Top 5 Features of SEMrush for Marketers
There are several very powerful competitor and keyword analysis tools such as SEMrush, MOZ, SpyFu, SimilarWeb, Alexa, Ahrefs, Majestic etc. Each tool has different strong features; for example, Ahrefs is great for backlink audit or Alexa shows the traffic source locations of a website via a very user friendly interface. Among all these, SEMrush known to be the most famous digital marketing tool for competitor and keyword analysis.
I would like to start with what I don’t like about SEMrush: Paid Traffic (Advertising Research).
As I am in charge of adwords accounts of various brands in various regions, I can compare my own data with my competitors in these regions. Very few times SEMrush could display close to correct values but most of the time its estimation is unfortunately not accurate.
Organic Research
This section is the most valuable part for me. It comes with a chart that shows the number of keywords bringing users to the website via Google’s top 100 organic search results and the number of users expected to visit the website in the following month (assuming average monthly organic traffic stays relatively the same). Below the chart you can see a table that lists organic keywords (sorted by position by default) with advanced filtering. Most of the time I focus on the Keyword and URL (Which page is listed on Google when searched with that keyword) columns.
This section is accurate most of the time but it doesn’t have to be 100% accurate for me because what I try to learn on this section is the most SEO friendly pages of my competitors and with which keywords they are ranked highest. This gives me idea about two things:
1- Where I should focus on my content marketing
2- Which keywords I should focus on my PPC campaigns.
Keyword Magic Tool
By the time I write this post (28.01.2018), keyword magic tool was still in Beta phase but it’s been already in my top 5 features list of SEMrush. When you enter your target keyword and region, SEMrush generates a report that lists alternative long tail keywords together with their volume (as the average number of monthly searches for a given keyword over a 12-month period),
CPC value (shows the average price in US dollars advertisers on Google Adwords pay for a user’s click on an ad triggered by a given keyword) and competition level at that keyword. Unfortunately at the moment you can pick only 30 different countries. I hope it will support more regions soon. For more information, please click here.
Keyword Gap
Under the Gap Analysis section you can find Keyword Gap report where you can enter your competitors (max 5 websites) and see their top keywords relative to each other. The report shows only the keywords that are common in the SERP results of all the websites you entered. For example, plus500.com dominates the first position with “plus500” related keywords on google (no surprise as its their brand name) but you won’t see such keywords in the screenshot I shared below because other websites are not ranked in this keywords. Actually this is a nice way to eliminate the brand keywords and the real successful organic keywords of the competitors.
Backlinks
Under Domain Analytics you can find the backlink report of SEMrush where you can find source URL (the page of a third party website that links to your competitor) and target URL (the page of your competitor). This is a very valuable information for two reasons: 1- The content on this page is beneficial for others so they link to your competitor. Try to provide better content than this. 2- This link is bought (most probably an advertisement). This can be a potential advertisement opportunity for you too. Ps. Recently SEMrush announced that they have integrated their service with Majestic for better backlink analysis.
Competitors
You should be aware of all the players in your niche. SEMrush competitor finder section is perfect for finding out who might be competitor of your competitors (not always a website listed in that section is really a competitor).
Conclusion
To sum up, there is no perfect marketing tool that serves you with all the features you need and gives %100 accurate results. You have to experiment and make comparisons with different options depending on your requirements. I’ve tried to explain the most important features of SEMrush for me, according to my own requirements and my own criterias. Organic research, keyword magic tool, Keyword gap, Backlinks and Competitors are the most common features of SEMrush that I use in my daily life.
Which SEMrush feature I didn’t include in this article but very helpful for you?
