SEMrush is one of the most popular digital marketing tool trusted by internet marketers all over the world. With a massive database of over 46 million domains and 120 million keywords, it is the go to tool for small and large businesses alike. Companies like Philips, Forbes, Hyatt and Paypal are amongst its top users. It is an all-in-one tool suit for not only improving your business’ online visibility but also discovering marketing insights that can help you make better decisions regarding your marketing spend. SEMrush mainly focuses on areas including SEO, SMM, PPC, Keyword Research, PR, Content Marketing, Campaign Management and Competitor Research. All these tools combined is all that there is to digital marketing, so if you are able to fully reap the potential of SEMrush, your business would be set for bigger things.
Keyword Research
If you know even the ABC of the world of digital marketing, you would be aware of the fact that keywords are of immense importance and successful keyword research can be a game changer for any business. With the SEMrush keyword research tool, you can easily outperform your competitors. There are a number of ways in which the keyword research tool facilitates your business and gives you a competitive edge over others. The first one being keyword overview, which lets you find out the potential value of any keyword.
From instantly judging the keyword on set parameters such as estimated value and the competition that the keyword has to discovering how the keyword actually fits your goal, the Keyword research tool does it all. It also helps you analyze a complete list of your competitor’s organic keyword rankings and pages. This way you not only discover the best performing organic keywords for your niche but you can also target each of those keywords individually and find new ways to win SERPs.
The Keyword Research tool also has a database of over 20 billion keywords, which it lets you surf through a friendly and streamlined interface. The integrated keyword manager helps users analyze up to a 1000 keywords at a time and see changes for a keyword in the search engine results in real time. Finally, the keyword research tool also allows you to compare your keyword profile with that of your competitor and device new strategies for launching more efficient SEO campaigns.
On-Page SEO
The term on-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your website’s individual web pages in a way as to rank higher and earn relevant traffic when a query is made on a search engine. On-page SEO is relevant to applying all the SEO best practices to the web content as well as the html code in order to boost your page rankings. The SEMrush on-page SEO tool lets you analyze your website’s health by checking the interactions that it has with Google, thus providing you with fresh ranking ideas. The on-page SEO tool lets you run a complete audit of your website’s pages with the help of a high-speed crawler in a matter of minutes, which then recommends easy fixes for all the issues that plague your website. It also gives you an exhaustive list of ideas to improve your website’s rank by applying tips related to content writing, link building and SERP feature targeting. Finally, it helps you analyze log files of your website’s interactions with Google crawler to help overcome any hindrances that there might be due to both structural and navigational issues in your website.
Figure 2: SEMrush On-page SEO Tool
Local SEO
Local SEO is a digital marketing strategy for a business that has a physical store or location and serves a set local geographic area. Thus, local SEO gives you the tools to promote your product in your own locality when people search for it on the internet. SEMrush local SEO tool can sculpt the perfect strategy for your small business. It has a multitude of features such as listing management, which puts your business data into the most authoritative directories automatically and follows your ranking progress on your locality’s zip code level while monitoring reviews in those directories. The Local SEO tools also makes the use of position tracking feature to track your daily online performance by monitoring device types, keywords and keeping an eye on the competition in the area. It also does an on page SEO check for your website as compared to your local competition by analyzing their strategies and trends in your area. Finally, it also lets you enhance your social media performance allowing you to harness the full power of all those sales channels.
Figure 3: SEMrush Local SEO Tool
SEO Competitive Analysis
In business terms, competitive analysis is a strategy in which you identify all your major competitors and then research their marketing strategies, sales and products inside out and then devise strategies on top of what your competitor is already doing. SEMrush competitive analysis tool lets you analyze your competition in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is enter your competitor’s domain name, and it will show you everything from your competitor’s organic search rankings and position changes to all their keywords that they are ranking on. Using this same tool, you can also see all of their backlinks and thus find all their referring domains and by applying the right filters, you can uncover unlimited new opportunities to find new backlinks for your website. The competitive analysis tools lets you analyze up to five competitors at a time, uncovering the gaps in the keyword strategies that you can put all your focus on. Similarly, you can do this same gap analysis for backlinks as well, find out which domains link your competitors and not you, and then reach out to them to build your own backlinks to those authoritative sites. You can get all of this information in the form of comprehensive SEMrush reports that you can share with your team to work on and devise better strategies.
Figure 4: SEMrush competitive analysis tool
Rank Tracking
Another useful tool that SEMrush incorporates is called rank tracking which helps you monitor your performance on Google’s SERPs and then develop your SEO strategy accordingly. The first technique is the one we discussed earlier called position tracking which helps you track keywords, competitors and domains on Google as well as your own campaign progress, spot and fix cannibalization and then taking the next steps accordingly. Similarly, SEMrush also allows you to track the volatility of different search engine’s SERPs based on daily changes that occur in them. Lastly, it allows you to narrow down on domains that have higher rankings globally with the most organic visibility, similarly the ones with paid visibility and traffic to give you an idea of what you need to do even to achieve a fraction of that traffic.
Figure 5: SEMrush rank tracking tool
Other Features
Since we are focusing on the marketing and more specifically the SEO aspect of it, we discussed all the major tools that SEMrush houses that help websites build their SEO strategy. However there are a number of other tools that SEMrush comes equipped with that we think are worth mentioning here.
- Content – In the content category, SEMrush has a wide variety of tools and features including content marketing, content creation and distribution, content optimization and last but not least content marketing analytics.
- Market Research – SEMrush also helps businesses carry out market research with tools such as competitor analysis, market analysis, paid advertising and competitor PR monitoring.
- Advertising – In the advertising niche, SEMrush facilitates its users with tools and techniques such as PPC keyword research and website monetization.
- SMM & SERM – Lastly, it also helps with social media management.
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