SEMRush from the People Who Brought You SEOQuake Is HOT
SEOQuake is one of the best browser tools for learning all about a web page’s SEO profile, and if you have been reading this blog for very long, you already know that I love it! The Add-on is free and you can get it for Firefox, Opera, or Chrome. I can’t tell you how often I use it to find out the age of a site, the page and Alexa rank, the number of backlinks for a page, and much, much more. I love it and find it one of the most convenient tools in my SEO toolbox for a quick evaluation.
You may not know it, but the people who brought you SEOQuake also have an amazing analytics site called SEMRush. If you’re interested in knowing what keywords you rank for, it’s a great place to check that out with a free account. You can do it at Google Webmaster tools, too, but SEMRush gives you so much more.
If you’re into SEO (and if you aren’t, you should be), having a pro account is quite helpful. (I’m an affiliate, so I will be paid a commission if you decide to join as a pro member, but you’ll see the benefit in just a few here. Just making the FTC happy.)
All you need to do to start your exploration at SEMRush is to type in your domain at the top of the page. What you get is a ton of great information, and it looks like this:
The first thing you see is a list of the keywords that are bringing you traffic from Google. (We all want that cool organic traffic, eh?) But with this tool, you can see what keywords are working best for you and use them more often and get more traffic. Or, you can see that keywords you’ve been targeting aren’t doing the job you’d like, so you may want to reconsider and concentrate on some other keywords that might be that low-hanging fruit that we hear about so often.
For this blog, there are 54 keywords that are pulling in traffic in the U. S., but I can also see that I have keywords pulling in traffic in the U.K., Russia, Germany, and six other countries, too, and what those are. Pretty cool. It can help you to figure out how to dominate in those countries, too.
Guess which keyword is bringing in 38% of my search traffic? SEOQuake. I have even more reason to love it. 
“jQuery fancybox” is bringing in 10% and so on. It’s very interesting to see what keywords are pulling in the most traffic, for sure. But once you know, you can use them more and really make them pay off, especially if the keyword in question is heavily searched with little competition.
You can also see the CPC (cost per click) for PPC (pay-per-click) and how much it would have cost you to get that organic traffic if you’d been paying for it through Google AdWords. If that statistic doesn’t convince you that you need to think about SEO, I don’t know what will.
The next section of the report analyzes your AdWords keywords. I don’t do AdWords anymore, so this isn’t something I’ll use, but you might find it useful if you’re still working with Google’s AdWords. They just got too restrictive for me to mess with anymore, so I’m using good old-fashioned content to do the traffic job for me, which works just fine. However, SEMRush can help you to find some very cheap keywords to bid on. That makes it worth its weight alone.
Another interesting section of SEMRush is the competition analysis. I find that my biggest competitor is Google. Argh! Couldn’t I have something easier? LOL But I write about Google a lot, and they did give me that swell notebook that I totally love, so I can’t be completely unhappy, right? But are you ready for my other competitors? Wikipedia, About.com, GotoMeeting, and YouTube. LOL… It’s amazing that I get any organic traffic at all, eh? But I do.
There’s a lot more that you should investigate at SEMRush. You really can’t have too many stats about your site, right? I’ve been using it since the SEODigger days, but that site is now closed. SEODigger wasn’t as powerful as SEMRush, which gives you much more detailed information.
But this site isn’t just for analyzing our own site or even the sites of your competitors alone. It’s also a great way to analyze keywords. I just plugged in my most effective keyword – SEOQuake, and came back with data on the specific word, on related keywords and keyword phrases. Because keyword research is such an important activity for any webmaster, this just makes things a little easier, especially if you’re an avid AdWords user. You can see the approx CPC, the competition, and the trend for that keyword, which is extremely helpful in determining if you have a killer keyword or a real dud.
SEMRush also shows you the keywords that Google is bidding on or other sites that are your competition and how much the company spends on CPC. Google’s budget? A cool $8 million. Wow.
What don’t I like? Some of the terms they use are a bit confusing at first, especially for a novice or someone not really into analytics. There are little question bubbles that give you terse explanations, which is good, and they have a string of tutorial videos that will bring it all clear. However, I wouldn’t just jump in and expect to understand everything unless, as I said, you’re working with stats all the time and know the generic abbreviations and such. But it’s really no big deal.
Anyway, this site is most definitely worth checking out. You can get 10 results only with a free account, but it will give you a flavor for what SEMRush can do for you. If you like it and find it useful, as I do, having a pro account is the next step. Never skimp on SEO. It’s the cheapest traffic you can get and if you do it right, that traffic will last for a very long time to come.
