We all know how hard it is to drive traffic to a new website or a small business website. But in this Semrush Review Article, I’ll be taking you through a digital marketing research tool called SEMrush.

In this blog, I’ll be teaching you how to use this tool and how to drive traffic to your website with the help of some features in this tool. Stay with me till the end of this blog and you’ll be able to use this tool to drive the traffic you desire for your website.

Semrush Review: What Is SEMrush?

SEMrush is a complete digital marketing research tool that helps you to understand Precisely how and where your competitors have found success, so that you replicate it for your business as well.

 

 

SEMrush can be used to tackle several tasks such as:

• Website audit.
• Position tracking.
• Keyword research.
• Backlink analysis.
• PPC Research.
• Content Planning.
• Social Media Monitoring.

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Again, SEMrush is the most extensive SEO competition intelligence solution you will ever find on the internet. There are lots of other SEO tools out there that performs similar tasks, but I think semrush is the leading pack.

In this semrush review, we will cover in details, all features of semrush, and equally guide you on how to use these features to carry out specific tasks.

SEMrush Features That Make It an Incredible SEO Tool

Let’s look at the core features that set semrush apart from other SEO tools.

1. Competition Analysis: semrush enables you to quickly find your competitors and conduct a thorough analysis of their SEO strength and weakness and use this information to strategically compete with them. We’ll discuss this in detail.

2. Advanced Keyword Research: SEMrush keyword research tool is very comprehensive, unlike most other keyword research tools out there. With SEMrush, you’re not only able to perform basic keyword research, you’ll equally be able to figure out which keywords your competitors are ranking high for and their overall strength.

You can also use the “Related Keywords” feature to identify new keywords in your niche that you never knew existed.

3. Effective Link Building: You’ll never find link building easier than when you use SEMrush, because you’ll see all the backlinks your competitors have, where they got it from and when they got it.

Rather than guessing your competitor’s strength, you can access their backlink data and leverage it to knock them off the organic listing.

4. Complete Website Audit: SEMrush allows you to effectively perform an SEO audit of your website and easily figure out where improvements are required.

5. Social Media Marketing: Using social media in business is very necessary in this era. SEMrush can help in boosting your social media traffic by calculating your social media reach and comparing it to your competitors.

6. Strategic Organic Research: You can use SEMrush to easily generate an in-depth organic research report based on a domain or keyword phrase. This organic research contains all the needed parameters to build a tactical search engine marketing plan.

7. PPC Advertising Insight: PPC advertising can be very challenging, annoying, and frustrating. Especially when you’re not targeting the keywords. Worse case scenario, you could waste thousands of dollars on your pay per click campaigns.

The good news is that SEMrush allows you to look into your competitor’s campaign with respect to paid keywords and leverage this useful data to your advantage.

 

How To Optimizing Your Website With SEMrush

I will describe SEMrush as having a spy in your competitor’s marketing department. Before you look at your competitors, it’s important to understand what you can do to improve on your site. This gives you a vivid knowledge on where to attack your competitors from.

 Auditing Your Website

The best way to fully understand and benefit from this SEMrush review is to get an account. So go ahead and visit their website to create free account here.

Follow the steps below to audit your website;

1. Click on Project and then Add New Project
2. Then enter your information into the box like so:
3. You’ll then need to click on “Site Audit”
4. Fill out the audit settings

Wait for some seconds or minutes depending on your site and you’ll be presented with a lovely, complete audit of your site.

COLLECT BENCHMARK

Before checking out your competitor’s website, you have to first of all start with your own website so you can have a better idea where you are at the moment so you can better compare your website to the competition.

Here’s how to do that;

In SEMrush:

1. Select SEO Toolkit
2. Click on Domain Overview from the side menu
3. Enter the domain e.g. “ahrefs.com” you want to analyze
4. Click search

The report will show your high-level data including;

• Organic search
• Paid search
• Backlinks
• Display advertising

 

 

 

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As you scroll down the page, you can see more details, including:

• Top organic keywords
• Organic position distribution
• Main organic competitors
• Competitive positioning map

 

 

Scroll back up and click the pdf button at the top of the page. Now you can download the dated report and benchmark your data. Use the data on the overview dashboard to establish some baseline benchmark metrics:

• How many organic traffic are you getting?
• How many backlinks do you have pointing to the site?
• How much paid traffic (if any)?
• How many keywords do you have ranking in the top ten search results?

Save this data and save it somewhere important. You have to constantly review this metrics and see if your SEO and PPC efforts are proving effective.

   COMPETITOR RESEARCH

We often underestimate the number of our competitors. We assume that the only top 10-20 ranking sites are rivals. Unlike common perception, there can be countless competitors in your field.

To outdo them, you firstly need to know who they are. SEMrush provides you with a list of all organic competitors. You can spy their keywords, backlinks, and other things in just a few clicks.

Identify Your Top Organic Search Competitors

The next step is to identify your top organic competitors.

In SEMrush:

1. Select SEO Toolkit
2. Click on Organic Research from the side menu
3. Enter the domain you want to analyze e.g. ahrefs.com you want to analyze.
4. Click on the Competitors tab

The Competitor Positioning Map highlights the top organic search competitors. For each domain, you can see the keywords ranking in the top 100 search Results, as well as the volume of organic search traffic.

Scroll down from the Competitor Positioning Map, and you will find Organic Competitors report:

Pay close attention to the following metrics from the above results:

1. Competition Level: the larger the number of common keywords, the more difficult the level of perceived competition.

2. Common Keyword: the keywords for which multiple domains rank in the top Google search results.

3. SE Keywords: the number of keywords bringing visitors to a website via Google’s Top 100 organic search results. I’ll advise that you start with Common Keywords column to filter out the domains currently ranking in the top 100 results for the same keyword you are ranking for.

The more common Keywords, the stronger the competition. Select a domain from the Organic Competitors results that has a high number of common keywords. This is the first competitor you will be analyzing greater in detail.

Take a Behind-The-Scenes Look at Your Competitor’s Performance

Now that you have identified your competitors in the previous step, SEMrush allows you to get an “All Access Backstage pass” to see how your competitors are driving traffic at the individual keyword levels, page/post, and the subdomain/subfolder levels.

You can use this data to create a proven roadmap to quickly scale your organic traffic across each stage.

How to Find Your Competitor’s Keywords

Our aim here is to find keywords that are driving the most traffic. So let us all follow the steps involved keenly and I believe this information will help us know the right keyword to choose to drive traffic necessary traffic to your website.

In SEMrush:

• Select SEO toolkit
• Click on Organic Research from the side menu
• Enter the domain e.g. (semrush.com) you want to analyze
• Click on the Positions tab
• Apply advance filters

How to Find Top-Level Organic Traffic of Your Competitors

To view your competitor’s top-level organic traffic, here are the steps to follow;

• Select SEO Toolkit
• Click on Organic Research from the side menu
• Enter the domain e.g. (semrush.com) you want to analyze
• Click on the Overview tab

The Overview report shows the total organic traffic and keywords for the domain.

How to Find Your Competitors Folders

Using filters in SEMrush, you can find which subfolders drive the most organic search traffic. Here are the steps to follow to do that;

• Select SEO Toolkit
• Click on Organic Research from the side menu
• Enter the domain e.g. (semrush.com) you want to analyze
• Click on the Positions tab
• Apply advanced filters: Include > URL > Containing > /reviews/

How to Find Your Competitor’s Pages/Posts 

You can also check individual pages which are driving the most organic traffic across each stage. This tells you which topics (rather than keywords) your competitors are targeting. Here are the steps to follow;

• Select SEO Toolkit
• Click on Organic Research from the side menu
• Enter the domain e.g. (semrush.com) you want to analyze
• Click on the Pages tab
• Apply advanced filters: Include > URL > Containing > /Collections/

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    Semrush Review: Keyword Magic Tool

This is one of the most effective keyword research tool in the SEMrush suite. With over two million keywords in its data base, you’re sure to find tons of keywords for your business.

You can also create up to 50 target keywords lists if you’re helping multiple clients or if your business has many facets. Simply type in any keyword (although I recommend typing in a short tail keyword) and you’ll get an instant result. Here are the steps to follow;

• Click on Keyword Analytics
• Click on Keyword Magic
• Enter in your target keyword(s) into your search bar and submit.

You’ll get useful data such as;

• Long-tail keywords to pursue
• Average monthly search volume
• A trend graph
• Keyword difficulty
• CPC (average cost to advertise for the keyword)
• Competition for entering Adwords auction
• Number of SERP features found for the keyword

How to Get Tactical Organic Ranking Information

After you’ve managed to identify your top organic search that your competitors have ranked for, identify their top-performing content and unearth loads of potential long tail keywords to target.

Find Out Where Competitors Are Getting the Upper Hand in The SERP

In this step, you’re going to find all the common keywords where your Competitors are ranking higher than you in the SERPs. Here are the steps to follow;

• Select SEO tool
• Select Organic Research from the sidebar menu
• Enter the domain e.g. (semrush.com) you want to analyze
• Click the competitors tab

Scroll down the page to the Organic Competitors table and click on the Common Keywords for one of your competitors.

A new window/tab opens in SEMrush, with the Keyword Gap details pre-populated.

Scroll down the page to the results table listing all the keywords your competitors are ranking for in the top 100 search results.

But to narrow the selection, let’s add a filter, so we only see the results for your competitors site ranking in the top 10 results.

Now you have list of results you can target.

What You Must Do About the Information Above

Export and filter the data above to show your competitor’s top ranked common keywords. This view will show you all the keywords where your competitor is ranking highly, but you are not.

These are immediate areas of potential growth. Click on one of the common keywords and identify which content they are using to rank for it. Click through to the post and analyze the content. Are there obvious reasons why your competitors page ranks and yours doesn’t?

• On page SEO?
• Level of detail?
• Moe up to date?
• Number of referring domains/backlinks?

Take these insights and start optimizing your existing competing content to gain quick wins in the SERPs. Here are some ways to sort the data to get some valuable insights;

• Sort by competitive density to uncover low competition keywords where your competitors rank in the top 10. Revisit your on-page optimization and link building strategy to see if there are opportunities to improve content.  You can climb the rankings for low competition keywords very quickly with a couple of quality backlinks and some basic on-page optimization.
• Sort by CPC to find high commercial intent keywords that you can use to attract more bottom-of-the-funnel traffic.
• Sort by search volume to find keywords that are bringing your competitors a lot of traffic from the SERPs. Often, you’ll come across several keywords you had never considered, but could easily be ranking for.

Semrush Review: Keyword Difficulty

After finding potential keywords to target, one thing to consider is the chances of actually ranking for them. The last thing you should not do is to invest a lot of time, money, and resources targeting keywords you might never rank for.

SEMrush has a Keyword Difficulty Tool that allows you to simultaneously assess the level of competition for a large batch of keywords.

This can save you a lot of time having to filter excel spreadsheets and manually review keyword competition within the Organic Research Positions reports. Here are the steps to follow to determine a certain keyword difficulty;

1. Select SEO Toolkit
2. Click on Keyword Difficulty from the side menu
3. Enter a list of your target keywords
4. Click on the Show Difficulty button

You will then see a table that lists the following:

• Keyword difficulty percentage
• Search volume
• Number of search results (for the query)
• SERP features overview (this tells you if there are featured snippets, instant answers, site links, featured videos, etc. in the search results)
• Keyword trend overview (this is a graph of how the search volume differs across various months, looking at this will give a good indication as to whether the keyword is highly seasonal, or not)
• SERP snapshot (e.g. a snapshot of the top 10 ranking pages)

The higher the keyword difficulty percentage, the more difficult it will be to rank for those keywords. NOTE: If you click on a keyword, it will take you to the Keyword Overview report and shows you which of your competitors are already ranking for that search term, along with the corresponding URL(s). Also you can see the difficulty for other countries.

Semrush Review: What You Must Do

Not all keywords are equal. Some are more competitive than the others. Targeting the wrong keyword can lead to waste of time and money. As a result, I want you to focus on only the competitor keyword opportunities which you can realistically rank for in some few months.

One of the best ways to narrow down the competitor keyword set to these terms is to establish a keyword difficulty baseline.

Then make a note of your keyword difficulty baseline across each relevant intent bucket be it informational, investigational, and commercial, because you’ll be using this to narrow down the competitor keyword opportunities later on.

How to Do Site Keyword Positioning Tracking

To start with position tracking features with SEMrush, you will have to open up your Position Tracking campaign on the overview tab.

You will see a list of summary domain visibility, estimated traffic to the domain, and average position of every keyword you are tracking.

Next, you can find the ranking overview section where you can identify you and your competitor’s position to manage the keywords for your campaign.

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Let’s Start With Visibility Trend

Visibility percent result is based on the average position of any domain ranking pages. If any domain has no ranking on Google top 100 results for any targeted keyword, the visibility will be 0%.

And if any domain has the first position of Google ranking, the visibility will be 100%. You can find here you and your competitor domain visibility at once and go to the estimated traffic and average position graph as well.

How to Find and Remove Toxic Backlinks Using the Backlink Audit Tool

The Backlink Audit Tool checks your domain’s backlink profile to help you avoid Google penalties related to toxic backlinks. You can audit all of your links, analyze the toxic score and markers, request website owners to remove toxic backlinks, and ultimately create a disavow  file to send to Google. How to do that:

• Select SEO Toolkit
• Select Backlink Audit from the side bar menu
• Select from your list of projects

Once you have run a backlink audit, you have the latest results displayed. In the top right-hand corner, you can click on Integration to connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

• Search Console allows you to access extra backlinks for your analysis, get up to date info on disavowed backlinks, and update your disavow file with just one click.
• Google Analytics gives you the updated Toxic score for affected backlinks. On the Overview report, you can see the Domains by Toxic Score showing colored segments of toxic (red), potentially toxic (orange), and non-toxic (green).

Clicking on the View full report button takes you to Audit report. Here you can review the toxicity level of each referring domain, based on 45 toxic markers:

• 60-100 means the domain is Toxic
• 45-59 means the domain is potentially Toxic
  

If you click on the toxic score, you can see why the domain has been flagged:

On each line of the report, you have 3 options:

• Click Delete > To Disavow – requests Google to ignore your toxic backlink
• Click Delete > To Remove – requests domain owners to remove the backlink
• Click Keep > To Whitelist – adds the link to your safe list of domains  

How to Find and Manage More Link Prospects in Seconds

SEMrush allows users to find, check and manage thousands of link building Prospects in seconds. Here’s how it works:

• Enter the SEMrush Link Building Tool
• Enter a list of keywords plus competitors and let SEMrush do its magic.
• Select the best prospects from the list SEMrush kicks back.
• Reach out and secure the link without ever leaving SEMrush.

Here’s how to do it: Go into one of your projects and select Link Building option

Next, you’ll be prompted to add up to 10 keywords you want to earn high rankings for and up to 10 competitors

Then click Start Link Building after a few minutes, SEMrush should kick an Overview report. Click on the Prospects tab to see more info

The data of each prospect is very important. For example

• The Rating tells you how difficult getting a link from this website is likely to be. The higher the rating, the more likely you’ll be able to add the link to your backlink profile.
• The Trust Score measures the quality of a domain based on its referring domains.

How to Reclaim Lost Backlinks

It hurts a lot when you lose valuable links you’ve worked so hard to build. Though it hurts, it happens. But SEMrush allows you to check how you lost your backlinks and how to get them back. To do this,

• Head back to the Backlinks Analytics tool and select Backlinks tab
• Click the Lost backlinks
• Select the follow filter
• Sort by Page Score in descending order

How to Optimize Your Content with the On-Page SEO Checker

The On-Page SEO Checker provides a structured list of things you could do to improve the rankings of pages on your website. The report includes on-page SEO ideas, semantically related words to include on your Pages, target content length, readability, and backlink prospects.

SEMrush calculates the optimization ideas based on the top 10 real-time competitors for each of your targets pages and keywords.

The Overview report displays the total number of suggested ideas, an estimation of how much traffic the ideas could help you gain, and a short table with the suggested pages to optimize first

From the report, you can click the links to investigate the optimization ideas further Or you can head straight to the Optimization Ideas tab where you’ll see a list of all the suggestions:

You can sort the table by priority, URL, Keywords, Total Volume, Last Update, or the number or type of ideas. The on-page SEO checker advises what action you take and what benefits you can expects as a result. It’s an excellent way to start analyzing your site.

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SEMRUSH REVIEW: PRICING AND PLANS

In all semrush is a saas (Software As A Service) application which charges both monthly and yearly price. As compare to other SEO softwares like ahrefs, moz etc it seems a little bit expensive.

But one thing you have know is that, in everything quality and value comes first. Once you know what the tool can do for you, there is no need to be worried about the price. Below is the pricing table for all the plans.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What Is Semrush?

Semrush is an amazing tool that you can use to do all your SEO research analysis for your websites. It can be used to do Keyword Analysis, On-Page SEO ckecking, Backlink profile auditing, Competitors intelligence analysis and so many SEO releated features.

How Much Does Semrush Cost?

Semrush has three main plans for its users. They are categorized base on their functions and the amount of data you want to get from each plans. All the plans are paid on monthly or yearly bases.

• Pro Plan – $99.95
• Guru Plan – $199.95
• Business Plan – $399.95

Is There Any Semrush Free Trail ?

Unlike other competitors SEO tools, semrush has a 7 days free trial for you to use any features in the software for your SEO needs. You can unlock your 7 days free trial here before it expires.

What countries & languages does SEMRush support?

Currently semrush has data for Canada, USA, United Kingdom, Australia, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Singapore, Finland, China, Ireland, Mexico, Israel, Netherlands & Turkey.

Semrush data is over 100 million Keyword across the countries above which you can access here . Semrush tracking tool can allow you to perform ranking analysis in any location.

What Is Semrush Used For?

Semrush as it is can be mainly use for SEO analysis. There several SEO  metrixes that youb can use semrush for syuch as:

• Competitive Reasearch
• Keyword Research
• Link Building
• Rank Tracking
• On-Page & Tech SEO

CONCLUSION

SEMrush is an amazing tool, so I will devise every reader to purchase it if you have not and this semrush review should be use as a starting point of your SEMrush journey.

The information in this review are not only thing you have to know about SEMrush but It’s enough to get you started in driving traffic to your website. However, I’ll advise you to explore the tool and make good use of it.

If you follow the above advice, you’ll be able to drive more than enough traffic to your site and the purpose for your site will definitely be achieved. You can leave your questions in the comment section and we’ll get back to you right away. Subscribe to our youtube channel here for more tutorials.