How to Use SEMRush Pro for Free: A Step-by-Step Guide

Digital marketing is a vast and dynamic world, with an abundance of tools designed to streamline your efforts and boost your online visibility. One such tool is SEMRush, a comprehensive suite of features that can significantly enhance your SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing.

This post focuses on how to use SEMRush Pro for free.

What Is SEMRush Pro?

We are using SEMRush Pro here to mean (SEMRush Premium) i.e: either one of the premium versions of SEMRush, offering advanced features that can take your digital marketing strategy to the next level.

Fortunately, SEMRush offers a 7-day free trial for their premium plans, allowing you to explore its powerful features without making an upfront financial commitment.

However, to make the most of this trial period, you need to understand how SEMRush works, and that’s where this guide comes in.

Exploring the Benefits of SEMRush Pro

Before we delve into how to use SEMRush Pro for free, let’s take a moment to appreciate the benefits that this premium plan offers:

1. Advanced Keyword Research

SEMRush Pro allows you to conduct in-depth keyword research, uncovering long-tail keywords and providing data on keyword difficulty, volume, and more.

2. Detailed SEO Audit

The platform offers an in-depth SEO audit, identifying issues that might be hurting your site’s search engine performance.

3. Competitor Analysis

SEMRush Pro also allows you to analyze your competitors, including their backlinks, keywords, and traffic sources and ranking pages.

4. Content Optimization

The content optimization feature helps you optimize your content with recommended keywords and readability improvements.

5. PPC and Social Media Insights

Most people do not realize but SEMRush premium plans also offer tools for managing and optimizing your PPC and social media campaigns.

How to Start Your Free SEMRush Trial Today

Starting your SEMRush Pro free trial is a straightforward process:

• 1. Visit the SEMRush website and click on the “Start your free 7-day trial today!” button.
• 2. You’ll be prompted to create an account. Enter your email address and password, then click on “Create your account.”
• 3. You’ll be redirected to a payment page. Although SEMRush requires your credit card details, you won’t be charged until the trial period ends.
• 4. Click on “Place The Order” to start your free trial.

Remember, you can cancel your subscription anytime during the trial period to avoid any charges, but you will still be allowed to enjoy your access until the trial period is over.

Getting Familiar with SEMRush Dashboard

After successfully setting up your SEMRush account, you’ll be directed to the dashboard.

This hub provides an overview of your projects, including your site’s health, traffic analytics, keyword rankings, competitors (if you added any) and more.

Here are the key elements to explore:

1. Domain Overview

This section provides you with general insights about a domain—yours or a competitor’s.

You can see organic search traffic volume, paid search traffic volume, backlinks quantity, displayed advertising, and top organic keywords and their total count.

2. Keyword Analytics

The keyword analytics feature is used to get in-depth data about specific keywords, like their volume, difficulty, CPC, and competitive density.

You can also view phrase matches and related keywords.

3. Project

With the Project tool in SEMRush, you can create and manage your SEO projects.

A project is a way SEMRush provides you with smart recommendations on how you can improve your online visibility, and help you track your progress over time.

Each project can provide site health, position tracking, social media tracker, an on-page SEO checker, link building, and more.

Inside every project, you’ll find:
Here’s what you’ll find inside a project:

• Specific tools to manage your search engine optimization process, Pay Per Click, social media, and content marketing activities personalized to just your website alone.
• A set of powerful algorithms to set yourself apart from your competitors.
• A wide variety of insightful third-party data, including information from your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts, social networks, live SERP data, and more.
• A sharing feature that makes collaboration between agencies, consultants, clients, as well as team members, super easy.

4. Gap Analysis

In Gap Analytics tool, you can perform Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap analyses between your site and a competitor’s.

This feature allows you to compare your performance with your competitors to discover opportunities you might be missing such as keyword overlaps, completely missing keywords and weak keywords that might need improvement.

Discovering the Key Features of A SEMRush Premium Plan

SEMRush Pro offers a range of features designed to improve your online marketing efforts.

Let’s explore the key ones:

1. Keyword Research

SEMRush offers comprehensive keyword research tools that allow you to find the best keywords for your content, discover long-tail keywords, analyze their difficulty, and more.

2. Site Audit

SEMRush’s site audit feature scans your website for over 130 different SEO issues that can be hindering your search engine performance.

When the results are out and you are able to implement a sufficient number of fixes, you will definitely see a lot of improve in your SEO.

3. Position Tracking: Monitor All Your Search Rankings In One Place

Monitoring your site’s rankings on various search engines for any keyword couldn’t be easier with SEMRush’s position tracking feature.

This tool also allows you to track your competitors’ keyword rankings.

4. Backlink Analysis: Explore and analyze the backlinks of any website.

You can use this tool to inspect your backlinks and your competitors, giving you insights on how to improve your link-building strategy and what you might be missing out on.

5. Social Media Tracker: Track your social media performance and compare it to your competitors.

The social media tracker tool of SEMRush covers various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

And it basically allows you to easily track, audit and compare (with your competitors and role models) the performance of your posts on the various social media apps.

6. On-Page SEO Checker

With the on-page SEO checker, you get to recieve suggestions for improving your web pages’ SEO, including ideas on how to improve the content, the technical factors involved, backlink sources and their Domain Rating, and more.

How to Use SEMRush for Keyword Research?

Keyword research is an integral part of SEO and content creation.

Fortunately, SEMRush Pro provides extensive tools for this task. Here’s how to use them:

1. Go to ‘Keyword Overview’ under the ‘Keyword Analytics’ section.
2. Enter the keyword you’re interested in and click on ‘Analyze.’ SEMRush will provide you with an overview of the keyword, including its volume, number of results, trend, and more.
3. Scroll down to find phrase match keywords and related keywords. These sections will provide you with a list of keywords similar to the one you entered, expanding your keyword possibilities.
4. Don’t forget to explore the ‘Keyword Difficulty’ tool to understand how hard it would be to rank for a specific keyword.

Optimizing Your SEO Strategy with SEMRush

SEMRush is a valuable tool for improving your SEO strategy. Here are a few steps you can follow:

1. Conduct a site audit: Navigate to the ‘Dashboard’ and select ‘Create my first project.’ Enter your domain and start a site audit. SEMRush will give you a report outlining issues that could be negatively impacting your SEO.
2. Fix the identified issues: Use the report from the site audit to fix any problems that were identified. These could include things like broken links, duplicate content, or slow page loading times.
3. Track your keywords: Use the ‘Position Tracking’ tool to monitor how your site ranks for specific keywords over time.
4. Analyze your competitors: Use the ‘Domain Overview’ tool to get insights about your competitors’ SEO strategies. Look at their organic search traffic, backlinks, and top keywords to identify opportunities for your site.

Competitive Analysis with SEMRush

One of the key advantages of SEMRush is its competitive analysis tools.

You can compare your site’s performance to your competitors, identify gaps in your strategy, and find areas for improvement. Here’s how:

1. Keyword Gap Analysis: Use the ‘Keyword Gap’ tool to compare your keyword profile with your competitors. You can see which keywords you’re ranking for that your competitors aren’t and vice versa.
2. Backlink Gap Analysis: Similar to Keyword Gap, the ‘Backlink Gap’ tool allows you to compare your backlink profile with your competitors’. You can identify opportunities for new backlinks and improve your strategy.
3. Traffic Analytics: Use the ‘Traffic Analytics’ tool to get insights about your competitor’s website traffic, user behavior, and online performance.

Utilizing SEMRush for Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are crucial for SEO. Here’s how to analyze your backlinks with SEMRush:

1. Go to the ‘Backlink Analytics’ tool.
2. Enter your domain and hit ‘Check it.’
3. SEMRush will provide a comprehensive analysis of your backlinks, including the total number of backlinks, referring domains, referring IPs, and more.
4. You can also analyze your competitors’ backlinks using the same process.

Measuring Your Website’s Performance with SEMRush

SEMRush offers several tools to measure your website’s performance, including:

1. Site Audit: This tool analyzes your website’s health, identifies SEO issues, and provides recommendations for improvement.
2. Position Tracking: Monitor your website’s rankings for specific keywords over time and compare your performance to your competitors.
3. Organic Research: This tool provides insights into your website’s organic search performance, including top keywords, ranking changes, competitor rankings, and more.
4. Backlink Analytics: Analyze your backlink profile to understand the quantity and quality of websites linking to your site.
5. Traffic Analytics: Get insights into your website’s traffic, including visitor behavior, sources of traffic, and geographic distribution.

Maximizing Your SEMRush Free Trial Period

Now that you have a good understanding of how SEMRush works and what it offers, it’s time to maximize your free trial period.

The key is to be proactive and utilize all the tools at your disposal.

Carry out a comprehensive site audit, perform keyword research, analyze your backlinks, track your positions, and conduct competitive analysis.

Also, remember to explore the ‘Projects’ section.

Here, you can create an SEO project for your website and access tools like the On-Page SEO Checker, Social Media Tracker, Link Building Tool, and more.

The more data you can gather during your free trial, the better informed you’ll be to decide whether a tool like SEMRush and whether a premium plan is the right tool for your SEO needs.

SEMRush vs. Other SEO Tools: Which One Wins?

Every SEO tool has its unique strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the right one depends on your specific needs and budget.

Let’s see how SEMRush stacks up against other popular SEO tools:

1. SEMRush vs. Ahrefs: While both SEMRush and Ahrefs offer a comprehensive suite of SEO tools, SEMRush tends to have a more user-friendly interface and more extensive keyword data. Ahrefs, however, shines in backlink analysis.
2. SEMRush vs. Moz: Moz is renowned for its Domain Authority (DA) metric, which is widely used in the SEO industry. Moz’s toolset is simpler and easier to use for beginners, but SEMRush offers more advanced features and more extensive data.
3. SEMRush vs. Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest, owned by Neil Patel, is a simpler and cheaper tool that provides basic keyword data and site audit features. While it may be sufficient for beginners or small businesses with a tight budget, SEMRush offers more in-depth data and advanced features.
4. SEMRush vs. Google Keyword Planner: Google’s free tool is great for initial keyword research and discovering new keyword ideas. However, it lacks the advanced analytics, competitive analysis, and other SEO features that SEMRush offers.

Remember, the best tool for you will depend on your specific needs, budget, and the size of your business.

We explored a comprehensive list of 15+ Best SEMRush Alternatives [Reviewed and Ranked] and also a list of 13 Best SEMRush Free Alternatives: The Most Effective Free SEO Tools

Conclusion

SEMRush is an incredibly powerful tool that can provide valuable insights and help you create a winning SEO strategy.

The free trial of SEMRush Pro gives you access to all these features, allowing you to test the platform before committing to a paid plan.

Whether you’re a blogger, a small business owner, or a seasoned digital marketer, SEMRush offers features that can benefit your online presence.

From keyword research to competitor analysis, from site audits to tracking your rankings, SEMRush is a comprehensive SEO tool that’s worth exploring.

Finally, remember that the best way to understand SEMRush is by using it yourself. Dive in, explore its features, and see how it can benefit your business. Happy optimizing!

Frequently Asked Questions About How to Use SEMRush for Free

Now let’s tackle some frequently asked questions about SEMRush and its free trial.