SEMRush Organic Research Tool

Hi guys, so just a quick overview of the Organic Research tool on SEMrush. Recently done a webinar with Aleyda Solis which went well. You can see the full webinar at the bottom of this page, but this is just a quick recap on how the tool works, what it does and everything else that you can do with it.

So first of all, where do you find the Organic Research tool? When you log into SEMrush you’ve got your Dashboard over on the left-hand side and if you click on Domain Analytics you’ll see the second one down is the Organic Research tool.

If you click the Organic Research button it will open up a nice dashboard like this and you’ll be able to see here exactly what the tool does. So you can explore your rivals’ keyword rankings on desktop and mobile, view their landing pages displayed in the SERPs, see how much traffic a search term is bringing organically, find new organic competitors and observe domain position changes. So quite a cool tool. It saves you doing a lot of manual grunt work, which is I’m sure something that all of us want to try and avoid.

First things first you select the right database, in my case it’s going to be the U.K. version. I’m just going to put in my own domain name for test purposes and then you press this green search button that will show the graph dashboard and everything else.

I’m going to talk you through some of the stuff here, so if you want to change the database you can select the option here. Device, whether it’s desktop or mobile, you can also select that there. You can look in January, February, Merch and various other dates there. If you want to go back to historical data and if you want to change the currency to Dollars for your average cost per clicking stuff like that then you have a look at that.

This is just the brief overview where you can see everything, as you can see my website started in 2016 and this graph will show you all of the progress over the years. Not a huge amount of progress. I don’t do a huge amount of blogging, it’s more of a reference point.

It does show you the kind of top organic keywords. SEMrush they do a lot of webinars and do a lot of tutorials, so I’m position 1 for that particular search term which gets 18000 searches a month and so on. You can scroll all the way down there. You’ll be able to see the different volumes, which is hugely important. And obviously the percentage of sales traffic that those particular keywords bring in.

You can click on ‘View all organic keywords’ and you’ll be able to see all of that data. You can also see the kind of SERP Features. You’ve got local packed stuff, knowledge graphs, answers, news and so on. You can see everything that your URL has got based on those SERP Features. You can also see the top pages, how many keywords the particular pages rank for and things like that as well which is quite cool and you can also see top subdomains and stuff like that as well. That’s just the other version of my website, the non-www version of my website.

But for example, say we had a test.craigcampbellseo it’s quite good to see here whether that’s been indexed or not and if keywords are pulling up. It just gives you a quick chance to go in and make sure that any subdomain names not due to be indexed by Google are not actually getting picked up, so quite a cool little bit there to look at for top subdomains. Main organic competitors, you can see all your main organic competitors based in keywords and stuff like that as well.

So again, quite a cool feature, but I’m not going to go into any more detail on the overview because when we scroll across on these tabs here it drills down into all of that data.

Positions are the next tab and it will show you your organic search positions which in this case is 586. Now there is a bunch of filters here where you can actually just look at your top ten positions which I’ve got 52 of them. You can search by volume and you can use other advanced filters as well or filter by keywords. At the moment I’m not going to have any filters on. This gives you a kind of overview of all the keywords and stuff like that, that’s on there.

Craig Campbell:

Now over on the right-hand side, you can manage the columns. If you don’t want to see say the traffic percentages or the cost per click or the costs or competitive density or the results, you can eliminate all of these by unticking these boxes. You can also use on the right-hand side here, there’s a little icon you can drag and drop if you want to see traffic first for example. That’s quite a cool feature.

You can also export this data over here on the right-hand side if you wanted to give all of that data to a client if you were showing them anything there. Up at the top right-hand side you have the PDF button where you can actually export as a PDF. So just bear that in mind if you’re wanting to use that kind of stuff to show clients what you’re up to or any good information or whatever it may be.

Normally what you have down here is all the position changes and the difference in the positions or somethings were up two or three positions. It will tell you that. At the moment it seems we have no data to show. I’m not sure why that is, but again, you can manage the columns, you can export the data, and you can also export it as a PDF if you wanted to show people the position changes as a result of your work.

Next up is Competitors Again, you can export as a PDF, export the data or you can actually just drill down into the competitors’ data as well. But you’ve also got this Competitive Positioning Map which shows you a nice little graph of where you are compared to your competition, and as I say, you can then further drill down into the common keywords and various other things they’re working with you and your competition.

I don’t want to delve too much into that. Just want to stay focused on the Organic Research tool. Pages, it will show you all your pages and again, you can export this as a pdf here. You do have advanced filters and you can filter by URL. But what is quite cool is you can see the traffic that for example my homepage gets, the number of keywords that it ranks for and the backlinks that particular page has got as well.

Sadly I was made to face the odds by someone who decided to ram everything at my homepage which is fine. You know, just that stuff but that’s why that’s showing that amount of backlinks.

But keep on top of that if you ever do come up against that, but you’ll be able to see some of the other pages. I’ve just got a couple of backlinks here and there and that’s what you would expect to have throughout your website. But it does show your top performing pages based on keywords these pages rank for and stuff like that, so you want to make sure you keep on top of that.

Subdomains, as I say, you want to make sure that your subdomain names are not being indexed. So for example, if you’ve got a test website or other parts of your website that you may be used for something else, you don’t want that stuff indexed or maybe you do. If you do then fair play. You can look at the traffic and stuff like that that it’s ranking for, but for me in most cases, I think people have test websites and stuff like that which they will build on subdomain names and this is a good place where you can actually see if that’s happening to you.

In general, that is the Organic Research tool. As I say you can use it for a lot of things. You can delve further down into the data. And as I say you can then delve down into using other tools. So for example, if you go into common keywords between myself and Jump Online, it brings you up into the Keyword Gap tool and we can see where the gap is and if there are any opportunities that Jump Online are ranking for that I’m not.

So it does migrate into other tools, the Organic Research tool is something I use on a regular basis and it’s just good, personally speaking, to be able to see your position jumps etc it’s perfect. That’s one of my favourite features, the position changes. So that is something I would highly recommend that you use.

As I say, data is key to this whole game and it’s just another great feature by SEMrush. Just making the job easier, not having to do all the manual work. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years. In this time I have gained extensive knowledge in the subject of SEO and have build up a wealth of experience in SEO and other digital marketing services.

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Craig Campbell

I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.

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