Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Agency

A great advantage of Semrush is that it provides incredible detail and rich data about your website’s traffic. It can tell you:

• How many visitors your website receives per month.
• What country the traffic is coming from.
• Whether it is paid for, or organic traffic.
• How long visitors are spending on your website.
• The bounce rate – visitors who abandon your website after only viewing one page.
• What device they are using to view your website.
• How visitors arrived at your website, categorised into:
• • Direct traffic: means that they typed your website URL directly into a search engine.
  • Referral traffic: means that arrived at your website through another source that led them there, e.g.) a referral website.
  • Search traffic: means that they asked a question into a search engine and then clicked on your website because Google listed it in their result page.
  • Social traffic: means that they arrived at your website through a social media platform that led them there.
  • Paid traffic: means that visitors arrived at your website by clicking an ad that you had purchased.

All of this website traffic information is extremely useful for SEO agencies and business owners. It helps you understand where your traffic is coming from and how they are arriving at your site. This data can be used to identify a strategic path for increasing your SEO performance, identifying areas that are working well and areas that may need for development.

A backlink is when another website links back to your website in its content. Google algorithms use backlinks in order to determine the authenticity of your website, because if another site is recommending it, then it must be of value.

Semrush can quantify how many backlinks your site has and where they are coming from. Recent Google algorithm updates are now checking where the backlinks are originating from, in order to determine their credibility and the authenticity of your site. The rule of thumb is, that the harder it is to gain a backlink, the more credible it must be.

Semrush provides a platform that allows you to evaluate your website performance against a maximum of three other competitors. They provide a ‘Growth Quadrant’ table that visually displays a competitor analysis in relation to four main categories:

1. Niche Players: New or small companies with smaller audience size and a low growth rate
2. Game Changers: Emerging companies with a comparatively smaller audience size but that are growing quickly.
3. Established Players: Companies with large, established audiences.
4. Leaders: Companies with both a large audience and a rapid growth rate

This information is extremely useful for knowing where you stand in the market place and what your SEO approach should be going forward, it can highlight keywords that you should be aiming for, because your competitors are already ranking for them.

Semrush is a great tool for keyword analysis, a lot of SEO agencies use it to identify a website’s ranking keywords, their average position and traffic volume. It can also show the pages on a website that are ranking for those keywords, ensuring that businesses know what type of content is being valued by both the audiences and Google algorithms.

Semrush also sorts the ranking keywords into four main categories:

1. Informational keywords: searchers looking for an answer to a specific question or general information.
2. Navigational keywords: searchers intending to find a specific site or page.
3. Commercial keywords: searchers looking to investigate brands or services.
4. Transactional keywords: searchers intending to complete an action or purchase.

Identifying the category of keywords assists SEO agencies in determining the user path before arriving at your website, it is useful for influencing an SEO strategy and determining how you’re going to frame SEO keywords going forward.

Another major advantage of using Semrush is that it gives an incredibly detailed overview of keyword analysis. This is helpful for SEO agencies in providing them with valuable information about a keyword and the ability to rank for it.

Semrush provides data points relating to: 

Volume of searches

This shows the amount of searches, per month, that are performed for a keyword, on a global scale. This can also be viewed by Country, giving an even more detailed analysis of the keyword ranking. 

Keyword difficulty 

The keyword difficulty refers to how difficult the keyword is to rank for. Usually, the higher the amount of searches per month, the more difficult it is to rank, due to larger amounts of competition trying to rank for the same thing. 

Cost-per-click

Semrush will also tell you the CPC – cost per click, that Google would charge if you were to pay for ad space when users search for this query. This is useful for determining the value of a keyword. 

Keyword variations

Keyword variations, also known as secondary keywords, are an amazing resource of information for when it comes to writing your own SEO content. They ensure that you are using the phrases that people are searching for and you can even filter these results to match your business expertise.

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are a variation of keyword searches, many people type long tail keywords into search engines and this can help your business identify areas for producing content that answers them. 

Keyword questions

Semrush provides a comprehensive list of related keyword questions, these are great to include in any piece of SEO content as they literally provide the blueprints for answering user queries. 

Related keywords

Another valuable source of information, keyword variations help you consider other phrases that people are using to describe your related product/service. These are useful for diversifying your content, but still ensuring that you are using SEO phrases that will help you rank.

Serp Analysis

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages, on Semrush they provide a SERP analysis, which shows the websites that are already ranking for your targeted keyword. Not only is this useful for identifying what works for SEO performance, but it is also useful for identifying competitors that you may have not been aware of.

The SEO title is one of the most important aspects for content ranking on search engines. They should ideally be between 40 – 65 characters in length, and the keyword should always feature at the beginning of the title.

Although it isn’t always possible, try to create titles that have a number in them, e.g.) 5 ways to, 10 things to remember, etc, and try to include a power word, e.g.) Amazing, beneficial, supporting, etc.

Aim for a high word count, there is a lot of competition out there and if your content doesn’t have enough words, Google won’t bother showing it in their results. Website content should have at least 750 words per page and blog content and supporting articles should have at least 1000 words in them.

Readability refers to how easy your content is to understand. If your content is written with lots of jargon or technical terms, it will confuse a novice and Google will interpret it as difficult to understand. Try to write using simplified terminology and short sentence structures. SEO assistants will provide a readability score, so you can go back and simplify the content if needs be.

You should also make use of headings throughout your written content. Start with H1 headings and include your keyword in the H1 as this signposts to Google algorithms that it’s important content.

Headings also help the reader break up the content and skim the content for pieces that are relevant to them. Google tends to view written content in a pyramid like structure, so start with H1 and then progress onto H2, H3, etc.

The structure of your written content is also very important for making it appealing to audiences. Avoid using long paragraphs as this will only overwhelm audiences, try to keep paragraphs short, around 4-5 lines maximum.

You should always stick to using a font that is clear to read and uncomplicated, avoid using calligraphy style fonts as this might set an unprofessional tone and confuse the reader. You should also make use of italics and bold fonts, they signal important points to the reader and bold fonts signal to Google that it is an important term.

The keyword density refers to how often the keyword or keyword phrase is used in the written content. It is recommended that the keyword density is used 1-2 times every 100 words.