SEMrush Overview Series: SEO toolkit

Hey, there! This is SEMrush and, as you already know, SEMrush is a comprehensive award-winning suite for digital marketers.

For the longest time, we are the “go-to” toolkit for SEO specialists around the globe.

But we know that our SEO toolkit can seem really overwhelming at first – with over 25 tools in its arsenal and endless capabilities.

To make your introduction to SEMrush more smooth, we are about to reveal how you can make the most of SEMrush's SEO Toolkit.

Without any further ado, let's dive right in.

Your entire SEMrush SEO experience starts with our SEO Dashboard.

The SEO Dashboard contains key SEO metrics that provide a helicopter view on domain optimization You can easily connect your Google Analytics and Search Console to keep track of the key metrics in one place.

Once you've taken a close look at your own metrics it's time to move on to competitive research.

And the biggest benefit SEMrush provides is its Traffic Analytics tool, or what we call here the “Google Analytics for competitors” – the data is based on clickstream data, or real users' browsing history.

The report includes all the key SEO metrics for a competitor's site with monthly data, along with information on locations and devices from which the users visit their site.

On top of that, the tool provides data on where the traffic comes from, which helps you reverse-engineer competitors' marketing strategy.

Once you've taken a quick glance at your competitors' sites, it's time to get down to details.

Use Organic Research to analyse your competitors and find the keywords they rank for.

You can even analyse their site on different levels – look at the entire domain, subdomain, or a separate URL.

All the keywords your competitors rank for can be found in this easy-to-navigate table with a list of keywords.

And if you're not exactly sure whether you’ve covered all of your competitors, you can always double-check who your competitors are based on common keywords and total organic keywords Now when you're 100% sure about who your competitors are, take a closer look at their keyword strategy and maybe find some untapped opportunities.

Use the Keyword Gap to compare your keyword strategy to that of your competitors.

Take five competing domains and use the chart view.

The charts include both mutual and unique keywords for the domains you compare, make sure to pay attention to the unique keywords section to discover keyword opportunities you never thought of for your own website.

In Booking's case, you can see that Booking doesn't rank for the following keywords.

There’s more.

If you want to look at a specific keyword only with Keyword Gap, you can indicate what keywords you'd like to analyse exactly – be it organic, paid, or PLA.

The Keyword Gap tool was widely successful, so we thought – we can create a similar tool, but this time you can look at backlinks.

SEMrush's Backlink Gap tool has a similar functionality to Keyword Gap.

You can enter your competitors, check out where they get their backlinks from and cross-check the list of referring domains with your own list to discover some missing opportunities.

If you think we're done with keywords, well, that's not exactly right.

There's even more we can offer.

Keyword analysis and competitor benchmarking is only a part of your keyword strategy.

You also need to do some keyword research before you implement an efficient keyword strategy for your own domain.

And this is where Keyword Magic Tool enters the stage.

Keyword Magic Tool has everything you need for keyword research.

You can enter your seed keywords, pick the database – in fact, we have data for about 100 countries and over 8 billion keywords we update on demand.

The best way to look at keywords is by looking at them for each semantic group, and to help you embrace the latest search trends, we've added a “questions section” to make sure you can optimize your pages for voice search.

Afterwards, just pick the keywords you want to analyse in detail and add them to the Keywords Analyser tool that offers real-time data on key metrics you have to review.

Once you've made the final choice for keywords you want to work with, just send them to other SEMrush tools like PPC Keywords Tool to optimize your PPC campaigns for your target keywords, and Position Tracking tool to keep track of your performance.

And, as the cherry on the top, we encourage you to take a sneak peek at Organic Traffic Insights, a tool that finally shows you the “not-provided” keywords – a Google Analytics nightmare that every SEO faces every time they analyse organic rankings performance.

We combine GA, Google Search Console data along with SEMrush’s proprietary information in one table to solve the “not-provided” issue for you once and for all.

And now let's move on to Link-Building.

Now when we got your keywords completely covered, let's get right into one of the most significant Google ranking factors – backlinks.

But before jumping in straight to building links, you have to look at your competitors and at your own backlink profile.

And this is where you go to Backlink Analytics tool You should use Backlink Analytics to analyse your competitors' backlink strategy and benchmark your backlink profile against theirs by looking at the key metrics.

The tool allows you to look at backlink profiles from various angles and actually get redirected to any referring domain that caught your attention.

But, of course, learning about your and competitors' backlink profile is only half the battle.

To really win, you have to optimize your backlinks, this is when you use Backlink Audit Tool.

The tool conducts an audit of your existing backlink profile to pin-point toxic links that hurt your rankings and you can even reach out to owners of the site that gave you a “bad” backlink right within the tool.

But your biggest help in link-building comes from our Link-Building tool.

So let's go a bit more in-dept there.

Link-Building is your best tool choice for acquiring high-quality backlinks.

It gathers potential best backlink sources and prioritizes them by value they bring to your website.

Each prospect is analysed by several parameters and gets sorted by rating.

Then, pick the prospects you'd like to work with and choose the best strategy to work with the potential backlink source – for instance, let's start the outreach with this one.

As you can see, SEMrush already has the contact details for your email outreach.

All you have to do after you've received your link is add that prospect to the “Monitor” tab to stay updated on the status of your newly acquired backlink and take a timely action in case it gets lost or broken.

So you can see that SEMrush's Link-Building tool covers the entire link-building workflow, and once you integrate it with your Google Search Console and Gmail, it will only make your job easier.

And that's it for backlinks.

But why is it that you are relentlessly working on keyword and backlink optimization? To improve your website's overall search performance and rank on top of Google, of course.

And you need to keep track of each page of your site and its rankings.

So let me introduce you to a set of tools that we offer just for that.

So we know that Google's SERP is constantly changing.

And some days bring more volatility than others.

So, make sure to check the “SERP forecast” daily with our SEMrush Sensor.

It tracks volatility of Google's and Baidu's SERPs so that you can spot potential algo updates quickly, and generally check whether your industry and rankings within it are being turbulent.

But, of course, Sensor gives you a generic view.

To track your rankings, use Position Tracking.

This is an intuitive tool that tracks your SERP positions at a national or local level, it also separately tracks your rankings on mobile and desktop devices.

So, let's talk a bit more about how to make the most of this tool.

By and large, Position Tracking tracks a website’s search performance for a custom set of keywords in both Google and Baidu.

You can also add your competitors to benchmark your performance against that of theirs.

And then you can immediately see a Visibility Trend – a metric that aggregates performance of all selected set of keywords.

And when you check the keywords list, you can see whether you or anyone else managed to get into the SERP features.

And to make your work even more convenient, make use of Tags and Advanced filters options.

If you need a more detailed analysis, go to the Landing Pages sections to see which pages rank for which keywords.

And since you can check your positions at a local level, you can always identify your niche competitors by using the Competitors Discovery option – take a look at our suggestions and mark the relevant ones, and simply blacklist the ones you don't want to look at right now.

As I mentioned already, Position Tracking allows you to track your site's search performance across multiple locations and various devices all at the same time.

You can even specify the search engine you'd like to monitor – be it Google or Baidu.

Why do you need to compare each location & device range? This will help you compare which location performs best visibility-wise.

On top of that, the tool showcases whether there are any Featured Snippets for your relevant keywords.

And to make sure you always stay updated on any changes – positive or negative – set up custom alerts that will notify you of any significant changes to your SERP position.

Now when you're completely warmed-up with your keywords, backlinks, and ranking covered, it's time to get to heavy-lifting – the Technical & On-page SEO, probably the most challenging aspect of being an SEO.

But with SEMrush it will all be easy for you.

Fixing on-site and technical SEO issues is a meticulous job.

And SEMrush automates the biggest part of it so that you actually spend more time fixing issues rather than going through page to page, and tool to tool to find them.

Our Site Audit is a powerful website crawler that analyzes over hundred on-page technical SEO issues.

So, here we go! Site Audit tool allows SEOs to uncover what website sections and versions of the site (desktop or mobile) to audit.

By and large, the tool gives you a helicopter view on website’s health.

What's more, all the issues that are listed within the tool are grouped by their severity level which makes it easy for you to prioritise what you should fix right away.

For your convenience, issues are also grouped by themes, or your site's performance for particular SEO areas.

So, let's start with crawlability.

The crawlability report helps you identify whether any of your crawling budget gets wasted to pages with issues.

Since Google places close attention to site security, take a look at whether you have any security issues that need fixing right away.

And if you happen to have a website that operates across multiple countries and in different languages, see if your hreflangs are correctly placed – as one hreflang mistake can cost you your entire International SEO optimization efforts.

Also, keep a close eye at your site speed – the arrival of Mobile-First is placing bigger and bigger importance to site speed, so make sure you have it covered with SEMrush.

And, of course, when it comes to on-site SEO, you cannot avoid dealing with internal links.

Site Audit can easily identify any issues with your site's internal link structure to help you optimise the most efficient link juice distribution.

In a nutshell, these are the on-site and technical SEO issues Site Audit covers for you.

For more efficiency, you can choose whether you want to explore the full list of issues, or only analyse the issues of a particular page on your site.

It really depends on the size of your website, the number of people working on SEO, and really, you own workflow.

And to prioritize your efforts even more, connect your Google Analytics to Site Audit to start working on the pages with the highest traffic.

Once you're done fixing technical SEO issues on your site, it's time to get down to optimizing particular pages of your site for particular keywords.

And this is where On Page SEO Checker comes into play.

So, with the On Page SEO Checker you can optimize existing pages of your site for target keywords.

The tool provides you with optimization ideas based on our analysis of top ten organic rivals compared to your page.

The ideas are grouped into types, and if you open up the entire list of recommendations, you'll see them sorted by priority level – the ones that are more impactful and easily implementable are on the top.

And if you open the “Top 10 Benchmarking” section, you can compare your performance against the top ten domains that organically top the SERP for every target keyword you specified.

So looking back I've run you through the main SEO tools you'll be using, but before I leave you to explore SEMrush and discover its endless capabilities for yourself, let me walk you through the special management and collaboration section of SEMrush that makes your reporting job quick and efficient.

The first section is Projects that encompasses various tools that cover different aspects of website visibility.

And, what's more, you can always share the project for view or edit with your team or your client – to collaborate or simply show your progress.

And if you actually need to create a custom report that combines data from various tools – say SEMrush and Google – you can use My Reports.

You can create the report from the scratch or use our a pre-defined template.

You can choose branded or white-label option, and simply add the SEO widgets you need to overview.

You can even connect your Google Analytics and Search Console to get a comprehensive view of your SEO progress.

Once you've built the report, schedule how often you'd like to receive it or send it straight to your client.

You can even turn your configures report into a custom template if you so choose.

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that's it for today! This was a very brief overview of what SEMrush's SEO Toolkit can offer – but trust me once you get down to work, you'll find out even more features you can certainly make use of.

And if you feel like you could use more information on how to navigate through SEMrush, check out our Academy page that provides a detailed guidance on how to do SEO with our SEO toolkit and you can even check your knowledge.

And if you have a specific question you need help with, check out our comprehensive Help page.

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