Beyond Keyword Research with SEMRush: My Review

Name: SEMRush

Grade: A-

Price: $99, $199, $399

Website: www.semrush.com

It’s no secret that SEMRush is one of the leaders in keyword and competitive research tools for online marketing. However, the extensive tool set that comes with SEMRush also comes with a decent price tag. This often begs the question if SEMRush is worth it or if all those tools are really necessary for internet marketing. For those reasons I have written this SEMRush review, after having used the tool for several years,

The rapid growth of technology and easy access to online resources has made life easier for college students, and it can do so for you.

With the resources that SEMRush provides at your disposal, you can easily create income-generating online enterprises to help you pay for college or avoid student loan debt. Some of the classic online enterprise examples include the creation of an affiliate marketing website.

However, you need more than technology and internet to create a thriving online business when in college. You also need research and marketing tools that will help you achieve your goals. Enter SEMRush.

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is an online tool that allows you to analyze information regarding your website and that of your competitors.

In the online tech domain, there are tried and tested methods that always deliver results. So rather than “reinventing the wheel” or trying to come up with the “next big idea/thing,” SEMrush allows you to figure the existing methods that actually work, see how they work, and even fine-tune them to your benefit.

To demonstrate this, the tool allows you to see what is working for your top competitors i.e. what keywords they’re ranking for, what are their backlinks and backlinking strategy or see their email marketing strategy. With this information, you can then replicate it in your business model, and even fine-tune it .i.e. getting backlinks from higher authority sites than your competitors for even better results.

In a nutshell, SEMrush allows you to:

• Find your competitor`s profitable keywords
• Discover other new and related keywords
• Uncover content idea from your competitors
• Find thousands of backlinking ideas
• Find and remove unnatural backlinks
• Build data visualization

So how does SEMrush do all the tasks? The secret towards its efficacy lies in its features. It has powerful and value-driven features that are sure to drive and deliver results.

Let`s look at the features of SEMrush.

SEMrush Features

Image from: SEMRush.com

Competitive Analysis

Competitor analysis is probably the best feature of this tool. With SEMRush Keyword Research, you simply need to input your competitor`s URL.

Once you do so, SEMrush generates both a graphical and numerical chart that displays all your competitor’s data, including their monthly paid and organic traffic. You can even scrape further by clicking on the statistics to show the source of the traffic.

Additionally, the tool allows you to sort the ranked keyword according to the position, volume, keyword competitiveness (KC), and search volume trend.

Also, from here, you can see what keywords that your competitor has prioritized.

The second most important step of analyzing your competitor is to figure their backlinking strategy. SEMrush has a backlink tab that will allow you to have an overview of your competitor’s backlinks, including where they get their backlinks, types of backlinks, number of backlinks and the number of referring domain.

Another aspect of competitor analysis is reviewing their content strategy. This will involve examining their content, number of pages, keyword density, length of their content and many other content factors.

Armed with this information, you can then tailor your website to exceed your competitor`s in Google`s eye. For instance, you can try to beat them by sourcing your backlinks from higher authoritative sites, publish more content-rich and value-driven content or even try to optimize their best keywords.

Keyword Research

Another handy feature of SEMrush Keyword Research is the keyword research feature. With this feature, you just need to plug in a keyword you`re looking to rank for, and voila, you get a list of related and relevant keywords. With a capacity to analyze more than 120M keyword and 39M domain, SEMrush offers the perfect starting point for any Keyword research.

And when you click on a single phrase, the platform presents you with an overview of valuable information on the keyword such as volume, keyword difficult, CPC, and organic search volume.

And the best part of this feature is that it separates the exact phrase terms from the related phrase terms. This will not only broaden your keyword search results but also provide you with new content ideas.

Using keyword research with SEMrush is not only vital for content ideas, but can be crucial, especially for your PPC campaigns. The tool allows you to view CPC per country and view the competitor for specific ads.

Site Audit

What a better way of analyzing and assessing your overall on-site SEO. The suite audit, which is part of the Tools section allows you to assess your site and provide you with an overview of your traffic. After the “crawl,” SEMrush provides you with a website score that is based on the number of issues on your site.

Some of the issues that the site audit report highlights include:

• Presences of duplicate content
• Highlight the presence of a penalty or occurrence of a penalty
• Lack of meat0descriptions within pages
• Low-text HTML ratios

With this audit, you are made aware of the common issues in your on-site SEO, which you can fix.

The best part of this feature is the aesthetic visual appeal that allows you to navigate all the errors. Additionally, the platform also provides you with useful tips on how to handle or fix the errors.

SEO Ideas

SEO Ideas is really a suite of features from topic research to a full on analysis of your current website’s content. These various tools producs thousands of content ideas in addition to pointing out areas of improvement for your website’s current content.

What a better way of improving your SEO by having a tool that recommends SEO idea and points to pages where you need to improve your SEO.

The SEO Ideas feature is a handy SEO-improvement feature that is designed to ensure that you maximize your SEO strategies.

Like other features, the SEO Ideas feature breaks down the results into actionable steps, breaking each result on the basis of strategy, semantic, content, and backlinks. Clicking on any page will provide you with results or recommendations that SEO Ideas think will optimize your page.

Even though it`s not a one-touch dial and entails going page after page, it`s still an effective way of optimizing your pages.

Other SEMrush Features

The above features we`ve highlighted are probably the most essential for an effective marketing campaign. However, SEMrush Keyword Research still has plenty of other features, which include;

Social media toolkit

The Social Media Toolkit is comprised of 2 primary tools:

• Social Media Poster
• Social Media Tracker

Social Media Poster

The Social Media Poster tool allows you to manage all of your social media profiles as well as their strategy and schedule all in one place. You can schedule posts, tweets, etc weeks in advance. You can even save drafts for social media posts if you are not sure one is quite ready to be put into the queue.

Over time you will find that it is important to share the same post from time to time to help ensure it reaches your whole audience. The best way to do this effectively is compare the analytics of each post and see how they performed. With this data you can decide which posts should be kept in the rotation and which need improvement. The Social Media Poster tool gives you this data. Finally, you can connect various feeds together and gain insight into new content ideas for your site and social media profiles.

Social Media Tracker

The Social Media Tracker tool helps you keep your finger on the pulse of your social media profiles. The tool allows you to compare your social media performance to that of your competition’s profiles. Further, you can dive deeper into your competitions social activity, as well as their audience’s growth and how much they engage with your competitors posts.

What those 2 (really more than 2 but we’re calling it 2) features of the Social Media Tracker tool allow you to do is identify what content and posts are performing the best within your chosen niche and then find a way to re-purpose that content for yourself. I’m not saying you copy and paste. However taking an idea and doing it your own way is very common in this industry. That is how competition works, after all.

It should also be noted that these are project based. Each SEMRush plan allots you a certain number of projects. These projects are used for the tracking features SEMRush offers such as site monitoring, position tracking, social media tools and more. You can perform research independent of projects, but creating projects allows for long-term analysis and work to be done.

Backlink Audit

The backlink audit feature is used to discover and disavow the potentially toxic backlinks. Similar to the social media toolkit, this tool-set runs off of your projects. The above screenshot is only a taste of the data that the tool gives you in order to protect the privacy of my client.

The tool allows you to dig into each individual backlink, pick out the potentially dangerous ones and even helps you compiles a disavow file to submit to Google to remove the potential for those bad backlinks to harm your website’s organic performance.

Plans and Pricing

SEMRush offers 3 tiered plans: Pro, Guru, and Business, with a pricing of $99, $199 and $399 consecutively.

The variance between the plans is because of the analytics involved in each plan. For instance, the Pro plan is ideal for college students like you, the Guru plan is ideal for mid-level companies, while the Business plan is ideal for large SEO agencies and corporations.

Pros

• Easy to use and navigate
• Multi-million keyword suggestions
• Desktop/mobile breakdown
• Comprehensive results

Cons

• Quite baffling data that is at times challenging to interpret
• High monthly plans

SEMRush Keyword Research is truly a dream come true for any college student. It offers a gamut of handy and crucial features that are sure to make your online enterprises a thriving business.