Semrush Tutorial for Beginners 2026 (Complete SEO Guide)

I'm Matt and in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to use Semrush to improve your SEO and get more traffic to your website. We'll cover how to spy on your competitors and see what's working for them. Find keywords you can actually rank for. Build a content strategy that Google loves. Fix the technical issues that might be holding your site back. Build authority by earning links from other websites. Track your rankings over time. And even help AI tools like ChatGpt to say better things about your brand. By the end, you'll have a clear, beginner-friendly SEO system and the skills to start growing your traffic. But first, what exactly is Semrush? Semrush is a powerful online visibility platform that helps you get found on Google and beyond. It combines over 50 tools for SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, local search, social media, and competitor research all in one place. Everything is organized into toolkits based on your goals. Whether you're trying to grow organic traffic, analyze your competition, plan content, or run marketing campaigns more effectively. Normally, Seamrush gives you a 7-day free trial, but if you use the special link in the description, you'll get 14 days instead, twice the time to explore everything. Just click the link below to get started. You'll land on a page that looks like this. Hit try it free, enter your email, and follow the prompts to set up your account. You'll need to check your email and copy over the six-digit verification code. They'll ask for a credit card to activate the trial, but don't worry, you won't be charged right away. And quick heads up, stick around to the end of the video. I'll show you a few tricks to get the most value out of that free trial. You'll get a confirmation saying the trial is activated and then you can click start using Seamrush. Next, you'll land on the Seamrush dashboard. Let's start by setting up your first project. To set up a project, click the field in the center and enter your website name. For our demo, I'll be using onceupon coconut.com. This is a company that we're not affiliated with at all. I just like their website. They sell canned coconut water in a few different flavors. Click start now to get your personalized insights. Semrush will think for a moment and then the co-pilot AI will give you a set of personalized recommendations that you can scroll through. You can also collapse that and look at a list of all your SEO projects here. Right now, there's just the one SEO project, but as you add other websites, they'll show up here. At a glance, you can take a look at your organic traffic, your organic keywords, and backlink stats. You can also quickly click to set up a check for your site health, as well as track keyword position over time. We'll set these things up later, so don't worry about this right this moment. All right, now that your dashboard's ready and your site's loaded onto Semrush, here's where it gets really interesting. What if I told you Seamrush can show you exactly where your competitors get their traffic and what keywords you're missing out on? Even if you don't know who your top competitors are, Semrush does. With just a couple clicks, you'll uncover the sites you're actually competing with in Google and see which keywords are driving their success. We'll even build a quick win keyword list based on gaps you can quickly start ranking for. To do this, on the left side, go to the SEO toolkit and then click domain overview. Enter your domain in the field. Then click search. Seamrush will present you with a quick overview of your domain stats, including your authority score, your monthly organic search traffic, which we can see is up 21% from last month, total number of backlinks, and the number of websites referring back to the site, and the total percentage of share of traffic. If you scroll down, you can see a graph showing your organic traffic over time. On the left side, you can see where all of your website visitors are coming from. Scrolling down further, you can see the top keywords that your site is ranking for. For example, we can see that when people search for once upon a coconut, once upon a coconut.com shows up in the first position, which is great. That's what we want. Here we can see some other keywords as well. So, coconut on water, we're showing up in the third position. And here, there's not enough information. Scrolling down further, we can see the total number of keywords by intent. We'll get into keyword intent in a little bit. And scrolling down even further, we get to the competition information. On the left side, we have main organic competitors. Our list includes 100kcoonuts.com and a few others. For each competitor, you can see the competition level as well as the number of common keywords, the keywords that both sites, ours and theirs, have in common. On the right side, you can see the competitive positioning map. On the vertical axis, you can see the total amount of organic search traffic the sites are getting. And then on the horizontal axis, you can see the total number of organic keywords these sites have. So, Vit Coco has a ton of keywords and a ton of traffic. And Harmless Harvest is the same way. Meanwhile, our other competitors are getting similar traffic and have a similar number of keywords to us. Now that we know who a few of our competitors are, let's find out what keywords they're using to rank. On the left side, go to the keyword gap tool. Here, your domain will be automatically entered. Then below it, you can add domains of your competitors. Click the add domain field, and Samrash will automatically suggest your competitors. I'll go ahead and select 100 coconuts.com. And then I'll click the button to add up to three competitors. And then I'll select the next three competitors in line. For small or new sites, I found that Semrush doesn't always perfectly identify the competitors because there's not enough keyword information. So, you can always enter domains manually that you want to compete with or simply compare your site to other sites. When you're done adding competitors, click compare. See will generate a keyword gap report. On the left side, we see a list of our top opportunities. Missing keywords are keywords that our site is not ranking for at all, but our competitors are. You can see that coconut water, for example, has a total monthly search volume of 90,500. Quite a bit. If you click on the week tab, you can see a list of keywords that we and our competitors are ranking for, but we're not ranking as well as them. Click on view details to scroll down and get some more information. This is where we're going to find a few quick wins. So for example, we can see the coconut water water keyword has us in the 29th position on Google, which is like page three or so. It's not amazing, but we are showing up. Meanwhile, our competitors are showing up in position 6, position 2, position 28, and position 9 for that keyword. That keyword has a total monthly search volume of 12.1,000. The next column is KD percentage. This is keyword difficulty. It's a scale of 0 to 100 because it's a percentage with 100 being the hardest to rank for and zero being really easy to rank for. The next column is CPC or cost per click. This is the average dollar amount that people who are paying to advertise on this keyword are paying per click. Next, you have the competitive density column. This is a scale of 0 to one where one indicates that it's a really competitive keyword and zero indicates that it's really not. Last, you can see the total number of URL results that show up when people search for this keyword. Weak keywords are a great opportunity to try to rank a little bit higher since Google is already showing our site, just not very high. So, let's go ahead and add a few of these high volume weak keywords. So, we'll add coconut water to our list. To add to a list, let's click the plus button. The first time you go to add a keyword to a list, you'll be prompted to name your list. I'll go ahead and name this something relevant like coconut water first campaign. Then click the check mark. Now you can see our keyword has been added as the first out of a possible 2,000 in this keyword list. I'll click elsewhere on the page to close the popup. Then let's target three or four other keywords that we're ranking a little weekly for. For example, natural coconut water. Coconut water all one word. purchase coconut water. This one is a typo, coconut warer. And then we have coconut water for sale. So now you've got a list of your top competitors and a handful of keyword opportunities. But let's not stop there. This is just the surface. To really grow your traffic, you need your own unique keyword strategy, not just borrowed terms from your rivals. That's where Semrush's keyword magic tool comes in. It helps you uncover hundreds of keyword ideas, filter by search intent, and build a cluster that actually matches your content and your audience. And in this next step, I'll show you how to do it in minutes. On the left side, click on the keyword magic tool. Then enter in a broad search topic, something like coconut water in our case. Then add your domain to get some personalized insights. If you've set up a project, you can click your domain from the drop down, then click search. See will think for a minute and then it'll present you with a huge list of keyword possibilities. Here you can see at a glance it came up with 45,800 keywords with a total search volume across all of them of 1.1 million and an average keyword difficulty of 29%. While this sounds incredible, we're going to want to focus our efforts in on just a few keywords that have high potential. Here's a couple of metrics that we can look at to determine the potential of a keyword. First, you'll see that we have some new metrics. PKD, which stands for personal keyword difficulty. This is based on the current content of your website. In the case of Once Upon a Coconut, since they already have coconut water related keywords on their site, the personal keyword difficulty gets lower down to 50 versus a site that might be starting from scratch trying to rank for this term. There's also Samrush's estimated potential traffic for the site for each keyword. And this is an estimate based on the website's current authority score and the other competitors that are competing for this keyword. Last, we have search intent. Search intent is a crucial factor in determining what the searcher is actually trying to do. There are four main types of search intent. First, you have informational, like, is coconut water good for you? These match the awareness stage. People are just starting to explore a topic. Next, you have commercial, like what is the best coconut water? That's deeper in the evaluation stage where people are comparing options. Then you have transactional, like where to buy coconut water. That's the decision stage. They're ready to act. Last, you have navigational. This is when someone is searching for a specific page or website. If you match your keywords and content to each stage of the buyer's journey, you'll attract the right visitors at the right time and guide them all the way to the finish line. People generally start out their journey by looking for broad information about a topic, then comparing options, and then eventually making a purchase. Here you can see those exact same keywords I just mentioned. First you have is coconut water good for you. Then you have what is the best coconut water? Then you have where to buy coconut water. And you can see that theformational keyword has 22.2,000 searches whereas where to buy coconut water has only 480 searches. So while at first glance it might seem like a good idea to advertise your product page to people searching for is coconut water good for you, it's actually a bad idea. People at thatformational search intent stage don't even know if coconut water is good for them yet. So why would they make a purchase? You have to convince them first. And that's inherently going to end up being a smaller group of people than the people looking at the broad topic. Theformational keyword is coconut water good for you would be best matched with a piece of content like a blog post talking about the general health benefits of coconut water. the best type of content to promote for a commercial keyword like what is the best coconut water might be a comparison article of different brands. And then finally, when people make the decision to search for where to buy coconut water, that's when you can present them with a product page. So now that you understand search intent, let's identify some keywords we want to target. Let's say, for example, for Once Upon a Coconut, we're trying to get a product page to rank. So we'll want to use a transactional intent for that. To find only transactional keywords, go up to the filter section and click intent. Check the box for transactional and click apply. And then Seamrush will whittle it down to a list of 658 keywords in this case, down from a few thousand keywords. Next, let's avoid trying to target anything that's going to be difficult for our brand to rank for. So, under the personal KD percentage, let's set it to a maximum difficulty percentage of 50 and click apply. Now we're left with 248 keywords. And you can see next to each keyword is the search engine results position for that keyword for our brand. So for coconut water, we're ranking at position number 26. 26 is not the first page of Google. So let's try to improve our ranking for anything that's not in the top five. Let's add coconut water to our list. And let's add coconut water near me to our list. The next one is a tricky keyword. Harvest Coconut Water is clearly a search for a specific brand of coconut water. As a beginner, I'd recommend staying away from branded keywords. However, keep in mind that some advanced marketers do use branded keywords of other brands to try to steal their search traffic. This is advanced technique, so I'd stay away from it for now. Skip past any of these ones that are clearly brands. Fresh coconut water would be a good one to target. Harmless is a brand. and real coconut water. We want to target that one. Coconut water Amazon. They're looking for Amazon, so we'll skip that. Water with coconut. Sugar-free coconut water. Unsweetened coconut water. And you can continue like this, finding keywords that are relevant to your page and your content. So, once you've done this, you have a strong starter list of keywords, and more importantly, you understand their intent. But having the right keywords is only half the battle. To actually rank, you need to have content that's mapped to how Google thinks and how your audience searches. This is where most SEO efforts fall apart. You've got some keywords, but what do you do with them? Should you write a blog post, a landing page, a full guide? Samrush's keyword strategy builder shows you how to structure everything, and their AI tool can even draft the first version of your content for you. By the end of this section, you'll have a clear content road map and even a head start on your first article. On the left side, click on the keyword strategy builder. Here you'll see that it autopopulates a single keyword, coconut water. If you scroll down, you can see our list that we've been creating. Go ahead and click to open the list. Here you can see that we have 12 keywords with a total search volume of 104.6,000. If we wanted to build a strategy around this list, we could go up to the top right and click cluster this list. However, Samrush will point out that 12 keywords is not nearly enough to create a profitable strategy. We need more keywords in order to do this. So, instead, let's automatically create a strategy using five of these keywords as our seed keywords. Since we've already identified keywords that we like, now let's just identify keywords that have the best search volume. Go ahead and click the volume column to sort by high to low and then check the boxes for the first five. In the upper right, click the button. Make sure we're just exporting the selected ones and click CSV. Go ahead and save it. Open up the file and then in the keyword column, click the first keyword and then shiftclick to select all the keywords and copy them. Back in Semrush, let's go to the keyword strategy builder again. And here, paste in your seed keywords. Next, click create list. Now, Semrush automatically generates an entire content strategy based on our five keywords. Scrolling down here, we can see a topical overview, which is a map of its proposed topics with pillar content and subpages. Scrolling down, we can see in more detail the pillar pages with the highle topic and all the keywords it proposes for the topic as well as the specific subpages for each topic. So, what are pillar pages and subpages? Think of a pillar page as your main guide. Like for this pillar page here, cocoa water. It could be the ultimate guide to coconut water. That's your hub. Then you create subpages that go deeper into specific questions. People search for things like, "Does coconut water taste good?" or "Carbonated coconut water." All those pages link back to the main guide and to each other. That structure helps Google understand your site, improves your rankings, and keeps readers exploring your content. So, how do you start building this? Start by creating a pillar page as an overview or guide. After that, use each subpage to go in depth on one specific angle. Over time, this structure helps you rank for both broad and specific searches and keeps traffic flowing between your pages. So, let's take this cocoa waterpillar page here and on the right side, click create brief or content. Here you have some options. You can create a brief in content shake and this would be useful for a situation where you want to hand off a summary of all the keywords you want to use to somebody who's going to write some content. Alternatively, you can use Semrush's AI to generate an SEO rich article with your keywords. So, let's go ahead and do that for our demo today. We'll select article in content shake AI and then click apply. Keep in mind that Semrush's content writing capabilities are an add-on feature. And when you land on this page, it might ask you to subscribe. But if you go up to my apps, and then find Content Shake, open it up, and then click get free trial. Now, here you can get a 7-day trial. Go ahead and click get free trial. That'll activate the trial, and you can click go to app. Okay, now check this out. If you clicked the link below to get that 14-day free trial of Semrush, now by activating this trial, you can see that there's a little dialogue box up in the top right that says your free trial has been extended until the end of your Seamrush trial subscription. So now you've got 14 days to try out the content AI. Nice. If it doesn't load your content right away, go ahead, go back to the previous tab and again click create briefer content and then article in content shake AI. I'll go ahead and close the extra content shake tab. Here you can generate an article with Samrush's AI. Let's go through and fine-tune our settings. First, make sure to set your audience location. We're marketing to people in the United States in English, so this is just fine. But if you have a different audience, make sure to select your target country and language. Next, it'll propose a title. You can also click see suggestions under that to see other AI suggested titles. Additionally, you can click the tab used by competitors to see what kind of titles they're using. I really liked under the AI tab, this coconut water, nature's refreshing sports drink. That feels like a good title for a broad topic overview. So, let's click that. We've swapped out our title. Now, let's look at our target keywords. Now, here you can see there's a whole bunch of keywords all generated based on the five seed keywords that we provided originally. We'll go ahead and keep all of these except let's remove this branded one. Harmless Harvest. Make sure there's no other branded ones in here. All right, looking good to me. Next, you can select the word count. A,000 words is usually the minimum recommended. You can do shorter or longer, and longer might be good for a broad overview, but since this is suggesting a th00and, we'll go ahead and keep it that way. You can also click show advanced settings to see some additional options. For example, you can change the tone type of the writing. You can make it more or less casual. I'm going to leave it at neutral. And then for readability level, you can set how complicated you want the language to be. I want this to be fairly accessible, so I'll actually downgrade this to conversational language. Next, if you'd like, you can use the SEO booster to use competitive data to make your article rank higher. I'll go ahead and check this on. And last, you can decide if you want to allow it to add royalty-free stock images with Unsplash. This will depend on your brand and what your purpose is. For our demo, I'll go ahead and toggle this on, but for your situation, you may want to leave those out and add photos manually. Once you're happy with all the settings, go ahead and click create article. Summer will take a few minutes to generate the article, so this is a good opportunity to take a break. Grab a drink of water or a cup of coffee. When it's finished, Seamrush will present you with the full article. Go ahead and scroll through it to check it out. It's added photos and provided nice article content. You can see here it's pretty detailed. I don't think these particular photos are right for an article about coconut water. These just seem to be regular water, but you get the point. These are good placeholders, and you can always swap in your own images later. If you want to put this article in your own voice, you can click into the article and make edits. You can do this manually or you can ask the AI to rephrase things, simplify it, or expand on it. When you're happy with the article, go to the top right and click publish here. If you have a WordPress website, you can publish directly to the WordPress site or you can send this to Google Docs. I'll use that option. Go ahead and click open in Google Docs. Your web browser might ask you to allow this action. Go ahead and click allow. It looks like I might need to do that again. So, I'll go ahead and click publish, then send a Google Docs and open in Google Docs. Here, a window pops up asking me to choose an account. I'll click my account and continue to allow it. Samrush will process for a moment, and when it's done, you can click the green open document button. And here you can see it pulled in the full article, so we can edit it further if we want. And it's even organized by topic on the left. Now you've got a clear content structure, keywords in place, and even an AI generated draft to get you started. But here's the catch. None of that will matter if your site is full of technical issues holding it back. This next step is where most beginners panic. Technical SEO issues can feel overwhelming. But don't worry, I'll show you how to run a clean, focused site audit and fix the most important issues fast. Even one quick fix here can boost your rankings and make all your SEO work actually pay off. Let's go back to Semrush here. I'll close out this Google doc. And on the left side, go to SEO and then scroll down to site audit. Here, let's set up a campaign. You can see that it's automatically suggesting a campaign for our project onceupon coconut.com. So I'll go ahead and click that to set it up. Here you'll get a general settings popup. For the most part, as a beginner, I recommend using the default settings. However, I'll go through a few of these so you understand what's going on. If you go up and expand the section under scope, you can see that by default, the site audit will run on the root domain onceuponcoonut.com as well as any subdomains of onceupon coconut.com. For example, they might have shop.nceaponcoonut.com. Choosing to crawl all subdomains for your site audit depends on whether or not you want to SEO optimize those subdomains. If that doesn't matter to you, you can speed up your site audit by checking this box off. but I'm going to leave it on for our demo. Below this, you can limit the audit to a certain number of pages. This will speed up your site audit if there are a ton of pages you don't necessarily need to audit, but I do recommend optimizing as much as you can. If you're not sure how many pages your website has, you can open a new tab, go to google.com, and then search for site colon and then use your root domain. So, I'll use once upon a coconut.com. And here you'll see the results show only pages from once upon a coconut.com. If I go to tools and click to open it, you'll see that there are 85 results, meaning Google found 85 pages. This is great to know. So, let's close this tab and go back to our audit. 85 pages is well within the 100page limit here. So, this is just fine. But if your website has more pages, you can adjust this number here. Pages to crawl is a more advanced setting. So for most beginners, I recommend sticking with the default website setting because this will crawl your website most similarly to how the Google bot does. Lastly, you can set your schedule for a recurring site audit. You can set it to run the audit weekly, daily, or once. Let's set ours to run every Sunday. That way, when we come into the office on Monday, we have a fresh site audit to look at and a nice checklist that we can address throughout the week. I'll leave the box checked on to send an email once the audit is complete. On the left side, you can click through four pages of additional advanced settings, but we'll skip those today. However, it's good to know those are there so as you become more advanced, you can really dial in your site audits. When you're ready, go ahead and click the start audit button. This will take some time, especially if you have a large website with lots of pages. That's why I left that box checked on so that when the audit finishes, I'll get a notification via email. If you have other SEO tasks you need to do, you don't have to stay on this page. Seamrush will process in the background and let you know when it's done. I'll go ahead and fast forward here so we can jump straight to checking out the results. All right, here we are fast forwarded into the future and our site audit is complete. Let's click on Once Upon a Coconut to see the details. Here we land on the site audit dashboard. On the left side, we can see our site health as a percentage and we can also see it compared to the top 10% of websites. Our site is 83 and the top 10% have a 92% health, which means we have 9 percentage points of improvement to go. In the upper middle, we can see at a glance that we have three errors, 414 warnings, and 128 notices. These numbers can seem large and scary, but I promise it's not as bad as it looks. Generally, you want to address these issues with the most severe ones first. So, let's start with the errors. Click on the number below errors to see the detail view. Here we have a list of all of our errors. Each list item has a description of what the issue is, and then you can see why and how to fix it. So if you click why and how to fix it, you see there's a short description of what the issue is and then a brief description on how to rectify it. On the left side, you can click on the blue hyperlink to get more details about the issue itself. So we'll click on two pages and we can see that these two pages have duplicate metadescriptions. This is a relatively easy fix. In most website builders, you can simply update the metad description in an SEO section or update it in your HTML. Let's go back to all issues. Work through this checklist one at a time and when you're done with all your errors, move on to warnings. Remember on that dashboard it said there were 414 warnings. Here it says there's 10. What's that all about? Let's click it and find out. Here you can see that 292 of those warnings are for one list item. There's 292 images that don't have alt attributes. That sounds like a large number and it sounds pretty scary, but that's actually pretty easy to fix. Let's click on the 292 images hyperlink. And you can see here that there's a list of image URLs that don't have alt tags. So if you click the little box and arrow next to the image URL, you can see the exact image that needs an alt tag. That's a pretty easy fix, but it will take some time if you have 292 of them. Let's go ahead and close this tab out. As you address the issues in this checklist, you'll want to see your progress over time. To do this, click the progress tab. Here you can see a chart. If you hover over this purple dot, you can see that the total number of issues the site audit found today was 545. Each time the site audit runs, it'll be plotted on this chart here. So, if you're making incremental changes and fixing the issues in the checklist, you'll see this number decrease over time. I think this visual is a great motivator because it allows me to see exactly how many issues I've already conquered and how many remain to fix. Now that we've tackled technical SEO and identified quick fixes, let's dive deeper with the onpage SEO checker to optimize existing pages for our target keywords. On the left side under onpage and tech SEO, click on onpage SEO checker. Here you'll be prompted to enter your domain. Click the field and then select your domain from the drop down or enter it manually. You'll be prompted to select your target location. here. By default, it says United States, but you can drill down into a region and city or change your country. I'll go ahead and just click continue. And then you'll be prompted to add pages to optimize. You can simply autoimp import pages, but you can also select pages manually. Let's optimize our homepage, once upon a coconut.com, for the specific keyword coconut water. I'll click add page. You can continue and add additional pages just like this, targeting for specific keywords for each one. For this demo, I'm just going to optimize for this one page. I'll go ahead and click collect ideas, and the onpage SEO checker will get started. This will take some time to complete, especially if you're analyzing a lot of pages, so feel free to step away and take a break or work on other SEO tasks while this runs in the background. Just like with the site audit, I'll fast forward so we can get to the good part. Okay, so here we are fastforwarded into the future and the onpage SEO checker has finished putting together its report. Similar to the other tools, you can see that there is a brief overview of some different characteristics at the top of this page for total ideas. Let's scroll down and look at the top pages to optimize section. Here you can see that actually give us a list of pages instead of just the homepage. On the left side, it organizes them by priority and on the right side it shows you the total volume. Now, keep in mind here that total volume isn't the amount of traffic to the page. It's actually the total search volume for the keywords that these pages are set up for. Let's click the eight ideas button to look at the ideas it came up with for our homepage. Here we can see that there are several optimization ideas organized by category. The categories are strategy, SER, features, content, semantic, backlinks, technical issues, and user experience. Scrolling back to the top, we can see that it says we don't need any improvements for our SEO strategy. So nice. Check that off the list. Next, we have SER features. It says we should mark up the aggregate rating. It has a little bit of a description there. And on the right side, it has a difficulty rating of 1 out of three, meaning it's pretty easy to implement this change. And if you need a little bit more information, you can click on why should I do this? And it gives you a little popup that has some more info. Scrolling down, let's take a look at the content here. Here it says avoid keyword stuffing in body tag and it provides several keywords. Hm. Let's take a look at the detailed analysis. Scrolling down, let's get this full table in view. On the left side, you have a list of keywords. In the top, you have five main columns. Body, title, H1, metadescription, and SER. Within the first four main columns, there are two sub columns each. We have our sight's score and then the average of our rivals scores. Let's take a look at the best coconut water keyword. So remember it said we're using those keywords too much in the body. And right here it shows us that the best coconut water keyword is showing up in 5.86% of the text in the body. Whereas for our rivals on average it's showing up 4.37% of the time. At first glance, this might seem like you should reduce the amount of times that the words best coconut water appear on the page. However, that's only half the picture. If you scroll down all the way to the bottom, you can see keyword occurrences. And this table is set up the exact same way, but this shows you the absolute number of times that this keyword appears on the page, not just a percentage. So, for best coconut water, you can see that it shows up 19 times total. And for our rivals, on average, it shows up 45 times total. So that's actually way more than our page. What this tells me is that our rivals have way more content that's not the keyword best coconut water. So that the keyword shows up as a smaller percentage of the total amount of content. And if we go back to the page ideas view and check out our other content ideas, you can see here the second idea is to focus on creating more informative content. It says that the rivals that rank higher than you are using long form content on their web pages. Try to create more informative content. So these two things go hand in hand here. It's easy to get wrapped up looking at one isolated idea trying to fix things for one metric, but you should actually zoom out and take a look at all the things that it's saying and take a holistic view. If all we did was remove keywords from our page, we might not actually accomplish the goal here that it's laying out for us, which really is to create more informative content, which ultimately has a higher difficulty rating, but will most likely see a big impact on how that page ranks. These are just a few of the ideas that Seamrush might come up with for you. Ultimately, your analysis will look different than mine, which is great because it means it's personalized for each website. At this point, once you've fixed the issues presented by the site audit and the on-page SEO checklists, you've done the hard part. Your site is healthy, your content is structured, and your SEO setup is solid. But if you want to compete on page one, there's one more piece of the puzzle Google cares deeply about. Authority. That's where back links come in. Think of them as online votes of confidence. The more highquality sites that link to yours, the more trustworthy your site appears to Google. In this section, I'll show you how to find out who's linking to your competitors, where you might be missing out, and how to start building links that actually move the needle. A backlink is simply a link on another website that points back to your page. When other websites link to yours, it tells search engines that those sites vouch for you. According to Google, content and links are two of the most important ranking factors for SEO. Strong back links can push your pages higher in the search results, funnel extra visitors to your site via referrals, give your domain more authority, and help search engines to find and index your content faster. However, keep in mind some backlinks can harm your site. Links from sketchy websites can decrease your authority. So, it's important to have a backlink checker to analyze exactly who is linking to you. To get started with backlinks, on the left side under the SEO toolkit, click backlink analytics. Go ahead and enter your domain name into the field. Then, click analyze. At a glance, you can see some highle statistics about your domain's backlinks. For example, we can see that there are a total of 2,000 back links linking to our site from elsewhere. These are coming from 563 other websites. Our total website traffic is 28.4,000 visits a month with 7.3,000 of those visits coming from Google. If you'd like to, you can compare your site to your competitors by clicking in the add competitor field and then typing a domain manually or clicking one of the autosuggested competitors from the drop down. If you want to compare more than one, click the add up to three competitors button and compare some of the other websites. Click compare and then you can see how your site stacks up against the competition. This is a cool feature, but I'm not going to dive too deep into this for now. So, I'll go ahead and click cancel. What I really want to do is figure out how we can improve our backlink situation. So, right here under overall toxicity score, you see there's nothing generated yet. So, let's set up a backlink audit. Go ahead and click that link. You'll see that Samrush will start to process. To get a more detailed view, go ahead and click go to backlink audit. I'm going to go ahead and close out this popup up here. Right now, in the background, Samrush is auditing the back links for your website. When it's finished, we'll be able to check out the toxicity of these links to make sure that we don't have any sketchy sites linking back to us. And if the audit does find any sketchy sites linking back to us, we can take steps to mitigate that. This can take a while. So again, I'm going to fast forward to save some time. Okay, here again, we've jumped into the future and the backlink audit is complete. You can see that it has presented us with an overall toxicity score. Unfortunately, the toxicity score for this website is high. So, we need to take a look at the websites that are linking back to us and try to remove the toxic ones. Let's click on this 21 to see who the toxic referring domains are. If we scroll down, we can see a list of toxic domains. So here, for example, there's a site called Where to Buy Aged Domains and Backlinks from Purple Elephant. And if we click the little arrow and square icon next to it, we can go see the site itself. This website is a little strange. If you scroll through it, you can see it's just a list of links. This is likely some sort of black hat technique. Black hat SEO is the use of unethical or manipulative tactics like keyword stuffing, link farming, or cloaking to try to trick search engines into ranking a website higher. Again, we're not associated with Once Upon a Coconut, so I don't know if this is something that they have participated in deliberately or if this site is accidentally linking to them. But either way, if I was on their marketing team, I would probably want to unlink this site from ours. Let's close the tab out and go back to Samrush. You can see that the site has an authority score of two and a toxicity score of 79 out of a possible score of 100. So, that's pretty bad. This site and the other ones below it look like they're all really similar. They all have the same name here or a very similar name. So, they're likely all part of the same black hat SEO technique. Let's go ahead and check the boxes next to all these high toxicity score sites. We'll start with that. And up top here, you can click this little send icon to move the group of back links to the remove list. Let's click move to remove. And then back up top, you can go to the remove tab. On the remove tab, you can see that we effectively now have a to-do list with statuses for each of these domains. If you click send on the right side of a domain, it generates an automatic email that you can use to try to contact the domain owner and get them to remove the link to your site from theirs. Semer will even look at the email addresses registered to the domains and try to pull those email addresses in so you don't have to go looking for them. However, in some cases, they can't find it and you'll need to track down the owner's email address. You can send this template email to the domain owner within Semrush if you go up to from and click add mailbox, but we're going to skip that for now. At the bottom, you can click send and proceed to next once you've got your email and the recipient email loaded in there. And then it'll automatically move you through these domains that you want to remove one at a time. This is really effective and efficient way to clean up your toxic backlinks. If the backlinking domain owners don't remove your link from their site, you can also take steps to disavow that link where you provide Google with a text file that says, "We don't know these guys. We don't trust them." And that can help to improve your SEO by letting them know directly that you don't want to be associated with those websites. Now that we've talked about bad backlinks, let's talk about building some good back links. On the left side, click on the link building tool. Then click into the field and select your domain from the drop down or enter it manually. A pop-up will appear to add your keywords. We can work with these for now, but I also want to add coconut water to the list. Let's go ahead and click competitors to go to the next page. And like in the other tools, Semrush has pulled in a list of our top competitors. So I'll go ahead and simply click start link building. Just like the audit tools, Seamrush will take a little while to process this request. So I'm going to fast forward again. When Semrush is all done processing, you'll get this popup that says they found some domain prospects. Let's click to view them. Here you can see in our case, Seamrush found 2255 prospects with 415 keywords and we're competing with 1,876 other sites. Let's take a look at this list. The first time you use this tool, Serush will show you some pop-ups to help you understand what you're looking at. For example, here it says move good prospects to your inrogress list. I'll click got it, and let's take a look at the site. Why does Seamrush think this is a good prospect? Let's click to open it. And we can immediately see why Seamrush found this. This is a forum talking about coconut water versus regular water. This is fantastic. If somebody searches Google and finds this forum, it would be wonderful if somehow it linked to our site. So, one thing you could do if you found this website would be to reach out to somebody on the site and try to get them to link to once upon a coconut.com. Alternatively, you could create an account and post something about once upon a coconut.com. You have to be careful there. You don't want it to come across as spammy. It should feel very natural, but this is definitely a good opportunity. Let's close this tab out. And you can see that this website has a general URL type, an authority score of 54, which is pretty good, and a rating of five out of five for us. You can also click this arrow to see more details about the website. If you want to try to get a link on this site, go ahead and click to in progress. and Seamrush will move that site to the in progress tab. Let's go to the in progress tab to see what that's all about. So far, we have one prospect to contact. And you can see here, similar to the backlink audit tool and asking to remove links from a site, you can also ask to add links to a site. Simply click contact next to the website and it'll try to pull in an email for the domain. In this case, it didn't find one, but you could go looking for one and try to add it manually. And here's where you could send your message. Admittedly though, since this website is a forum, I think the best approach would be to simply create an account and contribute some content that linked back to once upon a coconut.com. When you've done that, you can go to the to-do item in in progress and click the check mark to move it to the monitor list. You can find your monitor list in the tab up top. And here you can track these links over time and see how many of these sites that you've reached out to have actually linked back to your site. Pretty cool, huh? So now you're creating content, fixing issues, and even building authority with backlinks. But how do you know if it's actually all working? That's where position tracking comes in. Think of it as your personal SEO scoreboard. It shows you exactly where your keywords rank, how you compare to competitors, and whether your optimizations are moving the needle. I'll also walk you through one underrated metric that's way more insightful than just checking your Google position. On the left side under keyword research, click position tracking. Then click in the field and select your domain from the dropown or enter it manually. That'll bring up a popup. Here we can track our position for different search engines including Google, Bing, BU, and even chat GPT if you're on the Guru plan. Additionally, you can track your position on desktop, mobile, or tablet. We're going to stick with Google and desktop for now. Under location, we'll select the United States in our case. And then if you're optimizing for a local business, you could enter your full business name in this field here. We're not going to do that, so we'll just continue to keywords by clicking the button at the bottom. On this keywords page, you'll want to enter the keywords you want to track your position for. You can enter them manually, or you can import them. Let's click import from, and then we'll import from keyword strategy builder. This will pull up our lists that we created earlier. We have our coconut water first campaign that we filled with keywords from the keyword magic tool. We also have the coconut water water list here which was the automatically generated strategy. To keep things simple for this demo, I'm going to use the coconut water first campaign list and click to import the keywords. Then I'll click add keywords to campaign. Here you can see that the 12 keywords have been added to the campaign. And on this particular plan, there's a keyword limit of 500. That's why I didn't select the other list because we would exceed that and we'd have to pay extra. At the bottom, I want to make sure that the send me weekly ranking updates via email box is checked. That way, I can see at a glance in my inbox how we're doing week to week. Next, let's click start tracking. Like the other tools in Seamrush, this can take a while to process. So again, I'll fast forward. Once Seamrush finishes processing, we get a high-level overview of our position data. There are three main metrics on the left side. visibility, estimated traffic, and average position. The average position shows your average ranking across all the tracked keywords, in our case, 12 of them. But it treats a number one spot and a number 10 spot as equally spaced, even though number one gets way more clicks. So, the average position here is 65, which doesn't sound amazing, but visibility, on the other hand, factors in click-through rates or CTR. Ranking number one gives you a much bigger boost than ranking number five or number 10. And visibility reflects that. It weights your rankings by how likely users are to click them. So across all our 12 keywords, there's a 1.9% likelihood that someone will click our site. Let's click the competitors discovery tab to get more information. Here you can see a competition map where we are ranked against our top competitors. And you can see here that in this view, Once Upon a Coconut has a 1.896% visibility rating. The top competitor, Harmless Harvest, has a 31.685% visibility rating. That means it's only 31% likely that someone searching for these 12 keywords will click on Harmless Harvest. So, even though we're only getting 1.896%, that doesn't sound so bad once you realize that even the top competitor is not getting 100% visibility for these keywords. That said, there's still room to improve. So, let's figure out what we can do to improve this. Scrolling to the top, let's click on the overview tab. And if you click on potential growth, you can see the potential percentage boost we can give our visibility ranking if we implement some strategic changes. Let's click view top keywords to see more information. Here in this rankings overview list, you can see that our first keyword, purchase coconut water, has a position of number 10 as of May 21st. and the current visibility of 0504%. We could potentially achieve a boost of 298% getting us up to 801%. These are still pretty small numbers, but a pretty large increase if you consider the relative change that happens. Keep in mind that these are just the rankings our site has today. And as we implement changes based on what we find in all the other tools and audits that we've used today, these rankings will improve. That's why we set up position tracking to track these metrics over time. We also want to track how we're doing against our competitors. So, let's scroll to the top and click add next to competitors. Here, it provides a list of suggested competitors. So, I'll go ahead and add a few. Then, I'll click save changes. Now, once a week, we'll get updates via email letting us know how our ranking is for these keywords compared to our competitors. So, now that you're tracking your rankings and seeing real results, the next step is expanding your toolkit. Whether you're optimizing for local search, running social media campaigns, or even trying to get your brand mentioned by AI chat bots, Semrush has tools for that, too. Let's start with local SEO. If you run a brick-and-mortar business or serve clients in specific areas, this toolkit helps you track local rankings, manage reviews, and keep your listings consistent across directories. Once your core SEO is dialed in, local tools can help make sure you show up where it matters most, right in your neighborhood. Then there's the social media toolkit. Schedule posts, analyze your competitors, and track engagement, all from inside Semrush. It's perfect for turning your SEO content into a multi- channelannel strategy without bouncing between apps. Next up, reports. These let you create custom dashboards and schedule automatic PDF updates, so your progress is clear and sharable, whether you're reporting to a client, a team, or just keeping yourself accountable. Once you've done the research and run the audits, this is how you track momentum. And now there's the brand new AI toolkit. It shows how your brand is being mentioned across AI platforms like ChatGpt, Gemini, and Perplexity. And it gives you insight to help you stand out in this new landscape. If you want to futureproof your visibility and your business, this is where things are headed. Semrush isn't just an SEO tool. It's a full stack marketing platform built for creators, entrepreneurs, agencies, and anyone who wants to grow smarter, faster. What we've covered so far is just the beginning. Don't forget to sign up for the extended 14-day trial by using the link in the description below. Thanks so much for watching this video, and I'll see you in the next one.