How I Set Up SEMrush for My Blog and Why I Chose To Do It This Way

 

What is SEMrush

SEMrush is an SEO tool that helps you optimize your website to rank higher in a search. One article described SEMrush Projects as “a group of tools that Semrush will use when analyzing your website and any sites or keywords you may want Semrush to check” (Antony, 2021). Overall, it helps improve your website’s performance. For this analysis, I chose to set up a Project for this blog so that I could analyze the performance of the blog and look at keywords to optimize the performance of it. While this blog will have less data available, since it’s so new, it will be interesting to see the different ways to improve the blog.

How to Create a Project in SEMrush

So where do you even start when setting up an SEMrush Project? With a free account, you can only set up one Project, so make sure you’re setting up a Project for the website that you want to optimize and focus on!

When setting up a Project, click on the tab “Project” on the left side bar. On the right side of the page, click the blue button that says “+ Create Project.” After putting the URL for your website and naming the Project, you can add tags and create parameters to help sort and filter your Projects. The Projects Dashboard also contains all your Projects, those shared with you, and your teams. If you’re an Admin on the team, all of the Projects will appear there, as well (SEMrush Knowledge Base, 2020).

Some Advice for Setting up a Project in SEMrush

While setting up a Project was relatively simple, there’s a couple of things I wish I’d known before setting it up. First, I wish I’d known that I would need to input keywords that I want to rank for as soon as I set up the Project. You can go back in and change them afterwards, but it would’ve been nice to automatically know at the beginning what I was looking at specifically. So my recommendation would be to do some basic keyword research before creating a Project to make sure you’re on top of it from the beginning! Second, the Project comes automatically set up with domain analytics, traffic analytics, keyword analytics, and backlink analytics. But there’s a lot of other tools that you can set up if you want to.

Here’s a list of the different tools in a Project:

o Site audit

o Position tracking

o On page SEO checker

o Social media tracker

o Social media poster

o Brand monitoring

o Backlink audit

o Link building tool

o PPC keyword tool

o Organic traffic insights

o Content audit (SEMrush Knowledge Base, 2020)

What I Set Up in My Project

To start off my Project, I began with the site audit, position tracking, on-page SEO checker, and link building tool. I chose these four for the following reasons:

- The Site Audit shows the health of your website, its rank, and how your keywords are performing. It also “detects any problems related to crawlability, content, links and coding” (Antony, 2021). The site audit deals with title tag errors, meta description errors, H1 errors, image alt tag errors, internal and external link errors, canonical URL errors, 404 errors, and more. It also chooses a health score for your website based on indexation, speed, and security.

- The Position Tracking shows the visibility of your domain and its target keywords. It also creates “daily updates on positions in Google’s top 100 organic and paid search results” (Antony, 2021). To use position tracking well, you enter the keywords you want it to track, and it will continue to monitor them automatically over time, tracking visibility, traffic, average position, labeling keywords as positive or negative impact. This tool also provides advanced keyword ranking metrics, including ranking distribution, positive impact, negative impact, top pages, cannibalization, and more.

- The On-Page SEO Checker helps to improve landing pages’ keyword rank and “collect ideas on strategy, content, backlinks and more” (Antony, 2021). When you choose which pages you want the website to provide optimization recommendations for, it’ll also show you the top 10 websites that rank for the keywords you’re using on that page.

- The Link Building Tool creates a list of potential targets to link back to in order to increase your website’s rank, trustworthiness, and authority. It also provides a list of what competitors are doing (Antony, 2021). While setting up the other tools in the Project would probably be smart, these three seemed like they’d create a good foundation to analyze the health of my website quickly.

What SEMrush Tools I Want to Learn More About and Why

Going forward, I’d love a greater understanding of all the tools. I’m hoping to do a deep dive into the majority of them (time permitting of course) so that I’ll have well-rounded knowledge of what SEMrush is capable of. But there are a few things that I really want to learn more about.

First, I want to know how to navigate SEMrush easily and quickly. While it’s a relatively user-friendly site, I want to master it so I know where everything lives and how to use it most effectively. Second, I want a better understanding of what each tool does and why I should (or shouldn’t) use it. For example, is every single tool worth investing time in for a blog or are some better for ecommerce sites? Third, I want to interpret the data collected from the three tools that I set up already to implement changes across the site. Without being able to interpret this data well, it’s pointless to collect.

References

SEMrush Knowledge Base. (2020). Launching a Project. Retrieved from: https://www.semrush.com/kb/243-launching-a-project#7

Antony, Alston. (2021). Semrush project toolkit tutorial in 2022 (in-depth 1 hour course). Digital marketing mind. Retrieved from https://digitalmarketingmind.com/semrush-tutorial/.