SEMrush and its many qualities allows us to consider it the best search engine optimization tool on the market to get new marketing insights and help you in digital marketing methods by improving online visibility, mainly in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns. Tools such as PPC, SEO, content marketing, and social media campaigns can be managed using this software.
It aids content marketers, PPC specialists, PR managers, and web developers carry out different marketing activities. SEMrush helps you identify the current trends in the industry and aids you in improving SEO for your page within your niche.
The use of SEMrush can lead to a better understanding of your campaign and that of your competitors. With the help of the SEMrush toolkit, valuable keywords are identified, which leads to the higher ranking of your website in the search engines.
How Does SEMrush work, and Why One Can Consider It the Best Search Engine Optimization Tool?
SEMrush performs many functions necessary to successfully run SEO campaigns, including competitive research, keyword research, link building, rank tracking, on-page, and tech SEO. Thus, by using all these tools, SEMrush helps run a perfect SEO campaign for your website.
Competitive Research
Competitive research means gathering information about your competitors in your industry niche. In this respect, SEMrush offers five critical assets that will allow you to keep track of your rivals’ moves.
Along with websites that belong to a different niche, you can also find a way to out-rank them on the SERP.
For successful marketing, it is necessary to know about your competitors. SEMrush helps this function through the competitor’s report, the overview and positions report, keyword gap, backlinks competitors report and backlink gap, traffic analytics.
- Competitors Report
By entering a keyword, SEMrush will give the list of competitors using it, and besides that, it also provides information about the competition level. The two factors based on which the competition level is calculated regard the total number of keywords the competitors have in common with you and the percentage of keywords you share with them.
- Overview and Positions report
In an overview and positions report, you are presented with an overview of the competitor’s performance. The overview and positions report includes the number of keywords on which a domain is ranked, the estimated monthly traffic, the estimated cost of running ads, branded traffic, and non-branded traffic.
- Keyword Gap
The keyword gap tool helps in comparing your keywords to that of your competitor. It analyzes any deficiency in your keyword strategy, where your competitor is having an edge.
- Backlinks competitors report and Backlink gap
The backlink gap tool aids in uncovering the link-building opportunities based on your competitor’s backlinks, and it provides your top four competitors for analysis. You can also use backlink reports to identify more backlink competitors.
- Traffic Analytics
The traffic analytics tool helps in getting an estimated account of your competitor’s analytical data. In this way, it enables you to decide whether you need to fix your marketing strategy.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the main foundation on which your SEO campaign stands, and the right use of keywords lead towards better ranking. The customers express their demand through the keywords, and you have to include those keywords in your listings to reach them. The SEMrush toolkit includes different tools for carrying out keyword research, which includes keyword overview, keyword magic tool, keyword difficulty, organic traffic insights.
- Keyword Overview
After making a list of keywords, enter them in the search bar of the Keyword Overview tool, and you will be provided with the data required for keyword analysis. Keyword overview includes organic search, paid search, CPC distribution, Ads copies, Ads history, trend, phrase match, organic search results, and related keywords.
- Keyword Magic Tool
The keyword magic tool helps in expanding your list of keywords by listing them starting from a single basic keyword. This tool gives many suggestions to add different keywords and provides them grouped in simplified categories.
By selecting the match types, you get a different suggestion of keywords in different categories such as broad match, phrase match, exact match, and related.
The keyword magic tool also helps in analyzing the high-volume keywords, which are question-based. It also provides a table containing information about volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competitive density for each keyword.
- Keyword Difficulty
The keyword difficulty tool explains the extent of difficulty for any keyword to achieve a good ranking. The difficulty level for 100 keywords can be analyzed with the help of this tool. The difficulty index is presented in the form of a percentage on the level of 1-100%, and the higher percentage means that it would be difficult to out-rank your competitor in organic search results.
Besides providing the difficulty index, the report also provides the keyword’s monthly volume, the SERP features, and the number of URLs in organic results. The trend of keyword popularity over a period of 12 months can also be seen with the help of this tool. This keyword difficulty tool helps in analyzing the amount of work required for the ranking of that keyword.
- Organic Traffic Insights
The organic traffic insights tool provides you with a detailed list of your keywords, and in this way, you would not need to base your SEO on some guess. This is done by connecting your Google Analytics to SEMrush.
This tool helps in measuring your SEO results by analyzing traffic growth points and landing pages. It also provides a list of performing landing pages and organic search traffic metrics.
The table provided by this tool includes data concerning users, new users, sessions, average session duration, bounce rate, and goal completions.
Link Building
SEO success highly depends on a strong backlink portfolio because backlinks from authoritative sources send signals to search engines about the quality of content available and ultimately help in achieving higher rankings in search results.
Thus, it brings high traffic to your website. Several stages in the process of link building are spotting opportunities for different backlinks, maintenance of good backlink record by keeping the toxic backlinks away, and checking the quality of your backlinks.
SEMrush uses different tools for the whole process of link building, including backlink analytics, bulk analysis, backlink audit, and link building tool.
- Backlink Analytics
The backlink analytics tool analyzes your backlink portfolio to find the suspicious links in your profile, and then you can add those links to Disavow list to get rid of them. To achieve a high-quality backlink portfolio, it is necessary to have a comprehensive analysis of it.
This tool also helps you analyze the backlink portfolio of your competitors, and provides you with the opportunity to find the links lost by your competitor, and ultimately helps you in the link-building process. It also shows how backlinks changed over time.
- Bulk Analysis
The bulk Analysis tool can be used to analyze the backlink portfolios in bulk numbers of up to 200 URLs. These analyses provide you with comparing your backlink portfolio with your competitors, ultimately helping you improve your own backlink portfolio.
- Backlink Audit
Keeping a good record of your backlink portfolio is also necessary to achieve a higher ranking because detection of suspicious links by Google brings a higher risk of penalties. Thus, besides finding new opportunities for your link-building process, SEMrush helps in maintaining a good profile by keeping suspicious links away with the help of its Backlink Audit tool.
The in-depth analysis of your backlink portfolio provided by the Backlink Audit tool helps you add the suspicious links to the Disavow list, and, by contacting the domain owner, to remove them, and in this way, you can monitor the whole link building process closely.
The Backlink Audit uses integrations with several other tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Majestic to carry out the whole monitoring process. Track of lost and gained links over time can also be maintained with the help of this tool.
- Link Building Tool
The main function of the Link Building Tool is to spot new opportunities for link building and streamlining the link building campaigns. Because backlinks provide strong ranking signals, it is necessary to maintain a clean backlink portfolio.
The functioning of the Link Building Tool consists of three steps, (i) finding relevant resources to get backlinks from, (ii) automating the outreach, (iii) monitoring the progress. In the first step, SEMrush uses information from many sources to suggest the domain to get backlinks from, including the backlinks of your competitors, the list URLs uploaded manually by you, the list of keywords on which you wish to rank higher, the mentions of brand title, and the list of lost backlinks retrieved with the help of the Backlink Audit.
Various metrics of Domain Quality, Domain Health, and Domain Relevance for the relevant resources are provided in this first step. In the second step of automating the outreach, different link-building strategies are created.
In the final third step, the progress is monitored to analyze whether the backlink is visible on a selected referring domain. On the monitoring tab, Active links indicate current backlinks, and Broken links are those placed on pages that no longer work; Rejected links are the ones that are chosen to be rejected by you, Lost links are those which were used to be active but are no more active, Undefined links are those which SEMrush cannot define.
Rank Tracking
With the help of SEMrush, you can constantly monitor your rankings on the search engines. Even if you have created the perfect SEO campaign and are ranked on top, it does not mean that you will always stay there. So, it is necessary to constantly monitor and analyze your portfolio and to spot new opportunities to rank even better. For the task of rank tracking, SEMrush provides two important tools: Position Tracking and Sensor.
- Position Tracking
The position tracking tool tracks your website’s position and performance on search results, analyzes your local competitors, and compares your efficiency with up to 20 competitors. By entering a domain in the project section of SEMrush, you can set up the process of position tracking.
- Sensor
The sensor tool provides information about the fluctuations in the positions on a day-to-day basis. Only the monitoring of rankings is not enough because Google updates its algorithms constantly, and ultimately position fluctuations occur.
On-Page and Tech SEO
The maintenance of the content on-page and the technical condition of your site are essential for better ranking. HTTP error codes, broken links, and HTML mistakes can severely damage your ranking. SEMrush helps in rectifying technical issues and making your website and content SEO friendly. For this purpose, SEMrush has three tools, Site Audit, On-page SEO checker, and SEO Content Template.
- Site Audit
SEMrush Site Audit tool provides you with the overall performance of your website. Site Audit audits the website and finds the existing issues, and then categorizes them into three categories: Errors, Warnings, and Notices on the basis of priority.
- On-page SEO Checker
This tool makes a list of the steps you can take to improve the performance of your website in search engines. The optimization ideas gathered by using On-page SEO Checker are categorized into seven groups, namely Strategic ideas, Technical ideas, SERP features ideas, Backline ideas, User Experience ideas, Semantic and Content ideas.
- SEO Content Template
SEO Content Template helps in designing the content which is SEO friendly. This tool is helpful if you have done the keyword research already and now want to make the content for your website, which is SEO-friendly.
Conclusion
SEMrush, thus, uses different tools to assess your website’s performance and that of your competitors and ultimately helps in designing an SEO-friendly website.
Using SEMrush, you can understand the performance of your website, find valuable keywords, understand your competition, attract high traffic to your website, maintain a valuable backlink portfolio, and ultimately maintain a high rank.
Thus, the SEMrush toolkit can help you maintain a high ranking of your website in search results and run a successful SEO campaign.