- In search, we love our tools. Ask anyone in the industry and they'll tell you about their favorite (or a handful of favorites) they use on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Tools make our lives a whole lot easier and our search campaigns easier to assess and strategize.
- Many of my past columns explore SEO or search issues and provide tips coupled with tools that provide solutions for day-to-day issues. While Google Analytics is the first stop to find problems or assess issues, after that I dig into my search "toolbag" to find opportunity or insight on what might help me.
- Upon review of my previous topics I found that there are a lot of tools I often choose from whether it is OpenSiteExplorer, ScreamingFrog, Majestic SEO and so on. There is a tool I mention quite a lot though that has helped me be more efficient as a digital marketer, that tool is SEMrush.
- As a kudos to wonderful tool, I've shared a few ways this tool has helped me to be more effective marketer. As an added bonus I interviewed Sean Malseed from SEMrush about what works, what needs work, and where SEMrush is headed next.
3 Ways SEMrush Can Make Your Life a Little Easier
- First off, let's touch on a few areas you can use this tool to make your life a little easier.
- We've lost keyword data from Google Analytics. Yes, Google Webmaster Tools provides some insight in the Search Queries section by Landing Pages, but SEMrush does a much better job.
- What I prefer to do is find organic landing pages in Google Analytics that have shown large gains or losses, run an export of all rankings in Google, and then sort by ranking page. I then sort by estimated search volume and look at top keywords that may have jumped or fallen.
- Competitive analysis is a great way to start researching a new search campaign or an ongoing effort. You can look at terms that competitors rank for by themselves and those that you both rank for together.
- As an ongoing effort, you can watch for what terms you both rank for, what pages of theirs they rank for, what is the content strategy in place, and possibly the inbound linking specifics of these landing pages.
- When it comes to gaining an understanding of my clients and their competitors growth in organic search, Traffic Price allows me to look past total ranking keywords and get a feel for if there is an expanding presence in long-tail (which is of value) but more so if the high volume/competitive terms are growing.
- Simply put, the tool looks at your ranking terms, their position, their search volume, and estimates by keyword your likely amount of clicks and what you would pay for this in paid search. Keep in mind, you mind rank for a great term in the top five and have a terrible title and description and not get that many clicks, but this just serves as a helpful estimation.
What I Don't Like, But Will Live With
- Those are just a few reasons why I like SEMrush. There is also much more that we won't cover in this post. But no tool is perfect, there are some downsides to consider.
- For example, SEMrush's organic search traffic estimations of sites seem a bit off. As I tell many in regard to SEO tool estimations, take estimated data with a grain of salt. Don't focus so much on the number but more so on the trends over time and comparison of other sites reviewed.
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