SEMRUSH

 

1. It gives 360 degree view of competition research

How are your competitors doing?

This is the single most important question you always need to ask yourself if you want to build a profitable blog or business online. Without competitor research, it’s impossible to scale your growth (be it traffic, sales or branding).

Although there are a ton of tools out there to do competitor analysis, nothing comes closer to Semrush.

It’s the perfect competitor research tool that lets you do the following things.

• Backlink analysis
• Finding top keywords of a site
• Estimate traffic of any site
• Finding the ad copies of your competitors etc

To put in a phrase, Semrush gives you 360 degree view of your competitors so you can easily know all the ins and outs of your competitor sites. This helps you give a detailed analysis on what keywords to target, which product ads to use and various SEO strategies you can deploy to build a successful online business.

You’ll now have to register by entering your email and any password of your choice.

Step 2: You will be now redirected to the page that looks like something like this.

Step 3: Enter your details (email, password and billing details) to grab your Semrush Pro account absolutely free for next 30 days.

Once you click on the “Place The Order” button, it will create your Semrush account without charging you anything.

Grab 30 days of Semrush Guru account for free 

Do you instead want to get access to Semrush Guru account which is worth $229.95? Then, follow the below mentioned steps.

Step 1: Click here to get 30 days free trial of Guru account from Semrush. Then, click on the “Start your free 30 day trial” button.

Now, you need to create an account.

You need to register yourself where you have to enter your email and password.

Step 2: Once you have entered an email and password to create your account, you’ll be taken to their payment page.

Now you’ll be given a 30 days free trial to their Guru account. Just finish the payment information and you’re done!

Why should you go for Semrush Guru account?

Here are few major reasons Semrush Guru account should be considered over Pro account.

• Get access to all the data and features from Semrush pro account
• 30,000 results per report
• 5,000 reports per day
• 3 simultaneous sessions
• Access to display advertising research
• Tracking of 500 keywords
• Access to branded PDF reports
• Access to historical data (including Semrush database archives, which go back as far as January 2012)
• and the list goes on

2. Your site metrics at one place

Semrush gives an overview of your site’s performance. Here’s how it looks like.

See that? Semrush gives a full glimpse of your site along with the details like:

• Organic keywords
• Organic traffic
• Ads (if you’ve any)
• Position tracking visibility
• Site audit (so you can easily check your overall site health to know if there are any SEO issues to fix)
• SEO ideas
• Social media tool (to keep an eye on your social following)
• Brand monitoring (if someone talks about your brand, name or blog)
• Backlink audit (along with the toxic links so you can get rid of bad links)

With the above metrics of your site, you can easily find whether someone’s talking about you, linking to you, your keyword positions along with the organic traffic volume and so on. So it’s really convenient to find out how your site is performing just by logging into your Semrush dashboard.

3. Traffic analytics of any site made easy!

Want to estimate the traffic of your competitors sites? Then, give a try to the Semrush new feature called Traffic Analytics (in beta version). It gives you the website traffic generated by desktop users (mobile user data has yet to be incorporated).

Here’s how it works. Go to Traffic Analytics under Domain Analytics tab and enter the domain of your website or any of your competitors site.

See the magic?

Semrush gives you an in-depth overview and shows all the details of your competitors traffic along with their sources.

You will find their estimated monthly traffic along with the following details.

• Unique visitors
• Pages/visit
• Avg visit duration
• Bounce rate
• Semrush traffic rank and
• Traffic sources

See.. that’s a lot of information. You are literally spying on their Google analytics where you can easily figure out their details like bounce rate, avg. time spent, top traffic sources etc along with their estimated monthly traffic.

These details give you enough understanding about what you can do to outrank your competitors.

Not only that, you get detailed information like:

You can find your competitors “search %” along with the referring sites with their estimated monthly traffic and you can also find out your competitors traffic by countries.

I can easily say that the information provided by Semrush is MORE accurate than the information that you get from other sites like SimilarWeb, Alexa etc.

4. SEO content template

This is the new feature of Semrush (Beta version, still) that helps you analyze your rivals’ content and gives you ideas to write perfectly optimized content for search engines to increase your search traffic.

In simple terms, this SEO feature helps you craft well organized content for search engines so you don’t have to worry about SEO optimization.

Here’s how it works.

Just enter a keyword and click on Create SEO template button.

And it gives you all the SEO recommendations for your content. Here you go!

Not only it shows you the analysis of your Google top 10 rivals but it also gives you valuable information such as keyword recommendations and general recommendations.

If you notice the above image carefully, you can easily figure out the following things to rank higher in search engine results.

• Things like how many backlinks you need and where to get them to get faster search results.
• General on page SEO recommendations like where to put your target keywords (on title, h1 tags, meta description etc).
• The usage of LSI keywords so you can get better rankings for similar meaning keywords to your primary targeted keyword.
• Along with the most important metric like the “text length”. In the above example, it’s recommending me to write 1376+ words.

You may now ask, why should I write 2000+ words for one post.

There are 2 simple reasons to write long form of content over short articles.

• Detailed articles send you more search traffic and Google crawlers give more weightage to the pages with meaty and in-depth articles. Usually 2000+ word articles always perform better than the 1000 word short articles. That’s why we highly recommend them writing for your sites if you want more search traffic.
• Long form of content adds a TON of value to your audience. It gives them great understanding about your topics so you can build trust and increase your overall website sales.

5. The pricing doesn’t burn your pockets

Let me quickly recap what you can do with Semrush and let’s also put some pricing for each one to give an idea about how much the whole package would cost.

• Keyword research – $50 to $100 a month (Long Tail Pro costs $67/mo)
• Competitor analysis – $100 a month (Moz costs $99/mo)
• Backlink analysis – $100 a month (Ahrefs cost $99/mo)
• Keyword tracking – $50 to $100
• Site audit – Upwards $100

Did you see that? All of them costs you upwards $500 a month but Semrush which offers all the above features (even more) at just $119.95/mo.

6. Keyword research made easy with Semrush

When it comes to keyword research, Semrush is my go-to tool. I don’t rely upon too many SEO tools to increase my search engine traffic. The reason is, it consumes time and drains energy. That’s why I spend more time on less tools and Semrush definitely tops the charts.

Let me show an easy tutorial on how to use Semrush for keyword research.

Let’s take a long tail keyword “how to lose weight fast” and here’s what I come up with.

You can also pick a database (country) of your choice so you will get even accurate results with Semrush. It also shows you the number of searches the specific keyword you enter on Google. So it becomes relatively easy for you to whether to go for it or not.

Notice that, your primary keyword has a search volume of 246K monthly searches (it’s a highly competitive keyword and you need a lot of quality backlinks to get #1 rankings, so stay away from such keywords) whereas the other keywords “how to lose weight fast and easy” has 4k monthly searches (which is better to target because of low search volume).

Likewise, you can get a ton of keyword ideas for your main keyword by clicking on the View Full Report button and you can pick the keywords wisely with low competition.

You can also find out all the related keywords to your primary keyword using Semrush (shown right side of the above image) so you can sprinkle LSI keywords (semantic keywords) within your blog posts to get better search rankings while doing on page optimization.

Here’s a great SEO tip while doing keyword research using Semrush.

NEVER pick keywords with higher monthly search volume.

Why? They are hard to rank for and you need to put a lot of efforts to get backlinks. So if you’ve a new blog, target low to medium volume keywords instead of going for high competitive keywords.

You may ask, “what’s the average monthly search volume I can go for to get better rankings”.

That’s a great question and it largely depends on your industry. For instance, if you are in a fitness industry and covering fitness news, finding a keyword with around 1000 monthly searches is great.

If you are in a news industry, you can get better rankings even for high volume keywords as most news are trending topics so your rankings will be more dependent on how fast you cover them.

As a rule of thumb, pick keywords that have a monthly search volume between 200 to 2000. That’s a good number and you can get better rankings with less efforts if you are targeting keywords within that range.

7. Want to do a site audit? It’s a walk in the park

Site audit is all about finding and fixing your site issues. Most bloggers always neglect to conduct frequent site audits of their sites.

If done right, by fixing all your site SEO related or technical issues, you can always rank better and doing a site audit is a walk in the park with Semrush.

Here’s how it looks like.

The above image shows the site audit results of Bloggers Passion. It gives a score (100 being the highest and 0 being the lowest), you can consider it as your site’s technical score. The more you score the better it is for your site in getting better rankings on Google.

Semrush site audit tool helps you find everything from:

• Site errors
• Warnings
• Notices
• Broken issues etc

That means, you can easily find all the site related issues like;

• Missing alt tags
• Lengthy title tags
• Broken links
• Redirect errors
• Blocked url’s etc

So you can easily start fixing those SEO related technical issues to get higher search rankings on Google.

The best part about Semrush site audit tool is you can do it frequently (once in a week or monthly once) so  you can keep track of how your site is performing and easily figure out if your site is penalized by any Google updates or not.

8. The #1 backlink analysis tool

Backlinks are the key if you want to build a site that gets a ton of traffic from Google.

Without getting links, it’s impossible to get higher rankings or increase your website traffic. Let me tell you one thing: no one links to your stuff automatically if you are unknown.

You should go out and start finding backlink opportunities in order to build links. Yes, there are so many link building strategies that you can use such as guest posting, blogger outreach, skyscraper technique etc but one of the most effective and simplest ways to build quality links is to do a backlink analysis of your competitors.

This is where Semrush is golden. It gives you accurate backlink information of any site no matter what niche or industry you are in.

Let’s talk about a quick tutorial on how you can use Semrush for doing backlink analysis.

Go to Backlink Analytics. Now, enter any of your competitors domain name (URL) and click on search.

In our example, let’s go with Backlinko’s URL.

Backlinko’s site has a whooping number of 2 Million backlinks pointing to his site!! It’s no wonder the site is generating a ton of visits a month.

Also, you can see all those links are coming from over 25,000 various sites. Semrush also shows you details like domain score (the more it is, the better impact can create on Google) along with the Trust score.

Not only that, Semrush also gives you data around the new backlinks to your competitors. In the above image, you can clearly see that.

You can also easily figure out the sources of backlinks of your competitors.

Have a look;

Now, how can you use those sources?

You can easily find out which of the pages of your competitors sites are getting more links from others.

You can do the 3 simple things to build massive links to your sites using this strategy.

1. You can analyze those pages
2. Create better content around those pages and
3. Reach out to those sources (who linked to your competitors) to link to your stuff

Does it work? Yes, but you have to reach out as many bloggers as possible to get the best results. If you are wondering how to make this strategy to work, check out this article on doing a proper blogger outreach.

9. Extremely easy to use and the data is so accurate

Are you a beginner to SEO and looking for an easy tool to manage your SEO?

Try Semrush then. It has the easiest user dashboard that allows you to perform everything from keyword research to backlink analysis to competitor research really quickly.

Just have a look at the Semrush in figures.

These are the stats:

• 6 million people are using it
• 20 billion keywords are tracked
• 140 Geo databases (to give you accurate information)
• 800 million domains are being tracked through Semrush

The above figures reveal us a lot of information. That whooping size of information can give us the precise data of competitors along with their backlinks, keyword ideas and a ton of other information.

10. Check where your keywords are ranking at a glance

Keyword tracking is one of the important factors that gives you an idea of how your keywords are performing on Google.

It’s important not only to find better keywords but also check their positions on Google.

Only then, you can apply various SEO strategies to get #1 page results on search results. Without keyword tracking, it’s impossible to know how your site is performing on Google. Here’s where an accurate data backed tool like Semrush wins the race.

It gives you accurate information about all of your tracked keywords along with their positions on Google.

Along with keyword tracking, you can also use this tool to compare several sites together. You can cross check 5 domains at a time to find how your other competitors are doing. This gives information about

• Their keyword positions
• Their search volume
• Their search ranking details etc

So all in all, Semrush is the most advance SEO tool that helps you boost your overall organic traffic. So what are you waiting for? Give it a try once and see the results.