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If we’ve already set up a project, we can either set up a campaign or a new project on the Position Tracking page. When setting up a campaign, we can give a scope specifying whether we want to track the entire domain, a subdomain, subfolder or URL, search engine, device, and location. We can also include a business name if we want to track how well our business is doing in Google’s Local Pack, but this is optional. As the next step, we’ll give a list of keywords to track our campaign's progress for those keywords.

With this information, we can start tracking our campaign's position in SERPs. For an even better picture of where we stand, we can add competitors, up to twenty, to see how well we’re performing when compared to our competitors.

Once we’ve set up a campaign on Position Tracking, the tool will send us a daily update of our rank via email.

Position Tracking gives us access to multiple reports, each with a unique purpose.

Landscape report

The Landscape report gives us a high-level view of our target campaign’s performance. We can adjust the report for the date range and the main website, which we can set as either our own or one of the competitors we’ve added to the campaign. For the filters we have set, the report gives us some important rank-tracking metrics, including visibility, estimated traffic, and the average position for all the keywords we’ve added to the campaign. It also shows a list of top keywords for our campaign, in addition to positive impact keywords, whose ranking is improving, and negative impact keywords, which include the ones whose rankings are falling the most over the recent time frame.

Overview report

Position Tracking Overview shows our website’s visibility, traffic, and our site’s position for the keywords we are tracking. The report starts with a Visibility Trend chart, which can be configured to show us the Share of Voice, visibility, estimated traffic, and average position over time. Share of voice shows how often our website shows up on Google for all the searches and not just for the keywords we are tracking. For instance, if we are ranking high for a keyword that gets only a hundred searches per month, our visibility will be high, but our Share of Voice will be low. If we want to see these graphs against our competitors, we can add those, too. Semrush allows us to add up to five competitors in the Overview report at a time.

Below the graph, there’s a table to show the current values of the position, visibility, and estimated traffic. We can also configure it to see the values of one of our competitors. We can also add or delete keywords from our campaign through the same report by clicking the "Keywords" tab.

There are plenty of other things we can do with the Overview report, including creating a PDF export of the metrics.

Other reports

We have discussed the Landscape and Overview report, but there are plenty of other tabs that we can go to in the Position Tracking tool. Each of these tabs gives us a different report showing metrics relevant to the context of that report.

For instance, the Rankings Distribution report compares our competitors’ performances in Google Search results. Among other things, it shows us how many Top 3, Top 10, Top 20, and Top 100 positions the competitor holds for the keywords in the campaign.

Then there’s a "Tags" tab that lets us track the growth metrics for our tagged keyword groups. It shows the same metrics as the Overview report, including share of voice, visibility, estimated traffic, and average position, but the metrics for each group, if we have grouped our campaign keywords by tags, can be seen from the Tag’s report.

Another useful report is available in the "Cannibalization" tab. The Cannibalization report lets us keep our site’s cannibalization health in check and notify us of any problematic pages that need fixing.

Site Audit

Once we have a good idea of where our website stands in search engines through the Position Tracking tool, the next task in our SEO campaign should be a site audit. If Semrush is our go-to SEO tool, this task can be performed through the Site Audit tool.

Semrush’s Site Audit allows us to perform a rigorous analysis of our site’s health through over 140 technical and on-page SEO checks. Similar to Position Tracking, Site Audit offers multiple reports on different topics.

To start using Site Audit, we will first need to provide the website URL, subdomain, or subfolder that we want to audit in the Crawl Scope, along with the limit of pages we want crawled for each audit and the source of the crawl. The source can be our website, sitemaps on our site, a link to the sitemap, or a list of URLs in a file.

There are also optional settings that we may configure for optimized results, such as the crawler settings, allow/disallow URLs, and more.

After configuring our Site Audit project, there are different reports that we can use to review our site’s health and improve it.

Overview report

The most basic metric here is the Site Health Score that the crawler generates, considering the errors and warnings associated with the crawled pages. We can also see the number of errors, warnings, and notices the crawler encountered on our site. Under the Top Issues heading, we’ll find a list of issues in our project sorted by their priority.

Thematics report

Above the Top Issues section in the Overview report, there’s a Thematics report section where we’ll see our site’s score for seven common issues. Clicking on any of these will take us to the detailed report on the topic. The Crawlability report, for example, will show if our site’s pages are easily accessible by the search engine. The HTTPS implementation report tells us if our website is secure and notifies us in case there are any security-related issues on our site or its pages.

Issues

Next to the "Overview" tab is the "Issues" tab, where we can see a list of errors, warnings, notices, or all of these related to our project. Each issue has a "Why" and "How to Fix It" button that we can click to learn how to resolve the problem. We can also go to the Progress report for each of these issues. This will take us to the Progress tab, where we can see how this issue has behaved over a time frame.

Other reports

There are some additional reports that can be resourceful. Crawled Pages report, for instance, shows us issues linked to each page that the tool crawls. The Statistics report shows details of certain other metrics related to the crawled pages. These include page markups, crawl depth, pages in sitemap vs. the actual pages crawled, and more.

Competitive analysis

Once we’ve used the two tools discussed above to understand our position in search engines and run an audit on our site to fix the visible issues, it’s time to uplift our site’s SEO. For that, Semrush offers a series of tools, some targeting competitive analysis, among other things. There are six different reports in Semrush to learn from our competitors.

The Competitors report in the Organic Research tool gives us a list of all the websites we compete against for organic rankings. The tool looks up the ranking keywords for the queried domain and pulls out a list of domains ranking for the same keywords.

There’s also a Competitors report on the Backlinks Analytics tool to give us a list of websites that share the most backlinks with our site. This report can help us find new link building opportunities for our website and grow our backlink profile.

The Organic Research tool pulls out our competitors in the case where we are ranking for certain keywords. If we have just started our website and are not currently ranking in search results, we can still benefit from looking up our competitors. In this case, we can go to the Competitors report in the Position Tracking tool. Here, we’ll find a list of competitor websites for the keywords we are targeting.

Under the Advertising Research tool, we’ll find another Competitors report, which shows us the websites that we compete with in paid search campaigns. The competition level measured here is based on the shared paid keywords and how our and our competitor’s total paid keyword count compares.

Keyword research

We already know that keyword research is a fundamental part of SEO. Semrush offers plenty of resources to collect lucrative keywords for us to work with. As with competitive analysis or any other area of SEO, Semrush offers a series of different routes to conduct our keyword research.

The first step is to brainstorm keywords relevant to our topic. For that, we can go to the Keyword Overview page in Semrush.

Here, we can type our topic/s and get plenty of useful information on it. For our entered phrase/s, you will know the search volume, keyword difficulty, search intent, top websites ranking for it, related keywords, questions, and variations of the keyword.

Once we have a list of useful keywords we want to target, we can create a list of these in the Keyword Manager tool to make them easier to track.

With the initial list of keywords, we can generate more ideas using the Keyword Magic tool. The list of keywords generated gives us the search volumes, keyword difficulty, search intent, and other important metrics all in one place to help us pick the most profitable keywords and add them to our master list.

If we want to benefit from our competitor’s keyword research, we can go to the Organic Research tool. Here, we can enter a domain and find out a list of keywords they are ranking for in organic search results. If our competitors are ranking for a keyword, targeting the keyword might also be a good idea for our site’s SEO, too.

Once we start ranking for keywords, there are ways to improve our current keyword profile. Semrush offers a Keyword Gap tool that we can use to compare your keyword profile against that of our competitors and make important discoveries on the SEO gaps in our profile that need to be filled. Through this tool, we can spot keywords that our competitors are ranking for and that we have missed. We can optimize our website for the new keyword opportunities we find here.

Link building

Once we have a website in place and have optimized it for keywords, we will need to build its backlink profile. Semrush includes a collection of link building tools to work on our backlink profile. With a new website, it’s not easy to know which websites to target for an inbound link to our website.

So, to get started, the first tool we should go to is Backlink Analytics. In this tool, we can enter a website we want to analyze the link profile of. If we already have a website, we can also enter our own domain to review its backlinks. For new website owners looking for link building opportunities, it’s a good idea to enter competitors’ domains to take a look at their backlinks. If we go to the Backlinks tab, we can see a list of backlinks for the website, their anchor text, target URL, and other related information.

On the "Referring Domains" tab, we can see a list of unique domains giving links to the website we entered. This can help us build a list of backlink opportunities for our own website.

If we want to enter a bunch of websites and pull out their backlinks altogether, we can go to the Bulk Analysis tool under the Link Building toolset category of Semrush. It lets us enter up to 200 competitors in a single go to pull out link building opportunities from them for our own website.

Semrush also offers the Link Building tool to streamline our outreach campaign. If we already have a Project set up on Semrush, we can create a link building campaign on the same Project. We may also choose to create a new Project to start our link building campaign on. Next, we have to enter a list of keywords and a list of competitors whose backlinks we want to acquire.

Once we start our campaign, the Link Building tool offers us tabs for Domain Prospects, Domains in Progress, and Monitored Domains. In the Domain Prospects tab, we’ll find domains worth getting a backlink from. We can move the ones we want to get links from to the Domains in Progress tab. In the Domains in Progress tab, we can send out emails to these domains, while in the Monitored Domains tab, we can track the progress of the backlinks we’re working on.

Additionals

Though the tools we discussed above have covered the basics of organic SEO, there are plenty of other resources that Semrush offers to help our online marketing as a whole. Just like SEO, it offers toolsets for advertising, social media, content marketing, and more.

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