I don’t have to explain (I hope) that the success of your organic findability stands or falls with your content strategy and the keywords you use.
The start and the basis of any SEO strategy is therefore finding out what the best and most relevant keywords are for your website / company. And you can do that with the Keyword Magic Tool from SEMrush.
The Keyword Magic Tool not only helps you find the keywords with the most volume, but also helps you find so-called long tail keywords.
These are often combinations of several words, which are searched less per month.
But because there is less competition and the relevance of the keyword for your website is often greater, they can yield more.
Small example: as a plumber in Arnhem, the keyword “plumber” may be of interest to you, but “plumber Arnhem” or “Call in plumber Arnhem” are of course much more interesting.
This is how you use the Keyword Magic Tool
Make sure you see “SEO Toolkit” at the top left of SEMrush (You will see this when you are logged in). Then click on “Keyword Magic Tool” under the heading “Keyword Research”.
Then enter the keyword and click “Search”.
You will then receive a list of relevant long tail keywords.
One of the best and simplest ways to gain inspiration is of course copying from your competitors.
And especially among the best scoring competitors.
Because why spend so much time devising blog topics, when you can find out all the topics of a competitor at the touch of a button.
If I also tell you that with SEMrush you can immediately see which blogs of your competitor score the best and which generate the most visitors, does that make you happy?
This is how you find out the best scoring content
Within SEMrush, go to “Organic Research” under the heading “Competitive Research”. Then enter the URL of your competitor and click “Search”.
Then click on “Pages” in the submenu and you will see all the top scoring pages of your competitor.
You can then also find out on which keywords they can be found with this article by clicking on the number in the column with “Keywords” and you can also see which backlinks the page has by clicking “Show” on the right.
I’ve said it many times before, but I’m going to do it again: High positions in Google are never a goal, it’s a means. It’s the customers and conversions that count.
That is the essence of all the processes I carry out for my clients. It does not mean that I do not focus on higher positions in Google, but it is never what I steer.
Now that I’ve lost that, it’s essential to point out that you need to know where you rank in Google for which keywords.
And it is even more important to know if you have failed or gone up. Because then you can immediately take action when your competitors are accelerating or when you might have a Google penalty on your pants.
You want to be able to view your position in Google per country, language and per device. So always make sure that you also set this correctly within SEMrush.
This is how you keep track of your positions in Google with SEMRush
Within SEMrush go to “Position Tracking” under the heading “Rank Tracking”. Then click on the project that it is all about, enter any keywords and check the data.
It is then up to you to view this daily or weekly and respond to the changes in data that you see.
Now that you know which keywords to use in your texts and where you can be found in Google, it is time to improve the technical condition of your website.
This is something I think SEMRush excels at. In my view, SEMrush has one of the most extensive technical SEO tools.
Within the Site Audit (as the technical analysis tool of SEMrush is called) a distinction is made between three categories:
Errors – These are problems that are bad for your organic findability and must therefore be addressed as soon as possible. Think of problems with your sitemap, your robots.txt, duplicate content and broken links.
Warnings – These are points for improvement in the field of SEO within your website that are not urgent. You absolutely have to pick them up, but they are not the top priority. Examples include images without alt tags, missing meta descriptions or pages without H1.
Notices – I also call this the beauty flaws. They do not make or break your SEO, but they are worth mentioning. Think of an external link without nofollow or an orphan page.
This is how you view the Site Audit of your website
Click on “Site Audit” on the left under the heading “On Page & Tech SEO” and click on the appropriate project.
Then see all errors, warnings and notices and even a list of the 3 most important technical problems within your website.
Almost any entrepreneur can name his 5 biggest competitors. But 9 times out of 10, these are not your biggest competitors online. Because not every company is as active online as it is offline.
And by online competitors, I mean your competitors in Google. So your organic competitors.
It is very important to find out these competitors so that you can keep a close eye on them in SEMrush, but also so that you can see what content they publish and what strategy they use.
Here you can learn from and on.
This is how you find out your biggest organic competitors
Click on “Organic research” under the heading “Competitive research”. Then enter your own URL and click “Search”. Then click on “Competitors” and you will see a list of your competitors and a handy graph to determine who are the real big boys online.
One of the most labor-intensive activities within SEO is link building. First you have a lot of time to figure out the website where you can place a link and then you also have to make a good deal.
And the chances are that they will not respond, that they will not post links or that you will have to pay for the link (and that can amount to hundreds of euros).
What if there is a link building strategy that costs nothing and has a much higher success rate than the strategy I mentioned above?
That free link building strategy is namely the recovery of lost backlinks. In other words, backlinks that have been removed.
This is how you retrieve your lost backlinks
Go to “Backlink Analytics” under the heading “Link building”, then enter your domain and click “Search”. Next you have to click on “Backlinks” in the submenu and then tick “Lost”.
Then you will see all your lost backlinks and so you can contact the owner of the website to ask if he / she wants to restore the links.
SEMrush is known as an all-in-one SEO tool. But it is actually much more than that.
SEMrush itself describes itself as “Online Visibility Platform”. And being visible online also includes advertisements.
In recent years, SEMrush has added many new functionalities in the field of advertisements. This way you can now also see which display advertisements your competitors are running.
You can then see exactly which ads they use, which landing pages interested parties are redirected to, which target group they target and which publishers they use.
This is how you find out the display advertisements
First, make sure you’re in the Advertising Toolkit. You can adjust this at the top left.
Then click on “Display advertising” under the heading “Market Analysis”, enter the website of your competitor and click on “Explore now”.
I said it earlier in this article, but the easiest way to generate new content and backlink ideas is to copy it from competitors.
One of the functions I use the most with Ahrefs is the Content Gap. In other words, the keywords that you cannot be found on, but your competitors can.
Now just the bridge to SEMrush, because it has a very handy Backlink Gap. In other words, the links that your competitor does have and your website does not.
Finding out the links that the competitors do have and you don’t do that
Go to “Backlink Gap” under “Competitive Research”. Then fill in your website and some of your main competitors.
SEMrush is one of the most powerful tools on the market and an asset to everyone. And it may provide an overwhelming amount of data, but it is often only the tip of the iceberg. There is usually much more to improve.
If you have any questions about SEMrush or if you want me to help you set it up, please let me know.
Don’t have a SEMrush account yet or would you like to try the software for free for 14 days? Then you can do that by clicking here.
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