Today, many businesses are expanding to the digital world, and it seems that this trend will only continue. Now, it is important for you to find the best methods and tools to understand your website, your social media channels, and even your visitors and consumers.
SEMrush
For those who are experiencing web analytics and SEO for the first time: Do not fret, because you definitely aren't alone. As an IMC student here at WVU, I’ve had the chance to dive into several different topics and web tools that can aid your business, like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and now SEMrush. Currently, we are going through the “SEMrush SEO Toolkit Course” and must build our own projects within the platform. We all had the choice between using our own website, our company’s website, or another business’, which I ended up choosing my own blog.
If you don’t already know what SEMrush is, it is defined by the official platform as “an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights” (“What is SEMrush”, 2019). This platform can assist marketers with:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Pay-per-Click
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Keyword Research
Competitive Research
Public Relations
Content Marketing
Marketing Insights
Campaign Management
(2019).
SEMrush is great because you get a deeper insight on your business’ website and overall effectiveness of your SEO strategies and keywords. You can also see how well your website’s competitors are doing and how you all compare in rankings. Not only that, but with SEMrush you are able to see what exactly is bringing down your website and what you can do to improve your SEO rankings.
Before even beginning my project, I was already excited to use the platform because based on the intro videos and tutorials I had watched, it seemed much easier to understand and navigate compared to other tools like Google Analytics. By the way, even though both GA and SEMrush are analytics tools, they each serve their own purposes and are not to be confused with one another (which is true about other web analytics tools, these two are just the ones that I’ve had the most experience with). Neither of these tools are meant to replace one another, instead, they should compliment each other.
Dashboard and Set Up
As stated earlier, I have chosen to use my student blog for my SEMrush project, so I wouldn’t be restricted from viewing any data. I have only just started learning about SEMrush and building my own project on the platform, so this is all still very new to me. Here is a current view of my project dashboard that I have titled “Blogger”.
When you first create your project, you are brought to your SEMrush Dashboard, which lists several different tools for you to set up, including:
Site Audit
Position Tracking
On-Page SEO Checker
Social Media Tracker
Social Media Poster
Brand Monitoring
Backlink Audit
Link Building
PPC Keyword Tool
Organic Traffic Insights
Content Analyzer
Since I have the opportunity to explore the platform and what all it has to offer, I wanted to set up everything; however, my student blog is fairly new with minimal content, so I don’t really have any backlinkings or chances of being mentioned through social media. I ended up choosing 6 out of the 11 options to choose from, which you can see are already set up and running. Once I get more settled into SEMrush, and have a more established website, I’d like to experiment more with social media tracking and backlinking. For some of these tools, I needed to link my Google Analytics account with SEMrush, but the process was very simple.
Site Audit
After creating my project, I took a little bit of time to explore SEMrush for myself to see what my blog’s data was looking like. One of my favorite features so far is the Site Audit, as it gives you a general overview of your website’s health. The Site Audit can show where crawlers have found errors or warnings, and also determines where adjustments can be made to your website.
Based on my own Site Audit, you can see that there are only a few errors on my website, however, there are plenty of warnings that tell me that adjustments could be made to improve my website’s SEO. The picture below was included in the Site Audit report, which honestly was great to me because this gave me a better idea of what exactly needed to be corrected. Clicking the blue links directs you to further details about the issues on your website.
On-Page SEO Checker
If you think that is helpful, wait until you see the On-Page SEO Checker. Looking at this feature, SEMrush shows that they have 6 total ideas for my webpage.
I’m an open-minded person, so of course I’m going to go over to Optimization Ideas to see what SEMrush has to offer me. When you get the idea page, it will bring you a link to your website (which you will click), which will then take you to a more detailed report of SEMrush’s optimization ideas:
From here, SEMrush shows that my Strategy and SERP Features are well-optimized, but something that could use work is my content. SEMrush suggests that I include some of my target keywords in my <meta> tag, and create longer, more informative content. The suggestions also explain why you should make these changes and the difficulty of the task. This feature alone impresses me because SEMrush is literally giving you the answers to your website’s problems in the palms of your hands.
Position Tracking
One other feature that initially grabbed my attention was Position Tracking. With Position Tracking, you can track your website’s visibility and overall keyword rankings. When it comes to my blog, the Position Tracking report didn’t really have much data to show - but cut me some slack, we are just beginning here!
What’s pretty neat about Position tracking is that you can easily add and/or remove your competitor’s domain to your report to track, view and compare the highest rankings for your top keywords. you shouldn’t act upon these results or make any changes right away. I remember from one of the videos from the “SEMrush SEO Toolkit Course”, that it was advised that you should not immediately make changes to your website because of this data; Even though being able to see all of these comparisons can be useful, it is important to remember that search demand for a certain keyword/keyphrase could just be decreasing (“SEMrush Toolkit Course”, n.d.).
Conclusion
Overall, for someone who was a bit timid about tackling a new analytics tool, I could honestly say that SEMrush did not seem overwhelming and was actually quite user-friendly. I felt pretty comfortable exploring through some of the features without much prior knowledge, and could already see with my own project how much data I was able to gather and analyze. Not only was the data useful, but even the advice given by SEOrush helped me understand where I could make improvements on my blog.
References
SEMrush SEO Toolkit Course - SEMrush Academy. (n.d.). https://www.semrush.com/academy/courses/seo-toolkit-course
What is SEMrush? (2019, November 01). https://www.semrush.com/kb/995-what-is-semrush
Comments
Post a Comment