23 Points SEO Strategy to Boost your Rankings and Increase Web Traffic

Are you struggling to improve your SEO rankings and getting pushed down by tough competition. Here’s your chance to claim your place with these tactical SEO Optimization techniques.

With people being bombarded with thousands of ads each day, standing out in the crowd and grabbing the attention of your target audience has become one of the biggest challenges most businesses face today. Tough growing competition can make the visibility of a company low, thus impacting its profits. At times like this it can be difficult to determine how you must actually promote your products or services, especially if you are a small or medium scale business and do not have deep pockets.

In this blog we are going to tackle this exact matter – How do you build sustainable organic flow of traffic to your website for substantial month-on-month growth, with cost saving. 

When it comes to sending traffic to your website, you can do a lot of things from PPC ads, social media marketing to email marketing but none of them can have the impact that SEO does. And since you are on this blog I believe you already know something about it.

SEO Techniques being covered

Why care about Search Engine Optimization?

Let’s compare the two most used methods of digital marketing – Search Ads and Search Engine Optimization.

With paid ads you can almost instantly have people visiting your website but once you stop advertising, your traffic flow stops immediately. On the other hand with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it may take a while (a month or two) to get a good number of visitors but you can create a sustainable flow of organic traffic to your website that might actually have a higher conversion rate than paid advertising and a much better ROI. 

You might ask…

Can Organic Search traffic provide a better conversion rate?

Yes, there is a high possibility of it because of the little thing called ‘Intent’, although it need not be true always.

When people search for something on Google, Bing or any search engine, they do so because they are looking for something on which they might take action pretty soon. For example, if someone was searching for ‘Flower shops near me’ they are most likely planning to give flowers to someone and are likely to take action soon. 

That is called Intent, the intention (or likelihood) to take action based on information they gather via their search on the search engines. And if you can place your brand right there at the start of their information gathering journey you increase your chances to be considered for their purchase. It’s because they have already taken the first step towards their purchase journey and you do not need to initiate or encourage them. 

And that is the reason why there’s such a race to get ranked in the top of search results, so that brands can get a bite of that fresh intent-ready audience segment which is highly likely to make a purchase soon.  

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that paid advertising traffic is all bad – of course not. 

You can in fact use Google or Bing ads to get your website placed on the top of their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) via clever keyword targeting and by bidding aggressively. But then you will have to pump in a lot of cash to hold that position, whereas with SEO, if done right you can hold the first position on SERP with just a fraction of that cost.

That is where Search Engine Optimization comes in so handy. While search engine ads can get you placed up top, you will lose that position once you stop investing in ads. But that’s not the case with SEO. While SEO might take some time to bring in the results the impact is far more long lasting. A well optimized, strategically targeted webpage can stay on top of SERP for months and even years.

For this tutorial we have categorized the 23 SEO techniques into 7 sections as mentioned below, so that its easier for you to follow and implement the ideas accordingly.  

• SEO Competitor Analysis
• SEO Keyword Research
• Site Improvement: On-page SEO
• Upscale Link Building: Off-page SEO
• Content Marketing for SEO
• SEO Tracking and Monitoring
• Planning and Scaling

We want to show you tools and techniques to take your SEO game to the next level. We will explain how you can use SEMrush SEO Optimization tools to strategically improve your chances of getting ranked on the top of search results, despite heavy competition. 

Example use case:

For this blog we are considering the example of the hotel industry. Note that although we are taking the example of the hotel industry, the techniques apply to all industries. And to get a better understanding of how the tools might work for you, we would suggest you to at least get a trial access to SEMrush. In this way you will be able to try out the options as you read through the blog.

Now if you are ready, let’s get started…

i. SEO Competitor Analysis

Before you step foot into optimizing your website it would be great to have a clear understanding of the niche market you are doing business in. With Competitor Market Analysis you would be able to find answer to the following questions:

• Where does your domain stand in the digital market? 
• How much traffic and how many backlinks do you have?
• Who are your direct competitors in the digital space?
• Where do you stand in comparison to your competitors? 
• What’s their traffic and backlink strength?
• Which companies are leading in your niche? 
• Which products or services in your niche are in demand?

Having answers for these questions will help you formulate a strong SEO strategy to beat your competition and lead in your market. You need to have this data so that you can optimize your website accordingly and prepare it for success.

1. Identify Key Competitors & Learn from them – Domain Overview

The SEMrush Domain Overview tool gives a bird eye view of the key stats related to a searched domain. You will get a quick view of their Authority score, organic search traffic, paid search traffic, backlink strength, sample ads, top keywords and competitors.

You can use this tool to discover stats about your own domain or your competitor’s. So if you were to search with your domain then you will discover stats about yourself, your competitors and how you fare against them in organic search and paid ads. 

To access the Domain Overview tool, Click here: Domain Overview Tool

Points to be noted:

• As seen in the screenshot, you can check worldwide data for a domain or from specific countries.
• Below that find details about the domain like, Authority Score, Organic & Paid Search Traffic, Backlinks and Display Ad traffic so that you can estimate your competitor’s strength.
• Use the distribution by country data to understand which top 5 countries drive most traffic for them.
• Next you can asses their traffic and keyword change over time with the graphs.

Points to be noted:

• Then on the same page you would find their main keywords from which they are getting maximum traffic.
• Also find their main competitors so that you know from who else you can gather valuable data.

Points to be noted:

• Then you will find their main paid competitors to examine ad copies and keywords.
• And then you have sample text ads used by hotels.com to gather idea about what to include in your text ads.

If you have not identified your top competitors yet then, we would recommend to sort that out first as you can gather a lot of potentially game changing insights from your competitors. If you have a list of top 20 or 30 domains in your niche and you are able to uncover their backlink structure and replicate it you can gain some serious advantage over them. 

For detailed steps on how to identify your prominent competitors and beat them refer to our blog: 11 Points Guide on How to do Competitor Analysis using SEMrush

Reading Material: SEMrush Traffic Analytics Tool

2. Analyze Competitors’ SEO Performance – Organic Research

The Organic Research tool helps you dive into the organic search performance of a domain. It’s a comprehensive tool that allows you to do a thorough study and identify the most beneficial keywords, how much traffic they can bring and how to rank for them. 

Additionally, you can research your rivals’ organic traffic, see which search terms bring the most attention, and discover new ways to promote your webpage to a SERP top spot. Organic research gives you competitive data to know who your main organic rivals are, what keywords they employ, and how their rankings are changing.

Points to be noted:

• Examine traffic based on the top countries they get visitors from, so that you can replicate it.
• Collect data about their traffic to understand their strengths and how to beat them.
• Use the graph to assess growth patters, the spots marked with ‘G’ are Google updates.

Points to be noted:

• Monitor their top performing keywords so that you can incorporate them in your content mix.
• Observe their position change overtime to assess what search terms are in demand or for where they are loosing rankings so that you may take advantage of that opportunity.

Points to be noted:

• Then you can use the SERP Features section to analyze for which featured snippets they appear for.
• Click on the feature name to view related search terms so that you can replicate it.

Try it out for Free

3. Gain Strategic Insights from Competitors – Traffic Analytics

Use the Traffic Analytics tool to examine various elements of traffic received by your competitors’ website. You will be able to find out how much traffic your competitor gets, how many unique visitors, what’s their bounce rate and avg. visit duration. 

You will also be able to break down their traffic performance stats by device, top performing pages, traffic sources and geographic distribution. You can use this data to understand which traffic sources might work better for you or which additional geographic location you can target. 

Points to be noted:

• The Traffic Analytics gives you details about performance of the traffic.
• Analyze their unique visits, pages/visit, avg. duration and bounce rate.
• Find out which devices are bringing in most traffic for them.

Points to be noted:

• Then you can examine their traffic based on its type and how much each type contributes.
• You can see how contribution of each traffic type has changed over time.

Points to be noted:

• Use the Traffic Journey mapping to understand how people reach their website and where they click out to.

Points to be noted:

• Use this data to analyze which countries contribute maximum to their traffic.

For detailed steps on how to identify your prominent competitors and beat them refer to our blog: 11 Points Guide on How to do Competitor Analysis using SEMrush

ii. SEO Keyword Research

Keyword research is undoubtedly a critical part of your SEO process and getting it right can mean the difference between losing or improving SERP ranking. Now you can go on any keyword research tool to find new keyword ideas but what if you were able to get some performance insights from your competitors. In this section we will explore different ways to conduct keyword research and how to effectively incorporate them into your content.

4. Find Profitable Keywords to improve ranking – Keyword Magic Tool

An SEO strategy is incomplete without proper targeted keywords that have good search volume. You have to know what your intended customers are looking for, whether you’re creating a blog, preparing content for your solution page or building a FAQ section. Keyword research will help you create relevant content and improve your web pages to increase organic traffic. 

You wouldn’t need a magic wand to see what your clients are looking for on the internet, although the technologies that allow you to do just that may appear magical at first. To offer up-to-date information to over 4 million active users, SEMrush uses data mining algorithms, keyword optimization tools, trustworthy data sources, and several other techniques.

The Keyword Magic Tool, which SEMrush provides, allows you to evaluate groupings of keywords relevant to your market. Its powerful filtering and grouping features make segmenting keywords for each one of your initiatives a breeze. If you want to accelerate progress and rank first on Google’s first page (which you do), and your rivals want to appear at the top as well (which they do), you’ll need to find a means to acquire a competitive edge. The Keyword Magic Tool helps you identify possibilities to increase traffic to your website via strategic keyword targeting.

Points to be noted:

• On the first row, use different parameters to search for the most profitable keywords for you.
• Below that you can see the number of keywords found and the table of keywords with their properties.
• Use the links on the left to choose keywords based on a theme or main keyword.
• Use the column headers on the table to sort the list of keywords.
• A tip: Use keywords with moderate KD% and good traffic volume so that you can rank faster and still get a good amount of traffic.

Points to be noted:

• In the above screenshot, we have selected the theme ‘best’ and on the right side table you can view the list.
• Use this option to find keywords that best matches the page or product you are trying to optimize.

Points to be noted:

• Instead of typing in a keyword you can also search with a domain name like ‘hotels.com’ (as seen above) and find the keywords related to or used by them.

Points to be noted:

• Just another example of how choosing the theme ‘lake’ the tool brings you related keywords.

Here is a webinar on the guide to SEMrush – Keyword Magic Tool.

5. Find Missed Keyword Opportunities – Keyword Gap Analysis

No matter how fast you go, you’ll still have to compete for the first place on search engines. You may do a keyword gap analysis to evaluate your keyword ranks to those of another site. It will assist you in identifying opportunities that you may be overlooking. You may list down keywords that your competition targets and figure out their strategy based on this information.

The Keyword Gap tool helps you locate missing keywords and determine their characteristics from up to five different domains. It allows you to do in-depth comparative keyword research and develop a solid SEO plan. You can easily compare and contrast keyword profiles using unique metrics and fast filters. You can quickly determine where your rivals’ best growth opportunities are and begin creating your keyword portfolio. You may compare any piece of content, whether it’s a blog post or a homepage, to one of your rivals independently.

To summarize, this data will assist you in determining where you stand in comparison to rivals, which pages to focus on and improve your keyword potential.

Points to be noted:

• In this example we are finding out the keywords that hotels.com is missing but booking.com and expedia.com has used.
• If you wish to find keywords that your domain is missing, put it in the first box marked as ‘You’.
• The tools shows you top opportunities and the keyword overlap graphically. The keyword overlap gives you an idea of how strong is the competition and what are the chances of finding new keywords.

Points to be noted:

• Use the tabs marked in first row to find the right keywords for your use. Use the tabs ‘Missing’ and ‘Untapped’ for the best suggestions to tap into.
• In the table below you will find out where the domain rank for each keyword, keyword volume and difficulty.

6. Assess Keyword Quality and Performance – Keyword overview tool

Using this tool you can assess the possibilities of a term and how much it influences your visitors using relevant data such as quantity, keyword complexity, CPC, paid search competition, top-ranking sites, ad content, and so on. The SEMrush Keyword Research Overview tool provides you with the most up-to-date data on search engines, patterns, and the number of relevant keyword ideas, as well as statistics on their worth for Search Engine Optimization. 

Access all critical data points for the searched term, such as volume, SEO and PPC statistics, patterns, and display ads with SEMrush. You can identify the regions with the most search queries and target your SEO effort there. You can evaluate the data for both web and mobile indices.

Points to be noted:

• At first, find out what is the keyword search volume and the search volume by country.
• Use this tool to find out variations and related keywords that you can add to your content.
• And also questions that you can cater to while creating blogs or FAQ.

Points to be noted:

• Based on the keyword you search the tool shows you the top 10 pages ranking for it.
• Along with that you also get details like Authority Score, No. of Referring Domains, Backlinks and Search Traffic etc.

7. Make your SEO Work Easy and Boost Performance – Keyword Manager

You can find, evaluate, classify and arrange several keywords with the help of SEMrush keyword management tool. Give preference, coordinate, and respond to keyword data to develop and improve your SEO position rankings. 

An efficient keyword management system will result in more productive and data-driven SEO activities. You will notice productivity gains, better relevance in the search results, and time and budget gains if you use a systematic approach to keyword collection, discovery, analysis, and action.

You may monitor up to 5000 keywords in real-time with the SEMrush Keyword Manager tool. You have absolute control over the keywords you follow, which means they can be arranged into groups to track different issues or websites.

You may use the Keyword Manager Tool to keep track of:

• Real-Time Metrics: With the refresh function, you can get real-time analytics.

• Imported Keywords: Import keywords to monitor using other products, such as Keyword Magic Tool. You may also manually add them.

• Track Keywords: Keep an eye on keywords of your selection and keep track of any changes.

• Organic traffic insights: Organic Traffic Insights is a dashboard that integrates data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush. With this connection, you can easily cross-reference databases and unearth those “not given” terms from Google Analytics to receive the most comprehensive impression of your website’s organic search results. 

The key to achieving success with your SEO over time is to use the right information to make decisions. Organic traffic can be extremely valuable for your company and when done right, it can help you drive your growth.

Points to be noted:

• To add keywords to the Keyword Manager tick the check box at the start of each row and then at the top click the button that says ‘+ To Keyword Manager’.

Points to be noted:

• Once you click on ‘+ To Keyword Manager’ it will show you the available lists in the pop-up.
• You can select an existing list or create a new one.

Points to be noted:

• When you go into the Keyword Manager you will get a view like this.
• You can sort and pick the best keywords as per your task at hand.
• Find which keywords are triggering Featured Snippets and use them in your content mix.
• Get an idea of how the keywords are trending over time, if their search volume has gone up or down.

iii. Site Improvement: On-page SEO

Once you have completed your keyword research, it’s time to optimize your website. The health of your website plays a great role in your search engine optimization process. If your website is not in good condition then even the best off-page optimization efforts may not yield good results.

8. Check and Fix Website Issues to Rank better – Site Audit tool

Regardless of the type of website you have, it’s critical that your website is well structured and in excellent condition for optimal SEO results. Determining the optimizations required for a website to excel in SEO can be a challenging task, but a tool like SEMrush Site Audit can make it extremely easy. 

SEMrush Site Audit is a powerful website scanner that enables you to assess your website’s health by providing you with a list of issues that might be holding it back from ranking well. The tool categorizes the issues into 3 segments: Errors, Warnings and Notices. Errors being the ones to be treated with urgency.

If you or your client has a website that is struggling to rank well, use this tool to identify issues that might be hampering the website’s SEO performance. 

Points to be noted:

• The Overview tab gives you a bird eye view of the Site Audit stats.
• You will find out how many Errors, Warnings and Notices were found on the website.
• You can click on specific section to view more details.

Points to be noted:

• Once you click on Errors you will get a view like seen above, with the list of errors that might be holding your website back from ranking well.
• Fix the Errors urgently to avoid any probable damage to your SEO performance. You can get to Warnings and Notices gradually.

Points to be noted:

• Here’s a screenshot of warnings found for hotels.com. Get to the Warnings after the Errors are fixed.

The Site Audit tool gives you a list of areas where your website is having trouble. Addressing these problems will improve a website’s SEO rankings. Over 120 SEO checks are included in the Site Audit tool, ranging from minor issues like keyword stuffing and error messages to more technical concerns like HTTPS conflict.

 Fixing these issues will help you improve your website’s SEO.

9. Get SEO Improvement Ideas for your Website – On-page SEO checker

Use This tool to gather ideas about how you can improve your On-page SEO. The tool can provide you insights on the following parameters:

• Strategy ideas: Identify the best performing pages on your website and find out how you can optimize them to increase organic traffic easily.

• Backlink ideas: Shows you high quality backlink opportunities and the anchor text used by your competitors to help you grow and strengthen your SEO rankings.

• Technical SEO ideas: Shows you the technical issues that may be hampering your search positions. This tool takes data from the Site Audit tool and shows you what to fix on specific pages.

• Semantic ideas: Ranking well with SEO is not just about keywords, we also need to consider semantically related keywords to create a theme for the content. The tool analyzes top 10 webpages for the target keywords and offers suggestions to improve your webpages.

• Content ideas: The tool compares the content from the top performing webpages on SERP and suggests content update ideas to make your content more readable and consistent. It also shows if your content has the right keywords or if it’s not informative enough.

• User experience ideas: This tool helps you identify how your audience might be perceiving your web page and what needs to be done to improve performance.

• SERP Features Ideas: Shows you how the top 10 pages on Google are getting their featured snippets and gives you an idea of how you can do the same.

You can easily receive valuable on-page SEO recommendations with the SEO on-page optimization checker tool. It audits your webpages for errors and opportunities to improve your SEO ranking. You may use this tool to perform a complete analysis of your titles, H1 tags, description, and overall content.

Points to be noted:

• Once you search with the domain you get the list of ideas as seen above.
• On the table you will get the list of URLs and the ideas related to each page.

Points to be noted:

• When you go into the Optimization Ideas you will get a list of all the possible ways you can improve your SEO.
• Click on ‘Why Should I do this?’ and ‘See detailed analysis’ for more info.

iv. Upscale Link Building: Off-page SEO

We can all agree that backlinks have a significant impact on your SEO rankings. That is why SEMrush provides a smart set of backlink tools for discovery, analysis and implementation of links that can be most beneficial for your website.

10. Analyze Competitors’ Backlink Portfolio – SEO Backlink Analytics

SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics allows you to examine your own and your rivals’ backlink profiles, as well as compare several domains side by side. When you are about to start building backlinks for your website, it’s important to take an account of where the website stands. It also helps to know where your top competitors are getting their backlinks from.

SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics tool is a brilliant means of keeping a record of all your backlinks. All you need to do is paste your or your competitor’s domain in the Backlink Analysis tool, and the system will pull out all the required details for you to pursue your link building endeavour. 

Points to be noted:

• Use can use the Backlink Analytics tool to get details of your competitor’s backlink or compare it with another domain.
• The second row shows you stats about the backlinks for the searched domain.
• Use the graphs to understand how their backlink portfolio has been changing.

Points to be noted:

• The chart on the left shows percentage of backlinks based on authority score.
• The ones on the right shows no. of backlinks based on type and attribute.
• Use these data to analyze how many and what combination of backlinks would be required to get ahead of your competitors

Points to be noted:

• Then you get data about the top TLD and Countries from which they receive backlinks.

Points to be noted:

• When you shift to the Backlinks tab from the Overview you can see the full list of backlinks.
• You can sort through backlinks based on whether they are ‘Follow’ or ‘NoFollow’.

Points to be noted:

• When you go to the referring domains tab you get the full list of top domains from which they have received backlinks.
• Sort the list of domains by Authority Score ‘AS’ to find the best domains to get backlinks from. Getting backlinks from domains with higher Authority Score increases your chances of rising faster and ranking better.

11. Find and Eliminate Toxic Backlinks – SEO Backlink Audit

Backlink Audit examines your domain’s backlink portfolio to assist you in avoiding Google penalties caused by harmful backlinks. The tool walks you through auditing all of your links, analyzing the poisonous signals associated with any questionable backlinks. It helps you with sending letters to site owners, and finally creating a disavow file to submit to Google.

Websites must conduct backlink audits regularly to maintain a health backlink structure. Any unwanted low quality toxic backlinks can adversely impact your SEO ranking and reduce your SERP position. 

Points to be noted:

• Pay attention to the Overall Toxicity Score mentioned on the left side.
• Toxic backlinks can hurt your SEO worse than you can imagine, so if the tool shows that it has found toxic backlinks make sure to get to it immediately.
• Note that sometimes websites that you get links from purposefully might give out toxic signals. This could be because they themselves have a lot of toxic backlinks, and is passing on the link toxicity to you.
• So examine the toxic backlinks and remove the ones that you do not recognize and take appropriate action for the ones that you do know.
• Note that you can connect to Google Search Console to get more insights.

Points to be noted:

• You will also be able to see which industries the top rereferring domains belong to. This is important because backlinks from domains that are relevant to your website can have better impact.
• Also find out the Authority Score of the referring domains. Getting more backlinks from high Authority Score websites will improve your authority score and help you improve your SEO rankings.

Points to be noted:

• Use the Link Attributes table to understand how many of your backlinks are Follow or NoFollow. Links with Follow attribute pass on the rank authority that improves your ranking. Having a large percentage of NoFollow backlinks in the mix will not help you much.
• Use the Backlinks Type data to understand how you get your most backlinks. Text backlinks must have the right anchor text and image links must carry keyword optimized Alt tag.

Points to be noted:

• The above screenshot shows you the list of backlinks sorted by link toxicity, from high to low.
• Click the check box in front of the links that you do not recognize and are clearly spammy and then click on the Disavow button on top. The tool will automatically create a disavow links document that you can upload to Google Search Console.

The Backlink Audit will show you whether any of your platform’s backlinks are harmful. If you find any fraudulent websites connecting to your website, you may flag them immediately to Google using SEMrush.

When you Disavow and backlinks, Google will know not to include them when ranking your website. You can monitor all of your links in one location by connecting with Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Majestic. When it comes to controlling your links, this saves you time.

You should check your backlink profile frequently to verify that it is healthy and to identify any potentially harmful connections that arise.

12. Find Missed Backlink Opportunities – SEO Backlink Gap

Another helpful feature of SEMrush when it comes to link building is the Backlink Gap tool. This tool helps you discover backlink opportunities that your competitors have used but you have not. You can analyze upto 5 domains side-by-side, the first being your own domain.

Once you enter your own and your competitors’ websites, the tool will evaluate the backlink portfolio of all the domains and find undiscovered backlink opportunities for you. You will get a list of high quality new domain names to pursue and boost your link-building effort.

You may list competitors as base domains, extensions, and URLs. It means you may evaluate several subdomains or URLs on the very same site. You can also contrast –

1. a subdomain to a domain,
2. a subdomain to a subdomain, 
3. a domain to a URL, or any permutation in between. 

Points to be noted:

• In the above example we are comparing 5 domains side by side. Ideally the first domain would be yours which in this example is hotels.com. So in theory we are finding out the backlink opportunities that Hotels.com is missing but either one of the other 4 domains have utilized.
• The first 2 graphs shows you the change in Authority Score and number of Referring Domains over the time period of last 12 months for all the 5 domains.

Points to be noted:

• You can refine the referring domains by the categories: Best, Weak, Strong, Shared, Unique and All.
• You can sort the domains on the table by Authority Score (AS) and monthly search volume.
• Click on the numbers on the right to view which pages of the competitors are showing up on the search result.

You may examine the backlink networks of up to five rival domains at once with the Backlink Gap tool. SEMrush will show all the reference websites that provide links to these websites when you submit the domains. The filter gives the flexibility to see which websites connect to your rivals but not to you.

With a backlink gap, you can see the evolution of a competitor’s backlink profile overtime on a line graph, a fast filter tool for locating backlinks that your site is lacking. Users may also export their data to Excel and CSV. You can also obtain practical link-building and outreach insights.

You may choose the time on the graph to see how many backlinks got created in the last three months, a year, or all time. You may view any significant remarks from SEMrush or Google that may have influenced the number of backlinks for that particular day.

13. Find Backlink Strength of Multiple Domains – Bulk Backlink Analyzer

The Bulk Backlink Analysis report is a simple but powerful tool to employ for link development opportunities. Fill in the field at the beginning of the analysis with up to 200 URLs (one per line), and the column will update you with information about how many backlinks and originating sites each URL has. You’ll receive a clear image of the market’s mood, and you’ll be able to evaluate backlink profiles using numerous criteria and compare them to your own.

One can obtain each domain’s stats. As a result, you can observe measurements like:

1. visits
2. unique visitors
3. pages
4. average visit duration
5. bounce rate

Assessing your backlinks to rivals is an essential element of market research. It may reveal link-building possibilities in your immediate topic and show you how much further ahead or behind your opponents you are.

Points to be noted:

• The Bulk Backlink analyzer helps you examine the backlink strength of multiple domains side-by-side.
• Use this data to understand from which domains you can find backlink opportunities that you may have missed. Pick the domains with strong backlink portfolio and run them by the Backlink Gap Analysis tool.
• Analyze their No. of Backlinks, Authority Score, combination of Follow/NoFollow to estimat eteh amount of effort that would be required to beat these domains in search results.

Conducting a bulk analysis might help you discover new chances in specific areas of your internet business. It will use Full-fledged Affiliate Partnership Management, Content Creation and Public Relations, Link Building and Media Outreach, and Sales.

14. Find New Link-building Opportunities – SEO Link Building Tool

You can never neglect the importance of link building and the necessity to put up a strong plan that will help you gain high-quality links if you’d like to establish a page on Google. In reality, quality backlinks are still one of the top criteria for ranking well on SERP.

The Link Building Tool compiles a list of link building prospects for your domain and offers you an admin console via which you can execute an engagement effort to get links. It’s simple to do a comparative study on your SEO competitors while still running an outreach effort. You can get a summary of all your link-building actions in one place. One can follow the websites to see if any new prospects have emerged. You may also monitor email statuses and domain changes.

Points to be noted:

• As seen in the table above the the tool gives you a list of suitable backlink opportunities that you can capitalize on.
• Take into account the Authority Score and Rating value while choosing opportunities to pursue.
• Click on the small arrow next to the score to show more details, like which of your competitors already get backlinks from that specific referring domain.

The more high-quality links that lead to your page (and are included in your backlinks), the better you should position on Google and, as a result, generate more organic traffic.

v. Content Marketing for SEO

When you are trying to improve the SEO rankings of your website, it can help a great deal to have well optimized keyword infused content. Great content can not just help you rank better, it can also provide you an opportunity to attract high quality organic backlinks and social shares. 

Having well-optimized relevant content based on your target keywords, can be considered a cornerstone of a good SEO strategy. So when we talk about improving our exposure on search engines organically we cannot leave behind optimization.

15. Find Content Ideas that can bring Results – SEO Topic Research

Topic research aids SEOs, article writers, and marketers in article ideation plans. If you type a topic into the search field, the tool will create cards with relevant subtopics and ideas that are used in your writing. Use it to come up with new article concepts, headlines, and writing themes.

It all starts with objective identification and targeted strategic planning and segmentation when it comes to content marketing. There are several methods for locating content subjects that are relevant to your goals and target audiences. Discovering topics that are of interest to your end user can be attained with help of the SEMrush Topic Research tool.

• It’s only one of several strategies for spotting fresh possibilities and outperforming rivals.
• Find many attracting subtopics and most-shared headlines on any topic quickly.
• Get ideas for material that is particular to a given location.
• Discover the most frequently asked questions about a subject.

Points to be noted:

• The Topic Research tool helps you find content ideas that you can use to get better ranking with your target keywords.
• In the above screenshot we have searched for ideas related to ‘hotels near me’ in ‘United States’. You can change the search location as per your requirement.
• The tool then provides you a list of content ideas in the form of cards, as seen above.
• Click on the ‘Show more’ link at the bottom of a card to expand it.

Points to be noted:

• Once you expand the card it will show the details as seen in the above screenshot.
• You will first see data about the suggested content idea like: potential search volume, difficulty and topic efficiency.
• Then you have the data in 2 columns, Headlines and Questions. And right under it you have Related searches that you can search again to find more ideas.
• Use the questions to form sections within your content.
• Note that you can refine the questions by different themes as: All, What, How, Why, Can, Are, Do and What’s.

It’s critical to have material that sticks out from the crowd if you want to get found online. You’ll need to have software like SEMrush’s Topic Research to generate high quality content for your content marketing strategy. 

16. Create SEO-Ready Content from Start – SEO Content Template

When it comes to content, quality is the key differentiator between you and your competitors. You must generate high-quality content consistently for your website to rank well on Google and get a good flow of traffic to your website. 

It’s simple to operate the SEO Content Template to overview how your writing must appear to do well in SEO once you’ve decided on the proper subjects to cover.

The SEO Content Template from SEMRush makes it easy to build SEO-friendly blog articles and keyword optimized webpages. It takes the guessing out of the equation and facilitates the content generation process making it faster and efficient. You won’t get trapped with preparing with this approach. You get more time to devote to the implementation.

It’s an artificial intelligence-assisted content marketing tool. Here’s how it works:

• You type in one or two keywords that you want to target.
• It compiles data about Google’s top ten most popular pages.
• Provides suggestions on what you must include in your article.

Points to be noted:

• The tool gives you various parameters to create content that is optimized for SEO and ready to rank well.
• Use the Semantically related words to form a theme around your main keyword.
• Backlinks section shows you websites from which you can potentially get backlinks.
• The Readability score and Text length tells you what you must aim for to rank in the top of search results.

Points to be noted:

• Then the tool shows you the top 10 webpages on SERP for the keyword.
• It shows you how they have used the keywords in their content mix.
• You can get an idea about topics to write about and also how/where to insert the relevant keywords.

By offering a template of suggestions relevant to the target keywords, the SEO Content Template assists content creators in creating SEO-friendly content. When you enter a keyword or a combination of keywords, a template will occur. The tool allows you to accomplish more in far less time. As previously said, instead of wasting time in manually researching, you will be able to devote more time to creating content and promoting it to get the desired results.

17. Asses Content Quality while Writing – SEO Writing Assistant

The SEMRush Writing Assistant (SWA) accompanies the SEO Content Template tool. It assists you in writing an SEO-optimized post by running real-time assessments against the SEO Content Template’s suggestions. It’s also one of the SEMRush Content Marketing Toolkit’s products. The SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant (SWA) is a program that examines your blog articles or pages to see if they adhere to SEO best practices.

It displays you results on four distinct parameters:

• Readability: The fluency of your article is linked to how simple or complex it is to read. You’ll obtain a stated goal here based on the top ten sites on Google for that keyword, as determined by your SEO Content Template.

• SEO: As the name implies, this statistic aids you in adhering to on-page SEO best practices for the term you’re targeting.

• Voice tonality: When it comes to generating content, a brand’s tone of voice is crucial. It decides whether your content sounds informative or more pushy like an advert.

• Originality: Any plagiarism in your work is detected and flagged using the originality feature.

Here’s how it works:

• You choose one or two keywords that you wish to rank for.
• Make a template for SEO content.
• Write the text with the help of an SEO Writing Assistant.

The SEO Writing Assistant allows a content creator to assess a section of content’s SEO effectiveness and uniqueness in full detail. Not just that, but you can additionally evaluate how simple it is for users to read that particular piece of text. For more details refer to this SEMrush E-book on writing SEO-friendly content. 

18. Find if your Content is well-optimized – SEO Content Audit

For SEO you cannot emphasize enough the necessity of high-quality content for your website. Quality sites improve the user experience while also establishing authority with search engines. However, because “quality content” is a subjective phrase, how can you be sure that the material on your site is of good quality? Conducting a SEMrush content audit is the simplest method to accomplish this.

A content audit is a vital content marketing technique that entails examining every piece of website content. A thorough content audit ensures that you have a strategy in place. It will help you maintain your content freshness, and you will have everything you need to rank well in SERPs and engage readers.

Conducting a content audit from SEMrush is a perfect starting step. With this, you’ll be able to identify web pages that are outdated and perhaps obsolete, as well as pages with a low number of social shares – both of which are high on your list of things to fix. You may gradually enhance your website’s overall search engine exposure by going back and upgrading your low-performing website content with optimized on-page SEO components.

vi. SEO Tracking and Monitoring

Once you start optimizing your website its important that you are able to track your rankings and analyze the effectiveness of your work. Use the following tools to keep track of your keyword rankings on SERP and figure out how well your content is doing online.

19. Check Website Performance on SERP – Keyword Position Tracking

SEMrush’s Position Tracking assists you in keeping tabs on a website’s everyday ranks for a specific set of keywords. You may focus on any particular country and any device type with your setting. Tagging, sorting, filtering, and exporting reports are just a few of the tools that help marketers locate what they’re searching for in their website’s SEO or PPC performance.

With this tool, you can track your website’s search rankings through the keywords, compare that to your rivals, and find new ways to appear in Google’s top results.

Points to be noted:

• In the first row you get the details of location, keywords, competitors and when was the data last updated.
• Then you get the visibility %, estimated traffic and average position for the saved keywords.
• On the left side (marked with red box) you get a top level details of your keyword ranking distribution. You can see out of 56 saved keywords how many of them rank in top 3, top 10, top 20 and top 100.

Points to be noted:

• Below that you get a graph showing where you and your competitors rank on SERP based on the saved keywords.
• On the right you have the domains sorted based on their visibility for the saved keywords.

Points to be noted:

• Then you will find the table of saved keywords sorted based on their position on Google search result.
• You will be able to find out which of your keywords have triggered a search snippet and their rank on SERP.
• If you select a date range then you will be able to find wat has been the ranking position change over that period of time.

You can track any search term and domain using the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool, including the one of your competitors. You can create projects with your competitor’s domains and monitor their search running movements. 

You’ll receive access to a Search Result Snippet report that will help you find possibilities for featured snippets. Get quick local SEO competitor detection and tracking. To share findings with co-workers and clients, you can instantly download a PDF report.

20. Assess Brand value by Online Mentions – Brand Monitoring

Brand monitoring is essential if you want to know what people are saying about your company. It allows you to take accurate and effective decisions while interacting with a relevant community. 

SEMrush offers Brand Monitoring that records any term or phrase you choose to trace across the internet. It makes it simple for PR professionals and marketing teams to keep track of their brand’s reputation and references on relevant blogs and news sites. 

It offers a simple mentions feed that includes filtering, tagging, labelling, and other capabilities. You may use it to find link-building opportunities. Further Twitter and Instagram streams are available for monitoring brand mentions in tweets. SEMrush’s brand monitoring tool includes a visual graph that allows you to compare the patterns of tracked terms or phrases. It can monitor mentions of certain domains daily. It’s feasible to use Google Analytics to track traffic from remarks with links.

Points to be noted:

• At the top, set the date range for which you wish to see the data.
• In the second row you get info on mentions that the brand has received. Get an idea of total mentions, mentions with backlinks, positive mentions and total estimated reach.
• You can also find out the sentiment of the mentions along with distribution of reach.

Points to be noted:

• When you click on the Mentions tab you get a view like above screenshot.
• The tool allows you to search through mentions and also refine them by sentiment.
• You also get the Authority Score of the domain on which the brand was mentioned.
• As shown in the screen shot above the tool can help you keep track of different information related to a brand. In the above example we are seeing information about blog mention, investments, stock market performance and lot more.

Monitoring your brand with this SEMrush tool is an excellent method to get feedback on your products and services. People may write online reviews and share their thoughts on social media. Some of these viewpoints may even provide suggestions on how to enhance your product. It might assist you in identifying areas where your product is weak so that you can improve it for your consumers.

21. Evaluate Content Success by Shares and Backlinks – Post Tracking

Would it not be awesome to have instant access to the performance stats of each article you come across on the web? 

Keep track of your blog postings as well as the material of your rivals. You may track the performance of your articles that have been published on external sites using post tracking by SEMrush. You can monitor social interaction data, backlink count, referral traffic, and keyword rank daily.

Points to be noted:

• The tool shows you how many backlinks a specific Post/page has received.
• You also get information on social shares, keywords and estimated reach (if applicable).

You can track important metrics for up to 50 articles with Post Tracking. Here’s the information you can get:

• Social shares: The number of times the item got posted on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
• Backlinks:  The number of pages on the internet connects to this article with this backlink audit tool.
• Estimated reach: The projected impact of the item is the number of individuals who may have seen it.
• Referral traffic to your website: The quantity of traffic that arrived at your website because of a post based on your Google Analytics statistics.

With such data, you can see which of your outside pieces are doing best, evaluate different writing sites, and imitate your rivals’ most effective strategies.

vii. Planning and Scaling

22. Execute your SEO Strategy like a Pro – Marketing Calendar

A marketing calendar is an essential tool for all members of your marketing team to plan their efforts efficiently and strengthen your SEO strategy. A content calendar is even more important if you operate either alone or with a small group since it may help you better utilize your time and budget constraints.

SEMrush Marketing Calendar can visualize your goals and assist you in maintaining charge of the process at all levels, from a promotional campaign to the responsibilities of an individual colleague. You may obtain a bird’s eye perspective of your tasks to ensure that they’re all scheduled with annual details in consideration so that you may prepare for content by using Marketing Calendar.

Points to be noted:

• The calendar gives you the option to organize your marketing activities as seen above.

Each group member may view every job they’re accountable for in-depth using the Marketing Calendar. They can also keep track of the activity they’re working on and its present status.

The SEMrush calendar allows you to build a schedule of tasks to accomplish, attach required paperwork, categorize your activities with categories, and set due dates. Having a compatible team is vital. Check out our webinar on picking the right team for SEO. 

23. Record, Analyze, Improve – SEO Performance Reports

My Reports makes creating PDF reports from scratch simple. You’ll be able to deliver the findings of a website audit, give a competitive study, and demonstrate progress following a marketing campaign. To create the best reports for your business, combine modules from hundreds of SEMrush products, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google My Business, and any screenshots and pictures you have.

You may directly view any Semrush data and combine it into a single PDF using the drag-and-drop tools. You may either use pre-existing themes or develop your standard format to create reports. When you access My Reports, you’ll find a list of all the PDFs your profile has generated in the Report List. If you’ve ever made a PDF export and lost it on your desktop, you can locate it here and retrieve it again.

SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO platform. Many of the most creative elements are gone from the beta status, and we now provide almost everything needed for an SEO plan. The lead generation, SEO Ideas, and Keyword Magic tools, in particular, may be helpful assistance in bridging the gap between SEO and sales and marketing. You’re using it one minute to do a site assessment and the next to check website metrics. It transforms into a writing helper the next day. It can assist you with SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, market research, and competition analysis, among other things. 

Sign up for our free trial account, and you can gain access to a training session.