After countless sleepless nights, your business is finally up and running. The next thing you’re going to want to do is to keep a very watchful eye on your rivals. After all, they’re probably working really hard too and you wouldn’t want to fall behind. So how do you beat the competition?
You’re going to need the help of a powerful SEO optimization platform that will dish out the most crucial information about your rivals. This way, you can always be one step ahead of everyone. This is where SEMRush comes into the picture, one of the most popular SEO tools that’s available in the internet marketing world. It will provide you with tons of data that you can use for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, and so much more.
To help you further understand exactly what SEMRush can do for you and your business, here’s a breakdown of its features.
Main Features
SEMRush has plenty of useful keyword research and website review tools.
Keyword research is one of SEMRush’s most useful features, allowing you to identify which keywords you’re already ranking for as well as discover new ones you can capitalize on.
There’s the Keyword Magic Tool which is bound to become your best friend as it has over two million keywords in its database and it lets you find ones that are appropriate for your business. Simply type in a word and you’ll get immediate results. The Keyword Manager Tool is pretty neat too as it lets you further explore up to a thousand keywords of your choice, segment them, export them to a spreadsheet, and send them over to other tools. You shouldn’t forget about the Position Tracking Tool either. This is where you add the keywords you want to track so that you can get weekly updates on how you and your competitors are ranking for them.
SEMRush’s keyword research feature doesn’t stop there. There’s the Domain Overview Tool as well which you can use to learn more about your own website. It will let you in on the amount of organic traffic you’re bringing in through certain keywords, the top five organic keywords for your domain, traffic from paid searches, number of backlinks from referring websites, as well as many others. As for the Organic Research Tool, it allows you to learn a lot more about the keywords you and your competitors are currently ranking for. You’ll get a graph that shows your keyword growth as well as a table that shows you every single keyword you’re ranking for, listed in order of highest volume. Lastly, there’s the Keyword Gap Tool which you can use to identify the keywords that you rank below your competitors for.
Website review is another SEMRush feature that you should be fully maximizing so that you can have a better picture of how your website is performing as well as discover if there are errors you need to act upon.
The Site Audit Tool, for example, crawls through your website in search of problems that may be hampering your performance. As for the Backlinks Analytics Tool, it lets you view the backlinks to your website as well as your competitors’, which of your pages are being linked to, who’s creating those backlinks, and how the number of your backlinks are growing over time. You can even use it to see where your competitors are getting their backlinks from so that you can reach out to those sources in the future. Then there’s the Backlink Audit Tool which comes in handy if you want to see how reputable your backlink sources are. This is important because you wouldn’t want toxic backlinks to harm your website’s SEO.
SERP Features
SEMRush lets you study your site’s SERP features through various tools.
If you’re not sure what SERP features are, they are results on a search engine results page (SERP) that is not a traditional organic result. They’re special results that offer as much information as possible about a certain query. Examples of SERP features are featured snippets, reviews, video carousels, featured images, and site links. It’s important that you’re able to manage your SERP features because it’s possible that they could be stealing attention from your site. Since users are already given a lot of the information they’re looking for right on the actual search engine, they don’t have much of a need to go to your website. Fortunately, SEMRush makes it easy for you to study your SERP features.
The Position Tracking Tool, for example, lets you set target keywords and it will then show you the SERP features that they trigger. This way, you get to see the featured snippets that your site has been gaining and losing. As for the Organic Positions Report, it lets you check the keywords that trigger the SERP features of a certain domain as well as the SERP features that it has ranking for. Then there’s the SEMRush Sensor which helps you identify which SERP features show up the most in different types of searches. Other ways you can research your site’s SERP features is via the Keyword Magic Tool which filters keyword searches by SERP features, the Keyword Difficulty Tool which displays the different SERP features that a particular keyword triggers, and the On Page SEO Checker which gives you recommendations on how to rank for different SERP features.
App Features
The Position Tracking Mobile App lets you keep an eye on your website and competitors at all times.
If you’re always thinking about your competitors and how you can outdo them even when you’re not seated at your desk, make your life easier and download the Position Tracking Mobile App (it’s available on both iOS and Android). It’s basically the mobile version of the Position Tracking Tool which, as we’ve learned from this article, has plenty of uses. Once you have it on your phone, you can keep an eye on your website as well as your rivals at all times.
All the main features are present, allowing you to filter through your project lists and campaigns as well as view their corresponding key metrics such as position, traffic, and visibility. You can also take a look at your campaign keywords and their SERP position changes, access statistics to top keywords, and filter data by date, competitors, and top keywords. It’s important to note that for you to be able to use the app, you need to have an existing Position Tracking campaign.
New Features
The Position Tracking Mobile App lets you keep an eye on your website and competitors at all times.
Keyword cannibalization can cause serious harm to your website’s SEO. It happens when several pages or posts on a particular website go against each other for a spot in the SERPs for the exact same keyword. As a result, none of the pages are able to have a good ranking for the said keyword. Fortunately, SEMRush has made it easy for you to identity competing pages on your website via its new Cannibalization Report under Position Tracking which will give you a cannibalization health score. This allows you to determine which pages are more relevant to a keyword so that you can make the necessary edits.
The Domain Overview Tool also got an update, now allowing you to get instant domain statistics not only for the top-level domain but also for the subfolders, subdomains, and URLs below it. This way, you get to study the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals and go even further into the details of the report through any of the widgets. Because of the update, you can now also instantly compare five different domains. You’ll be presented with their authority score, SEMRush rank, organic keywords, organic traffic, backlinks, referring domains, paid keywords, and paid traffic cost all in one table.
Verdict
SEMRush is a powerful SEO tool but there’s a lot to learn when you’re first starting out.
It’s obvious that SEMRush is a very impressive all-around SEO tool, one that can help you optimize your website and make it more profitable. The amount of data it’s able to provide its subscribers is astounding and so you can be sure that your investment won’t go to waste. That said, there is definitely a learning curve involved when you’re just starting out with the platform as it can be quite tricky to understand the data that’s presented to you. Fortunately for first-timers, SEMRush offers plenty of resources for you to learn from, including webinars and video tutorials.
