SEO.
SEM.
UGH! Google is always changing how they rank and you try to optimize your site, but are you making any headway?
For a lot of small businesses and non-profits, it is a guess and pray strategy.
Now, most people don’t need to rank on the first page of Google for their business, but it would be nice to be optimized so that people can find you in the map packs and other places, right?
First, what’s a map pack? Here is one I just pulled up for restaurants near me:
Depending on what you do, you still want to be found and while you might not be willing or able to spend a lot of time and money on optimizing for search engine optimization, tools like SEMrush come in handy.
I am in love with SEMrush. I used it off and on for a while, but now I am logging into it every day and working on my client site audits.
Here is an overview of some of the tools that you can use in SEMrush and what they can do for you:
- Site Audit- This is my favorite, and if you want to run a site health check on your site, you can do it right from our resources page here. Don’t know where to start with your site or how your site is doing? This is a great place to start. It will share with you all about any technical and SEO mistakes you could have on your website. It also helps you to prioritize each of the issues and create a plan of attack
- Do you have a page that doesn’t’ work anymore?
- Are you linking to a page that doesn’t exist anymore?
- Do all of your pages have meta descriptions?
- Are all of your pages secure or do you have HTTP and HTTPS mixed together?
- Keyword Research- So you are ready to optimize for search, but what words are you optimizing for? Yes. SEMrush helps with this. They have a keyword overview tool, organic research where you can find what your competitors are ranking for, a keyword magic tool that will provide you with ideas, the gap between you and your competition, track and manage keywords, and get insights into your website’s organic search performance.
- On-page SEO suggestions- Yes, they will actually give you ideas based on what is performing well for certain topics and how you can improve your page to rank for keywords you want to track.
- Content Marketing- it will help with content creation, distribution, optimization, and analytics of your content.
- Social Media- They will actually post and track your social media performance.
That’s a lot of stuff, but when you think about it, they all work together to provide you with great results in search.
There is also their academy that will give you great insight into what you need to know to optimize for search.
It has a wealth of information and can make SEO a bit easier to understand and manage.
They offer a free trial too where you can check it out and if you have a bit of time to work on your SEO, I recommend you check it out.
I am not affiliated with SEMrush, but if you are interested, check out their website at SEMrush.com or keep things simple, run your site audit on our website and I would be happy to explain what the different items mean and give you some tips on how to improve your search engine rankings.
Check out my overview of the SEO Dashboard in SEMrush if you are curious about it here: