By the end of reading this SEMrush guide, we promise you will be become really good at:
Here’s what you’ll discover in this SEMrush tutorial:
All in all, this ultimate SEMrush guide is for all kinds of bloggers and SEO’s who’re looking to get more organic traffic, beat their competitors and drive high quality visitors to their sites from search.
An IMPORTANT Note to All The Readers
You need to get access to SEMrush 30 days free trial to make the most out of this ultimate SEMrush guide.
Why? Because there are a ton of features we discussed in this tutorial so having access to SEMrush for 30 days gives you enough time to explore every feature in detail.
Here’s the step by step easy tutorial on how you can grab SEMrush free Pro account for 30 days (absolutely no cost to you).
Step 1: Use this EXCLUSIVE SEMrush link to grab your 30 days SEMrush Pro account for free. The coupon is directly applied to the link, so you don’t have to enter any special coupon to grab their 30 days free trial.
Once you click on the above link, you’ll be asked to register an account on SEMrush by entering your email and any password.
In some cases, you might see a captcha, so fill out the captcha to proceed to the second step.
Step 2: Now, you will now be redirected to a page that looks like something like this where you’ll need to enter your billing details.
As you can see above, you’ll instantly see the Today’s Charge as $0 (that means, you don’t need to pay anything).
Step 3: Enter your billing details such as your card number to grab your SEMrush Pro account which is worth $99.95 absolutely free for the next 30 days.
Once you click on the “Place The Order” button, you’ll instantly get access to SEMrush Pro account without any charges.
That’s it! You’re done.
If you’re looking for an SEO toolkit that helps you perform any SEO related tasks including keyword research to backlink analysis to site audits, SEMrush is just for you!
Here’s the figures of SEMrush at a glance
All in all, SEMrush is the most perfect SEO toolkit you’ll ever need to significantly improve your performance in search engines.
We’ll also talk about the pros and cons of using SEMrush so you can easily decide whether it’s worth your money and time or not.
Pros of using SEMrush:
Cons of using SEMrush:
Well, SEMrush offers you 3 pricing plans which are listed below.
Let’s explain their plans briefly so you can decide the perfect plan according to your blogging and budget needs.
If you’re looking for 30 days SEMrush free trial for Pro account, click on the below link.
2. SEMrush Guru: This is the highly recommend plan from SEMrush which costs you $199.95 per month, or $1999.40 per year for annually if you choose the yearly option and you’ll get the following features.
If you’re looking for 14 days SEMrush free trial for Guru account, click on the below link.
3. Business plan: This is the advanced plan from SEMrush which costs you $399.95 per month, or $3999.40 per year for annually if you choose the yearly option and you’ll get access to the following features.
Click here to save HUGE up to $800 on SEMrush (on yearly purchase of Business Plan)
Do you want to save more money by purchasing any of SEMrush plans? Then, pay SEMrush for yearly (i.e paying in advance for 12 months) as you can save up to $800.
Here’s the quick breakdown of savings on SEMrush plans (if you go with their yearly plans).
But do you know what is the queen? Your keyword strategy!
Yes, proper keyword research is a surefire way to get more traffic from search engines like Google. No matter what niche you are in, if you want to grow your organic traffic, start targeting low competitive keywords and you’ll get the best results.
But here’s the thing about keyword research, it’s NOT easy. In fact, it’s a daunting task for most people and it’s also time consuming.
That’s why we recommend you to find the RIGHT SEO tool and start using it effectively to find traffic driving keyword ideas. Here’s where an all in one SEO toolkit like SEMrush comes into play.
It offers you an amazing tool for keyword research called “Keyword Magic Tool”.
Keyword magic tool from SEMrush helps you easily find a ton of low competitive yet highly profitable keyword ideas (including long tail keywords) in any industry you are in.
When you type in a keyword in Keyword Magic tool, you can find a ton of keyword data including;
Most of the times, the above keyword data is more than enough for you to easily discover profitable yet low competition keywords.
Before we get started, here are some of the metrics you should know while using SEMrush.
If you’re wondering about how to use it to find great keywords, here’s a simple tutorial for you!
Step 1: Login to your SEMrush account and click on Keyword Magic Tool under “Keyword Research” section. Enter any of your keyword or topic that you want to rank for.
Here’s how it looks like;
You can type in a keyword, choose your favorite database (where your target audience are) and click on the Search button to continue.
Step 2: Now, SEMrush Keyword magic tool gives you a list of all the keywords that match with your target keyword. Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, by default, it shows you broad match keywords (but you can also find “phrase match”, “exact match” or related keyword ideas.
It gives you a list of keyword ideas along with;
Step 3: That’s not all, you can also find a ton of questions which are related to your primary keyword. You just need to click on the “Questions” part (as seen below) and it will return to you all the question based keywords like;
As you can see above, question based keywords are shown up along with other keyword data like volume, KD, CPC and so on.
Question based keywords are great if you want to rank for featured snippets (and if you want to target long tail keywords) as majority of the people usually ask questions in Google search to find answers.
Step 4: Want mine more keyword ideas? Simply click on any of the keyword provided by Keyword magic tool and it will take you “keyword overview” section where you can find a ton of information including;
Here’s how the phrase match questionkeywords look like:
As you can see above, we clicked on one of the question based keywords (shown in step 3) and SEMrush started giving us phrase match keywords that match with the question based keyword.
Phrase match keywords contain similar phrases of your target keyword so if you want to include particular phrases within your target keyword, this feature can be very much helpful for you.
You can simply export your keyword data or click on View full report button to find a ton of phrase match keywords.
Here’s how the phrase match keywords look like;
As you can see above, you’ll see a list of related keywords. These can be used as LSI keywords because they are highly relevant to your target keyword phrase or topic and they give you a better idea of the closely related topics you can consider.
If you’re a blogger and looking to avoid keyword stuffing related issues, you should definitely find a ton of related keywords to use within your blog posts and start using them to avoid keyword stuffing and other issues.
Again, you can simply export your keyword data or click on View full report button to find a ton of related keywords.
So far, we’ve discussed about how you can use keyword magic tool from SEMrush to find better keyword ideas including question based keyword phrases.
Let’s now talk about a useful feature which is keyword position tracking
To be able to rank for a keyword, you first need to know whether your keywords are ranking in Google top 100 results or not. Once you get into the top 100 search results after publishing a post or a page on your site, you can hit targets like reaching to first 50, first 20 and then first 10 search results.
Once you’re on the first 10 results, you can try building backlinks, better on page SEO etc to climb up your keyword rankings.
For all that to happen, you first need to start tracking your keyword positions.
Not only keyword rank tracking helps you find where you’re in search results but it also helps you find declined keyword rankings (so you can take immediate actions to improve their rankings in search).
As you can see above, you can easily see your keyword visibility along with improve and declined keyword rankings at one place.
You can also click on “New Position Tracking” button to start tracking new keywords.
As you can see from the above data, SEMrush is the #1 powerful SEO tool for link building as it gives you access to a few great features including;
Let’s now talk about each one of the above features so you can understand how you can use link building tool from SEMrush for finding better link building opportunities.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, backlink analytics from SEMrush gives you a ton of useful data about your competitors backlink profile.
It includes;
Along with that, you’ll new and lost backlinks of your competitors in last 1 month, 3 months, 1 year, all the time of your competitors data.
Finding your competitors new and lost backlinks is one of the most effective ways to identify new link building opportunities for your site as you might come up with new keyword or topic ideas for your website.
By knowing your competitors lost backlinks, you can figure out how you can target those links by using various link building tactics like broken link building, blogger outreach, guest posts and so on.
2. Backlink Audit: Backlink Audit tool helps you find toxic backlinks on your site. Toxic links are those which are bad for your backlinks profile and often affect your search rankings. You should always keep an eye on your website’s backlink profile to see if there are any toxic links are there or not.
To put it simply, this tool helps you get rid of toxic backlinks that prevent your high rankings in search engines like Google. To start using it, you need to go to Backlink Audit tool which you can find under Link Building section on SEMrush.
Once you’re on it, click on “New Backlink Audit” and you’re done. SEMrush gives you an overview of your site’s backlink profile.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, you’ll find a list of all the referring domains along with the toxic backlinks. It will also show you potentially toxic domains (along with a total toxic score).
Once you click on those toxic links, you can take necessary actions such as using Google’s Disavow tool to remove them from your website. Here’s how you can do it.
In the above example, we entered Backlinko.com for link building purpose, it immediately gave us few keyword suggestions that you can use and once you click on the competitors link at the bottom, it will also start showing you all the relevant competitors sites.
Click on Start Link Building button in the next step and you’re done.
SEMrush link building tool takes some time to collect and analyse the data of your competitor sites (prospects data) and shows you all the data that you need to acquire new links to your site.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, you can find a list of all the prospects who are linking to your competitors domain along with the keywords (and their competitors).
Just go and select any of your competitors prospects and select any of the options given below (which you can access from “Add to Progress” tab).
Just pick any one of the above options from your desired prospects list to continue and it will instantly show up in the “In Progress” tab.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, in the In Progress tab, you can see that SEMrush link building tool is giving us 3 emails (for your target prospect). Once you click on it, it will display you all the 3 emails that you can use to get in touch with your prospect to get a backlink from them.
You can easily compose a new outreach email which you can use it anytime you want and once you send the email, the tool starts showing the status so you can know whether they’ve opened, read and responded to your email or not.
You can always keep an eye on the status of your backlinks. If you ever find lost or broken backlinks, move them back to your “In Progress” list and contact your link partners (or prospects) to fix them.
All in all, link building tool from SEMrush is a great way to find new prospects, reach out to them easily and track your link building campaigns all at one place.
4. Bulk Backlink Analysis: Do you want to analyse multiple domains or backlinks at once? SEMrush bulk analysis tool helps you with that.
You can enter up to 200 URLs or domains (one per line) to easily analyze backlink metrics. Here’s how it looks like;
We entered 3 of our competitors domains to perform bulk backlink analysis (you can enter up to 200 domains at once) and once you click on the compare button after entering few URLs (or domains), it instantly gives you the analysis of the backlinks.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, it instantly gives you details like;
Finding out what’s working best for your competitors already is the surefire way to know how to get higher rankings in SERP results.
Competitor analysis is the BEST way to find what’s working well and what’s not in your niche.
SEMrush is mostly known as the #1 competitor analysis SEO tool used by millions of people worldwide. SEMrush offers excellent tools and features to analyze almost any competitor website in the world.
Do you want to know how much traffic your competitor websites get?
You can easily sneak into traffic analytics tool from SEMrush and you can get an estimate of your competitors traffic.
As an example, we entered Neil Patel’s domain in the traffic analytics tool from SEMrush and it instantly started showing us the above result where you can find all the important data including;
Neil Patel has a popular SEO related blog which literally gets millions of views every single month and SEMrush is showing us the same results.
When you scroll down a bit, you can also find the site’s traffic source including;
You can also easily find out the countries from the site is generating the most amount of traffic. It literally acts as a Google Analytics tool for you where you can easily find out almost every detail about your competitor site.
You can do much more than knowing and analysing your competitors sites with SEMrush. If you’re wondering about how to do competitor analysis using SEMrush to get more data, here’s a simple tutorial for you!
Let’s first talk about how you can do organic research of your competitors sites using competitive research feature from SEMrush.
Step 1: Go to Organic Research section which you can find under Competitive Research.
Enter a domain of your competitors that you want to spy on. Hit enter and it will show you all the data. Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, you can find plenty of useful information about your competitors websites including;
Along with that, you’ll also find separate sections like;
Step 2: Finding your competitors top organic keywords (to find out why they are getting more traffic from search engines) along with the position changes.
When you scroll down, SEMrush also shows you a list all of your competitors top performing keywords which looks like this;
As you can see above, you can easily discover your competitors top organic keywords along with;
If you want to see the whole list of their top performing keywords, simply click on view all and you’ll get all the keyword data.
Step 3: Digging deeper into your competitors sites
The best part about competitor research tool from SEMrush is it gives you SERP features so you can easily target the kind of keywords you need to get better results in search.
Here’s how the data looks like;
As you can see above, you can find a ton of things from SERP features like;
Out of all the above, featured snippets are extremely important so let’s briefly talk about them so you can understand better. And you should also be knowing why should you target featured snippets of competitors in a while.
Featured snippets are the direct answers provided by Google. For instance, if you do a quick Google search on “who is the president of the USA”, Google instantly gives you the answer.
That’s what featured snippets are all about.
They help searchers to instantly get the RIGHT answers to their queries (so that they can save time instead of browsing a ton of links on the web). Finding your competitors featured snippets give you an idea of what kind of topics or keywords can help you do the same.
Why should you bother about getting featured snippets for your blog’s content?
That’s a great question.
According to research, 12.29 percent of search queries have featured snippets in the search results. Only 30.9 percent of featured snippets rank at the very top placement in the organic results. 99.58 percent of the featured snippets are already in the top 10 positions in Google.
Not only that, nearly 26% of all clicks will be generated to #1 ranking page with a featured snippet.
SEMrush which gives you complete data of your website’s featured snippets.
It looks something like this;
As you can see above, SEMrush shows you a ton of information about featured snippets including;
So there you go. As you can see, SEMrush competitive research tool has a lot to offer. It depends on how effectively you’re going to use it to outrank your competitors in search engines.
If you’re liking this guide, make sure to use the following link to get a 30 days free trial to SEMrush Pro account.
Have you ever wondered why you’re not getting more organic traffic to your site even after creating useful content regularly?
The problem might not be just with your content, there could be several issues with your site including on-page, technical or SEO related.
So how can you find out what’s stopping your website from getting better search results?
The answer is simple. Start doing website audits.
A site audit helps you diagnose all kinds of technical and on page SEO related issues that your site might have so you can fix them to improve your site’s SEO.
Here’s where SEMrush site audit feature comes into handy which offers you everything you need from giving your site a health score to performance reports and so on.
Once you’re on the SEMrush dashboard, go to On page and tech SEO to find Site Audits feature. Once you’re on it, give your project a name and click on “New site audit” button where you need to enter your domain name that you want to set up site audits for.
Once it’s done, SEMrush site audit feature starts auditing your site for any technical or SEO related issues that your website have and gives you the report along with a health score.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, you’ll get a total score out of 100. The higher your website’s total score is, the better it is optimized (and less issues it has).
You’ll find 3 types of factors with Site Audit feature from SEMrush which are;
The great thing about using Site Audits from SEMrush is that, it also shows you where exactly the issues are so you can easily fix them to improve your overall total score.
Did you know that SEMrush Site Audit feature basically checks over 120 on-page and technical SEO checks ranging from non-toxic to critical issues on your site?
Here’s what all you can find using SEMrush site audit feature in case if you’re wondering.
All in all, Site Audit feature from SEMrush is what all you need to find and fix all kinds of issues that your website might have. Once you start fixing those issues, you’ll definitely get better search rankings overtime.
The great thing about using site audit feature is that you can get on-demand crawling and scheduled auto re-crawls on a daily or weekly basis and you can find your technical related issues in minutes, not hours.
Did you know that, using SEMrush, you can get on page SEO related suggestions to improve your contents visibility in search engines?
Yes, you can do that with on page SEO checker from SEMrush.
Here’s how it looks like;
You just need to create a project, enter your website URL and it will run the campaign to give you the on page SEO recommendations.
As you can see above, you’ll get an overview of your website where SEMrush on page SEO checker gives you a list of ideas you can use to better optimize your posts.
You will get all kinds of suggestions including;
It will also show you top pages to optimize where you’ll get details like total search volume for those posts along with ideas to improve their visibility in search engines.
Let’s talk about the above SEO tools offered by SEMrush so you can understand how you can use them.
Do you want to find keywords with less difficulty? If yes, keyword difficulty tool from SEMrush is a great fit for you.
One of the biggest mistakes most people make while doing keyword research is they often target “high competitive or most difficult” keywords to rank for. Unless you’ve an authority website with a ton of backlinks, you’re not going to get top rankings with difficult keywords.
There’s no point in spending your time and money on running after high difficulty keywords so make sure to target keywords with less difficulty score.
SEMrush keyword difficulty gives you a score out of 100 for every keyword you target (the higher the percentage, the more effort it will take to rank for a keyword, so pick low score % keywords).
Here’s how it works.
Here’s how you can use the keyword difficulty tool in SEMrush
Go to SEMrush dashboard and find “Keyword Difficulty” tool under the Keyword Research section.
Enter any keyword or topic of your choice (as you can see above), and click on the show difficulty button to continue.
And SEMrush instantly shows you the data.
As you can see above, you can quickly find the difficulty of the keyword (which is an estimate of how difficult it would be to seize competitors’ positions in organic search with a particular keyword ranging from 1 to 100%) along with other details like;
Keyword difficulty tool from SEMrush gives you a better idea of how difficult or easier it is to rank for a particular keyword. The less KD score it is the better and easier it is for you to rank higher in Google search.
As a rule of thumb, try to find keywords below a KD score of 40 (or 50) so you can easily get higher rankings in Google search even with minimal effort.
One of the best ways to know how your website is performing is to compare with other competitor websites in your niche. That way, you can easily find out where you stand among your competitors in organic or paid search results.
SEMrush offers you domain vs domain comparison tool where you can compare your website with your competitor websites to get all the information such as keywords, backlinks and so on.
Here’s how it works.
Go to Competitive Research section from SEMrush and click on Backlink Gap and enter your domain along with any of your competitors (you can enter up to 5 domains).
Here’s how it looks like;
Once you enter the above data and hit enter, you’ll get the following data.
As you can see above, it shows you the total number of backlinks of all the domains you enter (along with the changes in backlinks from the domains).
The best part about using Domain vs Domain comparison tool from SEMrush is that you can easily find the missing link building opportunities from your competitors websites.
As you can see above, it shows you the missing link building opportunities from your competitors and when you click on the results, you’ll see the backlink sources.
That’s how you can use backlink gap to compare up to 5 domains to find a ton of link building opportunities to improve your website’s backlink profile along with the authority.
SEMrush Charts help identify your competitors’ and your own strengths and weaknesses instantly.
Here are some of the biggest benefits of using SEMrush chars for competitor analysis.
Here’s how it works;
Here’s how the charts look like in SEMrush dashboard.
As you can see, you can easily add up to 5 domains of your competitors and compare them with your website (or domain) to see where you are standing. You can easily discover your competitors strengths and weaknesses so you can adjust your SEO or content marketing efforts.
Before diving into the details, we want you to know about different keyword types.
In the first step, let’s talk about finding informative keywords which mostly help you drive traffic from search engines.
So firstly, we’ll talk about how you can use SEMrush to find traffic generating keywords. Then, we’ll talk about how you can use SEMrush to find money making keywords (which are also known as commercial keywords).
What’s the fastest way to build a profitable blog or website that makes profits? If you said “website traffic”, you’re absolutely right.
But increasing your website traffic, especially from search engines is not at all easy. There are literally millions of new sites are going live every single month, so the competition is getting fierce.
And it’s getting more complicated to increase organic traffic due to the frequent changes in Google algorithms. So if you want to get more search traffic to your site, you need to find high traffic generating keyword ideas.
Here’s where long tail keywords come into play. Long tail keywords contain 4 or more keyword phrases and they are easier to rank for (due to less competition in search).
Whether you know it or not, 70% of the search traffic comes from long tail keywords. That simply means, 70% of searchers use long tail keywords to browse something online.
So if you’re looking to get more organic traffic to your sites, start targeting long tail keywords.
If you’re wondering about how you can find traffic generating long tail keyword ideas with SEMrush, here’s a simple tutorial for you.
Step 1: Finding keyword data
Go to SEMrush dashboard and enter any topic or keyword phrase of your choice.
SEMrush instantly takes you to the Keyword Overview section where you can find a lot of data for your target keyword phrase or topic.
Here’s how it looks like;
As you can see above, we took an example keyword of “fitness apps” and the keyword overview gives us various details including;
You’ll also find things like;
If you gone through this SEMrush guide, we’ve already discussed about things like related keywords, phrase match keywords and so on.
Step 2: Finding long tail keywords
Now that you know the various details of your target keyword, it’s time to start finding long tail keyword ideas with low search volume.
Why should you for low search volume keywords? That’s how you can easily get higher rankings in Google search without putting too many efforts.
For finding low search volume keywords, you need to click “Phrase match keywords” section (you can also use related keywords section). Click on View more and SEMrush returns you a ton of results.
Now, you need to apply 2 filters (click on filters to add filters) which are;
The above 2 filters generate you “low search volume long tail keywords” which are great for increasing your search traffic easily.
Here’s how the data looks like;
As you can see above, after applying the 2 filters, SEMrush gave us few incredible keyword suggestions.
Similarly you can find a ton of more low search volume long tail keywords. That’s it!
One of the easiest ways to find traffic generating keywords is to mine your competitor websites. Find out what keywords are generating them most traffic and start comparing several of your competitors domains at once to see any similarities in keywords.
You can use Keyword Gap tool from SEMrush which offers you a side by side comparison of the similarities and differences between keyword profiles of up to five domains. So you can enter up to any 5 of your competitor domains to perform a keyword analysis.
Just go to keyword gap tool under “Competitive Research” section on SEMrush and enter any of your competitor domains in the tool.
Here’s how it looks like;
See that? You instantly get similar keyword phrases from your competitor websites along with their search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC and other details.
You can also add filters to easily filter out unwanted keywords and come up with traffic generating keyword ideas from your competitors websites.
Use SEO Content Template from SEMrush to Create Well Optimized Content
SEMrush offers you an incredible template called SEO content template which you can use to easily create SEO friendly content that attracts more traffic from search engines.
Here’s how it works.
In the above step, we’ve discussed about how you can find traffic generating keyword ideas with SEMrush, let’s now talk about finding money generating keywords using SEMrush.
Money generating keywords also known as commercial or buyer keywords.
They usually include “transactional keywords: including;
By using the above type of keywords within your website, you can attract potential visitors from search who are actually willing to buy something online.
And here’s how you can use SEMrush for finding commercial keywords.
Enter your main intent keyword (such as buy, purchase, discount etc) + any target keyword (such as “used cars”). So the keyword is “buy used cars”
Now let’s enter that keyword phrase into SEMrush and have a look at the phrase match keywords.
Here’s how the data looks like (in view full report section from phrase match keywords;
As you can see above, there are a ton of buyer keywords you’ll come across. Just filter out all the unwanted keywords that you don’t want to use.
You can also sort out the results by CPC so you can pick high valued keywords only.
Here’s how it looks like;
So there you go. That’s how you can find commercial intent keywords with ease using SEMrush. Just make sure to figure out your target audience intent to start using the right combination of keywords.
If you’ve any questions whatsoever, make sure email at anil@bloggerspassion.com and we’d be glad to respond!
If you’ve enjoyed reading this guide, make sure to use the following link to get a 30 days free trial to SEMrush Pro account.
The #1 purpose to write this comprehensive tutorial around SEMrush is to help you how to use SEMrush in the most effective way. There are a ton of bloggers and SEO’s use their tool but most of them are NOT utilising it fully.
Hopefully, we’ve covered almost every important tool that comes with SEMrush starting from site audits to competitor analysis and keyword research. If you’ve any more questions around SEMrush free trial or this SEMrush guide, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
Anil Agarwal who owns Bloggerspassion.com, is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable websites for over a decade. Bloggers Passion has been featured on premium online sites like Forbes.com, Huffingtonpost, SEMrush, Problogger, Crazy Egg, The Next Web and so on.
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Great Tutorial, SemRush is one o the best tool SEO Specialist like me. Especially for monitoring and analysis, although it’s paid, it worth it.
Thanks for this awesome post because only that person can understand the value of SEMRUSH who work on SEO. This is really very important information for me because I am an SEO Executive.