How We Used Semrush To Build a Solid SEO Foundation & Ongoing Strategy

 

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As most SEOs know, it is very rare to get the chance to create and implement an SEO strategy for a brand new website. You typically inherit a website, and more often than not, it is one that wasn’t built with a solid SEO foundation. Ultimately, much of your time is spent doing a full overhaul of optimizations and otherwise cleaning up mistakes that have been made over the years.

Fortunately for us at Liquid, we were recently chosen to compete in the 2019 Wix SEO Competition as the Wix SEO Haters and, therefore given the opportunity to start from scratch.

While we were certainly hesitant to participate in a contest like this after reading this tweet from John Mueller:

We saw this as an opportunity to test new tactics and teach clients and others the importance of implementing a well-planned SEO, on-going content creation, and link-building strategy.

With our team’s expertise in a myriad of digital marketing areas combined with the toolset SEMrush offers, we were very confident in our ability to perform well and (hopefully) win the contest.

Our Experience with SEMrush

We have been using SEMrush as our preferred tool for years. In a market flooded with SEO tools, we think what SEMrush has to offer is superior to its competitors.

They have a unique advantage, in my opinion, in their consistent commitment to innovation. Not only are they always improving their tools, but also, they have ventured into other digital marketing areas such as Content Marketing, Local SEO, Social Media, PPC, and more. SEMrush evolves as the SEO and digital marketing industry does – which is quite frequently – ensuring its users and their clients stay ahead of the curve.

SEMrush Tools We Use to Create a Solid SEO Strategy

Keyword Magic Tool

As every SEO has most likely drilled into their heads by now, any project or initiative should start with keyword research. For the Wix SEO competition, we started with the Keyword Magic tool.

The Keyword Magic tool enabled us to find and develop a master list of keywords, semantically related long-tail keywords, and the top questions being asked regarding our topic. To start, simply insert a keyword or phrase into the search bar and click the “search” button.

SEMrush then provides you with a table containing related search terms broken down into topic-specific subgroups from a database of over 16 billion keywords.

This one search for “Wix SEO” not only provided us with hundreds of relevant keywords and topics but also then allowed us to take some of the more popular and related topics and further expand our research into those areas.

For example, in the screenshot below, you will see there is search interest around Wix vs. WordPress. So, what we did was further expand that topic by doing a broad match search for “Wix WordPress”.

This tool allows you to do some pretty comprehensive research, whether you are overhauling metadata or identifying opportunities for content creation, as we did, shown here.