SEMRush for Beginners

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For businesses large and small, SEMRush is a software tool that’s packed with great information for SEM and SEO marketers. It was originally created to maximize SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results for website developers and online marketers in 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts (Startup Talky, 2022). SEMRush helps businesses improve their online visibility and comes at several price points, including a free option, a Pro plan, a Guru plan and a Business plan for enterprise customers and large agencies. 

SEMRush payment plans, SEMRush.com


They also offer helpful resources (as well as training and online certifications) for small businesses and entrepreneurs to understand how to utilize the myriad of tools offered and improve their overall online search results. 


There’s several sections of tools to SEMRush, but in this blog post, it will cover the most-utilized SEO tools and SEM tools for businesses. 


SEO Uses

On SEMRush, SEO has a major chunk of features within the tool. There’s several categories of features to help a website manager determine what they need to utilize, like: 

  • Competitive research

  • Keyword research 

  • Link building

  • And, on page and technical SEO


The SEO Dashboard that is built into the program provides several of these reports at a high level, in an easy-to-read format. If a person is just beginning to utilize SEMRush for their SEO purposes, it may be good to start with keyword and competitive research. 


Keyword research provides a handy Keyword Overview tool, which allows a user to upload a list of 1-100 keywords that your website would want to rank for. For my budding book business, I would utilize keywords like, “sell books”, “novels”, “what should I read”, or “cash for books.” The Keyword Overview tool then shares search volume, keyword difficulty, trends and more for the keywords that are inputted. This tool could help provide some insight into which terms have enough traffic to try and rank for, as well as the keyword difficulty. This can help to shape what type of content should be written for the site. 


The main competitive research tool is the Domain Overview dashboard, which showcases authority score, search traffic, and growth reports for competitor sites. For my site, Half Price Books could be a competitor. The tool then shows traffic distribution by country, top keywords, and how often that domain is featured as a SERP, as well as for what type of content was featured. This tool is extremely informative as businesses look to understand what competitors are doing to optimize their sites. 


SEM Uses

Another area of SEMRush is the search engine marketing and advertising toolsets. The Advertising Dashboard provides information on how competitors may be utilizing Google Ads for their website, as well as paid search traffic and position tracking. The tool also shows social media ads that may be running either for competitors or your own social media ads and how to optimize them. This tool would be extremely helpful for any business that is growing their SEM initiative at the same time as their SEO initiatives. It’s also important to think through how your SEM may be impacting your SEO and vice versa. If certain keywords are ranking organically, it could be time to lower the budget on those terms on paid search. SEMRush’s SEM tools can certainly help to identify this as businesses grow their search optimization. 



SEM Project: The Book Bee Blog 


Using SEMRush’s Project tool, I’ve been discovering areas of improvement for my website. The SEMRush sign-up and project build was fairly easy and took just a few minutes to set up for my blogspot domain. From the Project dashboard, I can monitor visibility percentage, keywords that my website ranks for, conduct a site audit and much more. Currently, since the site was just started a few weeks ago, I’m missing several pieces of information and have a visibility of zero percent. 


For the Site Audit, the tool crawls the site using a website crawler, which is a bot that finds and indexes content on a website using a software program (Cloudflare, n.d) The site audit for www.thebookbee1.blogspot.com shows 5 errors and 50 warnings as well as a site health of 76%. This can lead me to understand what on-page SEO fixes I can do to create an improved site health. The majority of the issues on my website have to do with a low text-HTML ratio, which SEMRush explains means the actual amount of text vs. amount of code. Since the blog posts I have posted are fairly abbreviated, SEMRush is prompting me to provide more relevant content on the pages to improve that issue. 


The Project also shows Domain Analytics, which feature a domain authority score and organic traffic percentage. Domain authority is a common SEO tool to determine how well a website is performing, ranked from 1 (lowest score) to 100 (best score) and currently, The Book Bee is at a zero (Outreach, 2021). This score can take several weeks, and even months to start to determine a domain authority score. 


A tool that I’d like to explore more is the On-Page SEO checker. I’ve used SEMRush for other work-related projects and never noticed this tool before! SEMRush describes the tool as a complete list of actions to take to improve rankings for specific pages on a site. As shown below in the image, there’s already 7 ideas that SEMRush is providing with this tool, mostly centered in the content area, as well as one backlink idea. 


 

The full report describes how I can improve my HTML to include target keywords in the title tags and H1 tags as well as the meta tags. It also suggests making the content more readable and to create more informative content. A great feature of each of these ideas is the difficulty meter, found on the right side of each idea. This would provide a starting place, based on comfortability with the code and site tools to make easier changes first and then update the more difficult changes after you have some time to get acclimated to technical SEO updates. It also suggests that I earn backlinks for quality websites that have to do with the content. Some ideas for backlinks could be book-related websites and other relevant pages. 


This tool could be very useful as I build out the Book Bee to be more than just a class project and turn it into my business website. I’m looking forward to uncovering more of what SEMRush projects have to offer in the next few sessions working with this software program. Although I’ve used it prior in my career, SEMRush is consistently adding new and better tools to their program and there’s always something new to learn about SEO and website optimization. 




References: 


Startup Talky. (2022, February 10). Success Story of Semrush | Founders | Business Model. StartupTalky. Retrieved June 13, 2022, from https://startuptalky.com/semrush-success-story/


Cloudflare. (n.d.). What is a web crawler? | How web spiders work. Cloudflare.Com. Retrieved June 13, 2022, from https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-a-web-crawler/

            Outreach, G. (2021, June 29). How Long Does it Take to Increase Domain Authority? Globex Outreach.                 Retrieved  June 13, 2022, from https://www.globexoutreach.com/increase-domain-authority/

Comments

  1. Nicola CJune 13, 2022 at 6:21 PM

    Wow Katie, very comprehensive analysis on SEMrush.
    This course introduced me to this software and I have to say I can already see it's value from the errors and warnings that the audit provided.
    I especially like the fact that they share ideas in which you can improve the health of your website/blog and provides useful tips on improvement.
    From my audit I see that I have a ways to go with a site health of 79%, I have 5 errors and 43 warnings.
    I'm still navigating my way through this software but thus far, it is shaping up to be a very useful tool.

    ReplyDelete

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