Today, you’re going to learn the hands-on skills you need to rank at the top of Google, even if you’re not an SEO expert. Semrush has all the tools you need to hit your web traffic goals, and we’ve got a simple framework for you to follow to make the most of it. Let’s jump in. To get a special 14-day trial of Semrush Pro, head to the following website. You can click on the card in the top right, or you can click on the link in the description below. From the homepage, click "Try it free." Fill in your account details, and then click "Create account." Then enter the verification code sent to your email and click "Confirm email." Next, fill in your billing information. You won’t be charged until you complete your 14-day trial. When you’re done, click on "Place the order." Great. Let’s get to the good stuff. Click "Start using Semrush." You’ll see a lot of tools on the left-hand side. Each tool is a specific piece of the SEO puzzle. Okay, so if you’re new to Semrush, you’re probably thinking there are over 20 tools here. How do I even get started? So, let’s make it simple. What is the problem? You need to bring in web traffic that generates leads that create sales. To help you create that traffic, we’ve created a framework to follow called the Rocket Traffic Triangle. You just need to implement the three Cs, content, connections, and corrections. Content is what your audience and Google sees on your website, which boosts your search ranking. Connections, also known as backlinks. The more well-known sites link to your site, the more authority your site has, which boosts your search rankings. And number three, corrections. You have to fix any technical problems which might hurt your ranking. Okay, back to Semrush. We’re going to use a real site for this tutorial called folk.app. It’s a real CRM. We have no affiliation with them, but I think it’s a good example of what you might face. It’s a newer business entering a very crowded market. Remember the first C is content. And one purpose of content is to get our website to show up in Google when users search for certain keywords. Let’s click on the keyword magic tool. This tool helps you find the best keyword opportunities for your website to rank high. You start with a keyword related to your niche. So, let’s start with CRM for startups. And then let’s add our domain folk.app so that Semrush can tailor its recommendations for us. I’ll click search. Pay attention to the total volume first. With only 2,160 searches per month and 480 for CRM for startups, we could focus on this, but it wouldn’t bring us much value over time. Let’s broaden our search by just searching for CRM for and then clicking search. 152,000 searches a month is a lot better. Let’s go through what each of these columns means so we can narrow down the keywords to target. Intent helps you understand the likely goal of the person searching this term. There are four different intents. Navigational, help me get to a website. Informational, give me more info on this topic. Commercial, help inform my purchase decision. And transactional, help me make a purchase. You’ll see these abbreviated as NIC and T. Volume is the approximate number of searches per month. Then there’s KD and PKD. These stand for keyword difficulty and personalized keyword difficulty respectively. The lower the difficulty, the easier it is to rank higher for that search term. Personalized keyword difficulty takes into account your site’s current authority. So for example, even though best CRM for real estate might only have a 38% keyword difficulty, the 70% personalized keyword difficulty means that we’ll likely have to do a lot more work than expected to improve our ranking. CPC or cost per click is the average price an advertiser would pay on Google ads for these keywords. And I like two other columns that aren’t shown, both trend and competitive density. Trend shows you a keyword’s popularity over the past 12 months. Avoid keywords that had spikes of popularity, but may not be relevant anymore. Competitive density is a measure from zero to one of how many other competitors are fighting for ad space on that keyword. A higher number means more competitors. Now to find achievable keywords, we need to look for high volume and low competition, so let’s filter for a personal keyword difficulty from zero to 49% and see what we get. So, we’ve got a pretty low volume here, so let’s expand this from zero to 49 to zero to 69. Let’s pick a few keywords to focus on. This is sorted by monthly search volume, so let’s try to stay near the top. We’ll choose a mix of commercial keywords like CRM for small businesses, CRM for realtors, for financial advisors, nonprofits, and some informational ones like what a CRM stand for, what a CRM and so on. Even though these might be really tough for us to go after the fact is that we’re in this market and we’re in this space and we need to be treated as more of an authority on these topics. Okay, let’s add all these keywords to a new list. We’ll call this day one keywords and click the check mark to save that. Now we can refer to these later. The next set of keywords to consider are the ones we already rank highly for but not high enough. Did you know, for example, that the top search result in Google could get up to 40% of the clicks with top five getting almost 70%? So, to find these, we’ll click on the organic research tool under competitive research, type in your website and click search. Let’s look for keywords where we’re ranked between two and 15 and click apply and then sort by volume. Let’s look through the table and add more keywords to our list. Looks like there are a lot going to our free email generator tool that we could capitalize more on. There’s also an interesting one down here a little bit called Google Sheets CRM template that we should try for. Let’s also add these to our keyword list day one. Our final source of inspiration for keywords comes from what our competitors rank for but we don’t. To find out what those keywords are, click on the keyword gap tool. Our site is already here. Let’s add some competitors. Semrush suggests some competitors but let’s go all in and add HubSpot and PipeDrive, and zixflow.com then click compare. You definitely get a sense for the authority of some of your competitors but don’t despair. Everybody was small once. If you scroll down, you can find keyword details. I think the most interesting list is the missing keywords which show you all the keywords that your competitors are ranked for but you’re not. We should definitely have content for sales CRM and real estate CRM. So, let’s check those and again add them to our day one list. Through this exercise you’d likely end up with a lot more than 14 keywords but regardless of your count you need to turn these keywords into an actionable content plan. This is where the new keyword strategy builder tool comes into play. Click on this tool under keyword research. Now in previous versions of Semrush you’d start with the keyword list that you just created but one problem is you want to maximize the keywords you target with the content that you write and 14 keywords really isn’t enough. Instead, we’ll use the research we just did to create seed keywords that Semrush can expand to give us a content strategy. We’ll type in the major themes of the keywords that we just looked at and click create list. This can take a few minutes so we’ll come back when Semrush finishes. Now Semrush has taken those five keywords and generated over 2,000 keywords for us to create content for and it organizes this content into seven different content pillars each with its own set of topic pages and subtopics. Some pillars are expected like best CRM for real estate. If we click on it, we can see all the keywords that content for this page would support. You can also collapse this keyword list and see all the subtopic pages that Semrush thinks you should write about too. Scrolling down more you can also see content pillars that we didn’t expect like CRM experience. Now of course you still need to audit these there are some things we’re not going to write about like Salesforce Dream Cloud Meeting. One thing’s for certain though with over 280 pages generated you won’t ever suffer from blank page syndrome, but we’re not done yet. Semrush will also help us write the best content for each of these pages. Let’s go back up to best CRM for real estate and then click on write content on the right side. Then click on send keywords to go to the SEO writing assistant. Here you can author your article and Semrush will score it based on metrics that matter to search like readability, tone of voice, originality, and of course good SEO practices. As an example, let’s import an existing article and see what it finds. Click on import text from web and then let’s pull in the number one search result for best CRM for real estate and click import. Semrush checks the page and it finds it mediocre. You can scroll down to see a number of recommendations including readability, SEO challenges, and even tone of voice. Click on any recommendation to get more specifics for your article. Now if you’re stuck even earlier because you don’t know what to write about check out Semrush’s new app Content Shake AI which will generate these articles for you. You can find a link to it in the description. Wow we’ve just covered the toughest part of the three C’s content. Let’s move on to connections to give all of our pages a boost. Connections is all about backlinks. Backlinks are links from other sites to your site. They build the authority of your website which results in higher search rankings. First, we’ll analyze our current backlink state and fix any issues we can find. Go back to the home page by scrolling up and clicking on projects. Then type your domain into the website name text box and click start now to activate Semrush Copilot. Copilot helps you focus on the most important pieces of your SEO strategy by giving you recommendations right on your home page. Let’s see what they have to say about backlinks. When you scroll down, you’ll see a section called backlinks lost. Let’s click on it to launch the backlink analytics tool. There might be some opportunities here. Let’s scroll down to the referring domains and sort by authority score so we see the most important sites that we’ve lost links from. First up is Notion.so. Let’s expand the backlink section to see what we’re missing. We can see this is actually our help site article built inside of Notion. Notion has recently changed the links from Notion.so to a subdomain like folkapp.notion.site, so there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s move on. Next up is curiosity.ai. If we expand the links section here, we can see that they published a top 10 list of apps that folk was likely a part of. Based on these two very similar URLs and the first seen and the last seen dates, it looks like they changed this URL to the second URL. If we actually go to this page, we can see that folk is still on the site with a link still intact. So, this alert may just be out of date. Given the low authority scores of these remaining backlinks lost, we decide it’s not worth our time to optimize for these links. Let’s move on to look at broken pages. These are backlinks to pages on our site that no longer exist. These send negative signals to search engine crawlers indicating an outdated or poorly maintained website which might penalize your ranking. Click on index pages. Then check where it says broken pages. Sort by the number of backlinks broken. One thing that sticks out is our terms of use and privacy pages. We can investigate the referring sites by clicking on domains. If we then expand where it says backlinks, we can see this looks like an app index that folk was once a part of. Since it’s only one domain with a relatively low authority score, it’s a business decision on whether it’s worth fixing these links. It looks like we’re in decent shape with our existing backlinks. Now let’s see what opportunities we have for new backlinks based on what our competitors have that we don’t. Scroll up and click on the backlink gap tool under competitive research. We’ll add our three competitors here. HubSpot, Zixflow, and PipeDrive, and then click on find prospects. Zoho looks like a great opportunity here. You can see how they leverage a lot of HubSpot’s content marketing in their own posts. And it’s likely because there’s an integration between these two products. So, this might not just be a good SEO strategy, but also a good partnership strategy for folk as well. Now remember, the goal of this page is to help you find all the domains that you’d like to acquire backlinks from. Once you’ve found those domains, you can keep track of them by checking them off, so we’ll check off Call Hippo, Your Story, and Zoho. And then click on start outreach in the top right. From here, you can select your project and then click on send prospects to go to the link building tool. We’re not going to cover this today, but it’s essentially a mini-CRM inside of Semrush to help you manage outreach to the right contacts at each of these websites so they can add backlinks for you. And if you’re interested in getting more backlinks, check out Semrush’s blog post here, which we’ll also put in the description. On to the final C, corrections. This is about fixing the technical issues your site has, which may impact your search ranking. Fortunately, Semrush has a great tool for this called the site audit. We’ll exit the backlink tool and click on projects to get back to the homepage. Then we’ll click set up under site audit for our folk.app project. This tool will help you identify major SEO issues to take care of. Semrush identifies these issues by crawling your website. So, we need to configure this crawler to make sure it’s crawling the right pages. Let’s go through these settings together. First, I only want to crawl the main domain, not subdomains. Second, we need to tell the crawler how many pages to check. If you don’t know how many pages you have, here’s a simple trick. Go to Google and search for site colon, your domain and click search. Then click on tools, and you can see about how many pages Google has indexed in the top right. So, let’s go back to the crawl settings and change this from 100 to 1,000 pages. Crawl source allows you to tell Semrush to either crawl the whole website using its own links, a sitemap or a static list of URLs. We’ll keep the default and click on crawler settings next. If your website blocks traffic from specific user agents or you’re worried about overloading your server by crawling pages too quickly, you can adjust these settings here. You can also control whether Semrush tries to render JavaScript content. This is useful if you have a lot of dynamic content on your pages. We’ll stick with the default and then click on allow slash disallow URLs. Here you can allow or disallow certain subdirectories on your website. We don’t have any changes to make here, so we’ll skip it and click on remove URL parameters. I know there’s a few special URL parameters that we have that I don’t want Semrush to think are different pages, so I’ll add them here and then click on bypass website restrictions. Here are some options to audit pages that you tell Google not to crawl or to crawl a site that requires a username and password, usually for a site that hasn’t been released to the public yet. This doesn’t apply to us, so we’ll click on schedule. Let’s just do this crawl once and then click on start site audit. This is going to take a few minutes, so we’ll come back later. Okay, the crawl is complete. There’s 111 errors to work through. Let’s take a look at them by clicking on the 111. Even if you’re not technical, Semrush does a good job of breaking down what errors are, why it’s important to fix them, and how to fix them. Let’s look at the first one. 57 pages have duplicate meta descriptions. Semrush explains that duplicate meta descriptions can confuse both search engines and people to tell between these two different pages. Let’s dive in by clicking on 57 pages. Let’s sort by number of duplicates and wow, 37 pages. Let’s investigate by clicking on the 37 pages link. It looks like all of our prompt templates use the same description. We can click on the first example and then view the page source to see if that’s really the case. If we search for description, we can see what we have here, and we see copy this prompt directly into your folk or let it serve as inspiration for your own. It’s pretty likely that this is something that got copied and pasted across all of our templates, so Semrush is right on point. Looks like we have a big opportunity to improve because all of these templates should have a great standalone presence on the search results page. Let’s go back to the main issues list. When you do this for your own website, tackle the low-hanging fruit first. What stands out to me on this page are the duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, broken internal links, and the 4xx status codes. We’ve covered content, connections, and corrections, but what about the fourth dimension? Time. With all this work you’re putting in, you need to know if you’re improving, so let’s dive deeper into how you can measure your progress. Okay, you know what to do. Let’s get back to the homepage by clicking on projects. Copilot will draw your attention to its most important recommendations first, like drop-in traffic and any changes to keywords you might be tracking. Let’s get an overall picture of our traffic because that’s the main metric that we’re after. Click on domain overview under competitive research. Type in your website and click search. Pay attention to the organic traffic and organic keyword sections. You can easily see both long-term and short-term trends. This confirms what Copilot said on the previous page, that our traffic is declining. You can use this tool to figure out if any of the changes you’re making are having a positive impact on both your traffic and your keyword rankings. Finally, you remember that list of keywords that we created earlier. Let’s look at how our rank for those keywords is changing over time. Let’s find it again by going to the keyword strategy builder tool. This time click the name of your list, check all the keywords, then click export to CSV. Open the file and then copy all of the keywords out of the second column. Now let’s track our rank for these keywords. We’ll go back to Semrush and click on position tracking under keyword research. We’ll enter our domain and click setup, and then we’ll use the United States as the country to analyze our ranks from. Click continue to keywords and paste the keywords you copied earlier into the text box. Then uncheck or leave checked the option to send weekly updates via email and then click start tracking. This will take a few minutes so we’ll come back when Semrush finishes. Okay, now it’s done. Let’s click on overview. And you see you have the start of a dashboard that will track your keyword ranking position for every one of these keywords every week. So, you’ve seen a lot of power in Semrush today. Before we close out, let’s talk about pricing. Everything I showed you today is part of the pro plan. And if you only have one site to manage, it’s a good fit. As an entrepreneur myself, here’s a simple question I use to evaluate these kinds of tools. If you could use Semrush to increase your web traffic by 20 to 30%, how much more money would you make? For a lot of businesses, that would more than justify the cost. That was a monster tutorial. You learned how Semrush can help you with the three C’s to get to the top of Google: Content, Connections, and Corrections. And as a bonus, you saw how to check your progress over time. If you learned something today, please give us a like and don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and let us know in the comments if you want to see any part of Semrush in more detail. This is David signing out, and I’ll see you next time.