Are you looking for a tool that can help in driving more visitors and grow your blog? Well, then you are in the right place as in this Semrush Review we are going to discuss a lot about its features and how you can use them for the growth of your blog.
What is Semrush?
Semrush is an All-In-One Marketing Tools suite that you can use for the growth of your blog. If you are already aware of Search Engine Optimization and looking for a tool that can help you in that process then this can be a great choice.
Even though Semrush is widely popular for its SEO tools, it has many other tools that can help you with various aspects like Social Media Management, PPC Ads, etc. So using this might help you save a lot of time as you can check different metrics right from a single dashboard that is essential to make data-driven decisions.
5 Reasons Why You Need to Buy Semrush in 2020
1.Generate Leads on Autopilot with Semrush lead generation tool:
Semrush offers a lead generation tool through which you can embed a widget on your website that can deliver a Site Audit Report to your leads automatically in exchange for their contact details.
The best part is that you can customize the widget in many ways like the TITLE, BUTTON TEXT, etc to align it with your website branding. This is an amazing strategy to generate leads from your website as you need not spend a lot of time creating a valuable lead magnet.
2.Track Your Competitors on Multiple Channels:
Tracking competitors on multiple channels generally requires anyone to use a lot of tools. When you use tools from different companies, it would be difficult to check and analyze their online activity.
Semrush can help in tracking your competitors both on search engines and social media platforms. There are many powerful tools that allow you to track their activity online across multiple online marketing channels and get better insights to stay ahead of them.
3.Discover New Opportunities:
Semrush offers a suite of tools that can help in discovering new opportunities and drive more traffic to your website. You can perform keyword research for finding new content ideas and plan your content marketing strategy.
Moreover, you can discover new opportunities to build backlinks for your website and plan your link building strategy.
4.Check Your Metrics From One Place:
When you have a website and social media handles associated with it, using Semrush you can easily check all your metrics like site performance score, social media followers, brand mentions, and many more from a single dashboard creating a project.
5.Track Your Keyword Rankings:
Monitoring your keyword rankings in the search engines is very important. This helps you understand the performance of your blog posts and optimize them better for improving their rankings in the search engine results.
I know these are pretty amazing features and if you are convinced you might be looking for a way to get started signing up for their trial.
Do you wanna more about Semrush?
Well, then let’s discuss more benefits and features of different marketing tools available inside in this review of Semrush.
Getting Started With Semrush:
Semrush has a good User Interface that is not too complex and allows you to access the different marketing tools. You can easily understand things spending some time even if you are not tech-savvy.
However, it might be a bit tough if you have never used any online marketing tools in the past. Before we move ahead, it would be better if you have a Semrush account so that you can explore the tools while you continue to read this.
Once you create a Semrush Account, logging in for the first time you will find different kinds of Dashboards on the left side under which different tools categorized for specific purposes like SEO, Social Media, etc can be accessed.
You can get started by adding a domain name in the projects section by clicking on the Add New Project button.
Adding the domain name as shown in the image you can create a “New Project” inside Semrush.You can also find different Dashboards for SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Content Marketing, Competitive Research, and other management tools on the left side of the main dashboard about which we discuss later.
From the image, you can see that I have already added my Project name “Blogging Rightly” with my domain. Once you have created the project you can see a list of 12+ tools that you can set up like Site Audit, Position Tracking, Social Media Tracker, Brand Monitoring, Social Media Poster, Content Analyzer, and many more.
Once you configure these tools properly, you can get a quick overview of aspects related to your project just by logging into your Semrush account.
For example, you can easily get a Site Health score when you configure the Site Audit tool as Semrush crawler would crawl and find out the issues on your website.You can configure it to crawl regularly and send an email to you.
Moreover, this helps you identify issues immediately when you check the overview of your project without the need to manually perform a Site Audit of your website every single day.
Similarly, there are many other tools like Social Media Tracker that display the followers count on your social media handles.All these can help you have a quick overview of your project domain issues,social media handle metrics and many more to look at all at once.
However, you can also access these tools easily from the respective Dashboards that you see when you login apart from the Project Dashboard page.
Semrush Dashboards:
With a lot of tools available inside, some of them are grouped into a Dashboard based on their purpose like SEO, Social Media, etc. You can easily select one of the Dashboards based on your purpose and start using the tools that you want immediately.
Currently, five types of Dashboards are available to choose from the main menu but we are going to discuss in detail only three of them in this article.
- SEO Dashboard
- Advertising Dashboard
- Social Media Dashboard
This is because most of the tools available under these three Dashboards can be seen again under the other two dashboards Content Marketing and Competitive Research Dashboards. However, unique tools that are accessible under these two might get covered in the future.
While we discuss the tools accessible under these dashboards, make sure to read the Special Feature Section at the end of each dashboard section in this article.
Apart from these dashboards, there are a lot of useful tools for planning, managing, and reporting your marketing campaigns under the MANAGEMENT Section on the Menu of Semrush Main Dashboard.
So let’s dive in and discuss the features, use cases of various tools available under the three dashboards in this article.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines using the SEO Dashboard Tools:
Semrush is pretty famous for its Search Engine Optimization tools having many use cases like tracking your rankings, performing site audits, etc. Once you choose the SEO Dashboard you can access various SEO tools under these sections from the menu.
1.Competitive Research
2.Keyword Research
3.Link Building
4.Rank Tracking
5.On Page and Tech SEO
1. Analyze Your Competitors with Competitive Research:
When you are just getting started, performing competitor research is the best way to plan an SEO strategy for your website. Just entering your competitor domain name, you would get a lot of data like organic and paid traffic estimates, backlinks, keywords and many more to analyze using the Domain Overview tool.
Not just competitor domains,you can also use the Domain Overview tool to gain overview of your website about keywords,traffic,etc just as I did here.
Here you can view different metrics like Authority Score, Organic Search Traffic, Paid Search Traffic, and many more as shown.
Apart from Domain Overview, you can also find Traffic Analytics, Organic Research, Keyword Gap, and Backlink Gap under this dashboard that can be useful to get a lot of insights about your competitors analyzing the data you obtain using them.
Special Feature: Get More Keyword Ideas From Competitors using the Keyword Gap Tool
The Keyword Gap tool available under the Competitive research section can help you gain a lot of content and keyword ideas. You can find the organic keywords that your competitors are ranking but you are not.
Ultimately helping you optimize your website easily and rank for various keywords that your competitors are ranking
2.Find More Rankable Keywords With the Keyword Research Tools:
Semrush is one of the top companies having a massive keyword database with billions of keywords from 100+ countries in their databases. So if you want to find Rankable keywords easily then you must need to use the Keyword Research Tools offered by Semrush.
Even if you are into PPC Advertising, using Semrush can help you find the best keywords to target in your PPC campaigns. Starting with the Keyword Overview, you can get various metrics like CPC, Estimated Search Volumes, Trends, etc entering a particular keyword.
It also provides a Keyword Difficulty Score on a scale of 100, helping you understand how tough it is to rank for a keyword on the search engine results.
However, we highly recommend you to never rely on the scores shown by any keyword research tool before choosing the rankable keywords as it depends on various other factors as well.
Note:
Never trust the Difficulty Score provided by any keyword research tool instead focus on manually analyzing the Search Engine Results and pick the keywords.
You can also find Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Manager, Organic Traffic Insights under this section. When you use the keyword magic tool entering a keyword, you would get a lot of relevant keyword suggestions along with the important metrics.
The best part is that you can refine the results further based on
- Important metrics like CPC, Volume, Competitive Difficulty, etc
- Keyword Match types like Broad Match, Phrase Match, etc
Moreover, you can them to your list of keywords using the Keyword Manager
Special Feature: Discover More Long-Tail Keywords using Keyword Magic Tool.
Long-tail keywords are generally low-competitive and easy to rank on the search engines. Finding them can be easy using the Keyword Magic tool offered by Semrush.When you enter a seed keyword in the Keyword Magic Tool and make a search you can discover many long-tail keywords by switching to the Questions tab on the results.
You can also find them using the Word Count filter under the advanced filters offered in the tool by setting it up for keywords with more words.
By the way, if you are new to keyword research and want to learn it from experts then you can sign up for their FREE Keyword Research Course by SEO Expert Greg Gifford from here.
3.Build a Backlink Profile with the Link Building Tools:
Backlinks are one of the major SEO factors that can impact the rankings in the search engines. By building quality backlinks to your website you might be able to beat your competitors in the search results.
However, toxic backlinks can negatively affect your rankings in the search engine result pages(SERPs). Using the Link Building Tools offered by Semrush you might be able to find various backlink opportunities.
Later you can build backlinks through various methods like Guest Posting reaching out to the website owners.
Start with the Backlink Analytics tool which can show you many details like Backlinks, Referring Domains, Referring IPs, etc that can help you identify good backlink opportunities.
You can also find other tools like Backlink Audit, Link Building, and Bulk Backlink Checker under this Link Building Section that can be quite useful for your backlink strategy.
Special Feature: Identify Toxic Links using Backlink Audit Tool
Toxic backlinks to your website might affect your rankings and can result in Search Engine Penalties as well. Using the Backlink Audit Tool you can get a Toxic Score by Semrush which is given based on the linking domains.
You can manually check the backlinks and place a request to the website owners to REMOVE them. You can also Disavow in case they didn’t get removed.Semrush even provides email templates for placing REMOVE requests.
4.Track Your Website Rankings With the Rank Tracking tools:
Monitoring the rankings of your website for various keywords in the search engine results will be easy setting up the Position Tracking tool under the Rank Tracking section. You can manually add keywords or connect with Google Analytics as well to set up the Position Tracker.
So start using the Position Tracker and monitor your keyword rankings regularly whether they have improved or lost rankings.
Special Feature: Get Updates On SERP Volatility with Semrush Sensor
Algorithm updates of Search Engines can become a boon or nightmare for the Search Engine Optimizers. You might see a sudden drop or spike in the analytics when the updates happen affecting your rankings.
A Semrush Sensor is a tool that provides you a score based on the volatility of the Search Engine Results(SERPs) in the Google search engine.
This is a super cool feature that is offered in the Semrush marketing tools suite providing a personal score for your website and helps you take necessary actions if there are any effects on your rankings or traffic.
5.Optimize and Fix your On-Page and Technical SEO issues with the On-Page and Tech SEO Tools:
Optimizing your web page content can help in improving your rankings. On-Page and Technical SEO tools can help you identify various On-page and technical SEO issues that can help you rank higher. They also help you by providing suggestions on various aspects.
With the Site Audit tool, you can perform an SEO audit of your website without the need to install any software on your computer. After crawling this shows warnings, errors, notices checking the HTTPS, Crawlability, Internal Linking, etc.
On-Page SEO checker is another cool tool that provides you a lot of ideas and actionable suggestions analyzing your content, keywords, and all that can help in optimizing the pages. You can also find other tools like SEO Content Template, Log File Analyzer, and Listing Management tool under this section.
Special Feature: Receive Automatic Updates about your Site Health using Site Audit
As discussed earlier, the Semrush Site Audit tool provides a score based on various On-Page and Technical SEO factors. The key feature is that you can set up the Site Audit tool and receive a report regularly to your email without the need to perform an audit manually as in the case of traditional SEO software.
If you wanna learn in detail about their SEO Dashboard and how to make the best of the SEO tools offered by Semrush, then check out their FREE Online SEO course and enroll in it.
2.Find Better Advertising Opportunities with Advertising Dashboard Tools:
Do you run PPC campaigns for driving traffic to your blog? Then you might find many useful tools in the Advertising dashboard offered by Semrush that can help you analyze the advertising landscape and find better advertising opportunities.
Remember Semrush offers tools to analyze both kinds of campaigns, Text, and Display campaigns. Just like the Semrush SEO dashboard, you will find tools under the Advertising dashboard to perform keyword research, competitor analysis, etc.
So we are going to discuss only the Market Analysis tools that are specific to PPC advertising.
Selecting the Advertising dashboard on the main menu you would be able to Market Analysis Section and you can find the following tools under this
- Domain Overview
- Advertising Research
- Display Advertising
- PLA Research
- CPC Map
Learn More About Your Competitors PPC Campaigns with the Advertising Research tool:
The advertising Research tool is a powerful tool that provides a lot of data about your competitor PPC campaigns like keywords, positions, position changes, etc in a specific country location.
Making a search entering your Competitor URL using the Advertising Research Tool you can find their keywords, traffic, estimated traffic cost along with their paid search trends.
You can also see their paid search trends, position changes, ad copies, subdomains, and many more using this tool. However, to see history you must have their higher plans like Guru or Business plan of Semrush.
Get Inspiration From the Display Campaigns with the Display Advertising Tool:
Display Campaigns are different from the normal PPC search campaigns as they appear on the Websites that are part of the Google Display Network that also includes a wide range of Google-owned services like Gmail.
Using Display Advertising Tool you can find the display ads by entering the keyword or domain name of your competitors. The best part is that you will also get data like last seen, first seen, landing pages, top publishers when you want to check the campaigns run by a competitor.
Analyze your Competitor’s Shopping Ad Campaigns with PLA Research Tool:
This is a super useful tool for e-commerce business owners who are running Product Listing Ads on Google. Using this tool one can easily check the product prices, keywords, etc of the competitors and prepare a good PLA Advertising Strategy.
Get an Overview of Cost Per Click(CPC) in different parts of a Country with CPC Map :
Using the CPC Map tool you can know the Cost Per Click(CPC)Estimates on Google Ads across different regions in a country. Especially When you are planning to launch the campaigns on a National Level, this would help in planning the budgets for a particular region.
You can also use this data to set up Benchmarks for your campaigns. Moreover, it also allows you to compare the data with the other regions selecting the industry of your choice.
3.Leverage the Power of Social Media using the Social Media Dashboard Tools:
Social Media can be a great source to drive traffic to your blog. As there are billions of people actively using various popular social media platforms, creating content, or sharing your blog posts is an amazing method to attract readers to your blog.
Switching to the Social Media dashboard, you can find the following tools
- Social Media Poster
- Social Media Tracker
- Social Media Ads
Now let me explain to you about each of them
1.Schedule Posts For Your Social Media Accounts With Social Media Poster:
Scheduling posts in advance helps in avoiding last-minute errors while sharing content on social media. Especially when you use emojis or hashtags or UTM parameter URLs there is a high chance of making mistakes when you try to publish the posts at the last minute.
Social Media Poster allows you to publish content on popular Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Not just them it allows you to publish content on Google My Business as well.
However,you need to connect your social media accounts just like I did with my social media handles.
You can have a look at all the different social media profiles that you have connected with your Semrush account from here.
Social Media Poster tool comes with a Calendar feature that allows you to have a quick overview of many things like
- How Many Posts Scheduled along with the respective dates
- Switch to next month or previous month and see what you have posted
- What Post you have shared on a particular Social Media Account
For example,here I have checked the calendar to view the posts that are published in the month of July on the social media handles.
When you plan to share a post on Social Media Accounts you can just select the respective profile and type the content in the editor. The best part is that the editor is feature-rich that allows you to
- Add Emojis
- Add GIFs
- Create UTM based URLs
- Preview your posts on Desktop and Mobile Devices
- Upload Images or Videos
You can schedule, queue, or publish the posts immediately once you are done with the content part. The best part is that Evergreen publishing on Social Media is also possible that can help in sharing the same content for a period of time regularly.
However, the drawback here is that you cannot directly publish posts on Instagram. Even if you schedule, you can publish through notifications that you receive.
By the way, there is a Chrome Extension for the Social Media Poster that allows you to easily share the text or blog posts on your social media accounts with just a few clicks.
2.Monitor Your Competitor Social Media Accounts with Social Media Tracker:
Monitoring the competitor’s social media accounts can help you understand what they are sharing and the engagement they are receiving. With multiple social media platforms, it is hard to check their activity individually.
Social Media Tracker allows you to track your competitor across many popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc all under a single dashboard.
All you have to do is enter their social media accounts to start tracking and see their follower growth, number of posts, engagement, etc. You can also keep track of the Social Media Channels of your blog and see their performance regularly.
3.Launch Your Campaigns on Facebook with Social Media Ads:
Do you wanna advertise on Facebook launching ad campaigns? Then Social Media Ads tool BY Semrush might help you. This is currently under BETA and it is not that powerful to launch big campaigns on Facebook like the Business Manager offered by Facebook.
However, you can launch campaigns from here when you don’t want to use the business manager and understand its interface again.
Special Feature: Find out the Top Content Shared By Your Competitors Easily
Finding the best performing content (that has the highest total engagement or engagement rate) can help you understand what worked for them so that you can inspire and improve your social media content strategy.
But doing this manually is not that easy as numbers can change at any time and scrolling through their feed is a very boring process. But using the Semrush social media tracker you find their top-performing posts on Social Media Handles easily with no manual work required.
Final Thoughts:
Semrush can be a great option to choose because it has a suite of marketing tools required as it has many tools that can help you with Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, and many more.
You can spy competitors, find amazing advertising opportunities, and keywords to rank. There are many special features through which you can generate leads or track competitors on auto-pilot.