Semrush Tutorial And Review – How To Use Semrush

Semrush is the ultimate tool that you should use if you are doing SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It is a popular SEO all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. It offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research. In this Semrush tutorial, I will show you how to use Semrush, also I will do a Semrush review to help you learn about the importance of Semrush in your SEO efforts.

Activate 7 Days Semrush Free Trial

What is Semrush?

Semrush is an online marketing tool that helps to offer solutions for PPC, content, SEO, competitive research, and social media. Using Semrush you can do SEO audits, competitor research, keyword research, find backlinks opportunities, and much more. It is a must-have tool for anyone in the online marketing world.

Semrush database is huge with more than 120 million keywords and 46 Million domains. It tracks multiple things like Google SERP (search engine results pages), online marketing campaigns (Google Ads), CPC ads, and keyword organic search ranks. Also, Semrush helps in content marketing.

Get Semrush Pro FREE Trial for 7 Days

Before starting this Semrush tutorial. You need to have the Semrush tool with you. Let me quickly tell you how to get access to the Semrush Pro account which is worth $119.95. To get access to this Semrush free trial of 7 days you just need to follow the steps below:

Activate the Semrush Pro 7-day free trial, by clicking on the link below:

Activate 7 Days Semrush Free Trial

You will land on the page which looks like the below:

Click on the button which has “Start your free trial!” written. You will land on the page below. Just enter your Email and choose a password to create your Semrush account.

You will be taken to the next page where you need to choose from the Semrush plans. For beginners, I would suggest choosing the Pro plan. If your budget and needs are higher then the Guru plan is good for you. After choosing the plan click on the ‘Get free trial’ button.

Now, I have chosen the Pro Plan and just enter your billing information. Congratulations! your Semrush Pro free trial will be activated and you can enjoy using this tool free for the next 7 days. After this time If you are satisfied with this tool, you can choose to subscribe to a yearly or monthly subscription.

Semrush Tutorial – The Initial Steps

in this Semrush tutorial, let us see how to use Semrush after you start your FREE trial. To start just log in to your Semrush account with the username and password you have chosen at the time of the FREE trial signup. Now you need to enter your domain or search keyword in the search bar as you can see in the image below:

If you enter a domain like the above. Semrush will pull a Domain Overview, which shows you an overview of the site like authority Score, Organic search traffic, and Backlinks. You can add your competitor’s domains or any other website to check where you stand in front of your competitors. if you enter a keyword like the below:

Semrush will show you a keyword overview. It gives an overview of the keywords competition and popularity among online advertisers and competitor websites who are competing for web traffic using SEO. Some metrics like Volume, Keyword difficulty, and Global volume are known with this and they are very helpful in SEO.

These two domains and keywords overview reports are the starting points of Semrush. You can now move further to start a Semrush project.

Activate 7 Days Semrush Free Trial

Semrush Tutorial – Set up a Project

Moving further into this Semrush tutorial let us learn how to set up a Semrush project. Projects provide you recommendations based on your provided domain on improving online visibility and tracking your progress over time. To add a project click on ‘Projects’ as you can see in the top right corner in the below image:

Click on ‘Add new project’ after you reach the below screen:

Enter your domain and any project name as in the image below:

Now you can set up project tools that help you fully analyze a website’s online visibility and manage campaigns. Because we have created our new project we must now move to the tool setup.

Semrush Site Audit Tutorial

Once you have created your new project. You can set up a ‘Site audit’ as you can see from the image below. Click on ‘Site Audit’ as in the image below.

Now you will reach the screen below where you can set up a lot of things for your project.

Click on the ‘Site audit’ setup as you can see in the image above. Post this, you will see a pop-up like the below image which will show the site audit settings.

Now, here you will see things like Crawl Scope, Limit of checked pages, and Crawl source. Let us understand what these terms mean.

Semrush Site Audit – Crawl Scope

If you want to crawl a specific domain, subdomain, or even a subfolder on your website you can enter it into the ‘Crawl Scope’ field. As we want to track our website we will leave this as our domain.

Semrush Site Audit – Limit of Checked Pages

What is the use of the Semrush page crawl limit? You might be thinking of this by now. The answer is you have the option to choose how many pages of your website you want to crawl in the Semrush site audit. Depending on your account subscription you can:

• Pro users can up to 100K pages per month and 20K pages per audit
• Guru users can crawl 300K pages per month and 20K pages per audit
• Business users can crawl up to 1 million pages per month and 100K pages per audit

Semrush Site Audit – Crawl Source

Setting up the crawl source helps the Semrush Site Audit bot find pages from your website to crawl. You have 4 options to set as your Site Audit crawl source:

1. Website: Semrush will crawl your website like GoogleBot, using a breadth-first search algorithm and navigating through the links it sees on your page’s code – starting from the homepage.
2. Sitemaps: Here Semrush bot will crawl the URLs that are found on a sitemap from the robots.txt file.
3. Crawling from Sitemap by URL: Enter your sitemap URL, so that the bot can crawl your URLs from that link.
4. Crawling from a file of URL: Here you can upload your file containing the list of specific pages that you want Semrush to crawl.

Semrush Site Audit – Advanced Setup and Configuration

There are a few more things as you can see in the Semrush Site audit settings which you can explore. Those are optional and not required for most Semrush users. We will leave them for this Semrush tutorial.

Let us more into the Site Audit now. To start the Site audit you need to click on the button ‘Start Site Audit’ as you can see below:

Semrush will now start the Site Audit process. As you can see in the image below the Site Audit will complete as below:

This will show the results of the Site Audit. The Errors, Warnings, and Notices in your report are the list of technical improvements that you can make to make your website perform better.

Site Health Semrush

You will also see your Site Health score which is 82%. Semrush Site Health is a metric that makes it possible to measure the performance of any website based on the most important technical factors.

The higher the site health score the fewer problems your site has. This also means that it is better optimized for search engines. Your Site Health score will improve once you start fixing the issues listed in the Site Audit report.

You can click on the ‘Issues’ Tab as you can see in the above image. This will take you to the Issues tab below:

This tab will show the site issues. And if you click on the Errors tab the button “5 pages couldn’t be crawled” in the above image. You will get the list of pages which are could not be crawled.

This will help in fixing those specific pages and improve your site performance. Likewise, you can click on other options like Errors, Warnings, and Notices to know the problems on your site and fix them.

Activate 7 Days Semrush Free Trial

Semrush Tutorial – Set up Position Tracking

Now if you want to track your list of target keywords in any location around the world. You can use Position tracking. This tool takes in your domain, list of keywords, and your target location and gives an overview of your keyword position in search engines. Let us see how this works below:

As you can see in the image above. You need to go to your project and click on set up “Position Tracking”. It will lead you to the interface as shown in the image above. You need to choose your Location, Search engine, and Device, and then choose keywords as below:

I have chosen the default options which pull keywords from Semrush organic report. You can click on ‘Send me weekly updates and you will get a weekly email of your keywords ranks weekly change. When you add these keywords to the project and click on ‘Start Tracking’ a position tracking report will be generated as below:

If you want to send this report to your manager, you can click export this as a PDF.

Semrush Tutorial – On-Page SEO Checker Tool

Another useful Semrush tool is the ‘Semrush On-Page SEO Checker. This tool helps you get ideas to optimize each page of your website for its target keywords to improve your On-Page SEO. This can be set up by going to your Semrush project and clicking on ‘Set up as below:

This will lead you to:

You can choose your target location and click on Continue. Now Semrush will ‘Auto Import’ the keyword, highest-ranking page, keyword source’ by default. You can choose to pull these results from a file, Google Search Console, Organic Research, or manually. We will leave this as the default option as below:

After you click on ‘Collect Ideas’ you will get results based on your chosen landing pages. My report is as per the image below:

This report helps me to optimize my website page and improve it. This tool will give your ideas to improve on-page SEO like increasing word count on specific pages, getting backlinks from specific domains, etc.

Semrush Social Media Tracker

This is a great feature to use in Semrush which is not available in most of the other SEO tools. This tool can be easily set up from your project dashboard as below:

Once you click on “Set up’ you just need to follow the step-by-step process to connect your social media profiles in Semrush. This tool helps you to Schedule posts, Track Competitors, Boost posts, Get Insights, and Create Ads. Let us look at each in more detail.

Schedule Post

The Social Media feature of Semrush helps you to:

• Schedule your social media posts
• Suggest the best time to post
• Connect your social media profile from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube
• Use UTM for tracking
• Import posts from CSV file

Track Competitors

You have the option to track the performance of your competitor’s social media profile. This helps you to:

• Compare you with your competitors
• Track what competitors are doing on social media. This will help you generate new ideas for your posts
• Gain Insights on what is working for your competitors
• Enable weekly reports from Semrush for competitor’s social media tracking

Get Insights

The Social media tracker tool helps you to get insights about your best-performing content, audience, location, and much more. You can get insights about:

• What is working and what is not
• Track audience growth
• Know about the age, location of your audience
• Track when your audience is online to help you decide the best posting time on social media

Boost Post 

Boosting your post from Semrush helps you to:

• Reach more audience from your posts
• Helps you to better understand your ads performance

Create Ads

With Semrush you can also do the following:

• Create Ads
• Track and optimize your existing ads for better performance
• Save time in ad management

Semrush Pros and Cons

Every tool has some pros (positives) and cons (negatives). Semrush is not immune to it. It is an excellent tool with a lot of features but has a few limitations as well.

I will do a Semrush review by listing the Semrush pros and cons so that you can evaluate this tool for your needs.

Semrush Pros

Understand your site’s performance

If you are running an SEO campaign. You need to know what is the outcome of your effort. Semrush can help you here. It will help you determine if your website traffic is increasing or decreasing.

You can know how your keywords are ranking (are rankings improving or not improving). This helps you to optimize your SEO campaign for better ranking positions.

In-depth keyword research

It helps you to get a thorough keyword analysis which helps you select the best keywords for your niche. I love the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool that helps you find low-competition keywords for your content. 

With the Semrush keyword magic tool, you can find long-tail keywords. These keywords are of 3 or more words and have lower competition than short keywords. Using these keywords can help you rank faster and higher on SERPs.

Competitors’ keyword research can also be done with Semrush. These keywords can provide you with ideas to get more traffic and conversions.

Understand Your Competition

If you are doing business you have to face competition from other players in the market. This makes competitor analysis an integral part of your SEO campaign.

For example, multiple companies are trying to rank for the same keyword as yours. This makes it essential to understand what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for so that you can outrank them.

With Semrush you can analyze your competitor websites with what they are doing/where they are performing well and so on. This will help you gather ideas for your business and campaigns.

You can gather a list of keywords that your competitors are ranking high and try to include them in your campaigns. Using this you can make effective strategies to get more traffic and conversions.

Increase Backlinks

Backlinks are a vital part of your online presence. Good quality backlinks increase your website authority and boost your rankings. A backlink is a link generated when one website links to another. Backlinks are very important for SEO.

Getting backlinks from legitimate, reputable websites is not an easy task. When you get such backlinks from authority websites your website is trusted more by search engines.

Semrush helps you see from where your competitors are getting backlinks. Also, they suggest quality sources you can gain backlinks from. Using this information can you can build a good backlinks profile for your website and improve SEO.

Reasonable Pricing

With so many features to offer Semrush plans are reasonably priced for small and midsize businesses. If you can get a Semrush free trial for 7 days and then upgrade if you feel the tool is right for you.

Gain useful information about visitors

Semrush lets you take a deep dive into the demographic of your users. This includes the age, gender, and location of your visitors. This information can be used to offer the right products or services to your audience.

Get rid of toxic elements

Semrush has a backlink audit tool that helps you to identify the spammy backlinks and get rid of them.

All in one tool

If you are looking for a one-stop solution for all your digital marketing, business intelligence, and SEO requirements then Semrush is the perfect choice for you. If offers all these services in a single tool

Semrush Cons

Not a friendly User Interface

The Semrush user interface is not very user-friendly and requires you to spend some time understanding it. For beginners, the user interface is very technical but if you follow this Semrush tutorial and use the tool for some time this can be easily fixed.

Too big to handle

With so many features in a single tool to manage your SEO and digital marketing requirements. If you are a complete beginner, it would take some time to fully understand this tool. The best option is to start with the features you need and slowly uncover the other features.

Semrush Tutorial and Review – Conclusion

In this Semrush tutorial, I have explained Semrush. I have walked you through the Semrush interface and shown you how to use its key features like Site Audit, Position Tracking, and On-Page SEO checker tool. Also, I have done a Semrush review by providing the pros and cons of using Semrush.

Now you know that Semrush helps you with a variety of tasks. Ranging from site audit, keyword research, competition analysis, and much more.

Semrush is continuously evolving and updated frequently. This ensures that they have the most accurate data which helps us to improve our SEO and marketing efforts.

I can say that Semrush is the best all-in-one tool that can help you in SEO, PPC, Keyword Research, Social Media Marketing, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Campaign Management, and Marketing Insights.

Activate 7 Days Semrush Free Trial

Semrush Tutorial – Frequently Asked Questions

Browse more Semrush Posts:

Semrush Keyword Magic Tool Tutorial

Semrush Site Audit Tool Tutorial

At the last of this Semrush tutorial, I can say that Semrush is a great tool for all your SEO needs. Semrush helps to improve your website’s performance and overall SEO efforts.