SEMrush is a very complete SEO tool with which you can improve the SEO of your website yourself. In this free tutorial some interesting features are discussed, so that your website (or that of your customer) will score higher in Google in the short term!
SEMrush has been one of my since I became a freelance SEO consultant favourite SEO tools. This tool speeds up my work as an SEO specialist!
However, you don’t have to be an SEO specialist at all to get started with this tool. SEMrush is like that user friendly that you too can use this tool.
In this article I show you the best features. By the way, did you know that this tool free is for small websites? If you have a larger website, you can try all functions for free for 7 days.
SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools. However, SEMrush can do much more than that. SEMrush offers ao. following functionalities:
SEO audits
analyze your competitors, for which keywords do they score well?
On-page (page) audits
Tracking rankings of your keywords (keywords)
Analysis of advertisements
…
You will find a complete overview of all functionalities on the SEMrush website.
In this tutorial, we focus on some important SEO tasks.
SEMrush offers different subscriptions for different target groups.
you have 1 small website and you want to monitor and optimize your SEO yourself
anyone who wants to discover the possibilities of SEMrush
you have 1 to 3 larger websites of which you want to monitor the SEO yourself and possibly want to optimize it
you work in an organization and you want to monitor and optimize SEO yourself
you work in an organization and you want to monitor the SEO yourself in order to be able to challenge the external SEO partner
you are a freelance SEO specialist
you work in a small marketing agency that performs SEO tasks
you have more than 3 websites of which you want to monitor the SEO yourself and possibly optimize it
you work in a large marketing agency that performs SEO tasks
This is a practical tutorial, I recommend that you immediately create a free account.
The free account has a number of restrictions, but it is sufficient to view the main functionalities. Do you have a small website? Then a free account is enough anyway.
TIP: In this tutorial I show you how to create a free account without having to give up your credit card.
Click here to immediately open the SEMrush website.
You will now see the following screen (or a similar screen):
Go to the SEMrush website
Click on the “Get a free trial” button.
You will now enter the following screen:
Enter your account information
Enter an email address and password here. Click on the green button “Create your account” afterwards.
With a trial you can try out all the functionalities of SEMrush for 7 days. If you choose a trial, you must provide your credit card.
Click the link at the bottom of this screenSkip trial“:
Skip the trial
That way you create an account for the free (limited) version of SEMrush and you don’t have to give up your credit card. You can still start the actual trial at a later time.
Would you like to try out all the functionalities of SEMrush right away?
Then you can of course immediately choose a trial version.
The next step is not that important. Depending on this choice, you will see a different dashboard. You can change this at any time.
Choose here “SEO” or “Skip” (the result is the same):
Choose your dashboard
You are now in the SEO dashboard of SEMrush:
SEO dashboard from SEMrush
At the top left (in the sidebar) change the choice “SEO toolkit” to “All tools” to it general dashboard to open.
When you are registered and logged in, you will enter the dashboard of SEMrush:
SEMrush dashboard
In the left sidebar you will find an overview of all available tools. You can create your first project centrally, in green.
If you want to make optimal use of SEMrush, you start by creating a project. A project is actually a website that you want to monitor.
In the free version you can create one project, in the paid versions you can create at least five projects.
Create your first project as follows:
Open the SEMrush dashboard. You will now enter the screen below:
Create your first project
In the left sidebar, click on “Projects” and afterwards on the green button “Create my first project”.
In the dashboard you can directly enter the domain name of your website to create a project. This is the simplest way.
Once you have created your first project, you will get an overview of all available SEO tools within that project:
SEMrush SEO dashboard
I always activate the following functionalities when setting up a project (see green box):
SEO audit
Position tracking
On page SEO checker
These 3 functionalities (and how to set them up) are discussed in detail below.
You can always reach the project dashboard via the item “Projects” in the left sidebar. Below that you will find the name of your project.
The SEO audit in SEMrush is very complete. When the SEO audit is complete you will have a list of (mainly technical) points of improvement that you or your web designer can work with.
Set up the SEO audit as follows:
Go to the project dashboard and click on the name of your project
Click in the dashboard of your project on the blue button “Set up” under “Site Audit”
You will now enter the following screen:
Start the site audit
By default, the limit of the checked pages is 100. This is also the limit for the free plan. If you want to run a site audit for websites with more than 100 pages, you have to take a paid subscription.
Only the sixth (last) step is still important. There you can set how often the audit should run. It is interesting to conduct the audit weekly, for example. So you immediately see an evolution.
In the sixth step, choose another frequency and click afterwards on the green button “Start site audit”.
The time taken for such an audit depends on the size of the website. The larger the website, the more time the SEO audit takes.
Once the site audit is complete, you will see the following screen:
Once the SEO audit is complete you will see a score (see green arrow)
You will now see an SEO score. Click on this score to view the results in detail. You will now see a little more information:
SEO audit score in detail
You will now see more details about your SEO audit. A high number of issues does not always have to be a problem.
SEMrush makes a subdivision according to priority:
Errors, in red: you should actually tackle this as soon as possible
Warnings, in orange: the importance of the warnings is much smaller, this is not a priority
Notices, in blue: you have to keep an eye on the notices, but often you don’t have to take action immediately
Click on the number under Errors, Warnings or Notices (in the green box) for more detail. If you do this you will see a detailed listing of the issues:
SEO audit results: errors in detail
In the screenshot above you can see one listing of all errors (only 1 in this case). Click on the blue link (1 page) to get an overview of the pages with this problem.
You can also choose to click on the “PDF” button at the top right. The result is a report in PDF that you can give to your webmaster. Of course it is also possible that you can get started with this yourself.
When you solve your issues, you should in principle see an improvement after a subsequent SEO audit.
Monitoring your positions in Google is one of the most important SEO tasks. A positive evolution means that your SEO efforts have a positive effect. With status quo or a negative evolution you know that you have to make adjustments.
In the free version of SEMrush you can track up to 10 keywords. This is usually sufficient for small websites. Do you want to follow up on more keywords? Then you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
Once you have entered your keywords, SEMrush will daily tracking. This gives you a perfect view of the evolution of your keywords.
Position tracking in SEMrush can be set as follows:
Go to the project dashboard and click on the name of your project
Click in the project dashboard on the blue button “Set up” under “Position Tracking”
The wizard will now start.
In the first step of setting up the position tracking, you can set the following:
Search engine: this will usually remain set on “Google” (choose “Baidu” only if you target the Chinese market)
Device: choose the device that is most important to your target audience here. For smaller websites it is best to leave this on “Desktop”.
Location: enter the location where you want to follow the rankings. This is actually where your target audience is located. For example: Belgium (for all of Belgium), Flanders (for all of Flanders), East-Flanders (only in East Flanders) or Ghent (only in Ghent). This is an important choice, so think carefully about this location!
Once you have set all this up, click on the “Keywords” link at the bottom right.
In the next step you can enter the keywords:
Proceed as follows:
Click on the “Manually” tab at the top right.
Now enter a maximum of 10 keywords (1 per line). Below that you can add a “tag”, enter a very short description here.
Click on the blue button “Add to project”
Click on the green button “Start Tracking” to start the measurement. Tip, leave “Send me weekly updates” checked, so you get an email every week with the evolution in your mailbox.
For 10 keywords it normally takes only a few minutes before the first results are ready. You can see this from the project dashboard:
Click on the percentage to see more details about your positions:
Position Tracking Landscape tab
You are now in an overview (Landscape tab). At the moment this makes little sense. It becomes more interesting when we look at the tab “Rankings”:
Here you get ao. to see your position for a particular keyword as well as what it estimated search volume (column “Full” = how much is searched for that keyword on average in Google every month).
This data becomes more interesting after a few days (or weeks), especially if you have made some adjustments to your website or individual pages. Because then you will be one evolution see.
The On page SEO checker gives you a detailed overview of things that can be improved on the SEO of your website. This is therefore an indispensable tool targeted SEO optimizations to be carried out.
Actually, this is also a kind of SEO audit, but more focused on the content. The recommendations are made based on selected keywords for certain pages (SEMrush makes a proposal here, see below).
You can set up the On Page SEO Checker as follows:
Go to the project dashboard and click on the name of your project
Click in the project dashboard on the blue button “Set up” under “On Page SEO Checker”
The wizard will now start:
In principle, the first step (target location) is correctly set.
Click the green button “Continuous“. You will enter the following screen:
SEMrush makes a proposal to optimize pages for certain keywords. In the case of the free version, this list will be relatively small and SEMrush’s proposal is sufficient.
You can also add pages and keywords yourself via the “Manual” tab.
In most cases the default settings are sufficient and you can immediately click the green button “Collect IdeasClick. But it certainly doesn’t hurt to run the On Page SEO Checker again after a few months.
It takes a while for the first results to be ready. You can see this from the project dashboard:
Click on the number of Optimization Ideas for more details:
Click on the “Optimization ideas” tab for concrete ideas:
In this screen you get an overview of the number of optimization ideas per page. Click on the green buttons to view the concrete ideas:
You will now see what checks SEMrush has performed. If it has a green check mark, then it is already good. If not, you can always click on a “Show more” link for a more concrete explanation.
In the most right column is also always explained why you have to perform a certain optimization and the difficulty.
I recommend that you implement recommendations with the lowest level of difficulty as soon as possible.
It can be very educational to analyze for which keywords your competitors score well, or which websites link to them. You can easily perform such an analysis via the tool Domain Overview.
You do not need to create a project to use this tool. Select “All tools” at the top left, then click on “Domain Analytics”> “Overview”. You will enter the following screen:
All you have to do is enter a competitor’s domain name, select the correct country (if necessary) and click the green “Search” button.
After a few seconds you will enter the following screen:
On this page you will already find a lot of interesting information, but it only becomes really interesting if you click on the number under “Organic Search“. You will then see a list of the keywords for which your competitor scores well.
Below “BacklinksYou see the total number of backlinks to your competitor’s website. Click on the number to get an overview of these backlinks. It may be interesting to also contact those websites to link to your website.
If you are an SEO specialist, you can also easily use SEMrush as a lead generator. For example, you can offer a free SEO audit on your website.
With SEMrush you can make an SEO audit in less than 15 minutes. Create a new project for this and perform an SEO audit (see above). You can export the result as a PDF.
This PDF is an ideal document to discuss with your potential customer. The action plan that you propose is important here! This must show that you are the expert!
PRO TIP: In the beginning of an SEO project it can be interesting to quickly find some quick wins to realise. This strengthens confidence, which is nevertheless important. SEO is a long-term process.
Go for the “low hanging fruit“. In other words, interesting keywords for which the (potential) customer ranks on page 2 of Google. Often you can, if a little optimizing, get it quickly on page 1 of Google. To find out these keywords you can also use the tool “Domain overview” (see above).
Prices start at $ 99. For this money you get the Guru subscription and you can manage 3 projects (websites) in SEMrush.
That doesn’t seem cheap, but SEMrush greatly automates and speeds up your SEO tasks. You get much better and more complete insights much faster.
If you work for customers, you can also invoice part of the subscription to your customer.
Create a free account (with restrictions) or start your 7-day trial (without restrictions)
I myself am a very satisfied user of SEMrush. If you have any questions about the tool, you can also contact their helpdesk.
Be sure to read the reviews on Trustpilot, you will see that most marketers’ reviews are extremely positive.
Want to learn more about SEMrush (or SEO in general)?
Then visit the SEMrush Academy!
The SEMrush Academy is packed with valuable (and free) courses. Even if you do not have a subscription with SEMrush, you can still use it!
In this article I have only discussed a small part of SEMrush. I personally think this is one of the best SEO tools. Of course there are other all-in-one SEO tools, but SEMrush is very good in terms of price-quality.
In addition to all kinds of tools to monitor and analyze your SEO, SEMrush also contains a lot of tools for you social media or Google ads (Adwords) to follow up. In short, SEMrush is extremely versatile. In addition, the functionalities are constantly being expanded.
Create a free account (with restrictions) or start your 7-day trial (without restrictions)
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