What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is simply the process of finding keywords that people use when searching online. With these Keywords, you can then use to create content that will attract visitors from the search engines. And so once you find a keyword, you will then expand on it to find similar keywords.
Main Purpose of Keyword Research?
Believe it or not, keyword research is the most important part of SEO, because when you understand what Keywords (high volume searching keywords) people are searching for online and create content targeting these key words, your pages will appear at the top of search engines top pages. Thus, you will get more traffic from search engines.
As you can see, if you don’t practice keyword research, chances of your pages appearing on the top pages of search engines are very slim. Thus, resulting in little to no traffic.
What Is The Best Way To Do Keyword Research?
Some people may recommend you do keyword research on your own (manually). So basically you write and hope that your post would rank for that keyword. While others may suggest you use a keyword research tool. I have tried coming up with keywords manually hoping to get ranked for these keywords, as well as I have tried using keyword research tools. I have to admit, I learned this the hard way, but using a keyword research tool is the best way to go.
And as mentioned earlier, there are numerous keyword tools available for you to utilize. In fact, some are Free while others require you to pay to use them. But not all the paid keyword research tools are as good as they say they are. In fact, some Keyword tools are rather in accurate.
I have come across the keyword tool SEMrush, and I only wish I had found out about it earlier in my blogging career. And so in this review, I would like to go in further detail about the SEMrush keyword tool and discuss more about its features, pricing, advantages and disadvantages. And lastly, my Verdict. So please do stick around and read till the end to better understand whether SEMrush is the tool for your business or not.
Overview Of SEMrush
SEMrush was co-founded by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov back in 2008. They started out as a small group of SEO and IT specialists with a goal of making the online competition a fair opportunity for everyone. And here they are today the world’s leading competitive research service for online marketing.
Features Of SEMrush
SEMrush has a lot of features to offer and can be used for more than than just a SEO Keyword research tool. But for the sake of this SEMrush Review, I will only review what I mostly use SEMrush for.
Some of the features offered at SEMrush are but not limited to:
- Traffic Analytics and advertising research: This is used to help you get insights on your rivals marketing strategies.
- Brand monitoring and back link analytics: help you learn where your competition is getting their back links and mentions.
- Display advertising and traffic analytics – Help your business get better research to inform your media buying strategy.
- Organic research and traffic analytics – help you get high quality data for new business and partnership generation.
- SEMrush Site Audit – Helps fix technical issues you are having with your website.
- Back link Audit – help prevent you from being penalized by Google penguin for having too many toxic back links.
- Position tracking – help monitor your websites positions across different locations and devices.
- Keyword magic tool – helps make keyword research a breeze.
- Domain analytics – help figure out which of your competitor SEO practices are worth applying.
- Organic traffic insights – optimize your SEO strategy for each version of your website.
- SEMrush sensor is used to help you keep up with Google’s Algorithm changes.
- Social media tracker / Social media poster: posting across multiple social media accounts.
- PPC keyword Tool.
- Ad builder.
- CPC map: learn which regions will bring your google ads campaign the most ROI.
- Topic research: find engaging topics and headlines.
- SEO content template: help you create content to deliver good SEO results.
- SEO writing Assistant: to help you know how optimized your content will be as you write.
- Content Audit: Monitoring the performance of your content.
- Brand monitoring: if you are planning a digital PR campaign and looking to choose the most effective PR channels.
With all that said, the main tools that I mostly utilize with SEMrush are the keyword magic tool, Keyword Analyzer tool, position tracking tool, and site audit functionality. Whether you are new to Keyword research or you need to brush up on certain aspects, don’t forget to check out this free and in-depth course from SEMrush on keyword research.
Keyword Magic Tool
The Keyword Magic Tool is what you will use to conduct keyword research. Not to mention, it is super easy to utilize and it is super quick. It is pretty straight forward, you simply enter a target keyword that you want to rank for, and you will get a lot of useful information such as:
- Search volume
- Keyword difficulty
- Competitive density
- SERP features
- Cost-per-click data.
Don’t be overwhelmed with this information. In fact, this is golden data for you to further analyze. So you will next use this data and build long-tail keywords and create keyword-rich content to help boost your rankings in Google. Remember, the main intention of using a keyword research tool is to help you rank in the top pages of search engines.
Keyword Analyzer Tool
You will use the keyword analyzer tool after you have grouped the keywords by topic and save them in Keyword Manager. Not to mention, you can send up to 1,000 of your favorite keywords to Keyword Manager.
Furthermore, you can even get an estimate of how much traffic these keywords will bring to your website, by simply looking at their click potential. So the higher the click potential the more traffic you will get with these keywords. Select the keywords and send them to the position tracking tool. Again, this is a very simple and easy process.
Position Tracking Tool
The position tracking tool is a tool that you use to send out the keywords that you select to help track your website’s rankings for your target keywords in the Google Top 100 organic and paid results.
What you’ll love about the position tracking tool is you will get weekly updates on how you and your competitors are ranking for those keywords. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
Back linker Checker
The backlinker checker will show me all the links that are pointing to my domain. You will get that information in such as graphs, pie charts, and a world map.
Domain Overview Tool
Keyword Difficulty Tool
You can utilize the keyword difficulty tool to help you focus on keywords based on its % of difficulty. Again, this is an easy to use tool. You simply just enter the keyword, get the % of difficulty for that keyword and you can export that data to an excel sheet. And the key here is to choose less difficult keywords, as you will rank in top position in organic search results.
Site Audit Tool
The SEMrush Site Audit Tool is a great tool that allows you to check and see what technical issues your site is having. The site issues are broken into three categories: Errors, Warnings and notices.
Who Is SEMrush For?
SEMrush can be used by anyone such as:
- Freelancers,
- Bloggers.
- Startups and in-house marketers with limited budget.
- For agencies,
- E-commerce projects and businesses with extensive web presence.
Pricing
SEMrush has a variety of plans to best suit your needs. So depending on the type of business you have, you can choose the plan accordingly. Please see below for more information on their types of plans and pricing.
Moreover, you can choose to go monthly or annually. Just so you know if you go annually, you will save (16%). So it is highly recommended that once you use SEMrush Free trial and you decide to want to join SEMrush, go for the annual membership. Read below to see how much you will save annually.
So with the SEMrush Pro, it costs: $99.95/month (if you decide to go monthly). And it includes:
- 10,000 results per report.
- 3,000 reports per day.
- 250 Keyword metrics updates per month.
- 3 projects.
- 500 keywords to track.
- 100,000 pages to crawl.
- 5 scheduled PDF reports.
- You can Try It Today For Free!
SEMrush Guru ($199.95/month) Includes:
- 30,000 results per report.
- 5,000 reports per day.
- 50 projects.
- 1,500 keywords to track.
- 300,000 pages to crawl per month.
- 20 scheduled PDF reports.
- Unlimited topics to research.
- Branded PDF reports.
- Access to historical data.
- You can Try It Today For Free!
The SEMrush Business plan costs: $399.95/month and includes:
- 50,000 results per report .
- 10,000 reports per day.
- 200 Projects.
- 5,000 keywords to track.
- 1,000,000 pages to crawl .
- 50 scheduled PDF reports.
- Branded PDF reports.
- Access to historical data.
- Product listing ads.
- Multi-user management
As mentioned earlier, if you subscribe as an annual member, you will save 16%. So if you choose to go for the SEMrush Annual Pro Plan, it will cost you $999.36/year. On the other hand, if you choose to go for the SEMrush Annual Guru Plan, it will cost you $1,999.44/year. And if you choose to go for the SEMrush Annual Business Plan, it will cost you $3,999.36/year.
Please note: If you want to have a custom plan, you definitely can, you would need to enroll in the Enterprise plan which is 100% flexible to suit your most unique marketing needs. However, you need to contact SEMrush to discuss further details.
Advantages Of SEMrush
- A very straightforward and easy to navigate tool.
- New features are added all the time.
- Even if you don’t have experience in SEO, you can easily access the tool.
- SEMrush offers a range of downloadable guides (in PDF Format) which you will find helpful to help assist you in improving your skills.
- When you join SEMrush, you can register for their webinars which are held by the top experts in digital marketing.
- Not to mention, Support is amazing.
- If you are a freelance writer, SEMrush is a great tool to use to learn SEO.
- SEMrush is very helpful for bloggers and small business owners to make sure their website is functioning correctly without spending a lot of money.
- An all in one platform. With this said, you are able to gather all the data you need and have in one platform, organized and tidy.
- Not to mention, you can downgrade / upgrade your plan at any time
- SEMrush has a refund policy, so in the case you are not 100% satisfied with the service, there is a 7 day money-back guarantee on any SEMrush subscription.
Disadvantages Of SEMrush
- Maybe pricey for some people. With this said, it is 1 user per subscription. And so if you want to add more users, you will be charged more. So this maybe an issue to some people. But again, consider the annual membership, as you will save more that way.
- Since SEMrush is an advanced SEO tool. It can be overwhelming with all the data it hits you with. You can always access SEMrush Ebooks to help you broaden your knowledge and improve your skills.
Verdict
In essence, Semrush is a must-have all-in-one tool and is really all you will ever need to meet your SEO and marketing needs. SEMrush are always updating the tools they have, as well as adding new features to better suit our needs. It is an advanced tool, any business can use it and benefit from it.
With all that said, if you are still unsure if SEMrush is the tool for your business, try the free trial of SEMrush and test drive it and see if it meets your needs. And don’t forget if you like it and want to continue using it, subscribe as an annual member, as you will save more that way.
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