How to Do SEO Analysis with Semrush?

Search engines are the source of traffic for most of the sites. Though you can rely on paid advertising and social for some time, organic search engine traffic should be the focus for running a website for longtime. You can improve your site’s visibility and ranking in search engines using optimization methods. However, this process involves series of SEO strategies to give you better results in your SEO campaign. The first part of any SEO effort is an analysis to evaluate what should be done to improve the ranking for Google.

An SEO analysis will point you in the right direction of your SEO strategy, you are able to discover which part of your strategy is working and which part is not. This allows you to make adjustments accordingly to prevent wastage of resources and time using the wrong SEO strategy. There are various tools and methods you can use to carry out SEO analysis. You can do some of the stuffs yourselves, however you can’t get details without use of third-party tools. SEO tools like SEMrush offers various functions that you can use to evaluate how your website is performing in search engines. We will take a look at how to do SEO analysis with SEMrush. You can register for a free account to do basic analysis with SEMrush. However, we recommend you use the free trail offer to check all premium features.

Understanding Organic Traffic

The end goal of SEO is to get a constant flow of high organic traffic that will last for years. So when planning your SEO strategy, SEMrush offers tools that help you analyze data that will enable you to understand how organic traffic has been affected in the past months. Part of SEO analysis is understanding and detecting how online and offline campaigns have affected your target markets and organic traffic. You can type any domain and get the overview showing organic traffic and other details like below.

Keyword Analysis

The next step in your SEO analysis is using SEMrush to analyze your website for which keywords are ranking very high in its target market and which ones are performing poorly. You can apply a filter in your keyword research to focus on the specific term you are gunning for in your target markets. After the results have come up for your search, analysis can be done by downloading the data onto an Excel sheet or in SEMrush’s interface.

You can arrange the results by search volume to evaluate and determine the best performing keywords. Just a mere look at the target keywords in your analysis will show how your site is ranking for each keyword. Keywords that are generic have high search volumes and that gives you a chance to increase your organic visibility.

You can also arrange your result by rank in descending order. This can give you a view of the top results in your keyword research and also give you a result for a number of long-tail keywords. The two analyses can assist you in your SEO strategy and using domain authority you can enhance your organic ranking using keywords that have low competition. Additionally, this keyword analysis can help pinpoint the keyword that can be useful for your content strategy.

Backlink Profile

Another aspect of SEMrush SEO analysis is analyzing the backlink profile. This analysis shows you the number of domains linking to your site. You can also make comparisons with competitor websites to see how you are faring in your off-page SEO strategy and the way you can improve your TLD (Top Level Domains) strategies. This analysis can influence where to focus on, in your link building strategies.

An example of CNN and Washington Post are given below for competitors comparisons.

You can also get the details of backlink types and link attributes.

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Analyzing Competitors

Up next, competitors’ analysis and we have the business and organic competitors, these two are the types of competitors to analyze.

Organic competitions

These are websites vying for the same keywords that are crucial to your site on the search engines. SEMrush provides the tool to do an analysis of the websites of your organic competitors that have better placement for the same keywords.

Business competitions

These competitors are sites or businesses with similar products and services as well as target markets like you. For example, CNN and Fox News are both competitors for the U.S. news market. Using SEMrush, you can carry out analysis of both your present competitions as well as prospective ones.

Competition Level and Search Engine Keywords

It is possible to arrange the data according to competition level that is you can carry out analysis of domains in competition with your site the same keywords as well as every competitors’ organic visibility. For example, websites with huge presences online such as CNN, Amazon possess a great deal of organic visibility for a lot of keywords.

Shared Keywords

When planning your SEO strategy, your SEO analysis should be aimed at your competitors with higher organic visibility than you for similar keywords for your business. A well-defined analysis can be done with SEMrush’s Domain vs. Domain tool.

In carrying out a Domain vs. Domain report, you can either do the analysis for shared keywords or using unique keywords. The result can help determine fresh opportunities for your site and acquire the keywords been used by your competitors.

On-page SEO

With SEMrush, you can also carry out organized website analysis using these selections:

• You can select the URL type (folder, subdomain, root).
• You can choose to carry out in-depth page crawling.
• You can set the crawl periodicity.
• Modification of tracking settings (monitoring the rank of your site and competitors, and local SEO).
• Choose a region or country of focus.
• Choose the device (tablet, desktop, or mobile).
• Set up notices and alerts.
• Link Google Webmaster or/and Google Analytics tools.
• Manual addition of a keyword or adding a list from an external file.

The free SEMrush account will enable you to crawl a project of not more than 100 URLs and identifying the main issues. To carry out further analysis will require a paid account. The results you get from your SEMrush analysis is categorized into two parts. 

Overview

This category presents the graphical summary of the analysis you have done and a picture of how well your website is doing and the things required for improvement. In the overview, the website rating depends only on the specified pages in the analysis. So if you are using the free version of SEMrush, analysis cannot have more than 100 URLs. You can try the SEMrush free trail to test premium version before you can upgrade.

Issues (Total)

SEMrush can also present the issues identified in the analysis, which are sub-divided into “notices”, “errors”, and “warnings.” In the analysis, the part in green color has no issues, those colored blue need to be improved.

Conclusion

Semrush offers you a wide array of tools that can help you identify the area to emphasis on, in your on-page and off-page SEO strategies to achieve better organic visibility. In the end thou, your SEO analysis must match with your set objectives or targets. In doing so, you carry out proper optimization of the issues identified by the SEO tool and create an effective strategy based on priority.