocks insights into your competitors’ content strategies, enabling you to shape your own content strategy with confidence.
Here are some examples of what you can do with it.
Discover Winning Topics at a Glance
The Topics Report interface simplifies competitor research by visually organizing their strongest non-branded pages into topics. Each tile provides a snapshot of its performance, showing traffic, search volume, and average keyword difficulty (KD%)—helping you prioritize the topics with the highest potential.
Understand Content Coverage for Deeper Insights
Beyond identifying top-performing topics, the Topics Report provides an in-depth view of how well competitors cover specific themes on their websites. For each topic, you can explore the number of pages (subtopics), the aspects of the topic they address, and the traffic each one generates.
Build and Manage Keyword Clusters
The Topics Report provides ready-to-use keyword clusters based on a domain’s top ranking pages, giving you a strong starting point for your content strategy. Each cluster is carefully organized and can be instantly exported for seamless integration into your workflow.
In addition to exporting, you can copy clusters to your clipboard for quick sharing or further use. The tool also allows you to add these keywords to the Keyword Strategy Builder, where you can organize them further or supplement them with your own custom keywords.
Understanding Topics and Pages
In this report, a topic is a broad subject covering multiple related pages on a website, while a page is a subtopic within that topic that provides more detailed information.
For example, for the domain macrostax.com, the report offers metrics on the site’s six main topics, which are covered across 101 pages. The topic “Nutritional Calculations and Information” includes pages like “sushi bake calories” and “chicken quesadilla calories.”
For every main topic, you can see:
- Estimated monthly organic traffic
- Total search volume (of the keywords that these pages rank for)
- Number of pages within each topic
- Average keyword difficulty (KD%) of each page topic
You can also review the metrics for each page’s keywords by clicking on a desired tile to access the detailed table below.
Where to Find the Topics Report
On the Semrush platform, you can find Topics in both the Domain Overview and Organic Research tools.
Domain Overview
In Domain Overview, getting a streamlined topical overview of your competitor’s site is as easy as entering their domain.
Scroll down to find the Topics widget, which provides an organized overview of the website’s topics that generate the most non-branded organic traffic.
Click on this widget to navigate directly to the full report within the Organic Research tool.
Organic Research
In the Organic Research tool, you can locate the “Topics” tab between the “Competitors” and “Pages” tabs. Enter your URL, click “Search,” and navigate to this tab to generate your Topics Report.
To look for topics from another domain, simply update the URL in the search bar at the top.
Review your report in the Topics Report tab.
Hover over any tile for additional volume and keyword difficulty metrics.
Click on a tile to see a detailed list of keywords for deeper insights.
From this report, you can export the desired list of keywords and add them to your custom keyword lists for tailored analysis.
Transforming Insights into Action with Topics in Organic
The new Topics Report isn’t just about seeing what’s working for your competitors—it’s about leveraging that data so you can make smarter decisions that drive results.
Here’s how you can put it to work:
Identify the Best Topics in Your Competitor’s Content Strategy
By analyzing keyword difficulty scores and detailed keyword data for specific pages, you can build a strategy focused on creating optimized content around high-performing, proven topics.
For example, after entering a competitor’s domain in the fitness industry, you might discover that “Workouts & Exercises” is their main topic. Further, their “murph workout” article is driving thousands of visits each month. It also carries a low keyword difficulty score.
This low score suggests that “murph workout” is a topic where you could potentially outrank your competitor by creating better content.
Click on the tile and review the table below.
This shows you the cluster of keywords from which the page gets its traffic.
From here, you have a clear roadmap for action: you can create a similar article optimized for the same high-traffic keywords, adding your unique perspective to stand out.
Beyond content, the data might even inspire broader promotional strategies—like hosting a Murph workout event to attract your audience and boost engagement opportunities.
Enhance Client Pitches
Because of its visual nature, the Topics Report can also help you create comprehensive, persuasive pitches that link content strategy directly to actionable business outcomes.
For example, say you’re pitching your content services to a lawn care company. After analyzing their competitor’s domain, you find that “Grass Types and Maintenance” is a main topic.
Specifically, content on the “best time to plant grass seed” is generating significant traffic and has a low keyword difficulty score.
You identify other related low-competition opportunities such as “lawn care services” and “best time to water grass.”
With this data, you can recommend creating a content series focused on these topics to provide homeowners with straightforward, practical advice. And because there are estimated traffic numbers associated with each page, your pitch will be data-driven and reliable.
Finally, you could tie the strategy to long-term growth goals.
For example, you demonstrate how ranking for these topics can establish the client’s authority in the industry, create a consistent stream of organic traffic, and set the stage for upselling more advanced products or services.
This holistic approach makes your pitch more compelling and positions you as a strategic partner in their success.
Leverage High-Impact Keyword Clusters
By targeting clusters instead of individual keywords, you can rank for multiple search terms and create more impactful, relevant content. The Topics Report makes it easy to uncover the keyword clusters driving your competitors’ success and organize them into a strategy you can act on.
For example, if you’re in the travel industry, you might input a popular adventure travel site like alltrails.com. The tool will display the best-performing content topics for that domain.
As illustrated, Alltrails.com has a high-performing topic of “General Hiking Trails.”
A closer look reveals that keywords like “hiking trails near me,” “trails near me,” and “walking trails near me” are driving significant traffic to the same page.
Instead of creating separate pages for each term, this cluster can be targeted with one comprehensive, optimized page.
Additionally, each page’s keyword cluster can be directly exported into the Keyword Strategy Builder for further expansion and customization.
Take the Guesswork Out of Competitor Topic Analysis
Let’s help you make your competitor topic analysis more simple and actionable. Spot opportunities, create stronger content plans, and outpace the competition—all in less time.
Ready to uncover your competitor’s winning strategy?
Head to Organic Research and explore their content topics today.
