How to Use SEMRUSH for SEO of your Blog

I have previously written at length about the SEMRUSH tool, which is a must-have pro tool for serious bloggers. Because there is a cost associated with SEMRUSH, I also shared a discount coupon which will let you grab this tool for free.
In today’s post I will be sharing some quick tips which will help you to learn how to use SEMRUSH, and how to use the data provided by this site to optimize your blog for search engines.
Before we get to the tips, I’d like to point out to you to a few problems with some existing blogs, and show you how SEMRUSH could help to improve keyword ranking.

How to use SEMRUSH to improve keyword ranking:

One of the biggest problems with old blogs in which SEO was not a focus for the blog’s creator, is poor keyword ranking. Most of the traffic these blogs get come from various posts, and you have no idea what keywords are driving traffic to these posts. This is key information that is missing, because if you know what keywords your blog is ranking for and the keyword position, you can do several things to improve your search engine ranking.
All the blog posts written before 2012 were not targeted for any specific keyword, and most of my old blog posts are ranking for keywords at different positions. Some of them are on the first page, and some of them are seen on the second or lower pages.
Here I will share the exact steps necessary to help me to find the keywords these blog posts are ranking for, and how I improved their rankings. You can follow this guide and do the same for your site.
First, create a free account on SEMRUSH or use the SEMRUSH discount coupon to grab a Pro account for free.
Once you have logged in, enter your domain name in the search field, and click on the full report of organic keywords. It will list all the money and traffic keywords you are ranking for along with other vital details such as:
Traffic estimate, Adsense CPC, keyword position, traffic percentage and keyword trends.
Next, sort your report based on keyword position. We do this because we want to push our second page results to first, and use my Google search CTR-increase technique to get more clicks. You can also sort based on keyword trend, which is a good practice if your goal is to focus more on traffic. Alternatively, if your goal is to increase your AdSense income, you can sort using keyword CPC. So we sort depending on what our specific goals are.
Here is a screenshot:

Now make a list of all of the URLs you need to work on. You can use a spreadsheet to create a list of keywords, positions and URLs. You can also add your keywords into any software you are using to track keyword position for your blog. A few examples of this type of software would be: SEOMOz, Traffic Travis or Free Google Keyword Monitor.  This process will help you later to see the progress of your whole project.
So now we have used SEMRUSH to extract this important data from our site:

• Keywords we are ranking for
• Money keywords
• Traffic keywords

Our next goal is to improve the ranking of these keywords. Following is the strategy that works for me:

Use a keyword optimization plugin:

I use the SEOPressor plugin to optimize my posts for particular keywords. I have previously shared a detailed feature list of SEOPressor plugin which will guide you in how to use it for optimal performance. This part will take care of on-page SEO.
Bonus tip: Add images, videos and slides if possible. Make your content as high quality as you can. This will make sure you can retain your keyword ranking for a long time to come.

Use link building:

To improve ranking, backlink building is very important. I use my guest blogging campaign technique to improve keyword ranking and get high quality links. I initially used it for a few posts, and I published guest posts on a few authority blogs, and I saw a very significant improvement in keyword ranking.

Use social media marketing:

Social media signals are very important these days to improve the ranking of a keyword. Share your blog post on Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter, and make sure to continue sharing it in regular intervals (7-10 days). Also, encourage your readers to share the article on their social networks and to bookmark it.

Create more related content:

This is a technique which I discovered later in the game, and it continues to work very well for me. If you are getting traffic for certain keywords, try to create more posts on similar and related topics. Interlink them, and this will help to improve the content ranking further. I use a professional tool call HitTail, and I find it very helpful for generating keyword ideas.
That’s it!
Now you just have to keep an eye on your keyword improvement, and see how all of this works out for you.

How to use SEMRUSH for further SEO of your blog:

Again, SEMRUSH is a SEM tool, and you can use it to find details for any website. Make a list of popular sites in your niche, and start mining out their data using SEMRUSH.
I also use SEMRUSH to generate more keyword ideas which leads to more traffic and thus more ad income.  For example, my niche is blogging and SEO, so I can focus on similar niche blogs to get more content and keyword ideas.
I have been using SEMRUSH for some time now, and I continue to find it worth my money. For any serious blogger who wants to work on the overall SEO keyword improvement of their blog, SEMRUSH could be a very profitable tool.

Sign up for a free SEMRUSH account

Let me know how you are using SEMRUS for the SEO of your blog!
If you find this article useful, remember to share it on your favorite social networks!