Semrush Tutorial 2026 | Step by Step For Beginners

Key Takeaways

Welcome to my complete beginnerfriendly tutorial on Semrush, an all-in-one digital marketing platform specializing in keyword research and search engine optimization. If you've just created a Seamrush account and feel overwhelmed by the dashboard, don't worry. This video will walk you through Semrush step by step. Each chapter is packed with examples, on-creen demos, tips, and best practices. Here's our plan for the video. You'll find the timestamps right here so you can jump to any section you need. Let's dive right in. Click the link in the video description to get an exclusive 14-day free trial of Semrush, double the usual 7 days. Then click try it free to create your account. You can sign up using your Google account or an email address. Enter your email address, a password, and click create account. You'll have to verify your email address before you can continue. So, pull up your inbox and copy and paste the code into Semrush. After that, you'll have a short form to fill out so Seamrush can better tailor your experience. Don't worry, it's only four questions long. Next, it's decision time. You can choose to get the 7-day free trial by signing up for a plan or opt to continue with the free plan by clicking skip trial. While you're free to do either, Smrush was kind enough to give my team access to the SEO Guru plan so I can show you all this platform has to offer. All right, to follow along, click get free trial, enter your credit card information, and then select try it now. With onboarding finally complete, you'll arrive on this screen, the Simrush dashboard. Let's get you comfortable with everything it has to offer. Chapter one, how to navigate the dashboard. The main dashboard is your central hub for projects and tools. For now, let's skip everything in the center and look over to the left. This sidebar is where you'll find Semrush's main sections. SEO. This is where you'll conduct competitor and keyword research. It's also where you'll be able to focus on link building, getting other websites to link to your website and check your onpage SEO, title tags, content, etc. And technical SEO, making sure your website is visible and easy to navigate for search engines. This is where we'll be spending most of our time in this video. AI toolkit. Much of the AI toolkit revolves around marketing. With it, you can check your brand's visibility, compare your site to your competition, learn how people search for your website, and more. Traffic and market. A more accurate name for this section would be traffic with a touch of market. This is where you see who visits your site, an AI, organic search results, a paid lead, etc., and how they got there through either email marketing, clicked an ad, clicked a hyperlink, etc. Local tools designed to help small businesses that operate in a relatively small geographic area, helping them create reviews, appear at the top of localized searches, and more. Content, where you can generate new content, articles, and blogs using AI, and optimize existing content. Social, where you can manage everything related to your business's social media accounts. Advertising. This is where you can research, launch, and manage advertising campaigns. Reports, a bunch of data pulled from all other tools and your website directly that let you see how your website is doing. App center, a relatively new feature where users can integrate thirdparty marketing apps to increase Sam Rush's functionality. You'll also see the home icon in the upper left. No matter where you are in the app, that will take you back to this dashboard. The top navigation bar has a search bar where you can directly enter a domain, keyword or URL to analyze. And on the right side, you have your account menu where you can manage your subscription and other users. And last but not least, the project dashboard. Since we have no projects yet, Semrush immediately encourages you to create your first project by entering your website's name. Let's follow the hints and get started by creating your first project. Chapter 2, setting up a project. Before we do that, however, let's briefly explain what a project is. A SEMrush project is essentially a container for a specific website, allowing you to run a suit of analysis on that site and store all related data in one place. Now, let's create your first project. Enter your website's domain in the enter your website name field and click the start now button. Pro tip, enter your root domain, meaning example.com, rather than a specific subdomain or the www.ver so that Samrush can analyze your entire site. For example, since I'll be using the financial times as our website, I'll want to enter ft.com instead of httpsw.ft.com. After clicking start now, your new project specific dashboard will appear under the heading SEO dashboard. Click the home icon to return to the main dashboard. You'll see your first project on the dashboard's home screen right here. Future projects will appear right here and you can start a new one by clicking create SEO project in the upper right. Understanding the project dashboard. Initially, the project overview will be mostly empty because no tools have been set up or integrated with your website. While you'll be able to see basic statistics like organic traffic, organic keywords, and back links by default, the dashboard is going to fill up as we set up site health monitoring, visibility tracking, the onpage SEO checker, and more. In other words, the project dashboard becomes a quick overview of your site's key SEO metrics. Pro tip. Although we cannot sync the Google Analytics and the Google Search Console for this example, it's essential to add them to your Samrush account. To get started, hover over SEO in the left sidebar and select SEO dashboard. Click on the settings gear in the top right corner of your project dashboard. Select setup Google accounts and follow the onscreen instructions to integrate these powerful tools with your Samrush accounts. For now, I'll head back to the central dashboard. All right, so now that your project is set up and ready, we can start using Semrush's tools to improve your website. We'll begin with keyword research. Chapter 3, the keyword magic tool and keyword research. A cornerstone of SEO is identifying and incorporating the right keywords, the words and phrases your audience uses to search for your business across your website. While Semrush offers a powerful keyword research suit, we'll be focusing on the keyword magic tool in this chapter. Accessing keyword research tools. In the left sidebar, hover over SEO and find the heading keyword research. There are a few options. Keyword overview, keyword magic tool, and the keyword strategy builder, position tracking, and organic traffic insight. We'll start with a keyword overview to get an overview of your website. Keyword overview gives a quick snapshot of a single keyword's metrics like volume, difficulty, etc. To use it, click in the search box. Enter a keyword, eg stock market. Select the project you want to access, egft fft.com. Choose a country database, eg United States, and hit search. In a few seconds, we'll have a host of metrics for this keyword to sift through, including how it relates to our website. Okay. At the top, we get an executive summary-l like view of the keyword. Volume lets us know how many times people searched stock market on Google. We also get a geographical breakdown of those searches. Next to that is personal keyword difficulty, PKD. A new AI powered metric that tells us how optimized our website already is for a specific keyword. In other words, how easy or difficult would it be for your website to rank for a particular keyword. In our example, Seamrush suggests it would be very easy for the Financial Times to rank well for our keyword. Given it's one of the world's leading financial news organizations, that shouldn't be surprising. We'll ignore the potential traffic and potential topic traffic since those just show us the day-by-day search volume. Further to the right is the search intents. This basically means why someone is searching for this keyword, the cost per click, CPC, advertising rate for this keyword, how competitive the CPC market is, and broader search trends over the last 12 months. Last but not least, we have a list of keyword ideas or related keywords that Seamrush thinks might be worth trying to rank for. We have much of the same information here as we did above, including the monthly volume and PKD. Of course, you can click on each keyword for more detailed view. With that general overview out of the way, let's go back over to the left sidebar and open the keyword magic tool. While the keyword overview feature lets us evaluate the performance of a particular keyword more generally, the keyword magic tool directly compares your website to your competitors and generates thousands of keyword ideas that can be refined with filters. Using the keyword magic tool, you'll see a field to enter your seed keyword. Type in a broad topic or phrase related to your business. For example, I'll use stock market again. Select my project and choose US from the country database. Click search and give it a bit of time. At first glance, this page probably looks overwhelming. Don't worry. Here's how to make sense of it all. Keyword lists and metrics. In the center of the page, the main table lists keyword related to the seed. The first seven columns should look very familiar to us. They are essentially identical to what we saw using the keyword overview feature. That said, there are still two new ones. First up are the search engine results page SER indicators which show whether the keyword frequently appears in maps, videos, the knowledge panel that appears on the right hand side when searching for a specific person, thing or organization etc. For example, stock market today appears in four SER features whereas stock market appears in seven. The more SERBs that regularly use a particular keyword, the more beneficial and visible it and your website will be. It's also worth noting that any column can be sorted by clicking on it. Try sorting by keyword difficulty percent to see the easiest or hardest keywords. There's also the updated section that lets us collect the most up-to-date data for a specific keyword. Simply click the arrow and wait for Semrush to fetch the latest data. Now, let's leave the main table for a moment and look to the left. The keyword magic tool automatically groups keywords by broad subtopics. This is incredibly useful to find niche topics. Click a group, eg crash, to filter the list to keywords containing that word. All right, now that you know your way around the table and the groups feature, let's see how to refine our search. Refine with filters. We've already discussed volume, keyword difficulty, intent, and cost per click, so we'll skip over them here. If you want to follow along step by step, I'll set volume to 10,0001 to 100,000. The chart will automatically update so we can target easier keywords. I'll set keyword difficulty to 0 to 50 and click apply. These two parameters have already removed more than 14 million keywords, leaving us a total of eight that fit our criteria. Rather than walk you through the rest of the filters here, I'll give you a quick crash course. Match modifiers. These appear at the very top of the window, allowing you to switch between the types of keywords you want Semrush to identify. In other words, how specific or generic do the related keywords need to be to the original one. Further to the left, there's also an all versus questions toggle that is handy if you specifically want question format keyword queries, which often make great blog posts like how to understand the stock market. Include/exclude words. You can require or exclude certain words. Pro tip, to know if a keyword is right for you, make sure to answer these four questions. Is it relevant to my website's purpose? Does the term have a sufficiently large and consistent search volume? Does the keyword have a low difficulty score? And does the keyword match your particular intent? Eg, is it informational or commercial? Focus on quality over quantity. Targeting a few specific terms where you can satisfy the search intent is better than spreading yourself too thin. There's one last thing to cover before we move on. How to save keywords. It's very simple. To demonstrate, I'll check the box next to all nine keywords. Click the blue send keywords button, select position tracking, and then hit apply. To send this to position tracking, I'll give it a domain ft.com. Choose Google Mobile and select United States from the drop-own menu. Click send keywords. That's it. Now, I'll be monitoring these keywords, which will allow me to see how I and my competitors change our SEO strategies over time and even dayto-day. Now that we have identified our target keywords, let's set up position tracking to monitor our progress. Chapter four, position tracking. Search engine optimization never ends. No matter how high you manage to rank your site in a particular niche or your local area, you need to maintain that edge. And the best way to do that is to use the position tracking tool. Let's get a basic campaign started. Setting up position tracking. Since we identified target keywords earlier, let's set up rank tracking for them. Since I never closed the previous window, I'll simply click go to position tracking. The first thing we'll need to do is configure our tracking settings. Click setup next to your project name. I'll walk you through this menu step by step. Search engine. Google is the default option here. And since the vast majority of web traffic runs through Google, keep it as is. Device, decide between desktop, mobile, or tablet search results. Since the majority of searches now occur on mobile devices, I'll go with mobile. Location and language. I'll set the location to the United States and keep the language set to English. It is possible to set up multilingual tracking, but we're not going to talk about that now. I'll show you how to set it up later in this chapter. Local map pack. If you're running a business with a physical address, make sure to enter your full business name here. This will help Semrush pull from your business's Google Maps SER. I'll leave it blank for my example and then click continue to keywords. Keywords. This is where we'll enter the keywords we want to track. You can type them in or import them. Since we saved them earlier, I'll click import from, select SEMrush suggestions, select keyword magic tool, broad match from the drop-own menu, type stock market in the following field, and hit import. There we go. That's pulled in our nine keywords. Since I don't want weekly email updates, I'll deselect this option here towards the bottom and click start tracking. It's going to take a bit for Samrush to set this up, so I'll see you when this process is complete. Once that's complete, you'll see a new dashboard with several tabs. I'll walk you through each tab except landscape and point out key features along the way. Overview, a summary page that shows all key metrics. The chart at the top of the page has two modes, competitive analysis, how your SEO is doing versus the competition, and potential growth. AIdriven insights that tell you roughly how much traffic you'd be generating by following Seam Rush's recommended changes. This chart has four metrics. Visibility, SEMR's in-house visibility index that tells you how many of your tracked keywords are appearing in Google's top 100 SER for that keyword. A score of 0% means none of the tracked keywords appear in the top 100. And a score of 100 means all the tracked keywords appear in the top 100. Estimated traffic, the number of searches these keywords are generating on a daily basis. average position, the mean of all your tracker keyword rankings, and going back to the left, share of voice. This this feature requires Semrush's top tier plan to use, but it is a ratio between a pages total traffic and the expected volume generated by its keywords. In other words, how effective are your keywords at actually pulling in users? Are they overperforming or underperforming relative to expectations? Scrolling down, we have the rankings overview. This list is a bit messy, but it contains a trove of valuable information. It includes our tracked keywords with their SER features, SF appearances, the difficulty of that keyword, potential current and future traffic for that word or phrase, our current SER position, any changes up or down from yesterday, the visibility score, total search volume, CPC ad costs, and which URL of yours is ranking for each keyword. In short, this is where we can view more detailed metrics of our campaign and see on a wordbyword level what's working and what isn't. If there's too much going on, you can always open table settings in the upper right corner and turn columns off or on. Let's scroll back to the top and move on to the next tab. Rankings distribution. A quick way to view how many of your keywords are in the top three, 10, 20, or 100 SERs. Tags. a way to group like keywords. I'll click tag keywords and since two of my keywords are talking about President Trump's influence on the stock market, I'll select them both. Name the tag Trump admin and click add tags. With that done, I'll be able to see how all keywords related to the Trump administration are doing. Pages where we can see the number of URLs on the FT ranking for certain keywords. Cannibalization, a report that detects if multiple pages from your site are ranking for the same keyword. This is not ideal because you're effectively competing with yourself. Some cannibalization is inevitable, but be careful. Competitors discovery, a graph showing all your chief competitors, who is getting the line share of clicks for each track term, devices, and locations. This tab lets you track your campaign's performance across all devices. Click add new target. Select which device you want to add, eg tablet, and choose semrush under keyword source. This is also where you can enable multilingual tracking by using the drop-own menu under language. As always, make sure to disable the weekly email update. Enter your business name for Google Maps and click start tracking and you're done. This campaign will be up and running in no time. For now, head back to the position tracking menu. And when you're there, open featured snippets. Featured snippets, a report showing which keywords have special SER features, maps, videos, snippets, etc., and if you're featured in them or not. Now that you know your way around the position tracking feature, let's quickly talk about how to make sure you don't miss important developments and can always stay on top of your SEO game. Scheduling and notifications. Samrush's position tracking can send you alerts if significant changes happen, like if you suddenly drop from page one to page three for a high-v value keyword. To set this up, click the bell icon in the upper right corner of the window right here. Open the drop-own menu for the first option and select change more than. In the next window, you can choose between 3, 10, 20, or 100. Set this to 10 and click setup alerts. Now, if you go up or down 10 spots in SERs, you'll get an email notification. Although helpful, this tool still provides a relatively limited view of just a few keywords we identified using the keyword magic tool. Next, we'll see how to find more relevant keywords using the competitive research tools. Chapter 5, competitor research. Understanding what your competitors are doing is crucial. Seamrush makes competitive research easy by revealing competitors keywords, traffic sources, and SEO strategies. This is what we will cover. The main overview, quick snapshot of any domain's performance, the difference between organic marketing versus paid marketing data on Semrush. How to find competitors and steal their best keywords, as well as how to identify gaps in your competitor's SEO strategy. Domain overview. spy on any website. To access the domain overview tool, open SEO on the left sidebar and under the heading competitive research, select domain overview. In the top search bar or via the domain overview tool, enter a competitor's domain. For my example, I'll go with the Wall Street Journal, one of the Financial Times chief competitors for business and finance news. Choose the country or worldwide and hit search. SEMR will show an overview of that domain's online visibility. Let's look at some of the main metrics. Authority score. Semrush's composite metric of the domain's overall SEO authority based on traffic and back links. The higher the score, the more Semrush and Google views the site as an established expert on a topic or niche. Organic search traffic. Estimated monthly visits the site gets from an organic unpaid Google search. Paid search traffic. estimated monthly visits via Google Ads. Backlinks, the number of external links or other websites that point redirects to the site. Traffic share indicates the site's share of traffic in its niche. All right. Now, let's take a look at organic and paid research. Organic research. This highlights data on organic, unpaid Google search results. The first thing we can see is the top organic keywords, eg the main ways unpaid visitors find the site. While interesting, what we're really after is the positions report, which we can access by clicking the two-page icon that appears under POS, or switch to the positions tab at the top of the page. This provides us with a list of all the keywords the domain ranks for, what position it ranks in, the estimated traffic each keyword generates, and the difficulty of that keyword. Switching to the next tab, position changes, allows us to see if the Wall Street Journal gained or lost ground regarding a specific keyword. Topics, meanwhile, show the best performing groups of keywords at any specific time. and pages shows which articles or blogs, products, etc. bring in the most organic traffic. We are not going to talk about subdomains for this tutorial. Now, before we talk a bit about paid advertising research, let's head back to the overview tab because there's one data point I want to highlight. Scroll on down to the very bottom of the page and look for main organic competitors. This hidden gem shows you sites that rank for similar keywords, occupy the same niche, and draw a similar number of visitors. Use this to discover sites you weren't aware of that compete with you in search results and the keywords they use, too. Let's move on to paid research. Head back to the main overview on the left sidebar and scroll down until you reach a section called advertising research. This section will resemble the organic research section, but we will see the top paid keywords the WSJ is pushing, their main paid competitors, and a chart that combines and visualizes those two data points. Of course, all you need to do is click on a specific data point like common keywords with offers.com to view a more detailed breakdown. Pro tip for beginners, focus on organic competition over paid advertising since that's the core of SEO and will ensure the long-term visibility and profitability of your website. So far, we've seen how to identify keywords that you and your competitors are using. But what about something more specific like keywords that are performing well for them that you aren't using? That's where the keyword gap tool comes in. Go ahead and open that up in the left sidebar. Getting started is easy. Enter your domain ft.com, your competitor's domain, wsj.com, and click compare. I'm not going to walk you through this whole page. We don't have time for that today. But take a look at the section called top opportunities. These are the top five words missing from our website that have proven incredibly successful for our competitors. As always, you can view far more by clicking view details at the bottom of the box. that will pull a ton, literally well over a million keywords that Seamrush has identified. While a small business's website won't have anything close to a million keywords here, the data is still going to be invaluable. If you run a small area business and your chief competitor is doing well on 12 keywords you aren't ranking for at all, then you can get to work, optimize your SEO strategy, and draw in new customers at their expense. By researching competitors, you'll uncover growth opportunities for your own site. Use these insights to refine your SEO strategy. Target the gaps and learn from others successes and mistakes. But what your visitors see is only half the battle. What's under the hood matters just as much, and that's what we will talk about in the next chapter. Chapter six, site audit tool. Your website's technical health is an often neglected aspect of SEO, but it is arguably the most important. After all, it is the foundation on which everything else is built. If your website takes forever to load, who cares if it has great keywords? Site audit is a tool that scans your site for technical issues that will negatively impact your SER rankings. Think of it as an SEO health check. It crawls, systematically visits a number of pages on your website, and finds problems like broken links, slow pages, missing tags, etc., and tells you how to fix them. Let's see how. Launching your first site audit. Starting a site audit is easy. Click the home icon in the upper right corner to bring up the project dashboard. Click on your project name and click on site audit in the left sidebar. As you can see, Smrush has already run a site audit in the background and identified quite a few errors. Now, let's configure the audits parameters and rerun it. Click on the project name, select the gear icon in the upper right corner, and choose ft.com from the drop-own menu. While we aren't going to be configuring every setting today, I'll show you the most important ones. Scope. By default, the site audit tool will crawl your entire domain, starting at your homepage and following links. Make sure the URL of your homepage appears here. Limit per audit. Free accounts can crawl up to 100 pages while higher plans can crawl more pages for a larger sample size. I'll keep this at 100 pages for the sake of time. Crawling is an intensive process and having the tool go through thousands of pages will take hours. In the future, you'll want to have the crawler run in the background or overnight. Schedule. You can set the audit to run on a schedule. eg weekly or monthly automatically. For now, I'll have it run just once. In the future, it'll be wise to schedule the site audit to run monthly to catch new issues and monitor progress. Those are the two settings I'll adjust on that page. Let's move on to crawler user agent. How the crawler will view your website. For example, I'll be opting to have the crawler act as Google bot instead of the site audit tool. And since most web traffic comes from mobile devices, I'll choose the mobile version. And that's all we're going to tweak here. Click save changes. It'll take a few seconds to update your settings. And when that's done, go ahead and click rerun campaign. Samrush will begin crawling your site. This is going to take a few minutes. So I'll see you when our audit is complete. Once done, you'll get a site audit report with a site health percentage score and a list of issues. Site health score. a percentage from 0 to 100 indicating overall technical SEO health. Don't obsess over getting 100% but aim for around 80%. As you fix issues, rerun the audit and you should see the score gradually improve. Interpreting site audit results. The report has multiple tabs, but the main one is issues. Let's open it to see all our errors, warnings, and notices. Here's what each one of them means. Errors red. the most critical issues that have a direct negative impact on SEO. For example, issues such as duplicative title tags, repetitive content, and invalid structured data items. Errors should be addressed first. Warnings yellow. These remain serious issues, but are less impactful on SEO than errors. For my example, this includes a lack of metad descriptions, low word count pages, and broken external links. notices blue minor issues or suggestions that you should save for last because they don't seriously impact SEO. For example, there are a few URLs with a permanent redirect and one page that can be crawled at all. Something to fix, but we can push that back. Clicking on the number of issues will pull up a new menu listing the URL of each impacted page. Clicking on why and how to fix it will open a small popup where Samrush explains the issue and provides instructions on how to solve it. Pro tip: not all issues are equal. Focus on the following four problems first. Fix any crawl errors. Broken links, missing pages, server errors first. If a page isn't getting crawled by Semrush, it isn't by Google. If a page isn't getting crawled by Semrush, it isn't by Google either. your customers will not see it. Improve site structure and onpage SEO basics. Ensure each page includes a title tag, metadescription, and a single H1 heading. Duplicate content and tags. Remove all duplicate title tags and content to avoid cannibalization. Page speed. Site audit provides a performance report on the overview tab. If many pages are flagged as slow, fix this as soon as possible. Slow pages will drive users away in troves. There's still quite a bit of ground to cover, so let's move on and look at another report. Core web vitals. The site audit also includes a core web vitals report. Make sure you're back on the overview tab and under thematic reports, click view details under core web vitals. It uses three criteria to evaluate page quality. The largest contentful paint LCP, how long it takes for the largest elements, text block, image, etc. on a page to be displayed to a visitor. First input delay, FID, how long it takes for your site to log and respond to user actions. And cumulative layout shifts, CLS, how often page elements shift due to ads, videos, or other dynamically injected contents. Each will be categorized as good, needs improvements, or poor. If your report is in the red, don't worry. All the pages it pulled from the FTE need some serious TLC. Like on the issues page, you're able to click on each top improvements for a pop-up how-to, as well as pull up the links for each page by opening the affected pages. Remember, don't be overwhelmed if your first audit, like mine, lists hundreds of issues. Often addressing a few key errors can significantly boost your site's SEO health. While your server site health is critical to your customers experience and your SEO, it's ultimately meaningless if your pages don't have engaging, well-written, keyword-rich content. And that's what we will cover in the next chapter. Chapter 7, content tools. As I said, Semrush isn't just about technical SEO and competitive data. It also offers several tools to help with content optimization and content marketing. In this chapter, we'll explore SEO content template to generate an SEOfriendly content brief for a given keyword. SEO writing assistant to get real-time optimization advice as you write content. Works in Google Docs, WordPress, or directly in Semrush. Onpage SEO checker to audit and get recommendations for existing pages targeting specific keywords. Link building tool to find backlink prospects and manage outreach. Topic research to brainstorm content topic ideas and find popular questions. Let's go through these one by one. This is going to be a long chapter. So get ready. The SEO content template. What it is? SEO content template, SCT, analyzes the top 10 Google results for a given keyword and generates an outline with recommendations on how to craft your content to outperform those competitors. Look in the left sidebar and towards the bottom of the list, click SEO content template. Enter a keyword or a set of keywords that your new article will focus on. My keywords will be stock market, bull market, bare market, recession, and tariffs. Next, select the location and device you want to optimize for. I'll use US and swap from desktop to phone. With that done, click create SEO template. This process will take a couple of minutes, so I'll see you when it's complete. And we're back. This page will contain a ton of excellent information, including the top 10 ranking URLs for your target keyword, so you know your competition. The key recommendation section is where it gets really exciting. It contains semantically related keywords to include in your article, eg words and phrases commonly found in the top pages. For my example, the top three are trade partners, supply chains, and central banks. back links, a list of domains that the top pages backlink to. You'll want to dig a bit deeper and investigate each to make sure it's a reliable source. For example, the first two sources recommended to me make no sense, but many of the rest look promising. Recommended readability score. The score here is calculated using the flesh readability test. A score of 52 indicates that these articles should be understood by the average high schooler. For marketing pieces, you want a much easier score, like 70 to 80. Recommended text length, word count, the average length of the top 10 pages. This recommendation is closely tied to search intent since most people are looking for information on the topic. Pages on the FT will be longer and more complicated than, for example, pages on an arts and craft stores website. Scroll down to the very bottom of this page and you'll see one last window, basic recommendations. You'll want to use whatever is recommended here in drafting your outline or prompt for a generative AI tool. To get a far more robust outline, head back to the top of the page and click export to doc. That will save this template as a Word file that you can use as a starting point or attach to an AI tool. Let's open a document to see how long it is. Wow, it's over a 100 pages. Obviously, it won't be perfect. You'll want to go through it and delete irrelevant entries, bad sources, etc., but it'll make writing your next article much easier. All right, now that the content template has given us our springboard, let's use the next tool to start turning that outline into a true article. SEO writing assistance, SWA. The SWA provides real-time feedback on your draft content for the target keywords. kind of like having an SEO coach looking over your shoulder. To get started, look in the left sidebar and click on SEO writing assistance. While I'll be writing directly in the app, you can always install an integration that lets you use the SWA in Google Docs. All right, the template we made in the previous example will be listed here. Go ahead and click open. Now, I went ahead and used chatgpt to turn the document that the content template tool created for me into a proper article. I'll paste it here into this window. The text will be quickly analyzed and the SWA will immediately provide several metrics. Overall score, an aggregate score out of 10 for the contents SEO friendliness, readability, originality, and tone. I started with a 7.7 out of 10, which is considered a good score by Seamrush. Pro tip, don't chase a perfect 10 out of 10 score. Use your judgments. As we will see, the article is not perfect, but perfection shouldn't be the goal. Context matters. The goal is to cover the topic thoroughly and naturally using only reliable sources and relevant keywords. Readability. We see our articles flesh readability test score. Mine is a bit too difficult, coming in at 37.3 rather than 51.3. It's close, but I'd want to improve the readability before publication. Word count. It shows your word count versus the recommended range. Though a tad longer, my article is still considered acceptable. Title issues. It'll check your title and let you know if there are any issues. For example, mine is a bit too long, so I'll rename it the Trump risk terrorists and the stock market. That fixed the issue. Content issues. This section works similarly to the previous one. identifying potential issues and recommending solutions. For example, ours wants us to consider splitting long paragraphs, rewriting difficult sentences, using more active voice, and replacing overly complex words. The SWA can actually do this for you. For my example, I'll click on the second hardto- read sentence and click simplify. I'll click it again and voila, the AI has made the adjustment for us. Rather than clicking replace and close, I'll go ahead and select the copy text button next to it. Close out that menu. I'll scroll down to where the text is and copy and paste it. There we go. Easy. That's it for readability. Let's move on to originality. Give the article a quick scan and make sure there are no issues with plagiarism. This will take a little bit to finish. There we go. The article is 100% original. Let's move to tone of voice next. This section analyzes tone, casual, neutral, formal, and how consistent you are throughout the article. Given that this article is for a more formal financial newsletter, it strikes the perfect balance. I saved the best for last. Let's move to SEO. It will check if we used all the target and recommended keywords created by the content template. As you can see, there are a few recommended ones we might have missed, but we hit most of them. Beneath that is another section called alt attribute issues. In short, this is just telling us to add some visuals or infographics to break up the wall of text. Far more important are the link issues it identified. It looks like all the links Chad GPT added are basically useless. They only link to websit's homepage. I'll have to go through and fix this manually. After using the SCT and SWA, you'll have a piece of content that is SEO optimized from the start. It targets the right keywords, covers related terms, is of proper length, uses the right tone, and is readable. Once you publish content on your site, you'll want to use the next tool to make sure everything as it should be. Onpage SEO checker. The on-page SEO checker, OPSC, is like a personal consultant for pages you already have. It takes a URL and a target keyword or pulls keywords it ranks for, compares the page against the current top ranking pages for that keyword, and gives actionable recommendations to improve that page's SEO. In the left sidebar, click on page SEO checker. You'll be prompted to add your domain. Now, we have to set it up. Keep the location set to the United States, but switch the device to phone. Click continue. Next, you'll need to add pages to optimize. While I'll be going with autoimp import for the sake of time, you'll want to go through this manually and add your pages one by one. Start with your most important ones like your homepage and key product pages. With that done, go ahead and click crawler user agents. While you can only crawl the desktop version of your site, make sure to switch this to Google bot. Click schedule. I'm setting this to never to avoid spending any additional units, the currency of Semrush, and I recommend you do the same. Use this tool manually when you think the time is right. All right, click collect ideas, and I'll see you when Semrush is done doing its thing. All right, that's done. Semrush will provide recommendations categorized by type. Strategy ideas. These are highlevel suggestions such as adjusting title tags or combining similar pages. Eg. Your title is shorter than your competitors. Consider making it more descriptive. Backlink ideas. It will identify some authoritative websites that are linking to your competitors but not to you. Technical SEO ideas. Address technical issues that negatively impact your SEO such as dead links. SER feature ideas. If the page has a keyword that triggers a featured snippet and your page isn't optimized for that, it will suggest making the page more snippet friendly. Semantic ideas, related words or phrases to your keyword. Content ideas, recommendations related to the pages text content, eg include stock market in H1 or add semantically related keywords. User experience ideas. These could be things like your page doesn't seem to be mobile friendly or improve your core web vitals LCP is slow drawing from site audits data. As usual, each suggestion comes with a why and how to fix popup. To get a more detailed view of each idea, click the blue ideas button next to any page. That will give you a detailed breakdown of the categories we looked at earlier. For example, it recommends making my first article's content more readable. All the tools we've looked at so far focused on researching, writing, and optimizing content, as well as technical SEO. Now, let's see how we can generate additional backlinks and boost your site's authority. The link building tool. Backlinks are tough to get organically, and buying them is against the terms of service for Google and other major search engines. That's where the link building tool comes in. It streamlines the process of finding backlink opportunities and managing outreach to potential prospects. To get started, we'll need to build a link building campaign. Look in the left sidebar and select the link building tool. Enter your domain name to get started and press enter. That will pull up this window where we need to add in the keywords we want to rank for so it can find sites ranking for those terms or related contents. To keep things simple, I'll delete these existing keywords and use the ones from earlier in the chapter. Stock market, bull market, bare market, recession, and tariffs. I'll click add and then hit competitors in the bottom right. This is where we'll enter the websites we want to outperform. The tool will find other websites that link to your competitors, but not to you. In other words, the tool tries to even the score by using your opponent's backlinks against them. Click start link building and I'll see you in a couple of minutes after the tool has done its thing. Using that input, Samrush generates a list of prospects, websites that it deems potential link sources along with reasons, eg they link to a competitors or have an article on a related topic. Click view prospects. Now let's talk about how to navigate this page and start contacting potential prospects. Here's a typical workflow. First, review prospects. Browse the list and decide which ones are worth reaching out to. Simrush provides information such as site's authority score, what type of website it is, and a priority rating. You can filter or sort by these metrics. Outreach on Semrush. This tool has an email outreach module built in. Though you'll need to integrate your email with your account, I'll show you how it works. For my first prospect, Encyclopedia Britannica, I'll click to in progress and then go to the in progress tab where we can view information directly related to this prospects. Note, for many prospects, Seamrush will find an email address or contact form, but not always. Sometimes you will need to do some leg work and go searching. Reach out by clicking contacts. Take the time to write a friendly, professional email. Get the most out of placeholder fields that personalize emails for you. Whenever you're done, send the email directly through Semrush. It will log it and wait for a reply. And that's it. You'll want to track the progress of each prospect, and you can quickly do that by looking at the status bar associated with each prospect. If the prospect was willing to backlink to your site, you'll want to switch them to monitor. The monitor tab lets you keep an eye on whether the prospects you targeted ended up linking to you. Pro tip, focus on quality prospects. Getting one link from a high authority relevant site is far more impactful than 10 links from lowquality sites. Samrush's scoring helps you make decisions here. Link building is timeconuming, but the link building tool streamlines the process by identifying leads and tracking outreach. As you earn back links, you should see improvements in position tracking and authority score over time. Now, let's round out this chapter by seeing how we can find ideas for future articles. Topic research. The topic research tool shows you which subtopics and headlines are popular in your niche. In the left sidebar, click topic research. Enter a broad topic, eg cryptocurrency, select a country, keep it US, and hit get content ideas. It will take Seamrush a few minutes to search. So, I'll see you shortly. When it's done, Simrush will show you a bunch of cards, each representing a subtopic related to your search query. Each card shows the subtopic as a phrase, eg crypto market or blockchain technology, the search volume, the top headlines within that subtopic. Click show more and you will see top questions, user questions related to the subtopic and related searches that are very similar. You can save something you found interesting by clicking the little icon to the right of each headline or question. Now they're all in your favorite ideas list. Between keyword magic tool and topic research, you have both SEO driven and audience-driven approaches to consider when brainstorming content. Combining them means your pages will not only rank well, but also appeal to your audience. Now, let's put everything we've covered in this video together by looking at a quick hypothetical SEMrush workflow. Use topic research to find a relevant content idea your audience cares about. Identify a target keyword or two within that topic via a keyword magic tool. Generate an SEO content template for that keyword. Write the content using the SEO writing assistant to guide you through the process. After you publish the page, run the onpage SEO checker on it to see if anything can be improved. Build a few links to it using the link building tool and track its ranking in position tracking. This integrates all Semrush content tools to maximize the chances of you beating out the competition. You now have a solid foundation of Semrush. You know how to navigate the dashboard, set up a new project, conduct thorough keyword research using a variety of different tools, track your keyword campaigns, investigate your competitors, audit your website, and iron out any bugs, and craft keyword-rich SEO optimized content. Build topical authority with backlinks and research new trendy topics in your niche. There's always more to learn, and as a beginner, the best way to learn is to put it into practice. Start working on your business's SEO today and refer back to the chapters of this tutorial whenever you need a refresher. Share this guide or specific tips with anyone else involved so everyone stays on the same page. And finally, the best way to support my channel is by signing up for Semrush using the link in the description of this video. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this video was helpful and I'll see you in the next