A tool to help you with your content marketing strategy and bring insights about your competition: learn how to use SEMrush right now.
If you were interested in this reading, you probably already understand the basics of Content Marketing.
I think you also have SEO knowledge and you know how this is a rough world and full of information.
But perhaps you face some challenges when putting all this into practice.
Doubts like “what keywords should I use” ?, “what keywords am I ranking for” or “how can I put together a good link building strategy”? they are quite common.
All right, it looks wonderful, but how do you do it?
In this article, you will find a complete tutorial on how to use SEMrush and how each function will help you.
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But before you proceed further and get yourself into it, you need to know a little about Semrush and its use.
What is semrush & How can you use it?
This is the first question that comes in mind of any user, whenever they heard about a new thing. Isn’t it?
There are various Marketing tools available now on the internet but they can’t provide a complete set of unique functions like semrush does. Semrush is an ultimate Weapon for marketing, which every Digital marketer should possess. But not to forget that it is paid tool with the cost starts at $ 99.95 per month for their Pro plan, however, you can also save up to $ 200 By choosing to pay $ 999.40 for a yearly plan.
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This tool provides extremely relevant data and is considered one of the best tools for SEO analysis among its rivals.
SEMrush’s strengths mainly involve a thorough analysis of keyword searches, global site analysis, and competitor analysis.
This tool provides extremely relevant data and is considered one of the best tools for SEO analysis.
SEMrush’s strengths mainly involve a thorough analysis of keyword searches, global site analysis, and competitor analysis.
Oops! Competition analysis? Well, you can do a bit of it with free tools like ubersuggest for competitor analysis. But I highly recommend to do it with semrush to get more professional outputs.
Yes! SEMrush data refers not only to your site but also to any domain you want to search for.
And while there are a number of great tools for SEO efforts, SEMrush lets you organize pretty much everything that matters in one place.
The site is very intuitive and gives it to find everything very easily, so we will investigate the possibilities it has to offer.
Initial Dashboard of Semrush
To get started on SEMrush, just make an account on the site. When you do, you will find an initial panel.
In it, you can configure your projects.
At the top, it has a search bar. There you can type a domain or a keyword to obtain information that will be organized in panels according to the search.
In the sidebar, you will find the analysis options that are also displayed in the generated panels.
Domain Analysis Using Semrush Toolkit
The name itself says so, right?
Just type the domain you want in the search bar for SEMrush to present you with the information related to that specific domain.
That’s great for analyzing both your site and the competition.
You’ll find information on organic and paid search, backlinks, main keywords, and competition.
Reminder 1:
When doing domain analysis, don’t use https: // or www. Using these will direct you to a specific page and not to the domain as a whole.
Reminder 2:
After searching, select the relative country you are analyzing. In this case, I put the US, because I wanted the data from Topglobals [choosen for analysis]and not from its subdomains.
There is the possibility of linking the Google Search console to the SEMrush and obtaining data together with the presented report.
Organic traffic Analysis Using Semrush
In this part, you will have access to the organic data referring to the domain:
- Top organic keywords: These are the top keywords searched on Google that lead to your site. This is useful to understand what brings more traffic to the domain in question.
- Distribution by organic position: this traffic is very good and shows how many keywords your content ranks for.
- Top Organic Competitors – This part shows the top competitions for the same keywords.
- Competitive positioning map: it is a very cool graph! It shows the main competition (each competitor is a different ball) on a graph based on the coordinates “organic keywords” and “organic traffic”.
Each report can be extended to show all the results.
To do this, just click on “View full report” or on each desired subtopic in the sidebar.
By extending the organic keyword report, we were able to see details of which posts they are positioning for which keywords and their variations.
This is very interesting to analyze variations in positioning.
Understanding Paid search Traffic with Semrush Paid traffic toolkit
In this session, you will have access to the same information mentioned above, but this time for paid media.
Backlinks Analytics of Semrush
Backlinks are essential for the search engine to identify the authority of your site and that of your content.
Healthy links, meaning that they come from authoritative sites and point to your domain, bring credibility to your site. Also read this new best semrush review 2020
SEMrush brings a report of backlinks that tells us how many and which domains are pointing to yours.
In this way, it is possible to identify in a timely manner, the origin and destination of those backlinks, that is, where they come from and for which pages they point.
The report also indicates the main anchors used, that is, to which text your link is being linked.
In addition to indicating the type of backlink: if it is linked to text or image, for example, and whether it is follow or no-follow.
This is useful to understand what your business is being related to and by whom.
It is also possible to understand the quality of the domain based on the backlinks through the Domain Score and True Score.
The Domain Score is related to the authority and quality of the domain. As for the True Score, it refers to the quality of the backlinks that point to your domain, that is, links to sites with good Domain Score.
Remembering that this information can be entered for any domain.
Therefore, all those possibilities that I just mentioned for your site, also apply to your competitor’s sites.
This is useful to identify what is possible to improve in your backlink strategy, which links to improve to a better position, which anchors to explore and even who is relevant to your area.
It is still possible to get multiple charts. The first of them points to the backlinks gained and lost over time.
Below, you will see other charts that will point to the type of backlinks received from the different criteria.
All charts can be enlarged to receive a full report.
It is possible to obtain detailed information about each backlink, see:
Each information of each backlink is presented in detail according to the domain coming from.
Evaluating the quality of these backlinks, there is still the possibility of excluding unwanted backlinks, it is enough that SEMrush is linked to Google Search Console.
Keyword Gap
In this part, it is possible to analyze two (or more) domains side by side.
The analysis compares according to the domains you choose based on keywords.
Let’s exemplify comparing Hubstaff with Clockify.
As we can see, the two domains have 7.9Kkeywords in common. That’s a lot, considering that HubSpot has 62.3K keywords ranking.
Therefore, those domains have strong competition for positioning with each other. The report also indicates the position of that keyword for each domain compared, in addition to the information already known, such as the search volume and difficulty of the word in question.
Filters can be used to find desired words or even select the search field, in addition to being able to filter by position.
In the example below, we select only the words that rank in both domains in the top 5 positions. Observe:
Thus, it is easier to identify similar content, in addition to flaws and quantities in each one.
Keyword analysis Using Semrush
With this tool it is possible to analyze a keyword and evaluate its difficulty, AdWords cost, positioning difficulty, among other variables.
Choose a keyword and type in the search field. Remember to always do the search based on your person, your context and demands, and make a choice according to the stage of the funnel you are in.
A report like this will be generated below:
The report will present organic and paid search data, CPCs by country, keywords with phrase match, related keywords, and SERP results by position.
Let’s better unravel each of the aspects present in the report:
Organic search and paid search
Those are the first two aspects presented when searching for a keyword.
Its importance is to present in summary form, the search volume and number of results for the keyword (organic search), CPC and competition (paid search).
In this case, I searched for the word “semrush” and selected the results for the United States. We see that:
- The search volume is 49.5k;
- The CPC for AdWords is $ 4.55;
- Competition is 0.21
All these values are high for a keyword, and from this we can conclude that it is an extremely difficult keyword and that it requires a lot of effort to position.
In this way, it is possible to conclude that, being among the first results, the return will be great.
Therefore, this first basic result is a preview so that you understand the profile and the difficulty of that word, which can be better understood based on the complete reports.
Phrase match
The phrase match points to keywords related to the one you are looking for, bringing variations of it.
The results are related to the users who click the most when searching for the word you selected in the search engine.
This is useful for you to search for long tails, subtitles or even variations of SEO titles for your content. Which results, of course, in your positioning.
In addition to that, SEMrush will target data related to that keyword.
You can filter the results according to what you are looking for, be it the level of difficulty, unwanted terms or CPC, for example.
Related Keywords
Despite looking like the same thing as phrase matching, it’s not!
Certainly, this section is related to the variations that the user types to find the results of the keyword they are looking for.
In other words, each person can type different keywords to find the same result, and SEMrush will show you what those words are.
Therefore, it is very common to find in this report, the variations of singular and plural, the differences of spaces and typing errors.
Organic Search Results
This part will show you the results of the organic search for the keyword you are looking for.
For “Semrush”, we can see that the first result is that of Semrush.com, even before Backlinko!
It is possible to analyze the domains in different positions, just alter the tab between “1-20”, “21-40” and so on.
This allows you to analyze what the first positioned are doing well and get insights for your strategies.
Keyword Magic Tool
This is a resource still under testing in SEMrush and it can bring good insights to your keyword strategy.
Just type a word and Keyword Magic Tool provides variations for it.
Thus, it is easier to make a selection based on factors such as search volume, difficulty percentage and competitive density.
In the case of the keyword that we used in the example, “Semrush”, the Keyword Magic Tool provides more than 94 thousand views. With such a large number, analysis becomes difficult.
So there are the filtering resources to narrow the list down to the keywords that really matter to your strategy.
Filters include, for example, word count, word difficulty, and desired and unwanted words.
In the example below, I made the filter so that the list had only 3 to 5 words, difficulty level between 30 and 70% and I excluded the term “sales”.
Notice how the list was reduced: the list now has just 10,950 keywords, instead of more than 95,000, as before.
It is still possible, using the box on the left, to select keywords belonging to the same group.
From setting up your site as a SEMrush project, you will have access to some useful resources.
Site Audit With Semrush Toolkit
In general, Site Audit is a resource that will give you information about the health of your site through a note.
This will search and identify various SEO related to your site, such as unwanted links and broken pages.
In the panel, it will write down the errors, warnings and warnings in general, through graphics.
With all other reports, this one can also be expanded for more detailed analysis.
For that, just select the tabs “Problems”, “Tracked Pages”, “Statistics”, “Compare Tracking” and “Progress”.
This is very useful to identify errors that may be negatively affecting the positioning of your content.
Position Tracking
In this part, it is possible to compare your domain and that of your competition, based on the SERP results.
The comparison is made based on the variety of the keyword and the positioning for those words.
The information is presented in a general way for a more visual and less detailed analysis.
Graphics generated can be visibility, traffic and average position.
There is also the option to analyze in more detail, each keyword and see the position of each domain, which ones have snippet or videos in the SERP, and other characteristics.
Backlink Audit
In this report it is possible to identify all the backlinks and details about them.
SEMrush gives an overview of backlinks, which can be extended.
You must be wondering the difference between Backlink Audit and the domain analysis backlink report.
The basic difference is that, in the Backlink Audit, SEmrush itself points out toxic links, based on a note (Toxic Score).
That is, it does an automatic analysis and tells you what needs to be changed.
However, it is clear that this is not a substitute for good human analysis.
Like everything in content marketing, it is essential that you understand the process and everything that is happening.
Organic Trafic Insights
The great advantage of this tool is to gather relevant data from the Search Console and Analytics in a single panel, facilitating analysis.
SEO Content Template
For those who are starting out in content production or are uninspired, or even for those who already produce content and need to streamline the process, this can be a good alternative.
This allows you to create SEO-optimized content from the keywords you want, offering a template based on the best Google results.
For that, just choose the keyword, select region and language and SEMrush will generate a template from the provided data.
However, always remember to check if what you offer matches and caters to your strategy.
Social Media Tool
This tool allows the comparison of your social networks with those of your competition.
Thus, you will be able to understand what is working in your social media strategy, what should be improved and what trends to follow in relation to the market.
And more importantly: it is possible to understand what your audience is looking for and what they are engaging with in the best way.
The channels that can be analyzed are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
For each channel, it is possible to obtain a specific report of publications, audience, activity, interactions and hashtags.
In the publications report it is possible to identify the main posts of the selected period organized by interaction.
In addition to the numerical value, there is a hook note given by SEMrush itself, beyond the data of each interaction (in the case of Facebook, reactions, comments and times shared).
Outside of this, it is also possible to compare the performance of your channels with those of other companies.
At the bottom of the page, you will find a general comparative graph of audience, activity and interaction for each of the selected blogs.
The bars are organized in such a way that they point to all the channels and the social result generated by all, and they are divided by color to indicate the participation of each channel in total.
It is possible to obtain more detailed data in relation to your competitors.
For that, just click on the tab of each analyzed channel and select the aspect you want to analyze.
For example: selected Facebook -> Audience, we have this graph that indicates the evolution of likes for each selected competitor. The analysis can be done for days, weeks or months.
This graph may seem a little boring (and it is), but there are others.
If you select, for example, Facebook -> Engagement, see how the graph looks for each competitor.
Those comparisons can be great for understanding what works for social in your market and having insights from other strategies.
Lead Generation Tool
This is a widget to stimulate your visitors to provide their data. This can be very useful to help in the conversion, through obtaining data from the leads.
My reports
With this resource, it is possible to issue reports with various SEMrush data in relation to a specific domain in a summarized form in a PDF or to receive it via email.
The reports can be easily customized to house the desired data in an easy and intuitive way.
Final Thought On Choosing Semrush
SEMrush, even being a paid tool, brings several benefits that can help you a lot in an SEO strategy.
Keyword analysis, detail on organic positioning and analysis of competition at various levels are the main ones.
In addition to that, it has the great advantage of gathering various information in easy-to-navigate panels and the possibility of linking various projects in the same account.
Therefore, with the possibility, this investment can be extremely useful for your business.
I recommend that, if you don’t have a planned budget for you paid for such advantageous tools, start thinking about it now!
Did you like the article? Still, have doubts about SEMrush and other SEO tools? Leave your doubts in the comments!
Rahul is a content marketer at topglobals. He is an expert in studying the latest trends and talk about online businesses and growing businesses on the internet. Playing with keyword buttons with magical words are part of his passion.
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