SEMRush is an amazing tool. I highly recommend everyone who is serious about SEO to use it (you can get a free trial here).
For me personally I use it for 3 main reasons:
- Track my site's performance (monitor keywords and positioning)
- Identify new opportunities (keywords and backlinks)
- To gain a better understanding of my site's SEO performance (internal audit / linking)
Let me break it down.
1. Tracking Site Performance
This has been crucial for me to know which keywords are performing in Google SERPs. For example, with SEMRush, I'm able to track if my site is ranking for keywords "Good Food" in Australia. And if I'm ranking for them, I'm able to gain a clearer idea how well they're ranking (did the rankings increase or drop).
SEMRush also has a very useful app that allows you to stay updated with the ranking position of your website for specific keywords, and it is updated daily.
2. Identify new opportunities
SEMRush has a few really cool tools to help you discover new keywords, as well as backlink opportunities.
With regards, to keywords, SEMRush recommends "new keywords" that have "low competition" that you can try to rank for easier (create fresh content rich with those keywords + increase backlinks to those content pieces).
With regards to backlinks, SEMRush recommends sites where the backlinks have a higher "strength" and relevance to the keywords I'm trying to rank for. For instance, if I'm trying to rank for "Good Food", it will probably recommend a few food blogs that I can contribute guest posts to with a link back to my site.
3. Audit and Site Performance Improvements
90% of websites need improvements in their site structure, internal linking, keyword density, and more. These fall under "on-page optimization".
With SEMRush, they are able to perform a deep "audit" on my website, allowing me to gain a better understanding on areas to improve or modify.
For me personally, I learnt the following about my site:
- I had many "orphan pages" (pages without any links to them, so Google couldn't crawl them). I was losing out a lot of traffic on these pages.
- I had very poor internal linking page structures with bad pagination. Basically Google had to jump 4 - 5 additional pages just to get to certain pieces of content, resulting in my rankings falling lower.
- My site's loading speed wasn't good, resulting in a higher bounce rate.
So yes, for anyone hoping to take their SEO game to the next level, I highly recommend SEMRush, Ahrefs, or MOZ. They're all awesome.
