A Practical Guide To use SEMRUSH For Growing Blog Traffic

SEMrush is one of my favorite tools & I have mentioned it many times here at ShoutMeLoud. I remember, it was around 2012 when I started using this simple search engine marketing tool & in the past 4 years, it has become one of the go-to tool for bloggers & SEO companies. There are many features which is useful for our blog that we can start using right now. Since I have missed announcing about those new features, here I’m sharing features that every website/blog owner should try today.

If you are an existing user of SEMrush, you can use it right now. If you don’t have an account, you can use this link to get 14 days free trial worth $150. This 14 days is good enough for you to try out all the below mentioned features & improve your blog search engine presence & make more profit in due course of time.

• SEMRUSH Review: SEO suite for those who love traffic
• SEMRUSH now offers Google India database 

If you feel I missed adding any important features which should be in top 5, do let me know in the comment section. So let’s get on with these new features of SEMRUSH.

5 new features of SEMRUSH to grow your online business:

Site SEO audit:

SEMrush offers complete site SEO audit with every plan (Including their starter Pro plan), which let you find all the SEO issues on your blog. You can setup site audit as a campaign & let it run every week or month, depending upon how often you need the SEO report.

I have setup weekly report for ShoutMeLoud, as this blog is big & very active. What I liked is, I needed to setup Site audit once & it will automatically send me a weekly report once the audit is done.

Here is report from WPfreesetup.com site audit:

Here is a bonus tip for you; if you are setting up site audit for the first time. You have an option to select from the different crawlers. By default SEMrush desktop/bot is selected for crawling & you can change it with Google desktop or mobile bot. I prefer selecting Google bot & suggest you the same, as it’s better to see the SEO report from Google search engine perspective.

Social media analytics:

This is one feature that’s in beta & is available for all SEMrush customer. Social analytics is one important aspect which is underlooked by most of the bloggers. This feature of SEMrush let you audit your FB page, Twitter account & G+ account.

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

At this time, their Social media reporting tool supports above mentioned reporting. Your goal is to always get the green mark in your weekly report. Here is the report from ShoutMeLoud social media channels:

What I like here is comprehensive detail on everything including number of updated & engagement. Especially if you have a close competitor, you can get vital data like how often they are updating their social media account & you can make a strategy based on solid data.

Since this tool is in beta, I would like to see few more features in their report.

• Youtube integration: In their supported social media tool, having Youtube would make a real difference. These days all the bloggers are quite active with video blogging & Youtube is the idle choice of all. I have earlier mentioned about VidIQwhich is for Youtube users & having that kind of data (Data shown by VidIQ) would make SEMrush social media feature the first choice among video bloggers.
• Suggestion to improve engagement: A suggestion to optimize your social media account based on competitor report would be useful for newbies.

SEO Ideas: (You will love this)

This is a holy-grail for bloggers who understand the importance of keyword optimization. I believe most of the SEO-savvy bloggers do & SEO ideas feature can do real wonder for them. The SEO Ideas tool simplifies the tasks associated with webpage optimization. By auditing your landing pages that appear in Google SERPs and comparing them to your competitors pages for the same keywords, SEMrush can give you recommendations for your optimization strategy and keyword targeting that may improve your Search Engine ranking.

You need to manually add all the main pages of your website & add keywords for which you want to get the idea. The report will be generated instantly & here is a glimpse of report.

The coolest factor is; it automatically pulls up landing pages with keyword based on your position checker settings. I have mentioned about Keyword position checker in the next section. This tool analyses the top 10 pages ranking for the same keyword (in Google) & suggest you changes to improve the ranking. For backlink building, you get suggestion for domains from where you should try acquire the backlink for higher ranking. Here is an example of 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 needs optimization (provided you have added them as mentioned above).

This is one feature that is underlooked by many SEMrush users & something that you should not miss.

Keyword Position tracking:

Tracking your keyword position is probably the most important aspect of your website SEO. Their keyword tracking feature is the reason I started using SEMrush regularly. In recent time, they have made tons of changes which includes support for Local SEO & track keyword based on device.

What I like most about this feature is the ability to add keywords directly from Google analytics or SEMrush. This will help you to quickly add keywords for position tracking.

In the below image you can see that keywords are picked from Google Analytics account. Sandbox area is where suggested keywords are shown & you can add or remove keywords.

Don’t forget to check the “Send me weekly updates” section. You will receive weekly email in which you can track which keyword ranking is improved & which one lost their ranking.

I have been a loyal user of SEMRUSH for years & it’s only because they keep adding new features which are a requisite of time. Not only it helped me to grow my blog, it also helped me to keep the SEO of my micro-niche site up to date. I’m sure you understand the pain of keeping tracking of SEO Progress of micro-niche sites, as they are mostly setup once & forget about it kind of work. (Read more about building profitable micro-niche sites here).

Login to your SEMRUSH dashboard & do try all the above-mentioned features. If you are new to them, you can use below link to get 14 days complete free trial with all the features worth $150 for free.

Get free trial access to SEMRUSH

How’s SEMRUSH working out for you? Do share your review & experience with me.

Source - www.shoutmeloud.com