Connor Kline 8 Essential SEMrush Tools For Bloggers Connor Kline
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While there are several different ways for you to optimize your blog and get the most out of your audience, not many tools can offer you the opportunities that SEMrush can! We’ll tell you why in this article.
SEMrush is an amazing tool that can offer you numerous ways to help improve the impact on your blogging success. Let’s start by diving right into SEMrush and exploring the best uses for maximizing your blog.
1. Researching Your Keywords
SEMrush’s Keyword Analytics area is full of different reports for keyword research.
One of the keys to having a successful blog is understanding your readership and where in the market your blog resides. Certain niche blogs have the ability to really thrive in their market if they understand which keywords they need to be targeting organically.
SEO Keyword Magic Tool
The SEO Keyword Magic Tool generates an extensive list of keywords, focusing on more long tail keywords and group keywords for potential ad group opportunities. This feature is perfect for niche blogs, as it allows you to spend all of your focus on the keywords with the highest relevance.
Phrase Match
Phrase match report is the perfect tool in ensuring that you are getting the most optimization for your page. It can become a dream tool for a blogger looking to spark that extra bit of creativity in writing their next piece.
Writing a blog post on the upcoming Super Bowl and want to capitalize on all of its surrounding buzz? Run a Phrase Match on the keyword “Super Bowl” and SEMrush will give you an analyzed list of all similar keywords that include “Super Bowl.” This can be perfect for you to differentiate yourself from your competition.
Once you’ve discovered a great group of keywords that you think would help your blog, it's now time to decide on the best content strategy for it. This is the perfect opportunity to explore the amazing benefits of the SEMrush SEO Ideas.
2. Create SEO Optimized Text
SEO Content Template
Perhaps the best section of SEO ideas when brainstorming for new ideas is the SEO content template – new feature within SEO Ideas. This is the logical next step after keyword research as it gives you an idea of what direction to take your researched keywords and begin your writing process.
Here you can simply choose the keyword that best represents your blog post idea and SEMrush will give you recommendations for your content.
This can be anything from reminders about meta-data, to the length of the ideas about semantically related words. All recommendations are not clichéd, for each keyword user gets original recommendations, based on SERP’s Top 10 analysis.
This is perfect for the process of creating a new blog post because you’ll know the optimal way to structure your content from the start.
3. Analyzing Your Competition / Following Your Rankings
Your job as a blogger doesn’t stop once your post is published In fact, what you do after you create a post can be what determines if your blog is going to sink or if you’re going to swim.
Position Tracking
The Position Tracking tool lets you view the exact distribution of your ranking keywords to show you which keywords are in the top 3 of Google and therefore bringing the most traffic. Since these bring the most traffic, they are the keywords that should be focused on the most.
SEMrush Position Tracking can allow bloggers to view their top competitors and compare your traffic with theirs. Understanding your top competitors can give you a better view on what your intended target audience is looking for. Running a blog can be a hugely competitive venture and using the Position Tracking report can give you a leg up on your competition by providing you with key insights into what your competitors are ranking for.
4. Optimizing Your Content To Best Your Competitors
As a blogger, keeping your site as optimized as possible can make a world of difference when it comes to separating from your competition.
SEO Ideas
SEO Ideas is an SEMrush tool designed to help users optimize pages on your website, or in this case, your blog. What really makes SEO Ideas special is the fact that this tool suggests to you precise optimization ideas. SEO Ideas give you a complete and structured list of things you could do to improve the rankings of certain pages of your website. So how can SEO Ideas help you as a blogger?
This tool takes keywords that you want to target and analyzes the pages ranking in the top 10 positions to identify SEO strategies that are working for your rivals. Given that you are battling for the same audience as these rivals, it becomes a huge benefit when you have this information and your rivals do not.
Learn how long your content should be, what keywords should be used and avoided, and where on your webpage to place them.
5. Site Health Analysis
Site Audit
The SEMrush Site Audit report is a website crawler that detects any technical SEO issues that are appearing on your site. For a blogger who may not always think of the technical side of their website, this can be the perfect tool to easily and clearly define what the issues affecting your site are and how you can go about fixing them to improve your SEO.
For example, let’s say you notice that one of your current blog posts isn’t performing as well as you originally expected it to be and can’t quite think of a reason why. If you run a Site Audit report for your domain you will also be able to see any issues on specific individual pages.
You can view which one of your blog posts you believe is underperforming and see how the technical side may be limiting its potential. Not only that, but SEMrush actually will tell you what these issues actually are and how exactly you can go about fixing them.
SEMrush Site Audit lets you compare different crawls with one another so you aren’t just making changes without seeing the analytics to justify your actions for improving certain pages. This can allow you to see technical issues found on the page hosting your blog post actually had an effect on your blogs performance. This will help you narrow down if the issues for your blog’s performance were coming from a technical standpoint or from content.
6. Social Media Reach
Your job as a blogger doesn’t stop once your post is published In fact, what you do after you create a post can be what determines if your blog is going to sink or if you’re going to swim.
Social Media Tool
The SEMrush Social Media Tool allows you to compare your social channels with your competitors all in one accessible interface. You can compare your audience's, engagement, and activity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and LinkedIn.
One of the benefits many bloggers have is their savviness when it comes to maximizing their use of social media platforms. If you know of other bloggers in the same space, you can monitor what they do on social media to appeal to their audience.
The Social Media Tool allows you to view both the engagement and the size of the social audience for both your own blog as well as your competitors. With this data you are easily able to see which of your social media platforms is performing the best, thus allowing you to decide where you should be focusing the social media presence of your blog.
You can use the Social Media Tool to help you analyze which specific blog posts are getting the highest amount of engagement with your target audience. This can let you know whether or not there is a certain trend within your blog about the types of posts that are getting the furthest reach and engagement. It's important to keep a close eye on each of your social media platforms to ensure you’re running the correct campaign strategy for each.
7. Monitoring Your Brand Outreach
It’s a huge must for PR managers, brand managers and marketing specialists to understand where their brand is mentioned, discover which channels are used by their competitors and focus on using those channels for promoting their brand – and SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool can help you with this. When running a blog it's important to be able to keep up with any mentions that are positive, as this can lead to an increase in your SEO if they provide a backlink.
You can find the dates of when your brand or keyword was mentioned the most, and when any mentions included backlinks. If you have more than one campaign (in this case a blog post) in your project, you can switch between viewing these different blogs. This can help your blog in finding potential outreach and possible guest post opportunities for yourself on another blog to help build your brand.
8. Content Analysis
The new SEMrush Content tool is the perfect tool to track and analyze your content marketing efforts. The Content tool can help you evaluate if your blog articles are appearing on third-party websites and if they are engaging with readers. You’ll see how many shares and backlinks each post has received since being published.
As a blogger, this can be an incredible tool to help you get a better understanding of where your content is performing the best on other domains. When blogs are picked up by third-party domains, it can be a huge boost in your SEO because it comes with the potential for backlink building and general PR improvement.
To get a more detailed view of the analytics for a specific post, simply click on that URL to see exactly where your articles are being shared.
Use this information to tell which places your content is being shared the most and whether you should adjust your strategy to reflect some of this data.
SEMrush can help you constantly monitor the performance of your blog so that you are never falling behind your competition.
It should be noted that you are able to fully sync with your Google Analytics account and Search Console Integration with the Organic Traffic Insights Tool within SEMrush Projects.
Conclusion
Combining all of the data pulled from these tools can give you that important edge over your competition. SEMrush allows you to get all of this vital information in one easy to use tool to help your blog reach that next level. Start using SEMrush today to make sure you are optimizing your blog as best as possible.
