A Practical Guide For Growing Blog Traffic Using SEMrush

SEMrush is one of my favorite tools, and I have mentioned it many times at ShoutMeLoud.

It was around 2012 when I started using this simple search engine marketing tool, and in the past 8 years, it has become one of the go-to tools for bloggers and SEO companies.

If you are an existing user of SEMrush, awesome! You must know how great it is.

If you don’t have an account yet, you can use this link to get a 14-day free trial worth $199.

14 days is a good enough time for you to try out all the below-mentioned features as you improve your blog’s search engine presence (which will significantly increase revenue).

Recently, SEMrush has added some amazing new features. Here are my favorites…

New Features Of SEMrush To Grow Your Online Business:

1. Site SEO Audit

SEMrush now offers a complete site SEO audit with every plan (including their most basic “Pro” plan) which lets you find all of the SEO issues on your blog.

You can set up your site audit as a “campaign” and let it run at specified intervals (every week, every month, etc.).

I have set up weekly reports for ShoutMeLoud as this blog is big and very active. What I like is that I only need to set up Site Audit once, and it will automatically send me a weekly report once the audit has completed.

Here is a report from a WPSutra.com (formerly WpFreesetup.com) site audit:

• Bonus Tip: If you are setting up Site Audit for the first time, you have an option to select different crawlers. By default, the SEMrush desktop bot is selected for crawling, and you can change it to the Google desktop or mobile bot. I prefer the Google bot and suggest the same for you as it’s better to see the SEO report from Google’s perspective.

2. Social Media Analytics

This feature is in beta, but it is available for all current SEMrush customers.

Social analytics are a very important aspect of SEO and are often overlooked by bloggers.

This feature of SEMrush lets you audit your Facebook, Twitter, and G+ account.

You can also check your competitor’s social media account to measure how well you are doing against them.

• (At this time, SEMrush’s “Social Media” tool only supports the above-mentioned reporting.)

Your goal is to always get the green mark in your weekly report.

Here is the report from ShoutMeLoud’s social media channels:

What I like here is the comprehensive detail on everything, including number of updates and engagement rate.

If you have a close competitor, you can get vital data like how often they are updating their social media account, and you can plan your strategy around their marketing campaign.

Since this tool is still in beta, I have a couple of suggestions:

• YouTube integration: Having YouTube here would be really helpful. These days, all bloggers are quite active with video blogging, and YouTube is always the platform of choice. I have mentioned earlier about VidIQ for YouTube users, and having that kind of data (data shown by VidIQ or TubeBuddy) would make SEMrush’s social media feature an idle choice among video bloggers.
• Improve engagement: Optimizing social media accounts based directly on a competitor’s report would also be very useful (especially for newbies).

3. SEO Ideas (You will love this)

This is a holy-grail for bloggers who understand the importance of keyword optimization.

The SEO Ideas tool simplifies the tasks associated with web page optimization.

By auditing your landing pages that appear in Google SERPs and comparing them to your competitors’ pages for the same keywords, SEMrush will give you recommendations for your optimization strategy and keyword targeting that could improve your search engine ranking.

You need to manually add all the pages of your website and add in keywords for which you want to get ideas. The report will be generated instantly.

Here’s what that looks like:

The coolest part is that it automatically pulls up landing pages with keywords based on your position checker settings. (I talk about the keyword position checker in the next section.)

This tool analyzes the top 10 pages ranking for the same keyword (in Google) and suggests you changes on how to improve your rankings.

For backlink building, you also get suggestions for domains where you should try acquiring a backlink for higher ranking.

Here is an example of an SEO Ideas report page:

• You should not miss their SEO Ideas statistics page, which is a dashboard in itself.

Here you can find the pages which need optimization (provided you have added them as mentioned above).

This is one feature that is under-utilized by many SEMrush users, and it really is something that you should not miss.

4. Keyword Position Tracking

Tracking your keyword position is probably the most important aspect of your website’s SEO.

The keyword tracking feature is the reason I started using SEMrush regularly.

Recently, they have just made a bunch of changes, and their tracking now includes:

• Support for local SEO
• Tracking keywords based on device

What I like most about this feature is the ability to add keywords directly from Google Analytics. This really helps speed up the process.

In the below image, you can see some keywords which have been picked from my Google Analytics account.

The “Sandbox” is where suggested keywords are shown, and you can add or remove keywords as you wish.

Don’t forget to check the “Send me weekly updates” section. You will receive a weekly email where you can track which keywords’ rankings have improved and which keywords have lost their ranking.

SEMrush Can Do A Lot more

I have been a long time user of SEMrush and it’s only because they keep raising the bar and adding new features which are amazing.

Not only did SEMrush help me grow my main blogs, it also helped me keep the SEO of my micro-niche site up-to-date. Usually, these micro-niche sites are ‘set it and forget it’, so manually keeping track of their SEO progress is a real pain. But SEMrush has stepped in and made this process a breeze.

If you are using SEMrush already, log in to your dashboard and start playing with these awesome features. If you don’t yet have an account, you can use the link below to get a 14-day (completely free) trial with access to all of these cool features included.

Get Unlimited SEMrush Free Trial For 2 Weeks (worth $199)

So now it’s your turn to let me know: How’s SEMrush working out for you? What’s your favorite feature? Do share your review and experiences with me in the comments below.

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