SEMRush

SEMRush is a great tool for performing a variety of search engine related tasks. I’ve used SEMRush in the following situations:

• when researching a site that I’m interested in buying
• to find keywords that my competitors are targeting

Researching Sites To Buy

If you visit website auction sites like Flippa and digitalpoint, you are likely to get useful statistics from the seller. Sometimes they are accurate and truthful too, but that’s a different bone of contention .

For websites whose statistics you don’t have access to, you can use SEMRush. For example, on your web surfing travels, you might happen upon a website that is in the same niche as yours and you might see it as a useful acquisition. Before you start talking to the owner, you need to establish what kind of traffic the site gets from the search engines, and also what keywords bring searchers to the site.

SEMRush is really good for that.

Let’s look at a site that I was investigating recently: http://nursefriendly.com. I heard that the owner was thinking about selling, so I thought I’d do some preliminary investigations before deciding whether to approach him.

When you type the URL into SEMRush and press enter, the main dashboard reports a selection of the following:

• Organic keywords – these are the keywords that people are searching for when they find the site.
• Google Adwords keywords – these are the phrases that the owner is bidding on in Adwords to drive traffic to their site.
• Competitors in organic search – these are the sites that also rank highly for the same organic keywords that this site does.
• Competitors in Adwords – other sites bidding on the same Adwords keywords.
• Unique Adwords Ads overview – gives you a snapshot of what the site’s Adwords ads look like.
• Potential ads/traffic buyers – sites that buy ads for relevant keywords.
• Potential ads/traffic sellers – sites that are in Google organic for your AdWords keywords

When we plug the nursefriendly report into the search box, we get the following juicy details:

We can see immediately how much traffic the site is getting and also the keywords that bring it. All of the above data gives a detailed picture of the site we are researching, but the areas I focus on are organic keywords, Adwords keywords and the Google SE traffic graph to the left.

Google SE Traffic

You can click on the graph to get a larger one. To be honest the traffic statistics here always seem to be lower than the real traffic. What I usually do is compare what this graph shows with the Google Analytics statistics for one of my existing sites and then use it as a rough gauge. According to Google Analytics (The Truth) One of my sites gets 45,000 unique visitors / month but the graph shows only 12,000 (The Estimate). Therefore, I estimate that the graph shows around a 1/4 of the real traffic.

Organic Keyword List

Let’s look at the organic keyword list. It helps to find out just what phrases people are searching for in Google to reach this site. You don’t want to buy the site and only then discover that it was one phrase like “squirrel porn” that was driving all the traffic! Have a look at the search phrases and make sure there’s nothing dodgy in there. Better to do your research before you buy. Click on the Full Report link to see all the keywords. The organic keyword list is really useful as it not only displays the site’s position in the search results, but it also shows you how many searches per month are performed for each phrase. You might find a keyphrase that the site ranks #9 for, that gets masses of searches and if you are a SEO hotshot, you might see the potential rewards of ranking the site higher for that phrase. Very useful indeed. Alternatively, you might notice that the site ranks #1 for many really competitive keywords and see the sites position as a bit precarious. One change in Google’s algorithm and those #1 spots might be lost, and with it the traffic. SEMRush provides the stats – you provide the analysis.

Stealing Keywords

The organic keyword list is also good for generating ideas for new content on sites you already own. You could research the URLs of the top 10 sites in your niche to discover the organic keywords that are bringing traffic to those sites. Conveniently, the list has an export to Excel button so you can export the lists for the top 10 sites, copy them all into one large spreadsheet and then sort the list by descending volume.

Volume is the number of searches performed for each keyword, so if you have the biggest at the top, those are the most highly searched keywords for those sites. Pick the ones you want and write your own content targeting them. This is a method I currently use to good effect.

Adword Keywords List

Suppose you find a site for sale in some website auction marketplace. It transpires that the site’s revenue is due, in no small part, to the traffic driven by the owner’s Adwords campaign. Of course, the seller would be a fool to reveal the details of the ad campaign in the auction details, lest some shrewd viewer copies it for their own purposes. They could quite easily replicate the site and then replicate the Adwords keywords with ad copy to boot.

Well, we can get our hands on that data using SEMRush.

Coming soon: Find out how to use SEMRush to replicate an affiliate site.

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