What is SEMRUSH?
SEMRUSH is a search engine optimization tool dedicated to keyword research, competitor analysis and Google Ads optimization.
How to use SEMrush and its main functions and features
organic research
This is one of the best features of SEMRUSH.
Enter competitor sites into SEMRUSH:
Enter competitor URL
Then you get a lot of very useful data:
semrush useful data
Let's quickly break down the metrics on this page.
First, take a look at "Keywords-Keywords":
keyword data
This is the number of ranked keywords on your site.
I don't think this metric is too useful. Suppose a website might rank on the second page of Google for 1000 keywords. Ranking for these 1,000 keywords may bring little traffic to your website.
Because this metric doesn't focus on the top ten keywords, it's not very useful.
Second, let's take a look at "Traffic-Traffic".
This is an estimate of the monthly traffic the site gets from search engines.
Traffic data
This data is not accurate. But it's a great way to measure competitor SEO.
Finally, let's take a look at "Traffic Value - Traffic Cost":
traffic value
Traffic value is the organic traffic value of the website.
(Assuming you need to pay email list the same amount to get the same traffic with PPC)
Because this metric takes into account traffic and the value of traffic, this is one of my favorite SEMrush metrics.
For example, if you entered the Nerd Wallet site into Semrush, you'd see their monthly SEO traffic worth a whopping $73 million.
nerd-wallet-traffic value
Organic Search Positions
Here you can get all the keywords the website ranks for.
(and their rankings)
keyword ranking
This is very useful for keyword research .
Rather than digging through the golden keywords in Google Keyword Planner, grab a list of already ranked keywords from here:
Ranking keyword list
After all, if your competitors rank for these keywords, you have a good chance of ranking too.
Now:
By default, Semrush only shows those keywords that bring the most traffic to the site:
Keywords that bring the most traffic
So this data is very helpful.
But you can do so much more with this data.
For example, you can filter the keywords that get the most searches by "volume-volume":
Get the most searched keywords
Or you can use the advanced filter to see keywords with a CPC greater than $5:
Screening CPC greater than $5
You can also filter out keywords that have SERP features (eg featured snippets/links). This way, you can target those terms that get a lot of organic clicks.
SERP Feature Filtering
In summary:
Organic search rankings are often where people start their keyword research.
Unlike most keyword research tools, this feature gives you a list of keywords that are easy to rank for.
Traffic Analysis
Traffic analysis gives overall traffic data for a website.
(Not just Google organic traffic)
So this data is very useful.
First, when you use a traffic analysis tool to analyze a website, you can get estimated overall traffic data for the website: