Become a pro in SEMrush
SEMrush is one of our favourite tools at Direct Impact when it comes to SEO. It provides an amazing overview on the main SEO pillars, not even mentioning its in-depth analytical features, visual graphs, automated reporting options, and its integrations to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Data Studio, and Trello. SEMrush offers different overview options, depending on where you are igniting your SEO fire for awesome results.
Depending on your primary goals, SEMrush can be used for advertising, social media management, content marketing, competitor analysis, local SEO and many more! How cool is that?
Let’s take a closer look on a higher level from their SEO menu:
Keyword research
At Direct Impact we don’t like assumptions, but shoot I will say this, by assumption this is where SEO starts for content. Without a conducted keyword research, you will create ad-hoc content with random topics. Don’t get me wrong, you might get lucky with a trending topic. But you can also focus on content-pillars and have some strategy behind those awesome organic traffic brining content formats 😉
When it comes to SEMrush, you can choose between the following points for keyword research:
- Keyword Overview – this section gives you a top-level overview on the keywords you enter. It provides a pretty coherent overview and helps you with a quick start to set your focus.
- Keyword Magic Tool – this is a keyword generator by SEMrush that you can use for SEO and for PPC.
- Keyword Manager – this is where you can deep-dive into keywords. You can send them to your projects and campaigns, or collect your favourite (aka most important) keywords under one interface.
- Position Tracking – this section lets you track a website’s daily rankings for a selection of targeted keywords.
- Organic Traffic Insights – it combines your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush data into a dashboard.
Competitive research
Well this is what I call an unfair advantage 😉 This section of SEMrush lets you spy on your competitors on a deeper level.
Based on their URL, SEMrush will collect the keywords they are ranking for and lets you run a gap analysis. Meaning you will end up having a visual and a table overview of the unique keywords from your side and your competition.
Just to make your life easier, SEMrush will categorise these keywords depending on uniqueness, allowing you to see search volume, and keyword difficulty based on competition. Everyone who works in SEO for content optimization knows that this is like liquid gold. In many cases, you have to play around with different tools to have overviews like this, so the amount of time you can save with this section of SEMrush is unbelievable.
Wait, there is more…
You can also set this up for backlinks 😉
Link building
As easy as it sounds, the link building section collects a full list of link building opportunities. Yes, all right, many tools can do that. SEMrush also provides you management interface.
It basically makes it super easy for you to keep track of backlink opportunities, and you can follow different strategies behind it. It gives you a built-in workflow to manage the process of your outreach. That means you can connect your Gmail account and do all communication from SEMrush. Depending on the account you have, it can also give you the contact information for the target websites and – last for the best – it provides monitoring and reporting on the progress over time.
Easiest.LinkBuilding.Process.Ever.
On Page SEO
This section is available once you have a project where SEMrush crawls the website in a recurring time frame – depending on how you set it up, this can be daily / weekly etc.
Once you have this section up and running
On Page SEO Checker
This feature gives you all the input and ideas you need to have on page level.
Obviously, you can change your URL parameters around when you set this up, so you can focus only on product category pages if needed. Or the blog section. Or product pages. Basically on anything you want.
How it works is it will collect a set of URLs and create an idea list out of it for optimization.
It will break it down for you on different sections from keywords through semantics to UX. You will be able to see if there is no meta description, weak keywords strategy, readability issues of your content, or – a real SEO nightmare – keyword cannibalization is happening on your pages. Each of these ideas can be directly connected to Trello if you prefer some project management tool included in your process 😉
SEO content template
This feature of SEMrush is a dream come true. Basically SEMrush can check the top 10 results on Google based on the keyword you are searching for and based on their content, it can create a template for you, so nothing can hold you back to work out SEO-friend contents 😉
Any questions? Contact our Queen of tooling.
Meet Blanka
Blanka is our MarTech tooling specialist. She is a real Boss with Martech tools susch as SEMrush. At Dirtect Impact we know her as the queen of tooling. Do you want to get started with SEO? Or do you want to know what Blanka and her team can do for you? Get in touch.
