First things first: are you hungry enough for success that you do an audit of your blog every month? How about doing keyword research while checking your competitor’s keywords as well? And do you track keyword ranking and check backlinks, too?
Once upon a time (excuse my old timer’s beginning), there were black hat techniques that almost every magician (bloggers and content creators) used to have high PageRank. These included blog rolling, illegal link building, paid visits and commenting, trolling, and many more. However, the wizards in Google created a wonderful animal called Panda.
The Panda was hated by many black magicians, but loved by the people. It penalized those who used black hat techniques. It focused on what the people loved — high quality contents from non-snobbing creators. This made many stumble. It made the internet better.
The Panda surely made everyone aware of their competitors through research. It meant content creators made people happy by creating high quality contents.
Were you one of the tens of thousands affected by the Panda updates? If yes, then you have made some mistakes along the way: providing thin contents can be one; failing to do keyword research is another one. Did you audit your site at least once every six months?
Don’t get us wrong: those Panda updates that Google slowly rolled out is a wonderful thing not only for the readers, but to the content creators as well. We should not hate the big guy, but instead, we must learn what it meant to teach us — that we need to put the audience first before search engines.
Now, let’s get to the real thing:
Bloggers and content creators need at least one search engine marketing (SEM) tool to succeed. SEM tools allow them to know which keywords will work best for their niche or target audience. There are many tools for this out there: Moz and Ahrefs are some of the well-known.
Enter SEMRush. It is an SEM tool that makes it pretty easy to do keyword research. You can use it to determine which keyword your site is ranked for. This is a pretty basic function, though. The better function knows which keywords your competitors are ranking for, and how they are doing.
After searching the right keywords for your target audience, you are now ready to use them. SEMRush is in fact very powerful that you can determine how your keywords rank in search engines. Moreover, it can tell you how your keywords rank for countries, cities, or just about any location.
You may wonder why is it good to know which country your keywords excel. Well, let’s just say that you need it if you target those living in the USA only, or UK, or India. It helps to ensure you don’t waste time producing contents for a country whose residents don’t want your contents. Maybe you need to translate your American English article to UK English or to Tamil, or whatever is needed.
With over 125,000,000 keywords and over 45,000,000 domains in SEMRush’s database, it is safe to assume that all of your competitors, big and small, are accounted for. It is easy to learn which keywords do, say, Facebook ranks for, as well as how it compares against Google Plus.
Knowing what you are competing against gives you a better chance of succeeding. You should know a lot of details about which keywords and related keywords you should use. SEMRush makes it very easy to know these.
To know your competitors’ keywords, all you need is to key in their website address on the search bar, and voilà — details will come like rain (it is like spying, but on a safe and humane level). From here, you can create high quality contents based on your competitor’s keywords and take a bite from their slice of the pie.
So, now that we know the strengths of SEMRush, is it time to use it? We say yes. Go ahead and try their service. You will surely gain tons of knowledge about your stuff and your competitor’s stuff.
Serious bloggers and big brands are already using SEMRush so that they can stay ahead of their game. The question is “why haven’t you used it yet?”
Here’s why we love SEMRush:
As for the cons, well, uh, we haven’t seen one yet. We will update this post once we see any cons. We wonder when that would be, though, because as far as we can tell, it is by far one of the best SEM tools we have ever used.
“Okay, I’ve tried it but I can’t understand a thing”
Don’t worry: you are not alone. We also experienced this when we first used SEMRush to rank this website. Here are a few of the most technical terms that you need to know:
Other data are self-explanatory. But if you still don’t understand, you can call them or go to their forums. You will surely find what you are looking for.
We hope you find this review enough to make you try SEMRush (remember there’s a free trial), and make it your tool of choice. It is powerful and easy to use; however, if you will not use its full potential, you will achieve less.
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