SEMrush Review – How To Get Great Website And Blog Post Ideas

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The secret sauce separating hobbyists and full-time professional bloggers are the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools that help rank articles at the top of Google’s page #1. Professional bloggers spend nearly 40% of their time finding the keywords that will help rank on Google because more views equal more website revenue. SEMrush is one of the primary SEO tools used and utilized by us on Wallet Squirrel for years. Here is our experience and SEMrush Review, how to get great website and blog post ideas.

SEMrush Review – Who is it for exactly?

SEMrush is an excellent and underutilized tool, but not everyone needs it. We see it best used by intermediate and advanced bloggers. When they’re first starting a blog, begin bloggers don’t optimize articles unless they’re focusing on building revenue. SEMrush is really for those trying to increase their traffic and make revenue.

Here is how we break out each blogging phase for this SEMrush Review:

  • Beginner Blogger – Someone just starting who’s under 15 blog posts. SEMrush isn’t really for you unless you want to start building traffic to monetize your website with Google AdSense ads or Affiliate Marketing.
  • Intermediate Blogger – Someone who has 15 – 100 blog posts. You’re starting to look at SEO tools to maximize the visibility of each post you write. You’re also starting to get media mentions and links around the web. Tracking your blog’s progress and optimizing your site is becoming a bigger priority. SEMrush is absolutely for you.
  • Advanced Blogger – Someone who has 100+ blog posts. You understand the importance of SEO in everything you do with your blog. Each pageview you get through Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo means more revenue to support your family. You want to easily find popular keywords, quickly determine their ranking difficulty for and analyze your website daily to find opportunities to optimize. SEMrush is absolutely for you if you don’t already have it.

Best 3 SEO Tools in 2021 (aka the competition)

These 3 SEO tools offer similar tools, similar to how Ford, Tesla, and Toyota all produce cars. Each does it a bit differently. Yet each is priced around the same.

SEMrush

SEMrush boasts over 6 million users and remains one of the top suites of SEO tools online. We’ll hit more on all of their tools below.

Moz

Moz has been one of the most well-known SEO toolsets for years. We use their free domain authority Google Chrome extension daily.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has a terrible name but does a fantastic job with their SEO suite of tools. We’ve noticed their backlink tools are a little better than Moz.

SEMRush Review – Here Are The Best Tools

On the About Page for SEMrush, they mention having over 48 tools developed since starting in 2008. However, not all of those are worth mentioning. We’re focusing on the best ones for bloggers and those wanting excellent blog post ideas.

Find Perfect Keyword Ideas

Any blog post you write or website idea you have, the goal is to be seen. You want people to find you on Google and enjoy what you’re writing. However, unless you’re fortunate, most times, your blog posts are going unseen. The trick becomes optimizing your articles with good keyword research.

Popular Keywords For Blog Posts

If you want your blog post seen, you need to write about topics that people are Googling. SEMrush tells you exactly how often a keyword or phrase comes up in a month. In this example, the term “How To Save Money On Groceries” is searched 2,900 times a month. Usually, any term above 800 searches is an excellent term to consider.

On the opposite “How To Save Money on Beer” has only 10 searches a month. So while you may write an excellent blog post on this topic and rank on page #1 of Google, your article won’t receive much traffic.

90% of Beginner Bloggers quit blogging due to a lack of traffic to their website. They feel their effort isn’t worth it. SEMrush helps set a realistic expectation for Beginner Bloggers in expected traffic and provides better keyword ideas.

Keyword Difficulty

The second part of keyword research is how hard it is to compete with the hundreds of similar blog posts. For example, the wildly popular term “Index Funds” has 171,000 searches a month! However, it has a keyword difficulty of 91 (1-100 scale, 100 being the hardest). So no matter how great of an article you write, you would need around 250 popular websites linking back to your post for it to reach page #1 on Google.

For most article ideas, we suggest around a 20% keyword difficulty for smaller blogs to have some chance of ranking well on Google.

SEMrush Review - How To Save Money on Groceries Keyword
SEMrush Review - How To Save Money on Beer Keyword
SEMrush Review - Index Funds Keyword

SEMRush Show You Competitors Statistics

Researching other blogs feels a little Sun Tzu, Art of War, but you need to know thy enemy. SEMrush gives you the tools to peek behind the scenes of your favorite blogs. This research shows you helpful information like their traffic, popular pages, backlinks, broken links, and top keywords.

One of the best ways to use this tool is SEMrush will identify all the backlinks similar websites have. Since the more backlinks (good backlinks) your website has pointed to it, the more authoritative Google will find your site.

Consider 3 of your competitors that link to Adobe’s Behance (great domain authority 92). This insight could tell inspire you to create a free profile on Behance to get that additional backlink like them.

SEMrush Analytics Of A Large (And Cool) Finance Blog.

SEMrush Review - Mr. Money Mustache Analytics 2021

Learn More About Your Website

To get great SEO, it’s not always about your articles. There are several SEO tools SEMrush has in its toolkit to analyze your site and make it better.

  • Review your backlinks – SEMrush will create a report of all the backlinks pointing to your site. Perhaps MSN News mentioned you, but no one told you about it. SEMrush can inform you of new backlinks pointing to your blog.
  • Find Broken Links – Consider a blog post you wrote two years ago now has websites you linked to that no longer exist. Broken links are considered poor maintenance by Google. SEMrush identifies all the broken backlinks on your site. Fixing these simple links can improve the health and SEO of your website.
  • Position Tracking – SEMrush can track all your blog posts’ keywords and tell you which ones have moved up and down in Google’s ranking. Consider an old article you forgot about, but now SEMrush has informed you it’s rolled up the ranking to page #2 on Google. You can either try to point so more links to it to move it up to Google’s page #1 or go back and edit it to make it more informative. Position Tracking is a great tool to inform your rankings in Google and discover the unseen potential.
  • Brand Monitoring – This is a super helpful tool to notify you every time your brand or specific terms are written about online. Consider someone mentioned your company “ABC Corp” but not linking to you. Usually, you would never know about this, but SEMrush can send you brand monitoring notifications. So you would be able to ask the original writer to add a link or use that mention in your media kits.

SEMrush Analytics Of This Site WalletSquirrel.com

SEMrush Review - Wallet Squirrel Analytics 2021

Social Media Scheduler & Analytics

Social Media Scheduling is something unique to SEMrush because it’s not included in Ahrefs or Moz. SEMrush wants to be your complete SEO tool, and Social Media is a big part of that.

This tool was pretty terrible when it first came out a couple of years ago in our original SEMrush Review. However, now it’s nearly unrecognizable from its clunky roots. The interface is clean, posting is easy, and the analytics are on a new level. They integrate the major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Plus, SEMrush offers additional tools to help create optimized ads if you want to try out Facebook’s ad platform.

Link Building Tool – SEMrush’s Greatest Weapon

I am in love with this tool, and it’s unique to SEMrush. In short, you enter up to 10 keywords, and SEMrush will generate a list of websites that rank well for those terms. Afterward, SEMrush has a database of emails to these websites and allows you to send customizable emails to their respective owners.

Outreach emails are fantastic at helping you build links. Consider an email like “Hi! Your article lists 10 different ways to save money on groceries. Here is a bonus 11th to share with your audience!”. SEMrush allows you to build a highly customizable template and automatically fill in the article name and website owners. You’ll be able to send out 500 emails a day, and even with a 1% rate, that’s five different websites that will link back to you. If you take anything away from this SEMrush Review, you should try this great outreach tool.

We’ve found some none spammy ways to use this tool, and it’s resulted in MANY unique backlinks for this site!

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Special 14-Day Trial In Our SEMrush Review

SEMrush is a bit pricy at $119/month, but it’s a fantastic tool, and there are ways to use it on a budget. We use it off and on because there is no annual contract. We use it for one month, do all of our keyword research and then unsubscribe when we no longer need it. It’s straightforward and more affordable to go this route.

SEMrush Review - Special 14-Day Trial

SEMrush Review – 14-Day Trial

After many emails with SEMrush, we’re excited to share this referral link gets you a 14-day free trial rather than the standard 7-day trial. Use this link from our SEMrush Review to start finding high traffic/low keyword difficulty terms for your next 20 blog posts. Keyword research for your future articles will be the biggest thing to take your blog to the next level, and SEMrush is one of the best tools to get you started.