Semrush Experiences with the SEO Toolkit
Learning Semrush
Semrush Courses
The good news is that Semrush offers a variety of courses. I completed the SEO Toolkit course. It’s described as a three hour course, but I recommend planning five to six hours and dispersing the time over multiple sessions. Each lesson includes video instruction, reading, expert tips video and an opportunity to practice using each tool.
Semrush Certification Exams
If you plan to take the certification exam the extra time beyond three hours is necessary to pass it. You can retake the exam as needed. It takes a little less than 30 minutes to complete.
Two Projects Started During the SEO Toolkit Course
Web Analytics Beginner Blog Project
I built this project while practicing Semrush during the toolkit course. I connected reports to Google Analytics and Google Search Console when prompted. I set up the following in the Web Analytics Beginner project and also linked descriptions for many reports if you want to learn more:
This report is full of zeros and n/a because I don’t rank for keywords and have no visibility or traffic to report.
This reveals six errors and measures site health at 74%. This is down 3% from last week. There are sitemap issues that impact crawl-ability and missing canonical tags that can help prevent duplicate data on the error list.
This suggests three ideas that could improve my optimization strategy and keyword targeting:
- using keywords in meta tags
- including “advanced analytics”, “analyze data”, “analytics tools”, “machine learning” and “real time” as keywords in content
- listings of domains to contact and potentially earn backlinks from
Implementing the suggestions MAY increase organic traffic by 1000%.
Backlink Audit and Backlink Analytics
My young blog has received backlinks from https://proftseo.blogspot.com/2021/03/great-post-from-kevin-perlmutter.html for two pages including the home page and “Choosing Social Media Channels“ post . Thanks Prof T’s SEO and Analytics Blog!
This has no data mainly because this blog has been landed on via direct, social or referral and not by organic search queries.
Brand Monitoring, Content Analyzer, Domain Analytics and Keywords were either set up with no data resulting or the report didn’t finish running even when I tried all the suggestions. I am still learning. I am also on the Pro version of Semrush which is somewhat limited in features that can be accessed and reached my limit on practicing some tools during the course.
Emeals Project
Although emeals is not my competitor it is a company I subscribe to and I am somewhat familiar with them. There is a wealth of additional information available so this is only a sampling of insights illustrated with screenshots:
- I crawled only 100 of the many pages on emeals.com to stay under the limit of allowed page crawls to save some for future projects. You can see the site health and the 15 errors that need addressed. Clicking on the red “15” in Semrush provides more details on what needs work.
2. Emeals may want to disavow some backlinks that seem dangerous.
3. Emeals Authority Score is 53 which is calculated by an algorithm using organic search, website traffic and backlink data. A higher score indicates a better quality website and you also see this score in Domain Analytics. Note the warning on dangerous backlinks again.
4. The Traffic Journey graphic provides a useful visual of where traffic originated and where users are sent from your site all measured in percentage of traffic. If you add competitors to compare, you can see the same information for them combined in the graphic with your data.
5. Organic Research helps compare competitors as shown in this positioning map. It compares both organic search traffic (y axis) and number of keywords (x axis). The bubble size reflects the amount of organic/paid keywords that are ranking along with the traffic received from them.
How Semrush Can Help
Singleton states that Semrush helps “optimize your website for search engines”. Semrush can measure your online benchmarks and how well new strategies are working. It provides information on competitors and how you compare. It suggests possible next steps to help improve your positioning and visibility. Standley points out that when the user experience is user-friendly good SEO can result and identifies on-page actions such as optimizing tags and descriptions, creating quality content, streamlining navigation and improving website speed. Semrush can help in identifying items in these categories that need attention and much more including facilitating keyword research, selection and implementation. A variety of tools and reports in Semrush are overviewed in this introduction video from Semrush:
What Semrush Can’t Do
While Semrush is a great tool for improving SEO, it can’t do everything. You still have to make decisions, set and measure goals and maintain focus to make progress on your own. According to Morris, Semrush can’t do the following:
Set Goals
While insights and data guide decision making and measure impacts of past decisions, you still define business goals and remain dedicated to achieving them on your own.
Guarantee Success
There are no promises that fixing errors and using the best keywords and etc. will work to a particular degree. The tool helps you make predictions and choose actions that might best improve SEO and ultimately ROI. You still have to determine and present meaningful information to business leaders that show efforts are bringing desired impacts to the bottom line. The results may not be immediate either so that adds a challenge.
Predict the Future
Algorithms and ranking criteria can change. The response to change determines who adapts or gets beat by competition. You have be aware of sudden changes and determine contributing factors in order to succeed. Semrush can adapt to changes but can’t necessarily predict what future changes will be or when they will occur.
Make and Execute a Content Plan
Semrush provides insights into keywords, content length/type and other tactics to make your content meaningful and rank well. You take that information and create the overall plan and strategy then implement it on your own.
Manage Time and Priorities
You may be alerted to hundreds or thousands of updates that need attention. On your own you prioritize what gets attention first and create workflows to move it forward. There may not be time to fix every issue but focusing on what matters most means your efforts make a difference.
Final Thoughts
As a beginner, Semrush is fairly easy to navigate. Reports can be set up and integrated with Google Analytics and Google Search Console, for example, without much difficulty. What will take time is navigating reports and determining the value of the wealth of information. Acting successfully on the insights and suggestions Semrush uncovers will not be mastered overnight. The Semrush knowledge base and experienced mentors to consult will be a big help on your journey.
Great post, Sheryl! I have to say that my favorite SEMRush function up to this point is the On-Page SEO Function. I sort of felt overwhelmed when I began experimenting with a project, but this feature helped me understand the next steps after observing SEO analytics. With the tool, SEMRush showed me areas of growth opportunity and how to fix existing content to boost SEO. I didn't realize there aren't goal-setting capabilities with SEO, and I'm surprised the platform hasn't incorporated that in the software. Creating goals is a great benchmark to base your success on, and having them can make results more understandable.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely love all of your visuals. It was really nice to have one for each sections as it really made each one of your paragraphs interesting and easy to understand. For your research on SEMrush, did you use the free or paid version? I am just trying to gather info to see if I had that much information on my forefront.
ReplyDeleteMy account says it is the Pro version. I was able to use all of the tools at least once during the SEO Toolkit Course but if they weren’t Pro I was locked out after the first time. If you are using the free version it will limit the number of actions and results per day to 10 in a number of tools I believe.
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