Content Notice!

This post is really old, and no longer reflect my skill level, views or opinions, it is made available here for archival purposes (it was originally on my old WordPress blog).

Keep that in mind when you read the contents within.

Lets Talk About SEMrush

What is SEMRush?

SEMRush is a web service that allows you to enter a URL to your own or a competitors' website, and  SEMRush will return  various SEO metrics, keywords and advertisement information about the website.

An example of a very good use case for SEMRush would be if you owned an eCommerce website that sold carpets, and you have a competitor that also sell handmade carpets, you are incharge of marketing your website and in turn, make the website more money.

So you put their URL into SEMRush and you will get an overview of the various keywords they are ranking for organically and are currently paying for(with something like Google AdWords), you can then take that information and compare it to your own website to see which keywords you should start targeting in your SEO and SEM campaigns.

Why I use SEMRush

There are a few good reasons as to why I choose to use SEMRush instead of something like Moz, MajesticSEO or something like RavenTools, and that is the simple fact that SEMRush gives me a way better organized "dashboard/quick overview" type display at the data that I am interested in.

The data I am interested in is mainly the organic keywords that I rank top 20~ for, which according to SEMRush at the time of writing is around 50.

It will let me see all the keywords that I rank for, their search volume, my search engine ranking position for the keyword(often abbreviated to SERP in the SEO world), the cost per click for that keyword as well as how many results there are for that particular keyword.

Country Separation

SEMRush is very useful for "country specific SEO", it allows you to check your keywords and traffic in their different "country databases", the one I am mainly interested in is the US database (google.com) and their Norwegian database(google.no), this will let me with a certain level of accuracy see how well I am doing in terms of SEO and traffic in my target countries.

Organic Keyword Report

organic-keyword-semrush

This is the holy grail for Search Engine Optimizers who need to get a quick overview over organic keywords that a site is currently ranking for, as well as webmasters with the same goal, as you can see above, SEMRush keeps track of the organic keywords that your website is currently ranking top 20 for, and displays them to you in a very easy to understand grid.

You get to see the search engine ranking position (SERP), the search volume for the keyword, how much the cost per click for that keyword is and which page on your site is ranking for the keyword, as well as some other information that I personally don't look at.

Information such as how many results there are for that particular keyword, when the keyword was last updated, and the "competition" ratio, which I don't really know how is calculated, nor do i care about.

Advertisement Keyword Reports

ad-research-semrush

In the above screenshot you can see the advertisement report for a Norwegian e-commerce store called "CoolStuff.no", they specialize in the "cool gifts and gadgets" niche, there are a few stores like that in Norway and everywhere else in the world.

If I were to do SEO for a competitor store like CoolStuff.no, I would start with looking at which keywords my competitors are paying for, and this information can be gotten from SEMRush via the Advertisement Report.

I assume that these keywords are somehow "scraped" from Google ads when searching for the specified keyword, if the website shows up, it gets added to the database over people who pay for that keyword.

It doesn't really matter of the data is collected, what matters is which keyword your competitors are currently paying for, to get thew most out of your SEM campaign, I would definitively use this information to my advantage and emulate another website's marketing strategy.

Backlinks

backlinks-semrush

In addition to some very nifty keyword research tools, SEMRush also let's you view which pages are linking to your website, these types of links are called "backlinks" in the SEO world, and are crucial to your SERP, which is short for Search Engine Ranking Position, you can read more about SEO Basics and Backlinks in my SEO for beginners post.

Anywho, SEMRush has a very nice overview over backlinks and gives you information about them such as:

  • The titles of the backlinks and URLs of source and target pages
  • Anchor text
  • External links
  • Internal links
  • Type ( Nofollow or "DoFollow")
  • First Seen
  • Last Seen

Although I don't always trust this data's accuracy 100% of the time, It's still a nice and quick way to get a brief overview of a website's "link profile".

If you need anything more comprehensive than that, I suggest using something like Ahrefs.

Keyword Research

If you are doing Keyword research, you might also be interested in the SEMRush Keyword Research feature, this allows you to search for a specific keyword, in my case I just did a search for search engine optimization and got this result back:

keyword-reasearch-semrush

I got suggestions for related keywords, the Cost Per Click for each of them as well as a handy "trend chart" that shows the popularity over the keyword over a certain period of time, a competition number as well as the search volume for each keyword.

this is a handy way to research the effectiveness of a keyword as well as get suggestions for other more viable keywords that you could use for your SEO and SEM campaigns.

Oh, did I mention the most awesome part about SEMRush?

The SEMRush API!

If you are a developer or webmaster, you can get access to ALL of the data I have talked about via their API, the price is negligible at 15 USD / month and you could potentially create your own "SEO Dashboard" for your personal use or use the SEMRush API in a commercial application that you could charge people for.

I am planning to use this API along with other API's and scraping methods to create my own SEO Tool in the near future, I will be creating a PHP wrapper class for the API and release it for free on GitHub once I am done with it.

I am also planning to create a desktop application with Java or Python(and Qt) as a learning project, in which case I will also write an equivalent class in that language.

Documentation on the SEMRush API can be found here.

Thanks for reading.

If you're interested in purchasing a subscription to SEMRush, I spoke to the affiliate manager at SEMRush and got you guys a special deal, you get to try SEMRush for 14 days for free, although it requires you to enter your credit card details.

And if you choose to renew your subscription, I will get a small commission for my referral, sounds fair eh? :)

SEMRush 14 Days Free Trial:

https://www.semrush.com/uk/product/order/136.html?promocode=SEMRUSH-YV89XJ7B