SEMrush Initial Thoughts- A Mighty Tool With Useful Analysis

This past week, I cracked open SEMrush, a powerful online tool for increasing online visibility and optimizing marketing efforts (SEMrush Knowledge Base, n.d.). Their tools and reports cover things like SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, and Campaign Management. One thing that I’m interested in how SEMrush gives you suggestions and ideas to improve and fix issues on your website and online marketing efforts, something I was always frustrated with when using reporting tools- it’s great that I can get all this data, but what do I do with it?

I’m using a Guru level account, which basically gives me everything a Pro account has only with bigger limits and a few more tools. I have to admit, for all the years I have tracked websites and digital properties, I’ve never heard of SEMrush before I opened my account- the reason I know of it now is from my Web Metrics and SEO masters class at WVU. Upon logging in for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tools and reporting SEMrush offers- to give you an idea of how much of an upgrade this was for me, here’s how my previous SEO efforts looked:

And here’s how SEMrush feels:

 

Once I got over the amount of stuff available in SEMrush, I quickly realized its potential. First off, there’s so much available, I doubt I’ll be able to use- it’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just that there are certain things I won’t need. I also noticed that a lot of the tools deal with looking into your competitors info, which aren’t super useful to me since my websites don’t really have any direct competition or sell anything- although I did play around with comparing my site to similar sites just to see what keywords they are using. 

With that said, I’m excited that SEMrush includes a social media scheduler and can track social campaigns- I’ve been looking for a new tool for this since I stopped using Hootsuite, so this should be useful). I’m also excited for the Content Marketing tools- for instance, the SEO Writing Assistant analyzes your content (articles, blog posts, etc.) and gives you ideas to optimize that content for better SEO. 

Something else I am really impressed with SEMrush is how well they have documented everything. They have detailed but easy to understand descriptions explaining everything, making it super easy to understand what is going on and what I’m supposed to be doing. I was also impressed with their Knowledge Base which had lots of entries and clear definitions and explanations, and they created a ton of videos to walk you through different aspects of the service. They also have training and toolkits, like the SEMrush SEO Toolkit Exam in their Academy, which will give me a certification in suing SEMrush when I’ve completed the course. I even got an email from their tech team letting me know that if I had any questions that I could email this person- talk about a great user experience. They really worked hard to make this tool accessible to anyone. 

As stated earlier, what I really like about SEMrush is that it not only gives you all this data, but it also analyses it and gives you suggestions for what to do with it.  This is done through setting up Projects. A project is kind of like a toolbox of really awesome reporting tools that analyzes your website and digital properties by campaign. For instance, I created a project for The Daily Athenaeum (WVU’s student newspaper), one of the properties I currently manage. I entered my domain to create a project, and had the option to track my digital properties with 12 awesome tools. I started with the tool everyone should use, Site Audit. Site Audit gives you details on your site’s health by crawling your website in a similar way to how Google crawls a site, and it gives you insights on your site’s visibility and health (SEMrush Knowledge Base, n.d.). I could probably write an entire blog post just on Site Audit alone. 

For the DA, my Site Audit shows an 83% for site health. A site health score is based on all the errors and warnings found on your site, and the higher the number, the fewer problems a site has, meaning it is optimized and offering a good user experience. SEMrush say that the industry average for news sites is 73%, so I’m not doing too bad. My site has 102 Errors (issues of the highest severity that must be fixed ASAP), 837 Warnings (medium level issues) and 562 Notices (items that are more recommendations than issues). 

 

Some of the Errors were things I could fix- for instance, I have a bunch of pages with duplicate meta descriptions. Other Errors cannot be fixed- for instance, a URL naming convention I have no control over due to my CMS. I’m also noticing that the size of my site is detrimental- I have over 75,000 assets in my CMS, and each asset has its own page (articles, photos, videos, etc.), and that doesn’t include landing pages and other elements. With the Site Audit tool (and other project tools), I am seeing how easy it is to lose control over website optimization- for instance, photos in our system use the photo title as the page title, but many of our photos were titled by their slug, like “07_04_10_2020_football.” We weren’t thinking about how our naming conventions would affect the website because photos aren’t usually displayed as standalone content, but the Site Audit sees those as standalone content, bringing our site health score down. However, the Site Audit tool showed me things I can fix, like how 311 links are missing the “s” in https- thanks to the Site Audit tool, I now have a list of links to fix, and they make project management easy by offering to send that list to Trello or Zapier to make accessing the info easier. 

I also set up On Page SEO Tracker, Social Media Tracker, Social Media Poster, Brand Monitoring, Backlink Audit, Organic Traffic Insights, and Content Analyzer. I am still diving into these tools, but one other tool I wanted to take note of is Brand Monitoring, a tool that tracks words and phrases that are mentioned across the website to assist you in reputation management- in other words, someone uses “Daily Athenaeum” in their blog, and I get an alert. However, I made the mistake of putting in “The DA” in the United States (our nickname), and I got back a ton of results that had nothing to do with us (I did get better results with “Daily Athenaeum”).

With these project tools, I’m not only getting advise and suggestions within each tools, but I am also getting reports, audits, and recommendations via emails from SEMrush. It’s actually a bit overwhelming, but I’m sorting through what is useful and what isn’t, and I’m learning a ton about my website and how to make it better. 

Since the DA is such a big website, I set up projects for two much smaller websites I manage- U92 the Moose (WVU’s college radio station), and my own blog, “The Nick Kratsas Experience.” These sits have just a handful of pages, making sorting through the project tools much easier. I’m actually glad I put in three projects since I can see how different kinds of websites and content make a difference. 

In all, SEMrush is a huge service, filled with more tools than anyone will ever know what to do with. With this overwhelming offering comes lots of help, with SEMrush explaining everything and giving you recommendations on what to do with it all. Now that I’ve tasted SEMrush, I can’t stop playing with it. Is there such a thing as a SEMrush junkie?

References 

SEMrush Knowledge Base. (n.d.). Getting Started. SEMrush. Retrieved from https://www.SEMrush.com/kb/15-getting-started

SEMrush Knowledge Base. (n.d.). What is SEMrush? SEMrush. Retrieved from https://www.SEMrush.com/kb/995-what-is-SEMrush