SEMrush is a popular SaaS platform that will help you with your digital marketing and SEO campaigns. You can use the tool to help you identify keywords, analyse your competitors, determine organic traffic coming to your websites, check your authority score, and monitor your referring domains.
Here are some of the things you can do with your SEMrush account.
How to Use SEMrush for SEO & Website Optimisation
Site audit
Before doing anything else on your website, starting with a site audit is crucial to help you know how healthy your website is compared to your competitors. To do this, follow the following steps;
Click on projects, then add new projects, after which a box will pop up and ask you to enter the details of your project domain and name. Finally, click ‘create project’. Move your cursor to the dashboard overview and configure your audit settings. Depending on how big your site is, it could take you a few minutes to generate the results.
The website audit with SEMrush will show you any issues with your site, such as errors, warnings, notices, and the top three issues and what you can do about them..
Discover your Competitor’s Keywords
When you click the overview page, you will see a display of keywords ranking well in your niche. Hit the ‘view entire report‘ button to see what your competitors are ranking for or what keywords they are trying to rank for.
Domain Analysis
Domain analysis helps you know how your website compares to other websites in your niche. The analysis also gives you insights into what needs improvement and how to do it. You can also perform a domain analysis of your competitors to determine their organic traffic, links, and authority score.
You could also do a domain analysis of a site you’d like to acquire backlinks. Such an analysis will help you know the authority score, advertising statistics, organic traffic, the anchor texts used by websites linking to this domain, and their best ranking keywords.
Authority Score
Having mentioned the authority score above, we should also understand what it is and how SEMrush determines it.
SEMrush determines the authority score based on the number of sites linking to a website (backlink profile), organic traffic, and monthly website visitors. The score ranges between 0 -100, and the higher the score, the more credible a website is.
Keyword Research using SEMrush
Keyword research with SEMrush will help you determine what keywords to target, how many people are searching for these specific phrases, how easy it is to rank for them, and who is already ranking for them. You will also find suggestions for related search terms.
The keyword difficulty element is crucial for SEO because it helps you identify keywords you can rank on search engines. Moreover, the keyword overview tool also helps you understand the search intent behind every keyword. Against a keyword, you will see the letters ‘I’ ‘, N’ ‘, C’ ,‘T’, which stand for informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.
According to SEMrush, users searching for informational content want to find a specific answer to their questions. Commercial intent means that the user wants to find a product or a service, while for navigational content, the user wants to find a page or a website. Transactional intent is for web visitors looking to buy a product or a service. Here is a detailed article that explains the importance of keyword research for SEO.
Position Tracking
Position tracking, also known as rank tracking, helps you monitor how a certain keyword performs on the SERPs over time. You only type in a keyword you want to rank for, but first, you check how it ranks currently.
Next, you set up all the settings so that you receive updates by country. SEMrush will send you reports showing your efforts and attempts to rank for these keywords. You can also enter your competitor’s data to compare your keywords’ performance against your competitors efficiently.
With the rank tracker element, SEMrush allows you to subscribe to alerts so that you will receive a notification if anything significant happens within your niche affecting your keywords.
Backlink Analysis
Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to a particular website. The backlink analytics tool on SEMrush allows you to see the number of backlinks, the anchor text used on the links, and how many .org, .com. Or .gov links your site has. You also get information on the IP addresses where these links originate.
The tool also lets you know when your competitor gains or losses a backlink, plus the value of each backlink. Such information will help you create your SEO strategy with insights into your competitors’ actions.
Moreover, the backlink analysis tool also lets you do a backlink audit which evaluates your links to determine which ones are spammy. We all know that Google penalises sites with spammy links. When you know which links are spammy, you can then disavow them, letting Google know the link should be ignored.
SEMrush is a link-building tool
Links are part of on-page SEO; the more you have, the better your chances of ranking your website (Of course the quality of the links is crucial as well!). SEMrush analyses your website and your competitors and finds websites it thinks you should approach for links.
Looking for Experts to Do It for You
If utilising it properly, SEMrush is a great SEO tool that will help you stand out from competitors for both on-page and off-page SEO techniques. SEMrush will also help with technical SEO so that all your strategies are informed for better success.
Need help with SEO? We have all the necessary tools including SEMrush plus an in-house team of SEO experts. Get in touch!
