SEMRush On-Page SEO Checker Tutorial
SEMRush On-Page SEO Checker
So just going back over SEMRush webinar that I’ve done lately and was on a tool called the On-Page SEO Checker. I’d done this webinar with Andy Crestodina and you will be able to see the full webinar at the bottom of this page. But this particular video’s just a brief overview of how the tool works, and where you find it and stuff like that.
Where to Find On-Page SEO Checker?
When you log into SEMRush, you’ll be given a main menu down the left-hand side, and then if you click on projects, it will take you to this nice big dashboard here, that will allow you to set up a site audit, position tracking, on-page SEO checker, social media and various other things here that are all fairly useful, depending on what you’re doing.
So it’s this one third along from the left-hand side up the top. On-Page SEO Checker’s going to be the tool we’re talking about today. So if you just click on that. And you allow SEMRush to crawl your website. It will give you a nice overview that looks exactly like this. So you’ll be able to see, I did this on Thursday, March the 7th, which was the day that I did the webinar, and there. So this is the dashboard.
Very simple and easy to use. The first thing I want to talk about is, see if you have any feedback in any SEMRush tool. Up the top here you can send feedback if you want to request that SEMRush add any kind of features that you think will be helpful. They’re fairly good at listening to requests from people if they’re sensible.
On-Page SEO Checker Integrates with Search Console
But we’re going to look at what’s new in the On-Page SEO Checker. So it’s got a nice user-friendly interface. You can integrate the tool with Google Search Console, which will give you a lot more data. It gives you benchmarking, it gives your top 10 rivals. The top 10 rivals being the people that are on the top 10 positions in Google for your search terms. Task prioritization, so you can see on the left-hand side, which we’ll look at in a moment, which looks like that. So things will have three kinds of gold or yellow marks. That is a high priority. And then it goes down to two and one for things that they may see as less important.
It also does have cert feature ideas, so feature snippets and reviews and various other bits and bobs. So it’s a great tool. Doesn’t do anything spectacular or anything here at all, but it’s very simple and easy to use, and if you’re doing client work, why not stick your tool through here and see what the suggestions are and then start to implement them? So you’ll be able to see here, I’ve got 35 backlink ideas, 33 technical ideas, no user experience, five featured snippet ideas, 35 semantic ideas and 104 content ideas. So, no matter who you are, there’s always going to be new ideas and suggestions, more content, whatever it’s going to be. More links or whatever. So there’s always going to be something useful comes from the back of this tool.
Optimisation Ideas?
So optimization ideas. We can look at any of the pages on the website, so it gives you priority three, two, and then if you scroll down it’ll go to one. And it gives you different ideas for different pages. And it gives you the kind of total search volume for those pages as well. And you can see what you want to implement here, so the further down the list you go, the less search volume there is, so you might not want to push ahead with some of those ideas, but certainly work from the top and work your way down.
So you can also use the filters here. So it gives you the priority. The page, so that’s the URL of your website, the keywords, the search volume, and you can also use this little filter here if you just look for … If you’re only wanting cert feature ideas, then you can just find out about those, or if it’s backlinks ideas, then I’m sure most of your pages can do with backlinks. Technical issues and so on. So you can filter those down, or you can keep it as all ideas. Gives you the last updates and any actions so you can delete the page, edit keywords, do whatever you want. You can also import keywords and pages, either manually, using the search console, .csv file, or whatever you may want to do.
So, we can click on, say, the truth about click fraud and stuff like that. So if you click on the URL, on the top right-hand side, you can send any of this information to Trello, it’s quite important if you’re using staff to do that. But you can see here, there’s no keyword cannibalization. Search needs no improvements. If there was an issue or if you’d another page in your website that’s targeting the same kind of keywords, then it would tell you that there are potential issues there.
On-Page SEO Content Ideas
Then you’ve got content, so it’s telling me to use header one tags, it’s making my content more readable, provide a more relevant meta description, and everything else looks to be fine there. Page content’s long enough and stuff like that as well. Semantic ideas, so enrich your page content. So there certainly is room for improvement on that.
As always, there’s going to be room for improvement on links, getting backlinks and stuff like that. We can also look at any kind of technical issues. There’s nothing on there at all, but there could be things like dodgy title tags, duplicate content, whatever it may be. And there’s also user experience. Page loads quickly enough, time on site is high enough, and the page has a low bounce rate. So they’re all good. And obviously, that data pulls from the search console.
So if you have something here that’s flagging up, for example, semantic. You can click on see detailed analysis and it gives you a whole bunch of information here. AdWords campaign, I’m using it. Rivals are using this word, these amount of times. This is my website and the percentages of the word or phrase usage against my rivals. And then you’ve obviously got TF, IDF here as well, and these are all things that you can look at against your rivals and tweak it accordingly and as you see fit.
You can also look at keyword usage, backlinks, content length, video usage. No one’s really using videos on particular search terms. And readability. So, I’ve got 64 … It’s based out of zero to 100, zero being hard, 100 is easy.
So mine is up there fairly high compared to some of the others. There are other people there that readability’s not so high. So you can look at these kinds of things and go into more detail on your optimization ideas for anything, whatever it is going to be.
Benchmarking
So, benchmarking, you can obviously use a typing filter here, and you can also show keywords that trigger the feature snippets first. And you can view the full analysis here, and it will give you the kind of … My page has only got 315 words. The top 10 average is 1500. So that’s something I potentially have to look at for that particular search term.
Referring domain names, my page has zero. The top 10 average of 35. Top 10 also use videos. I don’t have a video on that page. So, there’s a massive amount of improvement I could do on that particular blog post that I’ve got on my website. And you can see all the guys … I’m a way down there, I haven’t put anywhere near as much time or effort into that particular blog post that I’ve got on there, so a massive amount of room for improvement there, compared to some of the guys that are ranking really well.
Idea Tasks for On-Page SEO
Idea tasks. So, keywords. It will tell me that I’ve got stuff to do. And people will often ask, “How do you then mark this as done?” When SEMRush crawls your website and see that I have implemented, some header one tags using tagged keywords, next time it crawls it, it will eliminate that from the to-do list and it’ll mark it as done. So you’ve got a filter here where it gives you all the kind of task ideas. Then you’ve got 219 to-dos, and then you’ve got 95 that are done.
So, there’s a lot of work for anyone to be doing on their website. No one has a perfect website. So the On-Page SEO Checker is really simple and easy to use. It is also really good that you can pull this data onto a pdf and show it to clients, so if you’re doing client work you can obviously pull this stuff off, and obviously show them that you’re working on specific ideas, or you’ve got some benchmarking stuff that you think you’re weak on, and we need to work on this, because some people allow the client to do the content part, so you can certainly pull this information, send it to the client, and say, “We’re going to have to up the content because we’ve only got 300 words against everyone else who’s got an average of 1500 keywords.
So that is, in a nutshell, how the On-Page SEO Checker works on SEMRush. Quite a cool, tidy, simple, and easy to use tool on there, and I’m sure with anything it will always look to improve and add little functions and features. So if you have any questions, do get in touch with SEMRush, they’re always open to helping. Hopefully, you enjoyed the video. Thank you.
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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