Competitive Market Research with Semrush Trends and Power BI
A working method for digital competitive research, three tools you actually need, and the Power BI layer that turns Bulk Analytics exports into a dashboard your SEO and SEM teams actually read.
Competitive market research fails at the last mile. The data sits in a tool nobody on the team opens. Our fix pairs Semrush Trends with Power BI so the numbers land where people already work.
Most teams buy an intelligence tool, run a few reports, then quietly stop opening it. The insight never reaches the people setting quarterly targets. We treat that gap as the real problem, and we close it with two decisions: where the data comes from, and where people read it.
01How do you run digital competitive market research?
Digital competitive market research is the practice of measuring rivals’ online visibility and turning that measurement into decisions your marketing team acts on. We run it in three steps, and the order matters.
First, pick an online visibility tool. There are plenty: Semrush, Sistrix, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Serpstat, or SE Ranking. Each covers growth-hacking and competitor analysis for marketing and sales. We work in Semrush.
Second, choose where the data lives. This is the step most teams skip, and it is the one that decides whether anyone ever looks. We use Microsoft Power BI. The reason is dull and correct: Microsoft 365 is the office suite your colleagues already have open, and Power BI is part of that family. Cheap, easy to manage, no new login to forget.
Third, add the data source. Semrush Trends is a paid add-on module. With it you build a custom peer group by market or select a predefined business category by market, which becomes the raw material for everything downstream.
02Which Semrush Trends feature visualizes the competitive landscape?
Traffic Analytics is the Semrush Trends feature that visualizes the competitive landscape in depth, and it is the one we build on. Semrush Trends itself is a competitive intelligence solution from Semrush, bundling four tools: Traffic Analytics for a full online performance overview, Market Explorer for industry and competitor analysis, EyeOn for tracking rivals’ activity, and One2Target for audience characteristics.
We stay in Traffic Analytics. It gives us a summarizing view of core web KPIs plus a set of dimensions worth naming.
- 01Audience Overview
- 02Traffic Journey
- 03Top Pages, Subfolders, Subdomains
- 04Geo Distribution
- 05Bulk Analytics, the export that feeds Power BI
Bulk Analytics is the dimension that matters for our workflow. The others inform; this one exports.
The insight your team never sees is worth nothing. Bulk Analytics is the bridge out of the tool.
03How does Power BI turn Semrush data into a dashboard?
Power BI turns Semrush data into a dashboard by taking the Bulk Analytics export as its source and rendering it as a live report your team reads without opening Semrush. You download your custom peer group or business category, load it into Power BI, and start visualizing competitive market data.
That is the ownable move. Semrush measures; Power BI puts the measurement in front of the people who set targets. We use the resulting report to set quarterly OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for SEO and SEM departments. The numbers stop being a monthly export nobody reads and become the baseline for the next quarter’s goals.
We keep a live version running. See it move in the embed below, or read the deeper walk-through:
Semrush Trends is built to give deep insight into traffic data and market trends. For the full feature reference, read Semrush’s own documentation at semrush.com/kb/1121-semrush-trends. We do not re-host it; the source of truth stays with Semrush.
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