SEMrush: Initial Thoughts and Interests

SEMrush Overview

SEMrush is a valuable resource companies can use to track their desktop and mobile analytics on a deeper level. SEMrush allows companies to find the best ways to optimize their website for search engines. According to SEMrush blog, 12 great reasons to use SEMrush for content marketing are:

1.     More effective keyword research

2.     Comparative competitive intelligence 

3.     Analyze and Strategize 

4.     Identify new keyword opportunities

5.     Track your past and current rankings

6.     Analyze your competitors’ competition

7.     Don’t lose out on your existing traffic

8.     Find better advertising opportunities 

9.     Find advertising opportunities before your competitors do

10.  Create an effective guest blogging strategy

11.  Handle panda updates better

12.  Performs backlink analysis

(Teker, 2016).

 

There are many different features to SEMrush, making it a very valuable resource for companies to use. SEMrush is split into four different categories: SEO, advertising, content and PR, and social media. According to this week’s lesson, “At the heart of the SEMrush system is SEO, and while paid impacts the result, this section is (mainly) about organic. This section is mainly about organic keywords and backlinks and how to improve your ranking” (West Virginia University, 2022). Throughout this project, I will be focusing on SEO features that SEMrush offers. I’m looking forward to exploring these features throughout the next several weeks. 

 

Project #1

I decided to use Zara.com as my first project in SEMrush. Zara is one of the top fast- fashion retailers of the world and the opportunities for Zara are endless. Although I won’t be able to receive all the necessary data through SEMrush, I wanted to analyze how a big company like Zara compares to their competitors. 

 

As I set up my project through SEMrush, I began exploring the site and was amazed with all the information available. I started with keyword gap where you can explore the popular keywords between a specific domain and the competing websites. When I typed in Zara, competitors were already pre established like H&M, Asos, Pretty Little Thing, and Nordstrom. I found this feature helpful to see what websites are already considered the top competitors with Zara without having to conduct my own research. 

As you can see in the image above, this shows top keywords Zara should become involved with and a generic overview of keyword overlap between the four brands. Another interesting map I found below is from the “organic research” section and shows a competitive positioning map and how many keywords each company has compared to their overall traffic rate. H&M is the most successful when it comes to keywords/traffic with over 1 million keywords and 10 million organic search traffic. Asos is right next to H&M on the map with more keywords but fewer organic search traffic.  

 

Interests

The top features that interest me in SEMrush are site audit and social media shares. Site audit can help a company understand the health score of their latest audit. “SEMrush’s site audit is a powerful website crawler that allows you to analyze the health of a website. It will provide you with a list of issues that makes it easy to see where exactly a website is struggling” (SEMrush: Knowledge base, 2022). If a company fixes the issues SEMrush provides, it is likely they will see a boost in SEO for their website. Social media is one of the main ways customers get information in the world today, therefore social media shares is an interesting feature that can be beneficial to help improve a company. I’m always interested in any tool that features social media because so many customers are driven by social media. “71% are more likely to purchase products and services based on social media referrals” (Barysevich, 2020). Companies can see a lot of success based on their social media performance. There are many different features companies favor on SEMrush. According to Seer Interactive, “If we had to pick three of our favorite and most-used features from SEMrush, we’d have to go with: 

1.     Keyword magic tool

2.     SERP feature filter

3.     Keyword gap tool”

(Pietrangelo, 2020).

Companies can use SEMrush for a variety of tools, but the most popular feature of SEMrush is SEO. It can be overwhelming to start with SEMrush, understanding where your current website traffic is from and seeing how your competitors generate their traffic is a good start.  

Project #2

I’m planning on using another Google account to research my own blog account on SEMrush as well. After looking at some of Zara’s results, I can’t receive some of the data that I would like. Using my own blog will allow me to see real results that I can actually change to improve my website. Although there isn’t much traffic to my site, it will be interesting to see what opportunities there are for me to improve to get more traffic. 

Interests

With my own blog, I want to focus on SEO and how to improve my search rankings. Since my blog is small and doesn’t have much traffic, understanding how to improve my SEO ranking will be beneficial for me. I will also be able to get more information through my own website compared to Zara’s website. My plan is to start by auditing my website, conducting my keyword search, track rankings and then create better content to bring in more traffic. These tools will be very useful for me if I ever have my own business site and need to understand analytics on a deeper level. Small business owners are able to get amazing feedback with SEMrush in order to improve overall content for customers. 

Conclusion

Overall, SEMrush has many valuable features for companies to use. Throughout the next several weeks, I will be focusing on Zara and my own blog account. Zara will allow me to see how a big company compares to its competitors while my own blog while allow me to understand what changes I can make to see more traffic. Many digital marketing professionals use SEMrush because it:

·      Provides key data on competitors paid and search strategies 

·      Offers keyword and link building suggestions which helps with SEO

·      Generates relevant site audits with critical issues that need attention

(Click Ready Marketing, 2020).

 

 

References

Barysevich, A. (2020). How Social Media Influence 71% Consumer Buying Decisions. Search 

    Engine Watch. https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/20/how-social-media-influence-

    71-consumer-buying-decisions/

 

Click Ready Marketing. (2020). Discover the Benefits and Features of SEMrush. 

    https://www.clickreadymarketing.com/benefits-of-semrush

 

Pietrangelo, K. (2020). Three Essential SEMrush Features for SEO. Seer. 

    https://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/3-essential-semrush-features/

 

SEMrush. (2022). Knowledge Base. https://www.semrush.com/kb/31-site-audit

 

Teker, I. (2016). 12 Great Reasons to Use SEMrush to Supercharge Your Content Marketing. 

    SEMrush Blog. https://www.semrush.com/blog/12-great-reasons-to-use-semrush-to-

    supercharge-your-content-marketing/

 

West Virginia University. (2022). Lesson 4: SEO/On-page Optimization and Technical SEO. 

    Ecampus. https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?

    course_id=_176477_1&content_id=_8897722_1&framesetWrapped=true