Initial Thoughts: The Power of Semrush

 


What is Semrush?
        According to their website, “Semrush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights” (n.d.). The platform offers marketers the ability to analyze a website’s SEO, perform keyword and competitive research, manage campaigns, and review marketing strategies. Prior to diving into the coursework of Web Metrics and SEO, I hadn’t heard of Semrush. At first glance, the platform itself seemed intimidating and complex with the sheer amount of tools and features accessible on the website. Upon a deeper investigation of the platform, I began to appreciate how easy it was to navigate. 
        Semrush Projects provide users with 11 tools to analyze a website’s online visibility. Each tool provides valuable insight into how consumers are reaching the site and identifies areas of improvement in order to increase site visibility. An interesting feature that Semrush offers for marketers is email updates with progress reports with important information regarding recent projects. Another interesting feature involves Semrush collecting data from outside sources such as Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, or Google Search Console. This provides users with even more information for their SEO dashboards beyond the data that Semrush collects.
        On the Semrush platform, the menu on the left displays seven main categories for each project. These include SEO, Local SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Content Marketing, Trends, and Agency Solutions. To begin my journey learning Semrush, I chose to focus mainly on the SEO category which consists of four main sub-categories: Competitive Research, Keyword Research, Link Building, and On Page & Tech SEO. In order to learn more about the basics of Semrush and using the platform, I chose to use Terra Cafe’s website (terracafewv.com). I currently work for Terra Cafe as a social media manager, but I do not have access to the website, so I was curious to see how visible our site is as well as analyze our SEO performance. Unfortunately, because I lack access to the site, I was unable to connect the Semrush project to other Google platforms such as Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, but I would highly recommend doing so if able.

SEO Dashboard
        After setting up my project, I first examined the SEO dashboard, which provided a wide variety of data points regarding the SEO performance of terracafewv.com. The domain analytics at the top of the dashboard displayed metrics and performance trends compared to the last 30 days. For Terra Cafe, their authority score was 23/100, which could certainly use improvement. As for their organic traffic, I was impressed to see around 3,000, which was a .07% growth from the previous month. For a small, local cafe, this is a satisfactory result. There were 201 organic keywords and 0 paid keywords, which makes sense due to the fact that Terra Cafe does not utilize paid search advertising. The last data point displayed referring domains, which totaled 110.


        For Position Tracking, Terra Cafe received a 6.43% visibility score for keywords “cafe” and “bakery” using the location of Morgantown, WV. Semrush’s estimated traffic was 1.09, meaning An estimation based on the average click-through rate of each position in Google’s results multiplied by the volume of the keyword, and divided by 30 (i.e., the number of days in a month). It shows the probability that a user will click on a domain’s search result depending on this domain’s position in the SERP” (Semrush, 2022). According to Semrush, Terra Cafe’s average rankings of all keywords in Position Tracking was 62.2. Unfortunately, these results are disappointing and shows that the website isn’t performing as well as it could be based on the provided keywords. 


        I was curious to see how these results would change if using other keywords, including more specific and lengthier ones such as “terra cafe morgantown '' or “terra cafe”. As soon as I included them within the campaign, Terra Cafe’s visibility jumped 40% to 46.43%. Both “terra cafe” and “terra cafe morgantown” received a 20% visibility score. The average ranking keyword position score also improved significantly from 62.2 to 22.60. For both keywords, Terra Cafe’s website ranked first organically. It was interesting to see just how dramatically the inclusion of these keywords improved each data point within Position Tracking.


        As for the Site Audit, out of 18 crawled pages, Terra Cafe received a site health score of 93% with 7 errors, 23 warnings, and 3 notices. In reviewing the common issues among the site pages, duplicate meta descriptions, low text-HTML ratio, and unminified Javascript and CSS files ranked as the top three. Out of all the previous categories examined, I found this subcategory of the SEO performance analysis to be one of the most interesting. I definitely plan to review the thematic reports as well as the various issues and specific reasons behind the site's health score. Although our lesson briefly explained the concept of “crawling”, it still amazes me how thorough the data extracted is.


        Within the Organic Research section, unsurprisingly, the top organic keywords were “terra cafe” with 4.4K search volume and 36.51 traffic percentage, followed by “terracafe” and “terra cafe morgantown wv”. It was interesting to view the new trending keywords, which included “morgantown brewery”, “places to eat in morgantown wv”, and “morgantown wv”. I also enjoyed the Keywords by Intent section, which provided the consumer motivations for searching keywords. For Terra Cafe, 49.6% of users showed commercial intent, followed by transactional and informational intent. 


        The Organic Research section is undoubtedly one I will have to review; I was absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of information provided regarding popular keywords and trends in position changes. It was certainly interesting to analyze, but certainly requires time and effort to truly understand the data provided and how to use it. The same can be said for the entirety of the Semrush platform. It was amazing to see how forward-thinking and personalized the recommendations were for the selected website. Although I was intimidated at first, I was pleasantly surprised with the ease of navigation and sheer amount of relevant data provided. It is clearly a powerful analytics tool developed to help marketers analyze SEO and website performance, but it takes time and effort in order to truly harness the power of Semrush. 


References
Semrush. (n.d.). What is Semrush? Semrush. https://www.semrush.com/kb/995-what-is-semrush 
Semrush (2022). Terra Cafe: SEO Dashboard. Semrush. https://www.semrush.com/seo/7644284
Terra Cafe. (n.d.). Terra Cafe Morgantown. Terra Cafe. https://www.terracafewv.com


Comments

  1. Ashley StoneApril 7, 2022 at 7:37 AM

    Olivia,
    This was a really interesting post! So, what have you learned through your project that you can take back to your employer and share with them so they can change up their website? Are there any glaring issues? How are their keywords looking-are is the competition edging them out, or are the doing better than expected?

    Who are you using as competition? Have you chosen another cafe in the same area, or one down a few blocks? What are you finding on the SEMrush site most interesting to use? Personally, I really enjoy using the competitor research and keyword sections, but for you, I would think that the back links section would be very valuable.

    How can you take all the practical knowledge that you are gaining by working with a company you actually work for and apply it to your future work? Again, nicely done!

    Best,
    Ashley Stone

    ReplyDelete

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