Powerful Ways You Can Use SEMrush to Crush Your Competition

Competition to achieve higher rankings on the all-important Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) can be strong and fierce. With so many enterprises all vying for just a handful of positions, the quality of a brand’s goods and services are no way near enough to earn them a place at the top, let alone keep them there. Increasing organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. to a webpage requires lots of hard work, thorough planning and clever use of the available software in order to stay ahead of the competition.

For many years now, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become the go-to method for improving a brand’s online visibility and boosting revenue. While there are hundreds of different tricks for increasing SEO, there are specific tools that all marketing professionals around the world should have in their arsenal. One of them is SEMrush.

What is SEMrush?

In simple terms, SEMRush is one of the most vital tools that an online marketer can use in their optimisation efforts. It is a software research suite designed to provide digital marketers and online businesses with competitive data to inform marketing and business decisions. It takes the guesswork out of researching the market by providing businesses with deeper insights into their competition, as well as analysis of how their own website is performing.

While the platform is full of tools and features to help businesses optimise their overall marketing strategy, not all of them are as straightforward as each other. Having good knowledge of how SEMrush can be utilised will ultimately put you ahead of the rest of the competition in the market and lead to more of an edge when it comes to getting noticed.

Here are some powerful ways in which you can get ahead of your competitors by using SEMrush to its fullest extent.

Identifying your competitors

Before you set about trying to beat your competition, it is crucial to get an idea of precisely who they are in the first place. Whether you are selling shoes, books, or financial services, there will always be a number of different companies within your niche that are all eagerly battling for the top ranking on SERPs.

SEMrush is a fantastic tool for mapping competitors by providing accurate data on the online performances of businesses within your field. After entering your own website’s URL, a list of competitors will appear, ranked by a column indicating the level of competition in relation to your business.

The Traffic Analytics tool provides full access to data on your competitors’ domain traffic, allowing you to identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as evaluate a new market or niche, and even build an effective media buying strategy to challenge theirs.

Part of identifying your competitors also involves identifying their top content, a feature that defines SEMrush as one of the best platforms in their area. Opening up the “Pages” section displays a report with all the pages each competitor has ranked in the top one hundred SERPs, in addition to providing an estimation of the organic search traffic, cost of that traffic, the total number of keywords that piece of content is ranking for, and additional data on backlinks and paid keywords.

This all makes for highly valuable data in assessing precisely who your competitors are and how you can use their current strategy to develop and improve your own.

Pinpointing top ranking organic keywords

Everyone knows that keywords are a central driver of SEO, helping connect users with your site, therefore finding the most successful ones for your business should be an essential goal. SEMrush has a great feature that allows you to review the top ranking organic keywords for your website, displaying a comprehensive evaluation of how your SEO strategy is performing.

An article featured on SEMrush’s website suggests that businesses should analyse the data received from keywords strategically in order to figure out how to boost their organic performance based on the evidence in front of them. Special attention should be paid to the columns next to each keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. indicating Position, Volume, CPC (cost per click), and Traffic in order to determine how they perform in SERPs and allow you to make changes to organic SEO strategy accordingly.

Exploring new strategies to monetise your website

If you have already reached a stage in which you are consistently driving qualified traffic to your website, then you will probably be keen to explore new ways of monetising it. SEMrush makes increasing your revenue simpler by allowing you to reach out to companies who will be willing to advertise on your site or join their affiliate programmes without having to go through the expensive route offered by Google AdWords.

You can use SEMrush to look at specific keywords to rank your website or blog and identify the various businesses online that are paying for pay-per-click ads based on these keywords. SEMrush then presents these keywords in a user-friendly chart and connects to the businesses using them. Therefore, you will know precisely which companies to reach out to while looking for further opportunities to monetise your site.

Find high-quality link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. opportunities

The principal goal of any content marketing strategy is usually to get more inbound linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. to the content, and therefore, as a content marketer, you must have a link building strategy in place.

SEMrush allows its users to find out precisely where their competitors are getting their backlinks from and the total number of backlinks they have in place. This information can then be used to design a more effective and overall more successful backlink strategy for your own website.

A pie chart on SEMrush’s platform displays the backlinks, dividing them into ‘dofollow’ and ‘nofollow’ links so that users can see how many high quality links their website, and others, have.

Backlink analysis of SEMrush reveals the following data:

• Total number of backlinks
• Dofollow/Nofollow backlinks
• Referring domains
• TLD (Top level distribution) distribution
• TLD Authority (.com, .net, .edu, .gov, etc.)
• Referring domains by country

All this can be utilised to improve the quality of a business’ back-links and drive increased traffic to their site.

Create an effective guest blogging strategy

Guest blogging is a highly effective branch of content marketing that delivers successful results time and time again. With so many different websites accepting content from outside sources, picking out the best places to contribute your work can be tricky.

SEMrush allows its users to thoroughly research a website or blog for which they are considering writing a guest blog by identifying its strengths and weaknesses and laying them out in a simple chart for the user to see.

This puts businesses in a much stronger position when it comes to knowing whether guest blogging on any particular site will be worth their time and how beneficial it will be for their content marketing strategy.

Locate and resolve broken links

While it may seem like a trivial issue in the grand scheme of things, a broken link can have a considerable impact on the success of a business if it is not rectified in good time. Although a single broken link shouldn’t harm your reputation – internet users are now familiar with the 404 error appearing on their screens from time to time – when the number of broken links starts to pile up, what began as a small oversight will gradually become a major problem.

SEMrush allows its users to run a site audit that includes an identification of all the issues and errors contained on the site, displaying them all clearly in a visual report. It gives a total score percentage, while also letting the user know about any warnings and notices it has been able to detect. The platform’s “Send To Trello” feature is very useful, permitting the user to add your list of broken links directly to a Trello card. In addition, you can export the data as a CSV or an XLSX file.

Hence, SEMrush is an excellent piece of software for keeping on top of site maintenance, helping to identify and fix broken links and improve SEO ranking by offering a fully functional website.

Conclusion

SEMrush is a fantastic platform for businesses looking to maximise their presence online. It has a range of different tools and features that can be quickly learned and put to effective use, whether it’s to optimise your website, explore new avenues for monetising, discover information on your competitors or simply ensure that you have a website that works.

SEMrush is free, but you will only get a limited usage. When you upgrade to a paid account, you can generate more reports and utilise a lot more of the features.

It currently boasts four million users and holds extensive data on more than 550 million desktop domains, meaning that while the monthly costs may seem steep, with all of its extensive tools and features considered, from a marketing point of view, it is well worth the investment.