SEMRush Guide to the Basics (2023)

By Geoff Griffiths @mmatraining1980

SEMRush Tech Audit

Use the tech audit to keep an eye on your website.

You’ll need a Google Search Console account to do an SEMRush tech audit.

Go to “site Audit” near the bottom of the side-menu on the left and then click the “+project” button.

Once the site audit has been carried out, you’ll get a load of metrics that score the health of your website from a tech SEO perspective.

Image from SEMRush.com

Check the notices, warnings and errors, to see what you need to fix.

More info in this blog post.

SEMRush Keyword Gap

Keyword gap – add competitors, see what they are ranking for, that you are not.

Filter by search volume of keywords and keyword difficulty.

Keyword gap is also good for Google ads insights. If a keyword is les than a few dollars per click, but is transactional and difficult to rank for organically, it might be worth bidding on in Google ads.

On Page SEO Checker

Gives you ideas including top pages to optimize.

suggests keywords to include on specific pages

suggests backlinks to go after

UX issues can be flagged here too – connect Google analytics. Check out pages with high bounce rate and short time on site.

Organic Traffic insights

Connect Google analytics and search console

Here, you can see pages with good and bad UX metrics and the keywords driving traffic

You can also see which keywords each page ranks for.

Use this report to decide if you should include other keywords on a given page – in the page’s existing content, or create new, more specific pages.

Domain overview

Key metrics, shown at the top include bounce rate and average time on site.

You can see your own, or competitors top pages in terms of traffic

See traffic sources- what percentage of traffic is direct, coming from social media etc. (you may have to click on “Traffic Analytics” in the side menu to see this)

You can compare domain metrics to another competitors, or your own website.

You can use Bulk Analysis to enter up to 100 domains to examine.

Keyword overview tool

Good for finding head/seed keywords.

Can view the Google SERPs and see what the competition for a given keyword is like

See what other keywords competitors are ranking for, on a given URL.

You can see questions related to/containing a given keyword

You can see international search volume for a keyword.

Related keywords are shown too – e.g. “football supplies” is related to “football equipment”

See SERP Features – what rich snippets etc are showing in the SERPs.

Keyword Magic tool

Start with a seed keyword

by default the report will give you broad match keywords.

Be sure to check out “related” match types

You can add your selected keywords to a list.

More info in the semrush blog post about the tool.

Content marketing

topic research – add a keyword to get topic ideas

For example, if you enter “football equipment” (in the US) the tool gives lots of article ideas around “shoulder pads”, “football helmets”, “football cleats” etc.

Sometimes you get random ideas that you would never have thought of, like the searches around the dog called “pickle” when you look for topic ideas about Pickleball

  • There is loads more you can do with SEMRush, including position tracking. I’ll cover these additional tools in dedicated blog posts.