Blog SEO Expert » Tools and Utilities

SEMRush Review – Free SEO / SEM tool to analyze your keywords (and your competition!)

Blog SEO Expert — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:59:40 +0000

SEMRush - SEO Keyword Research & Analysis Tool

Ever wanted to know what your keywords are, and the other websites / blogs competing for them? Want to know your competitor’s main keywords? Want to know the main Google AdWords keywords for a blog? Want to know the search engine and AdWords traffic to a site?

SEMRush is the tool for you – its free, and it does all of the above! Here are all the things you can do with SEMRush in detail.

What keywords your competitors use

When you pout a domain name in the search box and hit search, you would get the keywords for which the domain gets traffic from Google, their positions, number of queries per month and more.

The results can be sorted by keyword’s position, percentage of traffic and estimated cost of targeted visitors coming to this site from Google search results. You can also export this data and analyze it offline.

To know what keywords that blog or website buys in Google AdWords, just go to the report “AdWords Keywords” where you will be able to view all the keywords from that site’s AdWords Campaign. You can sort and export this data as well.

[sniplet SEMRush_Banner]

Collect list of best keywords to optimize for your site

When you generate the report for your domain (as explained above), go to the “Google Organic Keywords” report and export it to a file. Open this file in Excel (or another spreadsheet program), and sort it by position in reverse order. You will get the list of keywords for which your blog already has enough high positions in Google SERP.

You can take this list and further optimize your blog posts for these keywords, drawing even more search engine traffic. It’s the easiest way to collect long-tail keywords for your blog.

Obtain related keywords

This can be used to get appropriate keywords for your blog. This is most useful when you are doing the initial keyword research for your blog, but can also be used while researching individual blog posts.

Begin with the main keyword, and generate the report for it. You can know how much a click costs for this keyword in AdWords, the average number of searches for it, and the competition of advertisers in AdWords for that term. The trends column shows changes in volume of searches for this keyword.

If you want to get more phrases that include your main keyword, go to the “Full Search” report. You can also export those results and sort & analyze them in Excel. You get details like the average number of queries per month, CPC and the number of search results in Google SERP. This is how you can find all queries with your min keyword in them.

For getting related keywords, open the “Related keywords” report where you can get queries similar to your main keyword. You can export this report as well.

Obtain common keywords for your domain and your competitors’

When you get the main report for your domain, go to “Competitors in Google” or “Competitors in AdWords” reports to get the list of your competitors in Google SERP or Google AdWords respectively. Then click on the numbers in “Common keywords” column and look at the reports “Competing organic keywords” or “Competing AdWords keywords”. Here, you would get the keywords that are being used by both you and your competitor’s sites!

Use SEMRush now – its FREE!

As you see, there are a lots of tools available at SEMRush. You can also be creative and use the data for innovative purposes!

So start using the SEMRush tool now!

Readers who found this post were searching for:

competion sem keywords, leave comments on competitors blogs, semrush market samurai

What factors to check in your site’s traffic analysis package for better SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 10:02:01 +0000

Too many factors – Prioritize

A site traffic analysis package like Google Analytics provides lots of matrices to you. If you check each of them daily, you would not be able to do anything else!

The way out is to prioritize and look at the most important factors every day. The others can be observed once a week or once in two weeks.

So, what are the factors that you should be monitoring daily to check your SEO effectiveness? Here we go.

Keywords used by people to find your site on search engines

This is the most important factor, and I am sure this is something that most of you would be already monitoring!

This list shows you which terms people are using in search engines to find your blog or website.

(Image source)

Here is what you can do through this list:

Once you know what terms are popularly being used to arrive at your blog, you can fine-tune your posts or pages for them for a further increase in traffic
When you see a high bounce rate for some terms and phrases, you can check your posts and rewrite them such that they cater better to topics related to those terms
You get ideas for writing new posts from the search phrases people use – what can be better than writing a post that answers a reader’s direct query?

Top landing pages

This is a list of pages that people have used to enter your blog or website. That is, this is a list of pages that people first arrived at on your blog. It can be through a search engine result page (SERP), or through a link from some other blog or website.

Why is this list important?

You can fine-tune these posts or pages (for the search terms used by your visitors) for a further increase in traffic (Check out “Keyword placement – where to put the keywords in a post” for more)
Once you know some posts are good entry points to your blog, you can provide links to other relevant content from these posts and pages

Referring sites

Apart from the traffic from search engines, people would also be coming to your blog through external links. This is a list of such blogs and websites that have been referring people to your blog.

This list will show you the effectiveness of your link building efforts.

If you have been commenting on other blogs and website for getting traffic and backlinks, you can also judge how effective it has been.

Sources of traffic to your site – breakup

This is a breakup of your traffic as per the source – it generally divides you traffic as:

Referred by search engines
Referred by other blogs and websites
Direct traffic (people who typed in your blog URL in the browser address bar)

This shows you mow much traffic you are getting from different sources.

If search engine traffic shows an increase over a few days and weeks, it means that your SEO efforts have been effective.

If referral traffic (visitors referred to you blog by other blogs and websites) shows an increase over a few days and weeks, it means that your efforts for getting backlinks have been successful.

Average time on site

This factor indicates the average time spent by a visitor on your blog or website per visit. The higher this number, the more interesting (or sticky) is your blog for readers.

When people spend more time on your site, it implies that they are getting a good experience on your site – both in terms of content and usability.

Both these are extremely important in the eyes of search engines like Google. We have discussed this earlier – please check out:

Readers who found this post were searching for:

factors of site analysis

Review of Google Analytics – A great tool to measure effectiveness of your SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:35:19 +0000

What is the aim of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

“Why SEO” – this is a very basic question that gets asked very often.

The answer is simple: We do search engine optimization to get more unpaid search traffic from various search engines like Google (also known as organic traffic).

In short, better SEO = More traffic from search engines.

Measuring what we want to improve

Since we set out to improve visitor traffic by doing SEO, the first thing that we need to do is to measure the traffic to your blog.

Unless you can measure the traffic, how can you know how effective is your SEO effort?

So, the very first step for you is to find a good traffic analysis tool if you don’t already have one. That way, you would know any change in traffic that happens due to your SEO.

You would also be able to analyze the changes in traffic patterns, and would be able to pinpoint what SEO steps are more effective for your blog or website.

(Wondering what you should look at in Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your SEO? Please read “What factors to check in your site’s traffic analysis package for better SEO”)

Google Analytics – The best

If you haven’t chosen a traffic analysis / visitor statistic analysis tool, here is what I always recommend: Google Analytics. In fact, you can opt for it even if you are already using some other website traffic analysis tool.

It is a great, absolutely free tool from the Google stable. Anyone, from any country, can register for Google Analytics.

If you have an existing Google account, you can easily register using that as well.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a JavaScript based traffic analysis tool.

When you register your blog or website for Google Analytics, you are given a small JavaScript code snippet that you need to put on all the web pages of your blog or website.

The ideal way to do this is to include the code in the template of the website, so that it automatically gets inserted into all the web pages!

What can be measured?

Google Analytics is a tool that would never stop to amaze you – it is capable of measuring LOTS of things about site traffic.

Here are just a few important matrices that Google Analytics would provide:

Number of page views
Number of visits
Number of unique visitors
Number of pages per visit
Bounce rate
Average time on site
Percentage of new visits
Referring sites
Analysis of sources of traffic to your site
Top landing pages
Top content of your blog or website
Keywords used by people to find your site on search engines

(Don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the terms – we would be discussing them here in the coming weeks)

You can view most of this data for any period you choose – from just one day to a few years! And you can specify exact date ranges for which you want to check the data.

Remember – this is just a fraction of the features available from Google Analytics. You have to try it to get the feel of the power of this tool!

How does Google Analytics look?

Here’s a screenshot of Google Analytics:

Sign up for Google Analytics now!

Signing up for Google Analytics is easy (and free) – don’t delay it!

Here’s the link: http://www.google.com/analytics/