Disclaimer: This post has an affiliate link for the Semrush Software
If you’re like me and want to get the most out of your software to run your small business at an affordable price, Semrush is an easy pick.
It’s really great if you want to become serious about SEO for your website and uncovering and endless supply of opportunities.
The good thing is, Semrush is great, even if you don’t use all of the functions, you’ll get enough value out of using the basic functions.
Let’s review the best ways to use Semrush to improve your SEO.
Keyword Research – If You’re Just Starting Out
If you’ve had a website for a while, with little to no traffic, or if you started a new site, this section is for you.
One great thing about Semrush is that you can use it to get ideas for how to build the content on your website.
Here’s how I used the Keyword Magic Tool to come up with the idea for this blog post:
First off, this may look like an overwhelming amount of options here. It’s a good but potentially bad thing if you’re not properly focused on what you need.
The goal here will be to come up with a keyword phrase or topic that is helpful to your audience but also not too competitive where you won’t be able to rank for it.
If you’re looking to write a blog post that you want people to discover through search, you’re going to have to compete by writing about topics that are less competitive.
For example, what I did was I wanted to sort by a more reasonable keyword difficulty (see below).
Keyword Difficulty %
The keyword difficulty index (from 1 to 100%) shows you how difficult it would be to outrank your competitors in the Google organic top 20 for a given keyword. The higher the percentage, the harder it will be to achieve high rankings for each targeted keyword.
The lower, the easier (or more reasonable) time we’ll have in terms of ranking.
Disclaimer:
It’s important to remember that as good as a tool like Semrush is, there are tons of new searches each day to the point where Google confirms that 15% of all searches are new, and never searched before.
With that in mind, this tool is used to serve as a guide or a compass so that you can create helpful content.
Back to the keywords!
Since so many searches are brand new, it’s always best to look for ‘questions’ that people ask. Luckily, there’s a function to search for them using Semrush. In the example above, I clicked on ‘questions’ next to ‘all’.
This helps me see which types of questions people are asking. You can also click the down arrow to see more information such as what the global search volume looks like.
I also understand that the intent of a question like this would be for someone who presumably already uses Semrush, wants to learn a little bit more about how they use the software to their advantage.
Now with this post that you’re reading, I’m able to establish myself as an expert and help answer that question in great detail.
Keyword Opportunities – If Your Site Already Has Traffic
Semrush will help out a ton if you already have some website traffic.
Let’s take a very big and well-known website for this example – Nike.com
If you type in ‘nike.com’ into the search bar and select ‘domain overview’, you can see it allows you to select ‘domain overview’.
Pro Tip: You can do this to do research on your competitors as well!
Next, click on ‘organic search traffic’.
This will bring up all of the keywords that are driving traffic to the website.
This is extremely helpful already but how about we try to find keywords that are ranking on page 2 and with a little bit of optimization and strategizing, can be bumped up to page 1.
Here, you can click on the ‘Positions’ drop-down and click on #11-20 to see keywords that rank on page 2 of the search results page (each page has 10 results).
Here’s an interesting one for ‘new Jordans coming out’. Right now nike.com ranks on page 2 for this specific query.
The page that they currently rank for, just has a category of ‘New Jordan Releases’ which includes all Jordan apparel.
The top ranking queries talk about specific release dates and which Jordans are due to be released.
Nike could come up with a way to deliver the best and most helpful experience for their users by creating something even better, especially if they helped sign users up for release date reminders, deals and more.
Audit Your Website
The technical aspect of SEO is extremely important. That’s why it’s a good idea to keep track of your website’s health, fix errors and take a proactive approach.
The site audit tool is great for helping you do just that.
It helps you prioritize fixes in terms of severity and even gives you an explanation of why and how to fix issues.
It might seem overwhelming but if you take them one by one and set time aside to make these fixes, you’ll be nicely optimized.
Give Semrush a Try
There’s quite a bit more that you can do with Semrush but these are the features that you can get the most out of, right away.
If you’d like to give it a try, you can start out with a free trial.
