As a new blogger, I decided to avail myself of a tool everybody talks about, SEMRush. I am paying just under $140/month for it.
It is pretty cool.
The first thing I noticed was that you type in a domain and get a Domain Overview, which includes the Authority Score, the Organic Search Traffic and the number of backlinks. You also get paid search traffic, but most of the domains I look at don’t have much for that.
You can also see how your traffic is broken down by country, but I rarely find that super interesting.
Then there’s the keywords area, for both organic and paid search. This is pretty interesting, especially if you click on the details. There you can see the KD—keyword difficulty—for each of the top keyword combinations for which the domain ranked. This is an estimate of how hard it would be to rank high for that keyword.
You also see what position the domain achieved for the keywords and the “intent” of the keywords. The intent is an estimate of what the person wanted to do when they searched on those keywords.
For example, if I search on “sea life in la jolla cove“, my intent is informational.
If I search on “kayack rental la jolla cove“, my intent is transactional.
If I search on “la jolla high school“, my intent is probably navigational. I’m just trying to get to the high school website without having to type in “https://lajollahigh.sandiegounified.org/”
If I type “dukes la jolla” my intent is probably commercial. I am just looking for the specific Duke’s restaurant at https://www.dukeslajolla.com/.
It can be a powerful thing to sort key words by the keyword difficulty, and then to see which one’s have a monetizable intent.
BTW, I highly recommend all of these searches, except the high school one, which I know nothing about.
Then there’s the Keyword Magic tool. This can help you to find related searches—with search volume—that you might be able to rank for. You can even put in your own domain to get a “personalized keyword difficulty.”
There’s the Keyword Strategy Builder, Site Audit and a lot more. Some of the stuff requires an upgraded account.
The keyword gap and backlink gap features are so you can compare how different domains stack up in those areas. It can be helpful to put in your own domain, and check the keyword gap with your competitors.
This can give you ideas as to keywords you might want to strive for.
Overall, this is a pretty cool tool. I think anybody who is serious about building a successful web presence should consider it. I know a lot of bloggers aren’t making much if any money, but SEMRush is affordable to try, and it can be eye-opening.
I’ve heard Ahrefs is worth checking out.
Their website says their “Light” plan is $129/month.
Check out the SEMRush website at:
Leave a Reply