SemRush: An Invaluable Tool

Hi everyone, Beckton here. Today we are taking a look at SEMrush, a tool that is extremely useful for analyzing all aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEMrush gives you data that can help you make better decisions about your website SEO and advertising campaigns. This happens to be one of our founder and CEO, Jay Berkowitz’ favorite tools. We generally prefer another tool for analyzing paid advertising, but SEMrush is great for looking at search positions, keywords and many other site metrics.
 

Search Rankings

This is a typical Google search result on a desktop computer. All Google searches now look like the display of a cell phone as there are no more ads on the right hand side. Google is now showing up to 4 Paid Ads “PPC” or Pay Per Click, 3 Map results and 10 SEO – Free Search Engine Optimization results.

 
SEMrush is great for analyzing organic search rankings of your site and your competitors and identifying opportunities to improve. The SEO or “Free” Organic search rankings are how high you appear for a certain term in a Google search (without paid advertising). You can see in the example image above that the organic results don’t start until after the ads and the map listings. Having high organic rankings is still one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. Consumers who know the difference between Paid and Free ads often prefer to click the Free or Organic results.
SEMRush shows you all sorts of data, like how many terms you are in position #1 for and how many total terms you rank for. In the image above, you can see that this website is #1 for organic search in “tax help atlanta” and that is reflected in the SEMRush report below. It also shows you your traffic volume for organic search, and what page people are going to from each search term.
 

Track Your Progress

SEMRush is great for tracking your progress on keyword listings over time. In the graph above, you can see that this website was initially ranking for just 10 keywords a little under four years ago. With a little Search Engine Optimization, the SEMRush data shows that we have brought that up to around 488 – a huge increase! And, all these new keywords the website ranks for drive over 10,000 free “SEO” clicks to their website for free.
But what if you don’t want to just admire your progress on getting new keywords listed, and instead, you want to expand out to even more keywords on the first page of Google? SEMRush is great at that too, as it shows which keywords your website might be on the second page of Google (results 11 – 20). When you identify these keywords, you can create articles, links and pages incorporating these keywords to improve your Google ranking. In the research below, we identified a number of high opportunity phrases to write about for the tax client.

Additionally, you can use SEMrush to look at what keywords your competitors rank for and how much traffic each one generates. This is great when looking for totally new keywords to target in your SEO, as you can tell how much traffic each one could generate for you.

Backlink Analysis

SEMrush doesn’t stop there. Keywords and search rankings are probably the two most useful, but it also provides data on things like total backlinks and the type of backlinks. In the research above, we see that Bestbuy.com has over 7,500 backlinks, which are links from other websites linking to Bestbuy.com. These links make the website more important in Google’s algorithm and improve search performance. SEMrush also analyzes how many links are of different types, text, images, forms etc. It also shows how many “Follow” links, where the link is disclosed to Google, and “No Follow” links, which are from sites like Wikipedia that Google’s search engine spiders do not assign points to in the algorithm.

If you haven’t used SEMrush to look at your site (or your competitors sites), you should give it a try. It gives you a lot of valuable information that can help you greatly improve your SEO and generate more traffic.