SEMrush: the essential SEO and digital marketing tool

SEMrush is one of the best SEO and marketing software available today.

Originally designed to facilitate keyword research, SEMrush has evolved remarkably to become the essential lever for online business development. It offers very interesting features that have already proven themselves with more than 7 million users worldwide.

In this guide, let’s discover the features of SEMrush for your website.

What is SEMrush France?

SEMrush is one of the favorite tools of SEO agencies. They use it to develop SEO strategies capable of propelling their websites to the top ranks in the SERPs. For this, SEMrush offers more than 40 tools and more than 100 features just to develop your business on the Internet.

This tool provides recommendations on content marketing, SEO natural referencing, SEA advertising, all to improve your visibility.

We’re talking about 20 billion keywords and 17 billion URLs crawled per day.

What can be done with SEMrush?

SEMrush is more than just a keyword research tool. It is also a compendium of digital marketing tools that propels you far ahead of your competitors. With this software, you:

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• optimize the SEO referencing of your website to colonize the first pages of Google
• find interesting topics for your readers and write quality content
• implement an effective social media strategy
• maximize the performance of your advertising campaigns
• analyze your positioning and that of your competitors

What are the features of SEMrush?

SEMrush offers you a hundred very useful features to improve your natural referencing and to make your site interesting for your targets. In addition to this, the tool you have what works well among your competitors. Take the opportunity to collect ideas and position yourself in relation to your competitors.

The features of SEMrush for businesses and digital marketing professionals are multiple. In the rest of this guide, we present the main features of the software while showing you an overview of their benefits.

Analysis of your competitors

Competitor research is one of the first features you can use on SEMrush to set up your SEO strategy. Thanks to it, you can analyze your site or that of your competitors to have an overview of their SEO strategy. This gives you the opportunity to draw inspiration from what works for them in order to better position yourself. All you have to do is provide the domain name of the site to be analyzed.

For example, by putting anthedesign.fr, the first three competitors that stand out are:

1. io with a competition level of 11% and 389 common keywords
2. 1ere-position.fr with a competition level of 10% and 326 common keywords
3. fr with a competition level of 10% and 266 common keywords

The overview of the domain

This option gives you an overview of the performance of your website or the site of one of your competitors. It presents the rank of the domain studied according to an authority score as well as its referring domains. Here you will find key performance indicators (KPIs) with which you can compare the performance of different websites.

Traffic Analytics: traffic analysis

This option of SEMrush shows an estimate of the number of visits received by your website or that of your competitor. You can analyze traffic trends, sources and even make relevant comparisons between up to 5 competitors. The tool provides you with details on:

• natural traffic and paid traffic
• direct traffic and traffic from referral sites
• An estimate of the number of visitors, the duration of visits and the bounce rate.

However, the quality of traffic is as important as the number of visits. This is why it is recommended to take the traffic cost indicator into account. This is an estimate of the monthly organic traffic value of the analyzed site. And to go further in traffic analysis, SEMrush offers the possibility of accessing more advanced data such as:

• the best viewed pages
• the audience of the site
• referring sites

Organic research

With Organic Search, you can find the keywords on which your pages or those of your competitors are positioned. This feature of SEMrush shows you the organic search performance of the analyzed website. Experts use it to identify:

• the SERP features available for the site;
• the main competing sites for organic search, their main pages as well as their subdomains;
• The best keywords to rank for.

Here is an example of a SERP feature on the SEO content keyword

Top performing keywords

While organic search tells you the total number of keywords for the analyzed website, it also tells you the top keywords for that site. These are the keywords that bring the site to the first page of Google results. SEMrush evaluates the performance of each keyword according to two parameters:

1. The difficulty score: it indicates the degree of difficulty to position yourself on a keyword. This score is 0 for the easiest and 100 for the most difficult. Its calculation takes into account several parameters: the authority of competing domains, the quality of backlinks and competitor content, etc.)
2. The number of searches per month: this indicates the approximate number of times this keyword is searched in search engines per month. The most searched keywords are naturally the most interesting for your site.

Keyword research

One of the features of SEMrush that you will never be able to do without is the ability to search for keywords. This function is essential to develop an effective SEO strategy and improve the quality of your SEO. Indeed, each web page of your site should target a relevant keyword for your targets.

By identifying the keywords used by your prospects to exploit the right material, you will succeed in gaining visibility. You will also be able to better position your site in relation to your competitors. Different possibilities are available to you to find and analyze keywords with Keyword Research with SEMrush:

Keyword Overview: the overview of keywords

This option of SEMrush gives you the ability to do extensive research to find keywords. Clearly, the tool can be used to identify the most popular keywords and terms among users. For example, you can search for the keyword “SEO techniques” and get specific information such as:

• search volume by country
• variations of the keyword
• the level of difficulty to position yourself on the keyword

Keyword Magic Tool: the magic keyword research tool

The main role of this tool is to find a large number of relevant keywords to form a semantic field around your main keyword. This is definitely the feature you will use the most. All you have to do is specify the theme or the targeted keyword and the country of research.

For example, if you do a search that targets the keyword “web writing” in France, you will have a list of 1,391 keywords. If, on the other hand, you carry out a search around the term “website creation”, you will have 3,240 keywords. The list is huge!

Fortunately, the tool has filters that you can use to sort the results. You will therefore only keep the keywords that are most relevant to your targets. The selected list can then be saved in the Keyword Manager for later use.

The tool also offers the ability to rank keywords by search intent. This is because intents can be read by search engine algorithms to come up with relevant SERP results and features.

Here they are:

• Informational: The user wants to find an answer to a specific question.
• Commercial: The user wishes to inquire about brands or services.
• Transactional: The user wishes to perform an action (conversion).
• Navigational: The user wants to find a particular page or site.

SEO Content Template

This is one of the coolest features for creating quality content. Thanks to the SEO Content Template, you can position yourself on specific keywords by creating optimized content. You can also take advantage of existing opportunities on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords.

LSI keywords are secondary keywords that have some semantic relevance. Some information is necessary for SEMrush to give you and SEO Content Template:

• the main keyword
• the territory concerned
• the target language

SEMrush will perform an analysis to offer you a Template based on the 10 best results from Google. You can then use it to produce content that will appeal to search engine crawlers. An SEO Content Template brings together a set of information:

1. a list of keywords to create a semantic cocoon around the targeted keyword
2. the ideal length of the content to write
3. Suggestions of sites where you can get backlinks. Pay attention to this level, as sites belonging to your competitors may appear in the list.
4. advice to give good readability to your content
5. or advice for writing titles and metadata ( meta-title and meta-description )

SEMrush also offers you to download the document. This option is particularly interesting if you need to write a brief to delegate the writing of your content to another writer.

Topic Research

Blank sheet syndrome also exists on the Internet. It is indeed necessary to regularly publish quality content to seduce Internet users and search engines at the same time. However, you have surely already happened to spend a long time in front of your computer without knowing what subject to discuss.

It is to avoid this problem that SEMrush offers the Topic Research feature. Its operation is quite simple. You must first specify the keyword on which you want to write content. The tool will then perform an in-depth analysis of the first 10 results that appear on Google.

SEMrush then shows you the content that your competitors have produced using the specified keyword. One click is enough for you to have many topic ideas. It is then up to you to read, sort and dissect the information collected by the tool to select the right subject.

You can also take inspiration from the most frequently asked questions by Internet users and research related to your niche. To take it a step further, you can follow your competitors’ content guidelines to build your copywriting plan.

SEO Writing Assistant

You have found an interesting topic and followed SEMrush’s recommendations for writing your content with the Topic Research and SEO Content Template features. It’s good! But is your content of good quality? SEMrush helps you check this with its SEO Writing Assistant feature.

You can write your text directly in the writing assistant or copy and paste. The tool then analyzes your content and gives you a rating. It also recommends actions to improve the quality of your content:

• readability
• SEO optimization
• originality
• The tone.

You can also add the extension to WordPress or Google Docs to take advantage of the tool’s recommendations while you’re writing your document or when it’s already in draft on your site.

The On Page SEO Checker on SEMrush

Optimization work requires an ongoing effort that goes beyond just creating and publishing your content. Again, SEMrush gives you the means to optimize the old content of your site. Its On-page SEO Checker module uses its analytical data and studies the SEO techniques of the top 10 results that show up in Google.

It then suggests practical actions to implement. Its recommendations are essential to optimize your content, your strategy and the user experience (UX) of your site. Its optimization suggestions also cover:

• Technical irregularities (beacons, originality, etc.)
• SERP Features
• the backlinks

The backlink editor: Backlink Building

A backlink or incoming link is a hypertext link that redirects visitors from one site to another site. You can get more traffic to your site by getting backlinks from other websites.

Search engines also consider these types of links as validations. That is, Google takes into account the number of links that point to your website to judge the authority of your domain and its relevance to users.

But more than the number, the quality of the sites that send links to yours is an important signal for Google. You will therefore be more likely to have better visibility compared to your competitors if you obtain a better profile of backlinks than them. However, you usually have to negotiate with other domain name owners to get backlinks.

If it is in principle a tedious job, everything becomes easier with SEMrush. The features of the Backlink Audit and Link Building Tool will make it easier for you to find actionable sources.

The plus of the link builder

Other features are bundled in the SEMrush Link Building module to make it easier for you:

• the search for new backlink prospects with the Link Building Tool
• monitoring the evolution of backlinks
• the creation of a deletion list of identified harmful links
• the link between SEMrush and your Google Search Console account

To achieve this, you must first create a project and fill in your domain name. You will also need to specify the keywords for which you want to have backlinks and your target country. SEMrush then displays a list of interesting domains to have backlinks at the end of the search.

You can then follow up on your actions and even add a mailbox with which you will send messages to prospects. Finally, you can export a deletion disagreement document to override an unwanted backlink for your site.

SEO site audit

With SEMrush, you also have the option of doing a full audit of your website or a competitor’s site. The goal is to analyze your site to spot technical issues that are hurting your SEO health. These are related errors:

• to the internal mesh
• to “crawlability”
• page load speed
• Broken links…

The analysis points all the errors identified so that you can correct them. SEMrush thus provides you with the information you need to optimize the technical aspect of your website’s SEO.

The tool is also programmable to perform regular audits automatically. You will thus be able to follow the evolution of the technical aspect of your site and correct the problems as they arise.

This feature is particularly useful to ensure that you have a site that is constantly optimized seo for hvac. The regular SEO audit also makes it easier to manage errors when the site is managed by several people.

SEMrush and SEA paid referencing

If you’ve tried online advertising and retargeting on Facebook or Google, you probably know how complicated it can be to optimize a Facebook Ads campaign or a Google Ads campaign. Again, SEMrush makes your life easier.

First, the tool gives you an overview of the average cost per click (CPC) according to the selected region. It then offers indicators for the best cost and the regions where it would be interesting to target prospects according to your keywords.

Therefore, you just need to reduce your costs to optimize your return on investment (ROI). SEMrush also gives you the ability to plan effective campaigns and track their performance. You can even automate your campaigns for specific time periods.

Position Tracking: position tracking

Monitoring the rank of your website is essential to assess the effectiveness of your SEO actions. That, SEMrush has understood and offers you a 360° view with its position tracking module. The tool allows you to follow the evolution of your ranking in search engine results. All this taking into account the keywords targeted by your site.

So you get regularly updated details on your site’s positions compared to those of your competitors. Generally, your SEO strategy is successful if your site gains ranks after a while. Otherwise, it will have to be reworked.

The Keyword Tracking tool helps you track:

• your traffic;
• the performance of your campaigns;
• Your visibility for each project.

SEMrush and social networks (SMO)

Social networks are essential today to develop the business of a company on the internet. These platforms are particularly useful to increase the visibility of the company and to increase its notoriety. But social networks are also exploitable to acquire traffic on your site. The easiest way to do this is to create content.

Here again, SEMrush will be of great use to you thanks to its Social Media Toolkit. This box includes tools that are particularly useful for:

• write and schedule the posting of your content on the networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) using the Social Media Poster tool
• Track and analyze your competitors’ social networks with the Social Media Tracker feature.

Thanks to the combination of these two tools, you can identify the content that works for your competitors. It will then suffice to inspire you to improve your strategy on social networks.

To conclude on SEMrush

If you have stayed with us so far, then you already know what SEMrush is and what it can do for you. But nothing beats personal experience. Take advantage of the expertise of our agency “SEMrush partner” to test the software’s functionalities. Your SEO and digital marketing will thank you for it.