Search Engine Optimisation Made Easy

A few years ago, I’ve started my solo entrepreneur journey in Australia. While back in my country of origin I had a strong network of friends and acquaintances, all in the advertising and marketing space, ready to help with my digital endeavours, here I was mostly all by myself. I was also a newbie in the e-commerce space, so all my attempts were based on a trial-and-error process. So, I was an easy prey for the SEO hunters out there. Right time, right desperate mindset, not enough traffic on my website, together with a lack of SEO culture, and I ended up paying a handsome monthly fee for some guys based (probably) in Thailand, but not enough connected to the Australian reality.

 I knew the SEO is a long-time endeavour, so I was patient. After not seeing any results, despite my efforts, I’ve realised I didn’t even know what to ask from them. So, I’ve started to do my own research and learning how to do SEO by myself. I found out that, if you’re the one writing your own content and set up the basis of your digital business, the more you know in the beginning, the easier it is to grow it later. And this is how I came over Semrush.

If you never heard about Semrush before, allow me to uncover this for you! Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. It has tools and reports able to help marketers that work in the following services: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, Campaign Management. OR, sometimes, to help newbies like me in the SEO world. I don’t use all the available tools, some of them are designed especially for SEO agencies working with a lot of clients and doing SEO for a living. I just want to rank better in Google and to write friendly SEO Content!

But can you get the most from the Semrush? Let me tell you what is easy and fast to implement so it will bring you the most benefits in the least amount of time.

Also, you can try it free HERE

Semrush Toolkits Category

The value of Semrush lies in the wide range of tools available - the software contains over 40 tools for SEO as well as content, advertising, competitive research, reporting, and social media management.

This way, you can manage all aspects of a website’s online visibility through Semrush. You can gather SEO insights, research competitors, use their content tools to create new pages, build links, run ads, and promote your new material on social media -- all using Semrush tools.

Ultimately, the way you use Semrush depends on your specific goals. However, most digital marketing goals require three steps: measuring, improving, and reporting. Semrush can help you do all three no matter what your area of expertise or focus is.

To help you achieve your goals, I will introduce you to the core features of Semrush, which will allow you to measure your website’s online visibility, improve the website/brand’s visibility, and then report the results of your efforts for future benchmarks. 

Here are the best Semrush tools to get you started:

1. Start a Project: Audit your Site, Track Visibility, Get SEO ideas
2. Discover & Analyse your Competitors
3. Dive into Keyword Research
4. Create Content Optimised to Rank
5. Build Reports Quick and Easy

 1. Start a Project

Projects are the best way to start measuring any website’s current online visibility. Setting one up is easy and they allow you to measure a business’s online presence from multiple angles and gather data over time.

Set up a Project on a domain that you want to analyse or improve online visibility for. To start, you need to enter your domain name in the Project setup window.

Once you have a Project set up, you are able to configure the 12 Project tools that fully measure a website’s online visibility and help you manage campaigns to improve its visibility. Each Project tool makes it easy to report any progress into a custom PDF with Semrush’s PDF report builder.

While there are over a dozen tools within a Project, here are three basic tools that are worth configuring without delay.

Project Tool #1: Audit your website with Site Audit

Site Audit is a great first Project tool to set up because it can give you instant insights about a website’s health. This tool crawls your site the same way Google does and gives you a report on all of the issues we found related to the website’s health and visibility.

Get a free audit HERE

After getting the results of your Site Audit, you’ll have your work cut out for you. The Errors, Warnings, and Notices in your report are your to-do list of technical improvements to make on the website to help it perform better. The Site Health is basically your website’s grade. As you improve the site and re-run the audit, the score will improve.

Curious where you rank in Google? Check your ranking HERE

Project tool #2: Track your website’s visibility with Position Tracking

Once you’ve decided on your target keywords for your campaign, start tracking them in Position Tracking. Then, as you complete your SEO campaign you can easily report how the website’s visibility has grown over time.

This tool can track your custom list of target keywords in any location across the globe. This way, you can watch your website’s improvements for the specific keywords and goals of your campaign.

It’s also able to track your competitors and their positioning for the same keywords so you can stay fully aware of the competition going on.

Once the Position Tracking campaign is running, you can set up Alerts to automatically receive an email whenever your site or a competitor’s crosses a specific threshold (into top 3 positions, gains 10 positions, loses 10 positions, etc).

If you need to report to a client or boss, it’s easy to integrate Position Tracking reports into a PDF deliverable with the Semrush PDF builder tool, My Reports. And you can also access the option to integrate Position Tracking and a few other Semrush reports into Google Data Studio.

Project tool #3: Gather on page SEO ideas with On Page SEO Checker

The On Page SEO Checker tool takes a list of pages on your site along with accompanying target keywords and provides you with ideas to optimize each page for its target keywords. This is how you make improvements after measuring your current organic rankings.

The ideas you get from this tool will range from technical SEO improvements to increasing word count on specific pages, to acquiring backlinks from specific domains.

Alongside the Site Audit tool, this is one of the quickest ways to gather direct opportunities to improve a website through quick changes.

2. Discover & Analyse Your Competitors

Semrush makes it easy to find out who competes with you not only in your industry, but any website that is outranking you for your target keywords.

Discovery

The easiest way to find your organic competitors in search, enter your domain into the search bar in the Organic Research Competitors report. This report tells you the exact domains competing the most for the same target keywords as the site you query in the search bar.

There are many other ways to find competitors based on metrics like advertising positions, common backlinks, a custom set of keywords, and traffic. 

Analysis

Once you’ve identified your competitors, you can use the following tools to learn all about their online strategy, measure where they stand with important metrics and benchmark your site’s metrics against theirs.

• To estimate a domain’s overall monthly traffic, analyse how they attract their website visitors and where they go next, and get averages of visitor behaviour metrics (time on site, pages/session, bounce rate, etc) - Traffic Analytics
• To see all of a domain’s organic search results ranking in Google’s top organic results - Organic Research
• To see a domain’s use of PPC advertising that Semrush found ranking in Google’s top paid results - Advertising Research
• To see all of a domain’s backlinks and referring domains - Backlink Analytics
• To compare keyword positions across 5 websites - Keyword Gap
• To compare referring domains across 5 websites - Backlink Gap
• To track recent posts, audience size, growth, and engagement of competitors on six Social Media channels - Social Media Tracker 

3. Dive into Keyword Research

The Keyword Magic Tool is where you’ll be able to do the bulk of your keyword research — with tons of information to measure the potential value of keywords to target that you can then improve your site with content based on. The good thing is that this tool is super quick and easy to dive into. 

Enter a target keyword that represents your product or service or a search that you want to rank for, and Semrush will return millions of related searches grouped together by topic. 

Using filters, you can find the top searched related questions, keywords with the lowest keyword difficulty, most affordable keywords to bid on, and more.

This process will help you uncover new low-cost and low-competition keywords that you can capitalize on and start stealing traffic from your competition.

 If you want to learn more, this FREE course with prominent industry expert Greg Gifford is for you!

4. Create Content Optimised to Rank

 As you work to improve your website’s SEO, you need to have content. And not just any content, but content that is optimised to rank.

What the SEO Content Template will give you is a complete template for creating an optimised piece of content from scratch. All you have to do is enter your target keyword and location and Semrush will generate the template.

To go one step further, SEO Writing Assistant takes your SEO Content Templates and integrates them into Google Docs and WordPress so you can grade your content in real-time as you draft it.

BONUS: you can add the SEO Writing Assistant Chrome add-on to your browser for a new way to improve your website with new, optimised content!

5. Build Reports Quick and Easy

Reporting is essential to digital marketing. If you work with clients, you should report what you measure before you do any work, and after you’ve done work to improve the business’s visibility, you should report again with the results.

Reporting on Semrush is easy - just go to My Reports, and drag and drop data widgets from your Projects and Analytics reports into the PDF builder. You can also add text blocks and images into the PDF builder to fully make it your own.

One more thing: they have a wonderful library of resources and courses to help you nail it right from the beginning!

And when it comes to trust, let me tell you that, with over 6,000,000 registered users, Semrush helps small and large businesses in every corner of the world to become more visible to their target audience.

Disclaimer to affiliate links:

Here’s the arrangement - Sometimes, I sell things. We all do, isn't it?

Yep, I sell things — on my website and in my messaging. Sometimes it’s my things, now and then other people’s things.

When someone I trust offers a course or product that I use, trust and have faith in, one I think could get you extraordinary outcomes, I love to promote it. By providing affiliate links to these items, I may earn a commission, which I like to call “thank-you cash.” It sounds (let’s say, for my sake) better than… the Avon Lady.

If you don’t mind, note that I haven’t received (yet) any free items, services, gifts, or anything else from these companies in exchange for discussing or presenting them on my recommendations list. But I hope I will J.

In the event that you have any inquiries concerning this, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me. 

If you need assistance in setting up automated systems for your business, from email marketing platforms to courses delivering platforms, reach out here: Camelia at zoomdirectmedia.com.au  and I will be happy to help!