How to Use Semrush to Build a Keyword Plan From Competitors

The short answer: with one domain, four competitors and a quarter of content to plan, the SEO plan's 500 tracked keywords (pricing page) are enough: create a project, let Site Audit and Position Tracking start, pull competitors from Organic Research, run Keyword Gap for the Missing and Weak terms, widen the list in the Keyword Magic Tool, group it, track it with tags, and check movement once a month.

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The output of this job is a list your writers can work from and a tracking campaign that tells you, three months on, whether the list was right. Semrush will produce far more rows than any team can write, so most of the work below is cutting. For what the product includes and costs, see the Semrush glossary entry.

Before you spend a single report:

1. Count your reports. One Organic Research search per competitor, one Keyword Gap run and one Keyword Magic search per topic: four competitors and five topics is 4 + 1 + 5 = 10, the whole daily allowance of a free account, per the FAQ on the pricing page. The free account does this job over a few days; the 7-day trial does it in one sitting, without exports.
2. Start from your own queries. Position Tracking imports keywords from Google Search Console and Google Analytics, according to Semrush's rank tracking guide, so the first list can be terms you already rank for.
3. Write down the baseline. Note the Site Audit error count and the Position Tracking Visibility score on day one. Those are the numbers the plan answers to.

Inputs: your domain, three or four competitor domains you lose business to in search, and the country database you sell in. Outputs: a grouped keyword list, a tagged Position Tracking campaign and a Site Audit baseline.

Step 1: Create the project

When you create your first project, Semrush configures and launches Site Audit and Position Tracking for that domain on its own. Later projects need both set up by hand, according to the Site Audit configuration guide. Start with the domain you are planning for.

Step 2: Point Site Audit at the right pages

In the setup wizard, set the Scope (a subfolder such as /blog/ if that is all you are planning), the Limit per audit and the Pages to crawl source. The configuration guide warns that the default Website source follows links from the homepage and finds the most accessible pages, which are not always the most important; a sitemap source prioritises by importance. Set the schedule to weekly. The SEO and Starter plans crawl 100,000 pages a month and 20,000 per monitored website, and JavaScript rendering starts on Pro+, per the plan table on the pricing page.

Step 3: Find the competitors that rank, not the ones you pitch against

Enter your domain in Organic Research, open the Competitors tab and pick up to four sites, as Semrush's keyword list guide describes. These are the domains that share your organic keywords, which is often a different list from the one in your sales deck. A new or small site shows little data here, and the guide suggests using an established site in your niche as the reference instead.

Step 4: Run Keyword Gap

Put your domain in the first field and the competitors after it, in the country database you sell in. The keyword list guide recommends a Keyword Difficulty filter below 50 and an Intent filter, then a look at the Missing and Weak lists: terms where competitors rank and you do not, or rank far better than you. Tick the relevant ones and use + Add to keyword list.

Step 5: Widen with the Keyword Magic Tool

Enter a seed keyword for each topic, choose the country database and a match type, Broad, Phrase, Exact or Related, per the Keyword Magic Tool manual. The Questions button shows question keywords only, and entering your domain in the AI filter bar adds Personal Keyword Difficulty for your own site. The keyword list guide adds a word count filter above four to surface long-tail phrases. Export, if your plan allows it, as XLSX or CSV.

Step 6: Group the list into pages

Send the keepers to Saved Keywords, or start a fresh list in Keyword Strategy Builder with up to five seed keywords. It groups the terms into topics on a Topical Overview map, with preset filters such as Easy Start and Quick Conversions, according to the keyword list guide. Give each topic one planned page and one owner.

A research tool is billed by the report, so its screens are built to make the next report look necessary. The list that matters is the one your team can write this quarter; everything else is a backlog, and a backlog in a spreadsheet costs nothing.

Step 7: Track the list

In Position Tracking, set the scope, the search engine (Google, Bing, Baidu or ChatGPT), the device and a location down to city or postcode, then add keywords from Semrush reports, Keyword Strategy Builder, Search Console or a .txt or .csv file, as the rank tracking guide lists. Tag keywords by topic during setup, attach up to 20 competitors, and click Start Tracking. Tracking several locations or devices in one campaign needs Pro+, per the pricing page.

Step 8: Let an assistant draft the monthly read-out, then check it

Semrush MCP connects ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or Claude Code to live Semrush data. In Claude Code, the setup article adds it with claude mcp add semrush https://mcp.semrush.com/v2/mcp -t http and authenticates through the /mcp command. The connection is read-only, and Starter and Pro+ include 50,000 MCP API units that refresh at renewal, per Understanding Semrush MCP.

Ask the assistant for the organic positions of your saved keywords for your domain and the four competitors, in your country database, with a short note on what moved since last month. A person then opens Position Tracking, filters by the same tags and checks each figure before the note goes to anyone. The article also advises asking for a set result count and database, because broad questions use more units.

What Semrush's own guides warn about

• Crawling from the homepage only. The Website crawl source reaches the pages easiest to find, not your priority pages, per the configuration guide.
• A missing trailing slash. Entering /shoes instead of /shoes/ as a disallowed subfolder skips every URL that starts with /shoes, the same guide says.
• Unstripped parameters. Without URL parameter rules, the crawler can fetch a page with and without ?page= and spend crawl budget twice.
• A blocked bot. The "Auditing domain has failed" error usually means the server blocks SiteAuditBot, and the fix is to allowlist it.
• Planning a trial around exports. Exports are disabled during trials, according to the subscriptions article.

FAQ

How many keywords can I track on the SEO plan?

500 a day, across up to 5 monitored websites, on the SEO and Starter plans, and 1,500 on Pro+, per the pricing page. A free account tracks 10 keywords for one website.

Does Site Audit render JavaScript?

Only on Pro+ and Advanced, according to the plan table on the pricing page. With rendering off, Site Audit reads only the HTML, which the configuration guide calls faster and lighter on your site but less accurate on JavaScript-heavy pages.

Can an AI assistant change anything in my Semrush account?

No. The MCP article describes read-only access: an assistant can retrieve Semrush data but cannot modify or delete it. Each query uses API units, which you can check under My Profile, Subscription Info.