SEMRush: SEO & Content Marketing Tools
Summary: SEMRush is a Swiss army knife tool that allows web marketers to explore the deepest levels of search engine optimization, site auditing, and competitor analytics.
It’s a fantastic tool for visualizing growth and evolution, but also for identifying successes and optimization opportunities for your website. SEMRush provides expert insight and recommendations for areas of improvement and celebrates areas where we’re already being successful.
This tool is exclusively for full-service clients. I regularly use essential tools from SEMRush for clients committed to actively growing their website(s) and who leverage Google Ads.
Before you read this. SEMRush is a particularly large tool. I’m attempting to share info/screenshots in a simple and digestible way.
Let’s look at a couple of examples.
SEO Tools
Content Tools
Integrations
Keyword Research
Whether you’re working in Google Ads or growing your websites, keyword research will inevitably come into play. Due diligence with keyword research always helps optimize web page production and Google Ads.
Keyword research:
- help inform content and ad strategies.
- helps us discover new high-value words or phrases.
- helps us optimize existing content and website navigation.
- allows us to make data-driven decisions.
We can then organize selective keywords into lists. From there, we can track how you’re positioned for the various keywords.
Competitor Analysis and Discovery
Before we can check position, it helps to know who we’re positioned against.
- Any website across the entire internet?
- Specific competitors in your local area?
This starts with having a well-documented (and regularly updated) competitor analysis or dossier. Some companies are only working against a few competitors, in which case a competitor dossier is easy to create. Some clients are working in more competitive markets with 15+ competitors within 100 miles or their business is regional. There are some cases, where clients have different competitors for different services or departments.
In any scenario, we need to know who in order to know how you’re performing in keyword positioning.
Position Tracking
Now, we can begin gathering insights on keyword positions and your positions against competitors. In the end, understanding the current landscape (good or bad) informs us how to make intelligent data-driven decisions on evolving your web marketing into the future.
SEO101: “Stats change frequently.” Refresh your reports a few months later, and the stats will surely have changed.
Other Great SEO Tools in SEMRush
Backlink Analytics & Audit
Backlinks refer to external websites that link back to your website (any page). Good backlinks can positively affect your SEO, and bad backlinks can negatively affect your SEO. In order to assess the good and the bad, we need a way to see them. SEMRush offers that capability.
With this activity, we can whitelist the “good” websites and blacklist the “bad” websites. What this means, is that we provide search engines with a list of these “bad” or non-reputable websites so they can discredit as sources of traffic. We’re basically explicitly telling search engines that we don’t want them affecting our reputation. The technical term for this is “disavowing links.”
Quantity of backlinks. From there, we can see what these sites are.
Site Auditing & Analytics
There are many tools out there that can perform these tasks. Since they all have their own methodologies for auditing, SEMRush is another great option to have a well-rounded, multi-point inspection to keep an eye on your evolving website and identify optimization opportunities.
