SEMrush Guide for Beginners
SEMrush is by far my favorite SEO tool that I use for my many daily activities. The possibilities offered by this popular Software as a Service (SaaS) are endless! With SEMrush, you can conduct keyword research, competitive analysis, fill your backlink gap, find the best keywords for your SEO process, analyze your website traffic and visibility in search results, and so much more! In this beginner’s guide, I will show you the most important features available in SEMrush to boost your website’s SEO.
Table of Contents:
- Dashboard
- Organic Research
- Competitive Analysis
- Keyword Research
- Backlink Research
- Site Audit
- Topic Research
- Boost Your SEO Process with SEMrush
Dashboard
With the intuitive and functional dashboard, monitoring the SEO process of your website is even easier! SEO dashboard in SEMrush provides a report with all the most important data about your site that you should measure on a regular basis.
To gain access to the SEO dashboard you simply need to create a project and then SEMrush will generate a report for you. If you have more than one project, you can switch between them – at the top of the page, there is an option to switch domains.
In the SEO dashboard, you will find excerpts from the following tools:
- Domain Analytics,
- Position Tracking,
- Site Audit,
- On-Page SEO Checker,
- Backlink Audit,
- Traffic Analytics,
- Keywords.
Importantly, SEMrush also gives you the opportunity to integrate SEO dashboard with your Google Analytics account, so all your traffic data is in one place! This is a great feature to compare if your estimated traffic data is consistent with the data collected by Google Analytics.
To integrate SEMrush with your Google account, enter your property details here:
It’s really worth integrating SEMrush with both your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts to get a full picture of your SEO performance as this way you’ll get data on total clicks, total impressions, CTR, user sessions, bounce rate, top page views, and many other metrics.
Organic Research
This report is especially important for planning your SEO campaign and measuring its effects. This report will inform you about the visibility of your website in search results, indicate its estimated traffic in different countries, tell you who your biggest competitors are whether you rank on any SERP features.
Enter the domain you want to analyze and SEMrush will show you a report that will show you the following data:
- estimated web traffic,
- top organic keywords,
- keywords in TOP50, TOP20, TOP10 or TOP3,
- top organic pages (sorted by traffic, number of keywords, or backlinks),
- organic competitors.
Competitive Analysis
Let’s stop for a minute at the last report listed above: Organic Competitors. If you’re planning your SEO campaign, competitive analysis is always a great place to start. And this is where SEMrush does its excellent job. SEMrush identifies your strongest competitors based on the competitiveness level, which is calculated according to the common keywords that you are displayed for in search results and the total number of keywords. Such a report can be exported to PDF, Excel, CSV, or CSV Semicolon file.
Once you have identified your biggest competitors, then you can do a more detailed comparative analysis. To do this, select Traffic Analytics and enter your and your competitors’ root domains. SEMrush will show you a report where you can check a bunch of useful comparative data such as:
- the total number of visits and unique visitors,
- average visit duration,
- pages per visit,
- bounce rate,
- traffic sources,
- traffic journey,
- countries from which the highest web traffic is generated.
What’s interesting, here you can perform a bulk analysis and check up to 200 domains all at once. However, you will need to buy access to the upgraded version of SEMrush (currently, it costs $200 per month).
Keyword Research
When it comes to keyword research, I think SEMrush does its job the best. This SaaS offers many tools that make finding keywords for the SEO process much faster and more efficient.
I personally recommend Keyword Magic Tool above all – this tool does wonders for keyword research and finds the best keywords in different languages. Type a query and SEMrush will find similar keywords according to the filters applied.
Note that SEMrush offers several modifiers so that you can limit or expand the keyword ideas. You can choose modifiers such as broad match (to get maximum range), phrase match, exact match (to get maximum relevance), related, questions (to get only question-based keywords).
Keyword research in SEMrush is also a great tool for planning PPC campaigns as you can increase or decrease the range and relevance.
What’s more, if you want to analyze a specific keyword, a great option is to use Keyword Overview. There, you’ll find all the information you need about that keyword so you can decide if that keyword gives you the potential to generate traffic to your site and if it’s worth introducing into your SEO process.
I also recommend a great tool Keyword Gap, which allows you to see what keywords your major competitors are ranking for, so that you can fill in – just like the name of this tool suggests – the keyword gap.
What you need to do is enter the URL of your site and your competitors:
You will get a report with all the keywords that are generating impressions and clicks for your competitors, and for which you are not yet displaying in the search results. I always recommend choosing keywords for the SEO process-based, among other things, on competitive analysis, and that’s what you get here:
Backlink Research
If you are planning your SEO campaign, then you should never ignore link building as off-page SEO is one of the key elements of the SEO process. And this is something that SEMrush can help you with as well!
When implementing off-page SEO, it is always a good idea to start with a backlink audit to evaluate the current link profile, the number of backlinks, referring domains, and toxicity score.
Once you have created a project, you have access to backlink reports. It is worthwhile to analyze these reports regularly to find all disavowed, removed, lost, and found backlinks as well as to measure the types of links (text, image, frame, follow, nofollow, sponsored, or UGC), top anchors, or categories of referring domains. It would be impossible to list all the data that SEMrush offers for backlink analysis.
Or maybe you want to see what backlinks your biggest competitors have? Competitor comparison is a great idea to fill in your backlink gap. Select the Backlink Gap tool and enter your competitors to find prospects for your website.
SEMrush will generate you a report where you can see on which domains your competitors have backlinks – this way, you can discover how to improve your link building process.
Site Audit
If you would like to conduct a basic SEO audit of your site to discover which elements should be improved or optimized so that your site meets the latest Google’s webmaster guidelines, SEMrush can prepare such a report for you, reviewing the overall SEO performance of your site.
To get an audit report of your site, you also need to create a project first.
Importantly, here you will be able to check many technical elements that need to be optimized. This is especially useful if you don’t have advanced technical knowledge about SEO. Site Audit will provide you with all relevant information about:
- Core Web Vitals,
- crawlability issues (404 errors, 500 errors),
- internal links,
- txt,
- broken links,
- sitemaps.
Once you’ve discovered all the errors and issues, you can make technical changes to improve your site’s health and SEO performance.
If you would like to learn what technical SEO is and which elements you should optimize, I have prepared a technical SEO guide for you – there you will find everything you need.
Topic Research
Let’s not forget about content marketing for your business. If you want to increase your visibility in search results and drive web traffic, then you should provide great, user-centered, and unique content on both your website and your company blog. SEMrush has developed a great tool for finding content ideas. Select Topic Research, enter the keyword you’d like to analyze and choose your target country, and SEMrush will show you a list of the most popular topics that drive high user engagement and have great potential for increasing web traffic.
Boost Your SEO Process with SEMrush!
SEMrush is one of the best tools for online marketing. It will help you in planning and measuring the effectiveness of your SEO process, but not just there. It’s a great SaaS solution for content marketing, PPC, social media, and other advertising campaigns.
The features offered by SEMrush are endless, it’s worthwhile for you to find your sweet spot and choose especially the ones you need for your SEO process. Will it be competitive analysis, or maybe keyword research and backlink analysis? It’s entirely up to you.
Thanks for that Matt. I consider investing in SEMrush and it really helped to review the tool 🙂
Glad it helped, Sophie! Enjoy using SEMrush for your SEO then!