If you need to improve your website's visibility and conversion rate, an SEO analysis tool is vital. Various solutions are available---so why should you choose SEMrush?
Designed for marketers requiring SEO, PPC, keyword research, web marketing, and all related insights, SEMrush regularly adds new tools. Backlink reports are one the most vital features, enabling you to deal with Google Penalties and Toxic Scores. Let's take a look at what they offer.
How SEMrush Can Contribute to Your Online Success
As a Software as a Service (SaaS) utility, you'll access SEMrush via the web.
SEMrush delivers information that you wouldn't otherwise have access to. With this data, you can make informed decisions about the next steps for your website. Make promotional decisions, develop content strategies---you can even compare keywords with competitor sites.
After conceiving and initiating proper strategies, you're not done with SEMrush. Reporting tools continue to provide feedback on your decisions and new information that contributes to your evolving strategies.
Single websites can use SEMrush; alternatively, SEO specialists can employ it, working exclusively or contractually with online clients.
Free Trial and Subscription Options for SEMrush
SEMrush is a subscription service with a seven-day free trial. You need to provide payment information at signup, but there's plenty of opportunity to cancel. Two subscription plans are available: Pro for $99.95 a month, and Guru for $199.95 a month.
With a Pro subscription to SEMrush you get the key tools, along with support for three projects. Meanwhile, SEMrush tracks up to 500 keywords, crawls 100,000 pages, and can export reports as PDFs.
The Guru plan supercharges this, with support for 15 projects, 1,500 keywords, and 300,000 pages. PDF reports are branded, and SEMrush's content marketing platform is added. Guru also includes multitargeting and historical data tools.
Which SEMrush package should you choose? It's a question of suitability and scalability. For those overseeing just one or two sites, the Pro subscription is clearly more suitable. For everything else, SEMrush's Guru plan is ideal, with a price to match the scale of tools on offer.
Creating a Project in SEMrush Is Easy
After signing up for SEMrush, starting a project is simple. A project consists of your website domain name, as well as an identifier.
Sharing options are available if you need to bring colleagues into your project. Meanwhile, you can also view other open projects, along with search filter and tagging tools to save time. There's also a Client Manager tool for SEO specialists working with multiple clients.
SEMrush Features Let You Develop Perfect Content
An SEMrush subscription includes everything you could possibly need to analyze and improve your website.
The service offers six toolkits, with tools for:
- SEO
- Advertising
- Social Media
- Content Marketing (Guru subscription only)
- Competitive Research
- Management
Each toolkit features several tools. For example, the SEO Toolkit features 19 different tools and reports, with access to the biggest keyword database around. As SEO is complicated for beginners, SEMrush offers an SEO dashboard along with a set of curated SEO tools. It also provides a detailed, easy-to-use knowledge base.
The SEO dashboard boasts several useful tools, such as Position Tracking to monitor progress on Google Search, and a Site Audit that detects issues on your site which prevent you from achieving a better Google ranking.
Another key feature is the group of backlink reports, which you can use to resolve issues with how your site ranks. This is vital, as one of the key points for ranking is your site's backlink profile.
What You Can Gain From a Backlink Audit Report
Backlinks are incoming links from other sites. Some of these might be good, such as reputable locations linking to your site as a source.
However, others might come from trashy blogs, or turnkey sites using keyword stuffing techniques to falsely accelerate their popularity. In short, having a lot of toxic backlinks may lead Google to penalize your site. To avoid that, you must clear out toxic backlinks via backlink audits.
To avoid such penalties and toxic scores, the Backlink Audit feature from SEMrush can analyze your site and produce reports. The results of the reports are usually encouraging, but almost always require some action on your part.
As with any of the tools on the SEMrush SEO Dashboard, simply click the Backlink Audit button to begin analysis.
Deal With Toxic Scores and Avoid Google Penalties
The results of a Backlink Audit will almost certainly be of some concern. There is, simply, no way to judge what other sites are linking to yours without the audit. As such, you'll likely be in for a few surprises.
The Backlink Audit report features six key tabs: Overview, Audit, Remove, Disavow, Lost & Found, and Target Pages.
Via Overview, you can gain a quick appreciation of the main issues. It lets you check URLs used by toxic domains, with the number of referring domains over the past 30 days listed.
The Audit itself is a detailed list of incoming links to your site, each rated by toxicity. Each backlink receives a "toxic score;" the higher the score, the greater the toxicity. Selecting an inbound link here presents you with two options: Remove and Disavow. When you choose Remove, those links are added to a list on the corresponding tab used to communicate with the site owners. You might request they remove the links to your site.
Alternatively, the Disavow option compiles inbound links into the Disavow list. This creates a file that you can upload to Google's Disavow Tool. Google's crawler will then consider these links when assessing your site, reducing the impact of Google penalties.
Another useful tool in the Backlink Audit is the Lost & Found tab, which analyzes links from new sites as well as lost and broken links. The Target Pages tab lists the most popular destinations for incoming links.
Every Website Needs SEMrush
SEMrush's Backlink Audit should be the first destination for any new subscriber to the service. Dealing with Google Penalties and Toxic Scores is a vital step in recovering or improving your site's position. Only then should you consider elevating the performance of content with some keyword research.
With traffic insights, keyword tools, social media scheduler, an SEO checker, ad builder, and much more, SEMrush is like having a full team of digital marketers working for you. It's a must-have for any website manager.