When doing search engine marketing, it is very important to gather as much data as possible on your own site, as well as, your competitors. There are a few websites that can do this, and one of those sites is SEMRush.com. Previously, I did an SEMrush Review, and went through the steps that you needed to follow in order to sign up for, and use the various parts of the site. Since my last review, the site has been greatly updated, and in this review I will walk you through the current way to navigate the site, my personal takes on how the site handles, and my thoughts on the usefulness of the site.
SEM Rush
With the current layout, you do not have to sign up in order to check out the stats of a link. However, signing up gives you the ability to email yourself, and others a copy of the results generated from your inquiries. Also, an upgraded account gives you a few thousand searches a day (the free account only gives you ten searches per day). When you first come to the website, there is a bar where you can enter a URL of a website that you wish to do research on.
The first page of the website defaults to searching Google.com in the US, but you can choose other countries for Google search engine related info. After entering your URL, and pressing the “search” button, you are taken to a page that uses a line graph to show the search engine traffic for that URL in the Google search variation that you have chosen. From this page, you can now choose to see Google searches from other countries, or you can see how your URL fairs in the Bing.com search engine variations.
As you scroll down, you can see the organic keywords, and pay per click (PPC) ad keywords that your URL comes up under. There is also a pie chart that compares and contrasts organic versus PPC ad keyword traffic. Below the charts is an abbreviated listing of organic, and PPC ad keywords that are associated with your URL. You can see a full listing of organic, or PPC ad keywords by clicking on the link associated with the type of information that you wish to view. When you do so, a new page is loaded with full details about the organic or PPC ad traffic depending upon which link you clicked. In the free version you get a maximum of ten keywords – to see information on the rest of the keywords, you would need to upgrade your account.
Another interesting and useful feature on this page is the ability to look at the pie chart that shows competitors in organic search. You can use the pie chart to learn how much competition you have from a particular country, and also find out what percentage of a website’s main keywords are ranking within those countries. If you need more specific numbers, the keyword information bar at the top of the screen gives you specific keyword ranking data for various countries. For example, for a particular website that I was doing research on, from the bar I could see that in a Google.com search, the website had 491 keywords that it ranked well for organically, whereas for Google.co.uk the same website ranked well organically for 110 keywords. The bar also showed me organic keyword numbers for other countries such as Canada, France, and Italy. Getting this type of keyword information can be very useful, but what can be even more useful is getting information on how various publishers, and advertisers interact with Google Adsense.
The Adsense related search section of the SEMRush.com website can provide useful information for those wishing to optimize their websites that are mainly monetized by Google Adsense. This part of the website is still in beta, and it shows the top 30 publishers, and advertisers for Adsense on the web if you do not put in a particular URL. If you input a URL in the search bar, the information gets much more specific depending upon if you wish to view publisher information or advertiser information. For example, if I click on the publisher link for Adsense, and put in a URL, I can see the number of publishers that displays Adsense ads for that URL, along with the number of ads, when they were first, and last seen, and how many times. This can definitely be useful if you are doing research on how well your Adsense ads are showing up on other websites, or how often your competitors are showing up within the Google Adsense publisher network. By clicking on the advertiser link in the Adsense related search you can see the number of advertisers, and Google Adsense ads placed on a particular website.
In another section of the SEMRush.com website you can also find out the number of backlinks that are going to a URL by subdomain, or main domain. This helps you track down what anchor text is being used with the majority of backlinks linking to a particular URL. The keyword research tool is also very useful. You can put in a keyword, and find out the cost per click (CPC) of that keyword plus you can learn the search volume of that keyword, and whether or not it is trending upwards or downwards. For those looking for alternate keywords, a list of phrase match keywords, and related keywords is presented further down the page. And if you are looking for even more keyword information, you can find out the top websites that rank organically in Google for your particular keyword.
Overall, the changes that have been made to the SEMRush.com website have made it much easier to use. However, there are a few things about the site that I wish could be improved upon. At the top of my wishlist, it would be nice if there was a way to get search engine info on subdomains that require a forward slash ( / ). For example, it is possible to pull up results for “USERNAME.maindomain.com”, however, if you tried to do a search for “maindomain.com/USERNAME” SEMRush.com defaults back to “maindomain.com”. There are many multi-blogger websites like TrendHunter.com and RedGage.com where bloggers have their own page designated with their username followed by a forward slash (ex: RedGage.com/FunStuff). Adding this feature to the search engine data retrievers on this website would make it easier for people to track down the top contributors for various multi-blogger websites in order to get in contact with them to see if they would be willing to write a blog post, or article about a particular product or service.
Outside of that, I learned that in doing my SEMrush Review that SEMrush provides great search engine research information that can be used to help a website be propelled to the top of the search engines.