SEMrush Review – How I Use It to Dominate SERPs

SEMRush is the #1 keyword research tool that allows users to compete and win over cooperators. It is an essential SEO tool for bloggers and ...

SEMRush is the #1 keyword research tool that allows users to compete and win over cooperators. It is an essential SEO tool for bloggers and content creators. Today. I will participate in this SEMRush review; I will tell you how SEMRush made search engine marketing more accessible than ever and even better. After reading this, you will conquer Google search result.

As a content writer and SEO project manager, I have tasted many SEO tools. Moreover, finally, I found the best one tool I needed to rank top on Google, Bing and other search engines. Google webmaster tool might help you a little for keyword research and learn about your site's data. However, that is not enough to dominate to SEM world. There is always a reason for some tools are free, and some are paid or premium. I bet, it is worth paying money for using SEMRush tool. However, you can start using 30-day free premium via this link.


SEMrush Review

SEMrush is an excellent SEO optimization platform with robust tooling across keyword research,  domain monitoring, and crawling. It is the perfect tool, and genuinely innovative features like SEO Ideas can give your business a severe edge.

I am going to show you some things that have been helping me become more productive in keyword research and SEO. For a backlink tool yes, Ahrefs, is the best but you must have SEMrush to dominate Google search! Doing any keyword research, competitor research, keyword volume lookup, I have found SEMrush to be much more reliable.

 Try SEMrush 

1. SEMrush Is Fast

The very first thing I love and appreciate about SEMrush, especially compared to Ahrefs, is that it is always fast! This is my biggest complaint with Ahrefs. If I have to go to another tab and work while waiting for results, well… you pretty much lost my business. I am a pretty good multitasker, but I should not have to switch tabs when doing keyword research. SEMrush is just plain fast.


2. Lookup Current Rankings of Posts

When I go to optimize a post that maybe I have not ever optimized on a site before, the very first thing I do is look up the current keyword rankings. If something is working, you do not want to break it. As they say, if it ain’t broken don’t fix it. If something is already right at the top of page 2 with good search volume, then I simply know I need to focus more on that. In this example, let's take the post I wrote about our “die peacefully.” So I want to see what it is currently ranking for so I under the “Domain Analytics” and “Organic Research” section I paste the URL of the post and hit “Search.”

SEMrush Review – How I Use It to Dominate SERPs


It then spits out all the keywords that I am ranking for and their search volumes. As you can see some keywords are not relevant because all I tried to help, people to prevent suicide. I never focused on such keywords, but I think I should work on its keywords because it is already getting a good ranking and traffic through search engines.

 Try SEMrush 


While it is not a lot of search volume, you can also see that keyword difficulty scores (in the 69s) are a medium for SEMrush, meaning over time I should be able to dominate them easily.

SEMrush Review


Improve Upon What is Already Working

So after seeing that information, what do I do next? I just need to improve upon what is already ranking and working. Here are some general guidelines I use to optimize a current post.
  • Update title to ensure it reflects the main keyword I want to focus on.
  • Update a couple of alt tags on images in the post with the keyword or secondary keyword.
  • Update the meta to ensure it includes the main keyword. While the meta does not increase your SERP rankings, it does affect your CTR. Moreover, remember, Google highlights search terms in bold!
  • If you have an ugly slug, redirect it (301) to a new shorter one, preferably the slug should match your main focus keyword.
  • Make sure the post has at least one link to an external site with high domain authority.
  • Add more content. This is usually almost always applicable. It is also an excellent way to ensure you have better keyword density. Moreover, yes, in 2016 keyword density should still be looked at. Don’t spam your keyword.
  • Make sure the post has a couple of interlinks.
  • Re-share on social.
  • Re-crawl with Google to ensure faster indexing/updates in SERPs.


So as you can see, knowing the current rankings of your post is very important. Without using a tool like SEMrush, I would have never identified this information above. Moreover, I could have destroyed some of the current rankings and lost traffic. So when you need to optimize an old post, be smart about it!


3. Grab Keyword Ideas

Now let's say I am writing a brand new post. Maybe about “blogging for money” So I have a few keywords in mind, but I do not know what has the highest search volume or the variations I should be using. So this is where SEMrush’s new SEO Keyword Magic tool comes into play. This is still in beta, but I am so glad they added this. I use it every day.

So in the SEO keyword magic tool, I input “blogging for money, ” and you can see it returns that keyword along with all the variations around it. It also gives the keyword search volume and the keyword difficulty estimation. Now anything in the high 70s is going to be pretty hard to rank for without some work. Especially if you are publishing it on a newer website. This is where domain authority comes into play. Soon a brand new site I would probably skip this topic or go at it from a different angle. However, without using a tool like SEMrush, you would have never known this.

Don’t waste time writing on a topic you might never rank for! It would be better to dig through to lower search volume results and aim for a keyword with lower keyword difficulty. Things add up over time, so writing for things with lower search volume is not necessarily always a bad thing if you push out much content and are consistently ranking high in SERPs.

Grab Keyword Ideas


4. Lookup Exact Keyword Search Volumes

The other day I wrote about Google’s horrible decision to change their keyword planner data to use close variation keywords. This means a lot of keyword data is now grouped, which makes it harder to do keyword research. Keyword tool.Io, LongTailPro, and pretty much any tool that uses the Google API. The current solution though? Well, because SEMrush grabs their keyword search volume from a couple of different sources, including approximations from their database, SEMrush does not have this problem. Note: KWFinder also doesn’t have this problem. If you are looking for a cheaper keyword research tool, definitely a great one. I use both KWFinder and SEMrush for everything that I do.

Let me show you a comparison below. So first I look up the following keywords in Google keyword planner and here are the results. As you can see below they all match. Well, this is not helpful at all!

cdn: 27,000 searches
content delivery network: 27,000 searches
content distribution network: 27,000 searches


Lookup Exact Keyword Search Volumes


However, let’s plug those keywords into SEMrush. So I go to the “Keyword Difficulty” tool in SEMrush, another amazing tool, and plugin in just those keywords. Moreover, it returns the following results.

cdn: 27,100 searches
content delivery network: 2,400 searches
content distribution network: 390 searches

Now that is more like it!

 Try SEMrush 



Steal Competitor’s Best Content


5. Steal Competitor’s Best Content

Another great tool I use in SEMrush is the newer “page” feature under Organic Research. This allows me to instantly see what a competitor’s best pages are and what is driving them the most traffic. As some of you know, I run a gluten-free blog, and so this is an example of something I ran the other day. This website is a competitor of mine, and I wanted to see which pages of theirs were ranking the highest and drove them the most traffic.  As you can see below, after entering their domain into the “pages” section it returns a list of the top pages with traffic % and the keywords that the URL is ranking for. You can then click on the “keywords, ” and it will give you the data as I showed you in #2 above, the keyword rankings for the post or page itself.

This is great for generating new blog post ideas as well as strategically writing to grab their traffic! You can even take this a step further and dig into the backlinks of that post or page and then try to reverse engineer the backlinks.


6. Find Competitor’s Traffic Sources

Moreover, lastly, a brand new feature that SEMrush has just added, and that is the Traffic Analytics feature. This is pretty awesome! In the past, you can use tools to find your competitor’s backlinks, keyword positions, top pages, etc. However, there was no way to find where the competitor’s referral traffic was coming from. Now there is! Of course, this is an approximation of aggregated data in SEMrush, but it is the best I have seen anywhere.




Summary

Those are just a few of things I use SEMrush for. Other great features include the SEO audit tool, backlink research, and position tracker. To be honest, I could sit here all night and rave about all the amazing features that SEMrush has, but the ones above are the most important ones. I use them every day, all day. SEMrush is one of those rare tools that never closes in my browser. I urge you to try some of the tips above as keyword research is alive.

 Try SEMrush 

You Might Also Like

0 comments