No wonder, if you really want your online project to achieve visibility and success, there are a number of things you just can’t do without . Taking care of the SEO of your site is one of them.

On the other hand, for really effective SEO work, you do need good tools . There are many free ones such as the Google AdWords keyword planner , Keyword Tool or Übersuggest , which are very good to start with, but soon fall short when you discover that there are very powerful things that make a difference and that you cannot do with these tools.

A very clear example is SEO based on the analysis of the competition . In the post you will see how tremendously powerful it is, although, unfortunately, with free tools you simply cannot carry it out.

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Comprehensive and affordable SEO tools are hard to find

The problem before SEMrush came on the scene is that paid professional tools are usually quite expensive and very specialized .

For example: Ahrefs is great for backlinks, Keyword Finder is three-quarters of the same for keyword analysis , Buzzsumo is the go-to for social media analytics , Sistrix is famous for domain analysis and visibility, etc, etc, etc. etc.

You start adding up and hundreds of euros a month come out.

SEMrush is the “All in One” among SEO tools

Therefore, when I discovered SEMrush it seemed like a breath of fresh air because it finally changes this frustrating situation with professional SEO tools:

  1. It is currently one of the most complete within the professional SEO tools, perhaps even the most complete of all, ideal for working comfortably, efficiently and quickly.
  2. You have a free option that, although limited in functionality like the other freemium tools, is not as limited as most of the others, due to this it already provides some value in its free version and is not subject to a trial period, you can use it indefinitely.
  3. The professional paid options (I use the basic one) have affordable prices . If we add the corresponding Sistrix modules, for example, they multiply the price of SEMrush.
  4. It is easy to use . You don’t have to be an SEO crack to use it well. It has a user interface that I find very successful and intuitive.
  5. It evolves at a very good pace , constantly incorporating improvements and new features.

In addition to all this, we have achieved special conditions for our readers to be able to use it for free without limitations.

I’ll tell you about it at the end of this post, although I strongly recommend that you read the post before jumping to the end ?

Analysis of the competition. Tutorial with SEMrush

Ok, so after the preludes to create a bit of context, let’s dive straight into the flour and see what can be done with this tool and how it is used.

Since SEMrush is such a huge tool that it is impossible to do it even justice in a single post, in this one I am going to focus on the “star features” of SEMrush that revolve around competitor analysis . This is a discipline within SEO that if you did not know it, I assure you that just by knowing it, it will be worth it to read the post.

The analysis of the competition is something tremendously powerful for your SEO work. You will see that, among many other things, you can consider, for example, an alternative keyword research strategy , very different from the traditional way of doing it and much faster and more efficient. When you know this, it is likely that you will practically no longer do a “traditional” keyword research process, except for specific reasons. This is what happened to me with this issue.

I assure you that what SEMrush is capable of discovering from a website makes it a tool hated by more than one webmaster…

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1. What then is the analysis of the competition or “domain analysis”?

As you’re probably already guessing, in the context of SEMrush, the term “competition” is largely synonymous with “keyword matching” .

Performing a competitor analysis with SEMrush is very simple: As soon as you enter SEMrush, you will see a search box above. Here you can enter keywords to analyze a search niche or a website domain to analyze the domain. For a competition analysis we will do the latter.

For this case, I have chosen an example that seems spectacular to me and that, in fact, is widely cited among experts for its excellent work at the SEO level: It is zalando , an online shoe and clothing store that has achieved a incredible positioning in a very short time , as you can see in the screenshot below.

I assure you that at this moment there are many SEO professionals and amateurs gutting this case ?

So type “zalando.es” in the general SEMrush search engine that I mentioned (top of the image) and choose Spain as the country (below the search engine).

You will see a screen like this:

2. SEMrush Main Report

What information can we extract from here?

As you can see in the screenshot, there is a first row with 4 groups of data with information summary tables that can be broken down further down the page:

  1. Organic Search (organic searches) : In this summary table you can see an estimate of the monthly organic traffic (from Google), the number of keywords from which it comes and the cost of this traffic (what it would cost to obtain it by paying Google AdSense ) , along with the ranking that the site occupies in terms of traffic with respect to other sites in SEMrush, an indicator of SEMrush that is comparable to the famous Alexa ranking.
  2. Paid Search (paid traffic) : “Paid traffic” is the concept behind the acronym SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and refers to the traffic that comes from online ads , specifically Google AdWords . Along with this you can see the number of specific keywords that the analyzed site is paying for .
  3. Backlinks (incoming links) : In this section you can see the incoming links to the analyzed website (backlinks). This module is one of the most recent and it shows: it is not one of the strongest parts of SEMrush , the number of links it shows is not as complete as, for example, in the case of Ahrefs. But it is already very useful because they include interesting things like, for example, the anchor texts used, etc. In addition, it is only a matter of time before this module evolves in the number of links that its database registers.
  4. Display advertising : This is a very recent module, in beta right now, that allows you to analyze your competitors’ advertising. It allows you to do things like, for example, analyze the design of ad headlines, subheads, images, layout, call-to-action, which landing pages they lead to, and special incentives from competitor ads and industry leaders to find what has worked best for them and apply it too.

3. Identify competitors (at the SEO level and at the business level)

If you scroll on the previous screen, you will reach the section that can be seen in the following screenshot. Additionally, SEMrush maintains a header with the above summary information.

Here I want to focus first on the “Main Competitors” section , that is, the sites that SEMrush identifies as your main competition, which means that they are the ones that share the largest number of keywords with you and are the best positioned in them. . Certainly very interesting information.

If you look at the screenshot above, there are several “View full report” buttons . With these buttons you access the detailed view of the information of each section.

If you click on the button in the “Main Competitors” section , you will see a very interesting list that breaks down the following:

  • Your competitor’s domain.
  • Their level of competition with you.
  • The common keywords you have with it.
  • The keywords for which that competitor is ranking.
  • Etc.

But in addition, you can continue to navigate through the data with links to drill down further. That is, for example, it is very interesting to break down the column of common keywords.

Thus, if we click on the link of the common keywords with shopalike.es (“Common keywords” column), we will see this screen in which I have also added a filter (a little further down you will see what it is) to limit the comparison to the keywords in which these two sites compete for the first three positions in Google:

Anyway, I don’t want to delve deeper because the post is getting away, but I think that with these examples it is already clear to what extent you can control your competition with these SEMrush functions, it is something spectacular.

Now, not everything is competing for positions in Google. Keep in mind that collaboration is often better than competition .

In this sense, you can also use this tool to do things such as, for example, identify similar blogs for networking , look for interesting collaboration channels for both parties, propose a guest post or a mutual exchange of posts, focus on analyzing strengths/weaknesses from the other site to complement each other in a coordinated manner and strengthen both parties through beneficial collaborations on those points (classic example: selling products as an affiliate of the other), etc., etc.

4. Do an organic analysis of your competition

If you remember, in the screenshot of the detail sections of the main report, apart from a “Main Competitors” section , there was also a “Top Keywords ” section, that is, the most important keywords of the analyzed website .

Here you will also find again a “View full report” button that will take you to a screen like the following:

And here we have again a very complete information with data such as:

  • The key word
  • Position that the site occupies for that keyword or phrase in the search results (SERPs)
  • An estimate of the % of traffic that keyword is bringing to the site
  • The page (URL) found at that position
  • The search volume for that keyword in the chosen country
  • Estimated CPC (cost per click) for AdWords ads
  • Up/down search trend over the last 12 months
  • Etc.

5. Go straight to the point with SEMrush filters

One problem you will run into now is that if you want to go in and find interesting keywords, you will see that SEMrush lists a total of 40,000, which is a huge number.

It’s great to have this many keywords on a site, but it’s also an unmanageable amount.

The question that arises then is:

Can this be circumvented to get directly to the keywords that really interest us without having to go through tens of thousands of them?

And the answer is “yes”: thanks to the SEMrush filters (look at the “Filters” button in the previous screenshot) with which this information can be segmented really well according to your needs.

You can filter by each of the columns (ie 10 criteria) and combine multiple filters with each other. Therefore, you have an enormous information segmentation capacity . With a good criterion you will get directly to what interests you in each case in a matter of seconds.

A simple example:

Suppose you have a fashion blog, you want to talk about shoes and you are interested in what interests people in relation to shoes.

An obvious way to segment is with the “shoe” filter, that is, filter for those searches that have the word “shoe” among their keywords (which also includes “shoes”).

You will see that with this filter almost 4,000 results continue to come out. It’s great that there is so much variety of searches in this niche, but there are still too many.

So let’s narrow it down a bit more. Suppose your site has a medium authority, for example, a DA (from Moz) of around 30 and you want to focus on searches where the competition to rank within the first 3-4 positions in Google is affordable for you. site.

This always depends on each niche, but for a domain authority like this, a reasonable first starting point might be to analyze keywords for searches up to a volume of 1000 searches per month.

By the way, if you do not handle terms like “authority” or “competition” well, I recommend this 10-minute read before continuing because without being clear about them, it is absurd to pretend to use a professional tool like SEMrush.

So let’s do a first quick filter to see “what’s going on” in this range of searches that are already quite sweet: we filter by the word “shoe” + a monthly search volume of between 500 and 1000 monthly searches. Additionally, we will sort the result in decreasing order of search volume.

Below you can see the result:

If you analyze the difficulty of competing for these keywords with SEMrush’s own difficulty estimation tool or (a bit more by hand) using the famous MozBar viewing for these Google search results, you’ll find quite a few keywords with a volume of search of 1,000 and with competition that seems affordable with a little work.

For example: for “online party shoes” (which you can see in the screenshot) there are many positions on the first page of Google that do not even have an exact match in the title of the keywords and among those that do, many They have a low page authority.

Three quarters of the same with “skechers shoes” (it is no longer in the screenshot and it also has 1,000 searches/month). He would even say at first glance that this case is possibly still a bit more affordable.

So here you have two good opportunities to position content such as “Where to buy party shoes online” or “10 super-original skechers shoes” .

These are just two specific examples, but there are dozens of them just in this segment…

Do you realize the power and efficiency of finding keywords this way?

Let’s reflect for a moment a little more on why this way of finding keywords is so much more powerful than what you can do with free tools like, for example, the AdWords Keyword Planner.

It is, in my opinion, mainly for these reasons:

  1. Instead of having to “guess” seed words to discover possible keywords, this method takes you directly to the best ones, the ones that other websites have already identified as the best or the ones that have also been appearing as good by chance. searches.
  2. This translates directly into saving hours and hours of niche analysis. You see at once which are the ones that are working best for your competition and you can make a good selection with dozens of them in minutes.
  3. You are going to find keywords that trying to guess them you would never have found because they are not obvious or even counter-intuitive.
  4. You will get a much more complete and accurate impression of your SEO strength compared to other competitors if you compare yourself with them in an analysis of this type since you can see what positioning other sites comparable to yours have achieved.
  5. You will know which content is giving them the most traffic.
  6. You can use the analysis of the competition as a source of inspiration to devise new content on your blog or website that also responds to a demand that you know for sure exists.
  7. If you combine it with a traditional keyword analysis you will also be able to see which keywords your competition has not yet taken advantage of. It can be an opportunity to detect weaknesses in your competition and take advantage of them.

That is, in short, if you realize, what we are talking about is another level of SEO, of being able to literally “gut” your competition at the SEO level. Just brutal, don’t you think?

And all this, is it ethical…?

Working in this way is so extremely effective that I have to admit that the first time I saw it, it gave me a certain “bad vibe”, it even seemed to me that it bordered on the ethical.

It is possible that something similar happens to you and that is why I think you may be interested in what personal conclusion I have reached after reflecting a little more calmly on the subject. But now I don’t want to cut the thread of the post either and that is why I refer you to Annex I at the end of the post.

an important comment

Another important comment I would like to make is the following:

If you’re familiar with analyzed site traffic, you may have noticed that SEMrush (and any other tool) only shows a portion of the total organic traffic that you can see in tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools. Don’t worry, nothing happens, because the information displayed by SEMrush is what really interests you.

It is not trivial to explain why this is so and I do not want to hinder the reading of the post with this, so I have also included an annex dedicated to it, Annex II.

Other things you can do with SEMrush that we will see another day

Returning to the thread of what we can do with SEMrush, I think that with the examples of competitive analysis tools that you have seen, you can already get a pretty good idea of ??how powerful a professional SEO tool like SEMrush is.

However, I want to remind you that what we have seen is only a small part of what this tool is capable of. That’s why I don’t want to close the post without at least giving you an overview of other SEMrush features that, in my opinion, are among the most outstanding and useful for a blogger.

1. Keyword analysis + related term suggestions

With SEMrush, of course, you can also do “normal” keyword analysis. To do this, simply enter the keywords in the search box in which we previously entered the domains of the websites that we wanted to analyze in the competition analysis. SEMrush knows when it’s about keywords and when it’s about domains and acts accordingly.

Also, this is done very well with SEMrush because it creates a very handy chart that shows the following:

  1. Searches that contain the keywords you have indicated
  2. Related keyword suggestions
  3. Google results for keywords
  4. And even the AdSense ads that Google shows for these keywords

And logically we can again use the powerful SEMrush filters that we saw before, with all the advantages that this entails to do this job much more efficiently.

2. URL Analysis

The analysis of URLs is a kind of analysis of the competition like the one we did before “in small”, that is, at the level of a specific page.

In this way, instead of gutting the entire domain as we did before, in this case we can focus on “spying” on the specific keywords from which a specific URL receives its traffic. Extremely interesting.

3. Estimate the difficulty of positioning

Earlier we talked about how to estimate the difficulty of competing for a certain search in a more or less manual way based on the PA and DA values ??that the famous MozBar shows for the different results of that search, together with the degree of coincidence of the keywords with the title and URL in the search result. It is a common way to perform this task.

SEMrush provides a tool that does something similar: the summary of the estimated difficulty for that search expressed as a %. This estimation is fundamentally based on the domain authority of the sites that rank in the first 20 positions and is therefore a simpler estimation technique.

However, I find this tool very interesting to quickly and roughly filter the most affordable alternatives between different keywords in a large niche, make a kind of pre-selection, and thus be able to focus your manual analysis on them and thus save considerable time.

4. Track your positions in the SERPs

Another fundamental task that you should do if you take your SEO work seriously is to have a list of the keywords for which you have been trying to position yourself and keep track of how you are doing for each of them.

There are free tools that do this quite well with the best one I’ve tried being CuteRank. But we come back to the same thing: the limitations of free tools.

I have used CuteRank for quite some time, but in its free version it is limited to one domain and, above all, I am tired of the limitations of being a desktop application. In other words, you can only use it on the computer on which you have installed it, you cannot consult the information at any time and as we are used to doing with web applications.

With SEMrush you don’t have that problem, it’s a web application and therefore you have access to it from anywhere you have internet access. It may seem silly, but in practice this issue has been very annoying to me when using CuteRank.

5. Backlinks

If you do serious SEO work, you’ll want to go beyond the limited information that Google’s Webmaster Tools offers about inbound links. With Google’s tool you will only know the total number of links and the total number of domains that link to each of your pages and to your site as a whole, together with a list of anchor texts (but without knowing which URLs they correspond to). That’s basically it.

It is very poor information that lacks things such as being able to know, for example, the distribution of anchor texts for a URL (to assess the “naturalness” of your links), the sequence in time in which the links to see if you are getting links at a reasonable rate or to detect problems such as negative SEO attacks, for example.

However, with SEMrush you have:

  • All of the above +
  • Time when the backlink was detected
  • Anchor text of each backlink
  • Type of link: follow / no follow
  • Link source: text, image, form
  • Distribution by domain types (.com, .org, etc.)
  • Distribution by IPs
  • Distribution by countries

Now, it is clear that this module is still very recent because it still has some weaknesses. If it is compared, for example, with Ahrefs, the number of links it identifies is quite low and in the various lists the complete filters that SEMrush has in the other modules are missing.

But in any case, it looks very good and it is only a matter of time before SEMrush corrects these weaknesses.

6. Site audit

Another thing that should be part of a complete SEO job is to audit your website. To do this, in SEMrush an audit project is created that can be scheduled.

In this audit, several dozen criteria are checked, such as the following:

  • Absence of important elements of SEO On Page (h1, h2, meta-description, etc.)
  • Errors in these elements (duplicate tags, excessively long titles, etc.)
  • broken links
  • site speed
  • Missing sitemap.xml
  • Images without ALT attribute
  • Etc., etc.

Once the analysis is finished, SEMrush will display a report with the results marking the different problems according to their severity. In addition, you can configure it to run with a certain frequency and notify you of the results. For example, once a week.

7. Online advertising modules

A final group of functionalities that cannot go unmentioned are the modules related to online advertising, specifically online advertising based on AdSense and AdWords.

Actually, it is a fairly large group within the tool that is made up of three specific modules:

  • Advertising : focuses on AdSense advertising that is seen at the top of the results.
  • Display Advertising : focuses on display advertising (ads that appear embedded within a web design page).
  • PLA Research : revolves around the “Product Listing Ads” which are product ads with photos and price included that appear for certain searches. If you search, for example, “shoes” you will get ads for all kinds of shoes from different brands that will usually take you to the product page in the corresponding online store.

There are many things that can be done with these three modules, some of them spectacular.

As an example I leave you again a functionality of analysis of the competition. In this case, the list of keywords for which zalando.es ads appear, along with a graph that shows very well when the company has invested in advertising and what budgets it has managed approximately:

But what’s more, this screen has niceties like if you click on the “Block” column it shows you exactly the ad as it appears in the search:

Tremendous, right? Well, we have only seen some of the things you can do with this tool, I assure you.

Conclusions and reflections

Although we have not seen all the details, I think that right now you can already perfectly intuit how complete this tool is and why I have called it the “All in One” of SEO tools.

Not surprisingly, SEMrush has had a very strong impact on the community and has earned its position as the reference SEO tool that it enjoys today.

Who is this tool for?

Well, very simple: in principle for anyone who has a website, it is what SEO has ?

If you really want your project to take off and reach a large audience in a reasonably close time there are two things that I highly recommend you learn, at least at a basic level: SEO and copywriting.

It is no coincidence that the two eBooks that you can download for free from this blog touch on these very topics. They are pillars in any project and have been logically also in Citizen 2.0. I assure you that you will understand very clearly why this is so if you tell them.

The case of this same blog is a very clear case: especially thanks to SEO, in less than 3 years it had already exceeded 100,000 monthly visits (right now it is around 150-160,000). It’s as simple as doing SEO has allowed me to know very precisely what exactly people in my niche demand and then create the content to provide it.

In that sense, I am very surprised that there are still gurus out there who dare to say nonsense like the only thing that matters is good content, that with this the traffic only arrives and that SEO is useless for projects that start.

Now… Well, you can wait sitting down if you pay attention to that advice.

The truth is that good content does indeed generate traffic and links. But this only happens when you already have an audience of a certain size because then your audience does a very important job of spreading the word for you by sharing your content, which obviously would not happen if it is bad. Even small viral effects can occur if you hit the nail on the head with some content.

So yes, indeed the quality of the content is critical. But at first it will be of little use to you if that content does not even see it or Blas.

For this reason, precisely at the beginning, together with intense dissemination work through other channels such as social networks, content aggregators, etc., is when you have to do SEO, which, in reality, is nothing more than simply doing a study of lifelong market applied to the network to discover what people are looking for (demand) in this environment. This way you can take this demand into account when you plan and create your content and optimize its positioning in Google as best as possible to get people, first, to see them and, second, to read them (thanks to good copywriting in the titles and rest of the content). content).

Plain old common sense, right?

And now the guru will come and tell me: “but if Google during the first 3 months is going to ignore you completely”

Now… but have you thought that if the content you make during those 3 months is done without rhyme or reason, it is almost certain that 80-90% will not be positioned in life and, however, if you apply SEO from the beginning, when Over time, your blog begins to gain a little authority against Google. That content is going to position itself and you are going to make it profitable for the rest instead of throwing it away?

All this without counting that if you get the odd link soon those 3 months become a month or less.

If Google itself recommends that you do SEO , then there will be some truth in all this, don’t you think?

In short, if you don’t want to wait years to grow in traffic and audience at a good pace, one of the best things you can do is start with SEO from day one.

When is it worth paying for SEMrush?

Possibly the previous arguments are convincing to you, however, the approximately €60 + VAT per month that SEMrush costs at the current exchange rate in its “Pro” version for most mortals is not a small thing. Normal.

How to assess then if it may be worth spending this money?

Well, logically, analyzing what is the return on investment that it can bring you.

This is difficult to assess a priori without knowing in advance the results you have achieved using it, but I propose the following criteria for reflection and analysis:

  • How much time do you dedicate to the SEO of your content per month and how much do you think SEMrush would save you, along with an economic valuation of your time.
  • How many hours you have for activity on your blog per week. That is, what is the impact of saving X hours per month on your project.
  • If your project is a personal project, a simple hobby or you have a project with professional aspirations.
  • Does your blog already generate income or do you think it will generate it?
  • What economic potential do you see for your blog in the medium / long term?
  • What is the SEO potential for your blog.
  • Do you want to tap into that potential really thoroughly?
  • How much are you willing to pay for the “pleasure” of using a professional SEO tool?

We have seen compelling examples of how using SEMrush you can obtain spectacular savings in the time of classic SEO tasks such as keyword analysis. A task that takes hours can be practically converted into minutes with SEMrush.

The question is how much do you value being able to save an hour of your time? At €5, €10, €20, €50…?

A student who has few or no financial resources, but time, is not the same as a person who already works and has financial resources, but also a family to care for and barely 10 or fewer hours a week to carry out their blog project. . It is clear that these two profiles are going to give very different economic values ??at the time.

For my part, for example, I am in the second case and I can tell you that right now I prefer to have one more hour to develop the blog than to perform a service that pays me €50 an hour. Therefore, from this perspective alone, if SEMrush saves me a little more than an hour a month, it is worth paying.

And of course if you have little time, but your blog already generates significant income (let’s say at least a few hundred euros per month), I think there is little to think about whether or not it is worth making an investment in making a More elaborate SEO if you are not already doing it and a tool like SEMrush.

Also, keep in mind one thing: nobody says that you have to pay every month.

In other words, if you organize yourself well and are rigorous, a very interesting tactic is to focus for, for example, a month on the content strategy for the rest of the year and, as part of this, concentrate all your SEO work on that period as well. . In this way, it is enough for you to pay only one month for the SEO tool.

Now, be careful, because not all niches are the same. There are much easier niches at the SEO level than others. Therefore, this must be taken into account. From what I have been able to see in the first person, for example, niches such as literature blogs, poetry blogs, etc. have seemed particularly complicated at the SEO level. (I am referring to blogs to disseminate own work, not that they speak of works by third parties).

In other words, SEO does not have the same potential in all niches. If the niche does not have good SEO potential, then it is logically more than doubtful that it is worth investing in a professional paid tool.

So before making any decision, you should be clear on this aspect by doing a first preliminary investigation with free tools such as the AdWords keyword planner, for example. And if you see that the niche has some potential, seriously consider going all out with a professional tool, even if that means paying.

Annex I: Is a tool like SEMrush ethical?

As I mentioned at the beginning, the first time I saw to what extent with a competitor analysis tool like SEMrush you can gut other websites, the first thing that came to mind was if that was not already crossing the red line.

On the other hand, the idea that anyone can come and gut the keywords and ideas that you have applied in your SEO work, a job of years, did not stop bothering me a bit. The truth is that it sucks.

A feeling like this invades many people who have a website.

Now, if you think about it calmly, something is wrong here : One tends to think that the keywords that he discovers and in which he manages to position himself well are “his”, as if they were gold nuggets that you find in a river. But this is not the case, the keywords are not yours, they belong to Google and, furthermore, they are 100% public .

What SEMrush does, in fact, can be done perfectly “by hand” by organizing the most relevant searches of a niche, entering them in Google and writing down, for example, in spreadsheets the websites that are appearing and their positions.

The simple thing with SEMrush is that it does this tremendously tedious job for you, and you can reap the rewards of that labor in seconds by checking out the tool. It does not discover any secrets, nor does it spy on private data, it simply organizes information that is already public in a very efficient way.

Therefore, in my opinion, there is no ethical problem of any kind here.

You simply have to be clear that these are Google’s rules and if you want to benefit from the advantages of appearing in their searches, you also have to know how to accept the “disadvantages”.

Annex II: Why the traffic estimated by SEMrush is much lower than the real one and why this is not a problem

In many cases you will see that the traffic estimated by SEMrush is significantly lower than the real traffic of the website in question. The first impression that one can get is that the tool is incomplete and immediately doubt that in these conditions it is worth using it.

Well, this is not the case mainly for two reasons:

  1. SEMrush only counts traffic from organic searches . Traffic that does not come from search is obviously not relevant to the purpose of this tool and, therefore, does not enter the accounts.
  2. Within this organic traffic, SEMrush focuses on really relevant searches. There is a lot of long-tail “moral” that is left out and that is irrelevant at the level of SEO strategies .

You can see this very well if you analyze your website traffic with Google Webmaster Tools . You will see that there are a huge number of very long tail keywords (4 or more words), with very few searches per month (less than 4 or 5 per month) that are, shall we say, “accidental”, but that nevertheless carry a lot of traffic to your website.

For example:

Also, if you analyze it a bit at the SEO level, you can see very well how green Raquel and I were on the subject of SEO then ?

Between a poor SEO and the low authority of the blog at that time, it was never able to position itself strongly in the “retouch photos” niche that we intended and that only for the exact search for “retouch photos” has 3,600 searches per month in Spain. .

However, it has generated quite a nice “accidental” traffic (2,000 visits/month) with a “super-long” tail, as you can see in the screenshot of my Google Webmaster Tools account below:

The really relevant searches are the ones that contain the words “retouch” and “photos”. Note that search is only a small fraction (about 1,000) of total search result impressions (over 40,000).

From here comes hundreds of long tail searches with even only 1 search and totally arbitrary. The last search that you can see in the capture, “photo editor with background of the same photo” has been searched 12 times in a month, but it is already a very representative example.

These types of “super-long” tail searches are the ones that SEMrush leaves out because for an SEO strategy it makes no sense to look at them. However, the sum of all of them is typically responsible for the vast majority of organic traffic on a website.

If you put “retouch photos” in SEMrush, it will show you +200 searches that contain these two words and that are the ones that you should really focus on to try to position yourself in this niche. You will see that we have only “picked up” relevant traffic from five of these searches in this example.

If we had had SEMrush at the time, we would surely have managed to optimize and position this post much better knowing all these really relevant searches, in addition to surely obtaining even more super-long-tail traffic.