What is SEMRush?

SEMRush is a tool that is specific to finding profitable keywords. We’re living in a time now when SEO is at the forefront of a successful blog. SEMRush is a program many new and older bloggers are using to optimise their sites, create the content their audience wants and create a better experience for their visitors.

If you are relatively new to SEMRush, you may be wondering what the tool is all about and different ways that professionals are using it for their clients sites.

What exactly is SEMRush?

The beauty of SEMRush is that that can be used by any number of sites. Whether you own a popular personal blog that relies on Adsense, Infolinks or have a corporate website that needs to bring in more traffic, SEMRush can easily work for you. Its platform works to identify different trends that happen within your niche, identifying a variety of keywords,  audit your on page SEO, check rankings and back links.

After all, when your blog is well optimised, it is going to do well in terms of bringing in both more traffic and revenue for you to benefit from. If you aren’t using a tool like SEMRush, you might not be aware of keywords that people are searching for to find a site like yours. You might not realise which pages on your site are helping or even hindering you from reaching success. SEMRush can easily transform the way that your site functions, and it is one of the essential online marketing tools that is recommended to use.

5 ways you can make use of SEMRush

SEMRush offer a free 14 day trial and can then extended to a paid membership if you feel it’s a useful tool for your site. As a site contractor, you may want to know what exactly SEMRush can do for you and how other site admins are using the software to optimise their sites.

1) Understanding Your Current Success

When you go to  SEMrush and enter your domain name you will see a general traffic overview screen, which will show you how you are doing in terms of the search traffic you are getting – for both paid channels and organic. You can immediately see if your traffic is trending up or down, if your rankings are improving or getting worse for your main keywords, how you are ranking within SEMrush, and more.

You can download the overview report produced by SEMrush as a PDF and it is very easy to change the date ranges so that you can see your site’s progress over different time periods such as the last 30 days or the last 2 years.

Here’s one part of the overview screen, which shows  traffic growth over a period of time.

2) Get a Better Understanding of Your Competitors

There are millions of sites and many are probably very much like your own. Because of this, it pays to know your competition and to see what is causing them to be a success while you may continue to struggle for traffic  to your site. SEMRush has a feature that enables you to get a look at your competitors and the keywords that they are getting traffic from on their own blogs. From there, you can easily make a decision to decide to develop content to target these search terms.

Understanding the competition and how their marketing is going will allow you to become more of a success in the long run.

If a competitor is getting traffic for keywords that are relevant to your blog, why don’t you target that traffic too?

For example this site covers a variety of topics to help people to start a blog, such as how to write blog posts or grow their social media following.

For example a site that targets similar readers to me is Pro blogger so lets have a look at their traffic.

This is an explanation of what the headings you see mean.

• Keywords: The top keywords that Pro blogger are ranking for.
• Position: Where they are ranked for these keywords (the number in brackets is their ranking).
• Volume: The estimated monthly traffic that is generated from these keywords
• CPC: The cost of a click if someone advertised based on this keyword (in US Dollars).
• URL: The web page generating the traffic.
• Traffic: The average percentage of all traffic the website is getting from this keyword.

So from this overview I can see that Pro blogger ranks fairly well for “What is a Blog” and this search term gets over 14,000 searches per month in the US. That looks like a good keyword for me to target in the future as those are the types of people I would like to join my mailing list.

I’ll start by creating a blog post targeting the terms you’ve found, promote my blog post to increase it’s visibility and start to grow my organic traffic.

3) Find New Keyword Opportunities

If I click on to the keyword “What is a blog” I can see more keywords that SEMRush thinks might be relevant to that term. These can be seen in the “Phrase match report” and “Related Keywords Report”.

From this quick search I can see another keyword that interests me… “What to Blog About” which has 1300 US searches per month.

4) Find Better Advertising Opportunities

Monetising your blog with advertising is a popular way to make money online.

There are website owners paying a lot of money for traffic, through networks such as Google AdWords, while you are driving your own traffic for free. AdWords can be quite expensive, so if you were able to find these companies you could make money by suggesting they put their display advertisements on your site directly or even join their affiliate program.

SEMRush makes this easy. It looks at all the keywords you are ranking for and then identifies companies that are paying for advertising based on these keywords and displays them in a chart.

If we look back at our Pro blogger example we can see that the following sites are carrying out paid advertising for keywords they already rank quite well for. Paid traffic is a great indicator of keywords that make money for bloggers.

5) Keep Track of Your Current and Existing Rankings

Another key feature offered by SEMRush is that you can easily keep track of your current and past ranking reports. You get to see different trends happening across all areas of your blog.  Many bloggers who aren’t using SEMRush may not really remember which keywords or entries were a true success in terms of their organic traffic. They might assume that some thing worked for them in the past, but not be confident which terms or pages were successful and why.

Utilising SEMRush as a Blogger

If you’re a blogger who isn’t currently using SEMRush for insights, you are definitely missing out on an opportunity to benefit your entire blog.  Knowing what is working for you and what is not working for you prevents you from pursuing something that could hinder your business down the road. It also helps you to become aware of things that are helping to bring in more traffic and revenue long-term especially by being able to understand the keywords other people are targeting.

The fact that thousands of bloggers and marketers all around the world are using SEMRush every single day should make you realise just how valuable this tool is.

SEMRush is literally changing the face of SEO and making it more accessible to all. You get to drive the vehicle that runs your site, and you get to delve deep into the workings of your blog to see what’s making it a success or keeping it from becoming one.