The Beginner’s Guide To Semrush

SEMRUSH is one of the online tools that you can regularly monitor your website’s performance and competitors from SEO to PPC when it comes to digital marketing.

beginner's guide to semrush

 In addition to the vital data it provides, it stands out with its regular follow-up of trends and innovative approach. Using SEMRUSH well gives you a significant advantage in your digital marketing efforts. After reading the article and evaluating our proposal in the last section, you will use Semrush more effectively.

Introduction to SEMRUSH

Semrush is an online tool that you can buy with a monthly payment. You can start using Semrush by paying $ 99.95 monthly with the “PRO” payment plan at the best price. At first, this price may not seem very affordable, but considering the similar tools on the market and the services it provides, this budget looks quite reasonable. With the PRO plan, you can add five websites as a project. Using it annually can save USD 200 by paying USD 999 instead of 1199 on this plan.

Before deciding which package is right for you, let’s review the key features of the tool:

Domain Analytics: In this section, you can get essential data about the SEO or PPC performance of any domain you own.

Projects: This section uses for services such as on-site Audit, ranking, and backlink tracking for any domain you define as a project.

Reporting: Semrush can provide regular reports on your sites in PDF format; some pricing plans have features such as personal branding in messages (the PRO plan does not have this feature).

User Management: Each account will start with one user, depending on the package you choose, and you can allow up to 9 people to access their Semush account with their username (the PRO plan is limited to just one user). It is worth mentioning that there is a monthly payment of $ 140 for each extra user.

Other: You can prepare dashboards by providing API access to show in different applications (the PRO plan does not have this feature).

Now that we know each feature, we can explain how you can use SEMrush.

You can see the SEMrush Dashboard in the image above. Each primary function is listed on the left, and the main categories are Domain Analytics, Keyword Analytics, Project, and My Reports. Besides, there are two more beta features at this stage: the SEO Content Template and Topic Research (Subject Heading Analysis), which we will briefly introduce.


You can type in a keyword or domain name to get started. When you enter a domain name, you go to the “Domain Analysis” section, and a keyword opens the “Keyword Analysis” page.

In this example, we searched “Amazon.com.” As you can see in the image, you can choose which location the marketing results are based on. Presenting data by geographic location is just one of the features that make Semrush stand out; Whenever you search, you should always make sure that you check the results against the country the site is targeting. So you can be sure of getting the most accurate results.

Creating and Managing Projects

Before we get to the search features, it’s time to start your first project.

From the control panel, you will see a button on the right called “Projects” with an “Add” button (+) next to it; when you click this button, the box where you can enter your project’s domain name and name opens as above. Enter your details and click the “create” button

After creating your project, you will see a shortlist of tools SEMrush has as above. Unfortunately, let’s say that you have to do a separate project for your site’s mobile and desktop versions right now.

Site Audit

The Site Audit or Site Audit tool performs on-site SEO checks on your site and extracts potential technically potential on-site improvements. This tool is unique and essential because it is continuously updated by following significant Google developments. It also allows us to compare the scans’ results at specific dates, helping us create Pre – Post-development reports in case of on-site errors.

You can learn essential tips about the Site Audit section by watching the Semrush Academy video below:

Pro Tip: We recommend that you prioritize fixing errors under the heading “Errors,” shown in red, and contains significant on-site SEO errors. We recommend that you not pay much attention to the “Total Score” section in this report, as it means nothing more than a score provided by SEMrush. However, your increase in this score from week to week will ultimately reflect positively on SEO work.

Position Tracking

Rank tracking lets you see where your site ranks in search engines for specific keywords. While the data in this section isn’t 100 percent accurate, it’s a great way to track your site’s progress instantly.
As you can see in the image, it is imperative to choose location and device while tracking the ranking. Optionally, you can narrow the results by selecting a region and city.

You can add competing sites to the section in the above field. This is entirely optional, but we recommend adding a few competitors to compare. By adding competitor sites, you can know your site’s performance and potentially what you can expect.

You can add competing sites to the section in the above field. This is entirely optional, but we recommend adding a few competitors to compare. By adding competitor sites, you can know your site’s performance and potentially what you can expect

You can learn the critical tips about the Position Tracking section by watching the SEMRUSH Academy video below:

 

SEO Ideas -or On Page Checker-

This section provides practical on-site optimization suggestions that can be performed quickly on your site. These suggestions can be in the form of a keyword added to your page, and sometimes you may receive a warning that you are using your target keyword excessively in your content.

To start working in the SEO ideas section, you need to select the site’s pages you want to be optimized. You can import this list or enter each of the URLs manually. When you’re ready, SEO Ideas will start analyzing your chosen pages. After that, it divides the ideas into separate categories with their colors.

Strategy ideas: Shown if you have more than one page on your site targeting the same keyword. If you already have another page on your site with a higher ranking in the search engine, it takes time to try and rank a page.

Semantic Ideas: Search engines consider relevant content when ranking for keywords; this semantic section will tell you if it will also help target search terms related to your page’s content.

Content Ideas: This section will help you understand the page content. It will suggest things like improving title tags (<h1> <h2>), and adding more content.

Backlink ideas: Backlinks are an essential part of SEO; this section will alert you to potential link-building opportunities for your business and help you improve your link text.

Technical ideas: You can see errors of the type that will require you to conduct a site audit in this section. If there are severe errors on your site, we recommend that you run the site audit application.

User Experience Ideas: Today, your site’s user interface, navigation structure, and ease of navigation become all the more critical. This section tries to show you the cells potentially causing some confusion and uses Google Analytics to pull this data.

You can see more data when you click on one of the page ideas. You will find a difficulty level for each of the suggested changes. Some changes may seem more difficult than others, so it might be a good idea to start with the easy and go from the hard way.

You can learn more by watching our Rank Increase video with On-Page SEO Checker:

You can learn the essential tips about the On-Page Checker section by watching the SEMRUSH Academy video below:

Social Media Tracker

By giving the Social Media tool access to your brand’s following social media accounts and specifying your competitors, you can receive regular social media benchmark (competitor benchmark) reports.

-Facebook
-Twitter
-Instagram
-YouTube
-Google Plus

There are some features this tool offers; below are some of the features that will improve your social media presence:

  • You can review multiple competing social media events.
  • You can monitor the ups and downs in traffic your social accounts receive.

You can look at the top trending hashtags used by your competitors.
You can compare with your competitors by tracking your social media habits, such as broadcasting frequency and the amount of interaction.
You can export multiple data types in PDF format.

Brand Monitoring

Brand tracking is a new feature for Semrush; it allows specific keywords to be tracked to see how often and in what position they are mentioned. You can use this information to improve your marketing strategy; for example, you can reach sites that do not contain a link to your site but mention your brand.

After filling in the information, you will see a dashboard like the above. From here, you can see the keywords and your mentioned pages; you can reach these results in more detail by expanding it to a mini browser window that shows you exactly where it was viewed. There are several ways to organize results with SEMrush; it offers loads of filter options and tags to separate products from each other.

Pro TipDon’t settle for using this tool to detect the web pages your brand is referring to. With this tool, you can discover online content where your web address passes (e.g., stradijidev.wpengine.com) but does not link to your site, and you can use it for backlink purchase and tracking.

You can get a better idea of what you can do with the tool by watching the SEMRUSH video below:

PPC (Pay Per Click) Keyword Tool

Using Semrush for your PPC research can be an excellent way to effectively use your digital advertising budget. This tool can pull off a staggering amount of data, and it can get you to an advantage. Once you’ve finished planning your PPC strategy on SEMrush, you can transfer all the content to your AdWords account in one click.

You can also go to the “negative” tab and add any negative keywords you do not want to show in your ads at the campaign level.

Organic Traffic Insights

You give this tool access to your website’s Google Analytics and Search Console accounts. The tool provides information on which page is ranked organically with how many different search queries by matching based on the landing page. It allows you to regularly monitor organic traffic performance and the organic traffic you get from other search queries that we call the long tail.

Pro TipWith the tool, you can regularly track how many different search queries any landing page is ranked. You can make arrangements in your content to pass these search queries. In this way, it will be possible to regularly increase the organic traffic you get from long-tail search queries.

You can get a better idea of what you can do with the tool by watching the SEMRUSH video below:

Domain Analytics

This section contains all the information you want to learn about domain names. This section includes a few tools to help you gather efficient information about your competitors and your domain.

Fields Overview

To get an overview of any domain name, you must enter the URL in the top search bar. Thus, you can see all the data that SEMrush has that domain name. You can click on the data in the results to expand the information.

In the “Overview” section, four main data groups exist. : Organic Search, Paid Search, Backlinks, and Display Advertising.

Organic Search

This section shows the monthly organic traffic your site receives. You can review multiple charts showing branding and statistics not directly related to the brand name, traffic, organic and paid keywords trends, and more. To get all of the data, you can click the “view full report” button, and you can save a copy of the report to your computer with the “export” option.

Paid Search

The paid search area shows how much traffic you can earn from the paid ad space.

Paid search statistics are very similar to organic search statistics; however, these are the results of paid search ads. SEMRush can show the competitiveness of specific keywords and what kind of Cost Per Click (CPC) you can expect.

Video Advertising

You can use this section to get statistical data if you publish video advertisements about your site on YouTube.

This report will show how many users have viewed your ad since it was published. When you click on any video, you can see the home page to which the ad is associated.

This section displays the backlink found by SEMrush. When you expand the data here, you can see where the backlinks come from.

Here, you can get detailed information about the domains you get the most links, the follow / nofollow ratio of the links, and the link text that the links have.

Pro TipSemrush’s backlink tool lags far behind tools like Ahrefs.com when tracking backlink performance. It is helpful to consider this situation while making your analysis. Be careful to use other backlink analysis tools.

You can learn the methods you should follow to get backlinks using SEMrush by watching the video below:

Traffic Analysis

semrush-traffic-analytics

It works very similar to Google Analytics. It will show your monthly traffic in different colors with various sources. You can get detailed information on customer behavior from this data, the country the call came from, and where they went after visiting the website. In each of these reports, you can access more data, see which search engines you use and which social media platforms are the most popular.

Important Note: “Traffic Analytics” tool is not free. Please look at the Prices page for details.

Traffic Rank

semrush-ranking-table

This domain is a list of the top 100,000 domains in SEMrush. We can say that this is a pretty exciting section for everyone in digital marketing to help you research the best possible website. You can use the sites listed here to get backlinks. You can also see high-performing Web sites by looking at the “Winners-Losers” section.

This area shows you a list of the top 100,000 similar websites. While the results shown in brackets are the public figures for that month, the green and red results show the search engine’s organic traffic, the ad traffic, the movements in areas such as keywords, and monthly click costs in AdWords. Sites listed at the top of the search are the winners with a standard increase in traffic; those at the bottom are considered losers due to traffic loss. Clicking on any of these sites will take you to the “domains overview” page for further analysis.

Domain Comparison

This section, which you can use to compare multiple domain names, can enter up to 5 Web sites and get data to show graphs and tables. Above, you can see a simple example model that allows you to compare three domains. Here, we used amazon.com, ebay.com, and netflix.com domains. The chart shows which site has a higher search volume.

You can add two other sites to compare results using the advanced mode. You can examine it with the keywords compiled from the five places we reached.

Keyword Analysis

The keyword analysis section is the section that presents the results that will be displayed when you type a keyword in the search bar instead of the domain name. Keywords are like bread and butter for someone searching the Web. People will use other keywords to search regardless of what they are looking for. This is where Keyword analysis comes in handy; With SEMrush, you can get all the detailed information you need on any keyword you can think of.

Keyword Analysis Overview

The keyword analysis section is the section that presents the results that will be displayed when you type a keyword in the search bar instead of the domain name. Keywords are like bread and butter for someone searching the Web. People will use other keywords to search regardless of what they are looking for. This is where Keyword analysis comes in handy; With SEMrush, you can get all the detailed information you need on any keyword you can think of.

Keyword Analysis Overview

In the keyword overview section, you can see a graph similar to a domain name search showing the keyword’s CPC (cost per click). Above is the list of data you will get with each search term.

Volume: This shows the average number of keyword searches in a month. Volume is a great way to determine the popularity of a particular keyword. While single-word or short keywords usually bring the most traffic due to the term’s width, “long tail” keywords are more likely to be specific to a specific meaning, type of service, or match.

The number of results: You will see the number of products listed on Google for this keyword; This indicates how competitive the keyword and the industry are.

Trend: You can see how popular the keyword you’re querying has been over the past 12 months. Following the latest trends frequently helps you understand which area of ​​the industry you can provide the best service.

CPC (Cost Per Click) – You can see each keyword’s cost price in Google AdWords. If you plan to launch a PPC campaign, researching which keywords they would best bid on using this campaign is worth researching.

Competition: Metrics showing how competitive a keyword is in Google AdWords can be found here.

Pro Tip: We recommend using the Keyword Magic Tool while doing keyword research. It will help you create a content strategy by finding other semantically meaningful keywords related to a particular topic.

You can explore the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool and what you can do using it by watching the video below:

Link Fluctuations

Sometimes a website may lose its rank quickly due to fluctuations in search engines. Sometimes the reason may not be search engines; a vulnerability may arise if the competition for keywords that have become the website’s focus and other websites targeting these keywords start to come to the fore with their content.

semrush-link-volatility

As you can see in the sample chart above, you can get data on how the website has fluctuated in the last 30 days. This tool gives the fluctuation rate between 0 and 10; it may be possible to say that the higher the score, the higher the sensitivity and fragility rate. You can also use a widget that you can place on your website to access these statistics easily.

If you have a client who communicates with you about ranking a page or keyword, we recommend looking at this tool. This data can prove that a change in Google is beneficial and can help you justify the variability in rankings.

Start a 14 Days Free Trial!

We can give you Semrush support to get better conversion and results from all your digital marketing campaigns, especially SEO and SEM. To do this, sign up for the 14-day free trial version of Semrush by clicking this link.

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