Semrush One Tutorial for Beginners (2026)

Key Takeaways

In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can win every search by harnessing the power of Semrush 1. We'll learn why you need to focus on AI optimization, how to identify and fix any technical issues with your website, make yourself visible to search engines and AI using the SEO and AI toolkits, identify competitive keywords in your industry and how to rank for them. Research the competition, write, refine, and publish content that is search engine optimized. and prepare for the AIdriven search patterns that will dominate the future. Before we get going, I'd like to thank Simrush for sponsoring this video. Now, let's get started by talking a bit about AI and how it searches for information. Chapter one, why bother about AI search in the first place? The danger is that your brand might rank well on Google but be completely absent from the AI generated answers people see. You could dominate Google search results, but if Chad GPT or Google's AI mode doesn't mention you, you're invisible to tons of potential customers. How many customers, you ask? Well, that depends on the survey you look at, but as an article in the Wall Street Journal from July 25 noted, chat bots are becoming the go-to source for online answers for many consumers, chipping away at the dominance of traditional web search and adding another avenue of outreach that brands must cultivate to connect with customers. This makes sense. After all, the number of searches conducted by AI will only increase as time goes on, and failing to prepare now will cost you in both the short and the long term. All right, with that in mind, there are three ways you can try to make your content more AI friendly. Be a top ranking source in organic search engine results that presents clearly structured data broken into paragraphs using a plethora of bullet points, etc., and includes trusted references back links throughout. And this is where Semrush 1 comes in. It's Semrush's newest offer. Combining their excellent traditional SEO tools with brand new AI visibility tools in one package. It helps you track how you show up in Google and AI answers side by side. In short, you'll get the best of both worlds and reach more customers. All right. So, now that you understand why it's so important to prepare your website for AI searches and how AI parses information, let's start talking about Seamrush. Chapter 2, onboarding plans and pricing. You can create an account and sign up for a 14-day free trial of Seamrush 1 by clicking the link in the video description. By the way, this is my exclusive extended free trial, which you can only get through my affiliate link. Now, to activate the free trial, you will need to link a credit card to your Samrush account. Now, there are three different tiers: starter, pro plus, and advanced. I'll talk about each one in a few sentences. Starter, this is designed for individuals or small teams starting their SEO and AI visibility journey. It provides all the core features of both the SEO and AI toolkits, but with limited functionality. You can monitor up to five websites, projects, track 500 keywords, and 50 AI prompts each day, and conduct competition research. This plan costs $199 a month. Pro Plus. This is geared towards growing brands, more serious bloggers, or midsized agencies. The main difference between Starter and Pro Plus isn't in capability, but an increased capacity. You can monitor up to 15 websites, track 1500 keywords, and 100 AI prompts each day, as well as make use of Simrusher's suit of content optimization tools. For these increased limits, it will cost you $299 per month. Last up is Advanced. This plan is suitable for larger teams, agencies with multiple clients, or businesses with extensive online presences to manage. Advanced gives you everything in Pro Plus with even higher limits. 40 websites track 5,000 keywords and 200 AI prompts each day and compare your brand's visibility against the competition using the Sherofoice tool with access to everything Seamrush has to offer. It costs $549 a month. For most people, the starter plan offers more than enough, though some of the tools I'll be showcasing in this video are only available on the advanced plan. All right, with that out of the way, let's dive into Semrush and get started. Chapter 3, dashboard overview. Before you can run, you need to learn how to walk. In this chapter, we'll take a quick tour of what you see when you first log in into Simrush 1. When you first log in, you'll land on the main dashboard. This page is organized by folders. Each folder is either your website or a competitor that you're tracking. You'll see a folder card on your dashboard that provides a snapshot of each folder's performance. even if you haven't created one yet. You'll see a few placeholders we can use as examples. Each card shows key SEO metrics at a glance. Though we'll see how to use each of these tools in greater detail later, we'll still work our way from left to right, covering each one at a time. AI visibility measures how often your brand is referenced in AI generated answers on a 100 point scale with 100 meaning your brand is always referenced and zero indicating that it is never referenced. Mentions tell you how often a brand is mentioned in AI generated answers. Site health measures your website's condition. Broken links, poorly optimized content, and code issues all negatively impact your score. Once again, it works on a 100 point scale with 100% meaning your website is perfectly optimized and bug-free and 0% meaning it's a bug riddled mess. Visibility tells you how often your brand appears in the top 100 organic unpaid search results for specific keywords. Organic traffic lets you know how many visitors your website is projected to have next month. Organic keywords essentially tells you how many keywords on your website are pulling in searches and back links are links to another website that redirects to your website. Highquality backlinks are a significant factor in how search engines such as Google determine rankings. In short, the card provides a comprehensive overview merging your Google data with AI insights in a single snapshot. All right, now that you know your way around the dashboard, let's take a look at the sidebar on the left. This is where you'll access some Rush's toolkits. SEO. This is where you will conduct competitor and keyword research. It's also where you'll be able to focus on link building, getting other websites to link to your website, and check your onpage SEO, title tags, content, etc., as well as your technical SEO, ensuring your website is visible and easy to navigate for search engines. AI. Much of the AI toolkit revolves around marketing. With it, you can check your brand's visibility, compare your site to your competition, learn how people search for your website, and more. For this video, we'll be spending most of our time here. And in the SEO menu, traffic and market. A more accurate name for this section would be traffic with a touch of market. This is where you see who visits your site, an AI, organic search results, a paid lead, etc., and how they got there. email marketing, clicked an ad, clicked a hyperlink, etc. Local tools designed to help small businesses that operate in a relatively small geographic area, helping them curate reviews, appear at the top of the localized searches, and more. Content, where you can generate new contents, articles, and blogs using AI and optimize existing contents. Social, where you can manage everything related to your business's social media accounts. advertising. This is where you can research, launch, and manage advertising campaigns. AIPR, a streamlined platform to help identify, research, cultivate, and manage media relations. You can also track media coverage here. Reports, a bunch of data pulled from all other tools and your website directly that let you see how your website is doing. App Center, a relatively new feature where users can integrate thirdparty marketing apps to increase Simr Rush's functionality. It's time to finally start doing. Let's set up our first projects and start improving our website. Chapter 4, setting up your first project and position tracking. Head back to the main dashboard by clicking the home button in the upper left corner of the sidebar. Get started by clicking plus create folder. Here you'll be prompted to enter your domain name, your URL. Pro tip, enter your root domain rather than a specific subdomain or the www version of your website so that Simrush can analyze your entire site. I'll be using the news organization, the New York Times for this video. So, I'll want to enter NY Times.com instead of www.ny times.com. The folder name will default to your domain name. Feel free to keep it or change it if you would like. I'll change it to New York Times and click create. All right. Now that our folder has been created, we'll need to configure it so we can take full advantage of all of Smrush's tools. Click the folder's name, for example, New York Times, to pull up the SEO toolkits dashboard. We need to create it into an SEO project. So, hit create SEO project. All right, there's a lot going on here. The first two boxes mirror the folder card from the main SEMrush dashboard, presenting an executive summary type display that highlights key metrics related to AI and search engine visibility and optimization. We've already discussed most of these, so we'll forge ahead for now. Simrush will ask you to configure six different tools. Let's work through these from left to right. Under position tracking, click setup. Remember how one of the main differences between the different Serush one plans was the number of keywords you can track? Well, this is where you set that up. Get started by selecting the search engine, device, and location you want to track for search rankings. For example, I'll stay selected on Google. Switch device to mobile and set the location to United States. Click continue to keywords. Now, input a set of keywords that you want to track. We'll start small. I'll use the keywords G20, Epstein, global warming, Supreme Court, and Momations. See how I formatted those? Each keyword must be on its own line for the tracker to function properly. And keeping them lowcase ensures that Semrush will search for all iterations of the word regardless of capitalization. All right, at this point you can toggle whether or not you want to see weekly ranking updates. I'll flip it off. When you're done, click start tracking. Semrush will gather all the data related to our keywords. This will take a few minutes. Once that's done, it'll open a diesel report breaking down where we stand. For example, the keywords block indicates that the New York Times ranks in the top 10 Google searches for momcience and in the top 100 for Supreme Court momcations, global warming, and Epstein. The top keywords block in the next row shows that they're ranking sixth, 21st, 71st, and 75th, respectively. Scrolling back up to the top of the page, you'll notice quite a few additional tabs. We'll look at them later when we got more tools set up. With that done, let's head back over to the SEO dashboard. Now, you'll see their position tracking block has been added to this page, allowing us to quickly and easily check our quick metrics without getting into too much detail. Pro tip, although we cannot sync Google Analytics and the Google Search Console for this example, it's essential to add them to your Semrush account to make your insights, well, more insightful. To get started, make sure you're on the SEO dashboard. Click on the setting gear in the top right corner. Select setup Google account and follow the on-creen instructions to integrate these powerful tools with your Samrush account. For now, I'll stay on this page. Okay, now you've created your first Seamrush folder. Navigate through the SEO dashboard and enable position tracking. In the next chapter, we'll set up the site audit tool to make sure your website is running smoothly and optimized for both search engines and AIdriven searches. Chapter 5, site audit. Before we dive into keyword research, content creation, and competition research, you need to make sure you're building on solid foundation. That's where site audit comes in. When you run a site audit, Semrush crawls your website just like a search engine would. For example, it navigates through your pages, follows links, and examines the content and code. Let's run it. On the SEO dashboard, look under site audit, and click setup. We need to set the parameters of our site audit. The first thing we can adjust if we want is the scope. By default, the site audit tool crawls your entire domain starting at your homepage and following links. Ensure the root domain URL of your homepage is displayed here. Limit per audit. The number of pages you want to be scanned in the audit. Free accounts can crawl up to 100 pages while higher plans can crawl more pages for a larger sample size. I'll keep this at 100 pages for the sake of time. Crawling is an intensive process and having the tool go through thousands of pages will take hours. In the future, you'll want to have the crawler run in the background or overnight. Pages to crawl allows you to customize how the tool crawls your website. Keep it simple and have it work through internally linked pages. Schedule. You can set the audit to run on a schedule, for example, weekly or monthly automatically. For now, I'll open the drop-own menu and have it run just once. In the future, it'll be wise to schedule the site audit to run monthly to catch new issues and monitor progress. Do not click start audit. Instead, move on to crawler user agents. How the crawler will view your website. For example, I'll opt to have the crawler act as a Google bot instead of the site audit tool. And since most web traffic comes from mobile devices, I'll choose the mobile version. Now, the tool will mimic Google's mobile crawler. That's all we're going to tweak. Now, we're ready. Click start audit. Samrush will begin crawling your site. This will take a few minutes, so I'll see you when our audit is complete. Once the audit is complete, click the name of your project to view a detailed report. The results is a site health score and a list of issues categorized as errors, warnings, or notices. Here's what each of them means. Errors red. The most critical issues that have a direct negative impact on SEO. For example, issues such as duplicate title tags, repetitive content, and invalid structured data items. Errors should be addressed first. Warnings yellow. These remain serious issues, but are less impactful in SEO than errors. For my example, this includes a lack of metad descriptions, low word count pages, and broken external links. Notices blue. You can view all your notices by clicking view all issues. These are minor issues or suggestions that can be addressed later as they don't significantly impact SEO. For example, some URLs have only one internal link. This should be fixed eventually, but there are more urgent issues to prioritize first. Clicking on the number of issues will pull up a new menu listing the URL of each impacted page. For example, I'll click on the red number under errors. Clicking on why and how to fix it will open a small popup where Samrush explains the issue and provides instructions on how to solve it. Pro tip: not all issues are equal. Focus on the following four problems first. Fix any crawl errors. Broken links, missing pages, server errors first. If a page isn't getting crawled by Semrush, it isn't by Google or AI either. Your customers will not see it. Improve site structure and onpage SEO basics. Ensure each page includes a title tag, metadescription, and a single H1 heading. Duplicate content and tags. Remove all duplicate title tags and content to avoid cannibalization. Multiple pages in your own website competing against one another for a specific keyword. Page speed. Site audit provides a performance report on the overview tab. If many pages are flagged as slow, fix this as soon as possible. Slow pages will drive users away in droves. There's still quite a bit of ground to cover, so let's move on. Core web vitals. The site audit also includes a core web vitals report. Make sure you're back on the overview tab and under thematic reports at the bottom of the page. Click view details under core web vitals. It uses three criteria to evaluate page quality. The largest contentful paint LCP. How long it takes for the largest element, text block, image, etc. on a page to be displayed to a visitor. Total blocking time, TBT, how long it takes for your site to log and respond to user actions. And cumulative layout shifts, CLS, how often page elements shift due to ads, videos, or other dynamically injeded contents. Each will be categorized as good, needs improvements, or poor. If your report is in the red, don't worry. Most of the pages it pulled from the New York Times need some serious TLC. Like before, you're able to click on each top improvements for a pop-up how-to, as well as pull up the links for each page by opening the affected pages. Remember, don't be overwhelmed if your first audit, like mine, lists hundreds of issues. Often, addressing a few key errors can significantly boost your site's SEO health. Now, click go to overview. So far, we've talked about how to improve your site's visibility on Google and Bing. But what about AI? Well, Site Audit now features a dedicated section for AI to ensure your site is AI friendly. This happens in two blocks, AI search health and blocked from AI search. Let's look at the AI search health first. Click the number of issues. As we've seen many times already, you can click on each issue to view the page impacted and also get a solution in app. Now, there's a whole lot more we can discuss regarding AI search, including how it works, what to watch out for, and how to structure your content for AI. However, I've already produced a video on this exact topic. I'll include a link in the description. Instead, let's head back over to the overview page and talk about the blocked from AI search block. The overview will show you how many of the audited pages are visible to the top eight AI search models. In the New York Times case, we can see they are purposely blocking AI. You won't want to do that for your business because AI search and regular search engine results differ in one key aspect. If a page is not visible to an AI, it will never appear in answers. Even if a web page is poorly coded, runs slowly, and has worthless content, it'll still be detected and findable using Google. With AI, even if your page is great, it cannot be found at all. With this in mind, updating your site's AI visibility should be your top priority. fix the foundation and you set the stage for all your SEO and AI search efforts to actually pay off in the long run. Still, while your server side health is critical to your customers experience and your SEO, it's only one small element of the larger hole. Chapter six, keyword research. Keyword research is the discovery phase for content opportunities, and Seamrush 1 includes several tools that can speed this process along. The first tool to know is keyword overview. You can find it in the SEO tab under keyword research. Go ahead and open it. This tool gives a quick snapshot of a single keyword's metrics, volume, difficulty, etc. To use it, click in the search box. Enter a keyword, for example, global warming. Select the domain you want SEMrush to access, for example, New York Times.com. Click the project name as it pops up. Choose a country database, for example, US, and hit search. In a few seconds, we'll have a host of metrics for this keyword to sift through, including how it relates to our website. At the top, we get an executive summary-like view of the keyword. Volume lets us know how many times people searched for global warming on Google. We also get a geographical breakdown of those searches. Next to that is personal keyword difficulty, PKD, an AI powered metric that indicates how well our website is optimized for a specific keyword. In other words, how easy or difficult would it be for your website to rank for a particular keyword? In our example, Seamrush suggests that it'll be quite challenging for the New York Times to rank well for our keyword, as the paper is only considered a moderate topic authority on the issue. This shouldn't be that surprising. After all, there are dedicated resources covering climate change, and the NT covers a wide swath of issues. We'll skip ahead to intent, why someone is searching for this keyword, the cost per click, CPC advertising rate for this keyword, how competitive the CPC market is, and broader search trends over the last 12 months. This can be a great resource for identifying high converting words that are not very competitive. Last, but not least, we have a list of keyword ideas or related keywords that Seamrush thinks might be worth trying to rank for. We have much of the same information here as we did above, including the monthly volume and PKD. Of course, you can click on each keyword for more detailed view. You can also see the number of searches framed as a question, and even enjoy a small keyword strategy section developed by Semrush. Still, as helpful as it is, it will only provide you with a snapshot. How many people search this term, how hard it'll be to rank for, what people intend buy it, and whether it could be lucrative. To really go down the keyword rabbit hole, you need the next tool. The keyword magic tool is one of Semrush's most popular features. Go ahead and open it. You'll see a field to enter what's called a seed keyword. So, enter a broad topic or phrase related to your business. For example, I'll use polls. Select the domain associated with my project and choose US from the country database. Click search and let us do its thing. At first glance, this page probably looks overwhelming. Don't worry, here's how to make sense of it all. Keyword list and metrics. In the center of the page, the main table lists keywords related to the seed. The first seven columns should look very familiar to us. They are essentially identical to what we saw using the keyword overview feature. That said, there are still two new ones. First up are the search engine results page SER indicators which show whether the keyword frequently appears in maps, videos, the knowledge panel that appears on the right hand side when searching for a specific person, thing or organization etc. For example, election PS appears in five SER features whereas elo appears in eight. The more SER features that regularly use a particular keyword, the more beneficial and visible it and your website will be. It's also worth noting that any column can be sorted by clicking on it. Try sorting by keyword difficulty, KD percent, to see the easiest or hardest keywords. There's also the updated section which allows us to collect the most up-to-date data for a specific keyword. Simply click the arrow and wait for Seamrush to fetch the latest data. It shouldn't take more than 10 to 15 seconds. Now, let's leave the main table for a moment and look to the left. The keyword magic tool automatically groups keywords by broad subtopics. This is incredibly useful to find niche topics. Click a group, for example, exit to filter the list to keywords containing that word. All right, now that you know your way around the table and the group's feature, let's see how to refine our search. Refine with filters. We've already discussed volume, keyword difficulty, intent, and cost per click, so we'll skip them here. If you want to follow along step by step, I'll set volume to 10,0001 to 100,000. The chart will automatically update. To target easier keywords, I'll set keyword difficulty to possible 30 to 49%. So, if you noticed, we started with 1.2 million different keywords, but through these two filters, we chopped it down to around 30. Now, rather than walk you through the rest of the filters here, I'll give you a quick crash course. Match modifiers. These appear at the very top of the window, allowing you to switch between the types of keywords you want Samrush to identify. In other words, how specific or generic do the related keywords need to be to the original one. Further to the left, there's also an all versus questions toggle that is handy if you specifically want question format keyword queries, which often make great blog post titles like how useful is election polling data. Include exclude words. You can require or exclude certain words. For example, include best to see only keywords that imply comparison. For example, best exit polls to predict the 2024 election. Pro tip, focus on quality over quantity. Targeting a few specific terms where you can satisfy the search intent is better than spreading yourself too thin. So, I hear you ask, how does this all tie into AI? Many of the keywords you find, especially the longer questionlike ones, represent exactly the kind of things people might ask an AI assistance. So, while doing keyword research, pay special attention to questions and natural language phrases. These are your bridge between Google SEO and AI optimization. By targeting that question with your content, you're tackling both fronts. you have a chance to rank on Google and be the source that AI assistants will mention in their responses. Another pro tip, consider incorporating longtail keywords, those longer, more specific multi-word queries into your content. Though they have smaller search volumes, they often imply a very specific question or context that's tailor made for an AI to search for. Now that we've seen how to use the keyword overview and keyword magic tool, let's round out this chapter by talking about the keyword strategy builder. Go ahead and open it. The goal of this tool is to group related keywords into clusters that correspond to specific pages or topics. Let's try it out. I'll keep the tool set to domain based, then enter my root domain and click create. This tool takes a long time to complete, so like the site audit, you'll want to let it run in the background or work overnight. I'll see you when it's complete. Okay. The tool has compiled a list of 111 pages we need to improve, ranging from pages about the current governor of New York State to an article on how to treat and prevent tennis elbow. I'll open a tennis elbow page to show you what the tool found. When we click that page, we see a few basic metrics. The page's total search volume, the average keyword difficulty, and the audience's intents. We can also see how many keywords the page currently ranks for, 53, and the average SER position of those keywords. At the bottom, however, is where we see what we came for. Tons of keyword suggestions that'll make the content more SEO friendly. Not only does the keyword strategy builder recommend 30 new keywords, it also tells us the intent of each so we can make sure it matches with the articles existing search patterns, how difficult it will be to rank for each using keyword difficulty percent and the observed volume for that particular keyword in the last year. Using these three tools together, then you'll be able to identify which keywords your site ranks well for, which ones need improvements, and even which ones you're missing entirely. Keywords, though, are still only part of the picture. In the next chapter, we'll add another tool to the arsenal, corporate espionage. Chapter 7, competitor research. I'm joking. Well, only so slightly. One of the best ways to improve your strategy is to look at what your competitors are doing. After all, if it isn't broken, then why fix? Simrush 1 makes competitive research easy and insightful, both for SEO and for AI. Better yet, it's totally legal. In this chapter, we'll cover domain overview, quick snapshot of any domain's performance, how to find competitors and steal their best keywords, as well as how to identify gaps in your competitor's SEO strategy. Let's dive right in. Domain overview. To access the domain overview tool, open SEO on the left sidebar and under the heading competitive research, select domain overview. In the top search bar or via the domain overview tool, enter a competitor's domain. For my example, I'll go with the New York Post, one of the New York Times rivals. Choose the country or worldwide, and hit search. Senrush will show an overview of that domain's online visibility. Let's look at some of the main metrics. AI search, we've seen this before. It shows how visible the competitor's website is to AI searches and even which models are finding and citing their contents. Authority score. Semrush's composite metric of the domain's overall SEO authority based on traffic and backlinks. The higher the score, the more Semrush and Google views the site as an established expert on a topic or niche. Organic traffic. Estimated monthly visits the site gets from an organic unpaid Google search. Paid search traffic, estimated monthly visits via Google Ads. Backlinks, the number of external links on other websites that point to the site. Traffic share indicates the site's share of traffic in its niche. Below, you can see a quick snapshot of which countries the site's visitors come from, and the traffic chart visualizes any dramatic fluctuations. Notably, you can toggle between AI search and Google search to get a clear picture of how the competitor is doing on all fronts. All right, now let's move down to organic research. Organic research. This highlights data on organic Google search results. The first thing we see is the top organic keywords. So the main ways unpaid visitors find the site. While interesting, what we're really after is the positions report, which we can access by clicking the two-page icon under posts or by switching to the positions tab at the top of the page. I'll click on the icon next to Yankees. This page provides a list of all the keywords the domain ranks for, the position it ranks in, the estimated traffic each keyword generates, and the keyword's difficulty. Switching to the next tab, position changes, allows us to see if the NYP gained or lost ground regarding a specific keyword. Meanwhile, topics show the best performing groups of keywords at any given time. In this case, sports and entertainment. pages show which articles or blogs, products, etc. bring in the most organic traffic. Pro tip for beginners, you should always focus on organic competition over paid advertising since that will ensure the long-term visibility and profitability of your website. It also doesn't hurt that improving your website's functionality and content will boost your visibility to both search engines and AI models. So far, we've seen how to compare you and your competitors AI and SEO optimization scores, analyze site traffic, and identify keywords that you and your competitors are using. What about something more specific like keywords that are performing well for them that you are not using? That's where the keyword gap tool comes in. Go ahead and open that up in the left sidebar. Getting started is easy. Enter your domain, ny times.com, and up to four competitors domains, nyost.com. Then click compare. I'm not going to walk you through this whole page. We don't have time for that today. But take a look at the section called top opportunities. These are the top five words missing from our website that have proven incredibly successful for our competitors. Depending on the search volume of these words, consider adding them to your site to boost your overall visibility. As always, you can view far more by clicking view details at the bottom of the top opportunities block. that will pull up a ton, literally well over a million keywords that Seamrush has identified. While a small business's website won't have anything close to a million or even a thousand keywords here, the data is still going to be invaluable. If you run a small area business and your chief competitor is doing well on 12 keywords that you are not ranking for at all, then you can get to work, optimize your SEO strategy, and draw in new customers at their expense. You should also play around with the different filters here. You can see keywords you and your competitors both use, shared ones they use that you aren't, missing, keywords that all competitors are outperforming you in, weak keywords you're outperforming them in, strong, and finally, keywords that you are not using, but at least one competitor is untapped. This is a quick way to build a to-do list of content or keywords to target. essentially a list of what's working for others that you either haven't covered yet or are underperforming in. Pro tip, this isn't about copying competitors verbatim, but about learning from their success. If they covered a topic and it's performing well, then cover it yourself with your unique perspective. Now, let's take a closer look at the AI side of things. Click on the SEO dashboard to return to your domain. Now, hover your cursor over AI and click on competitor research. This tool works the same way. Enter your domain and up to four competitors. Then hit run competitor analysis. Here we can again see each domain's AI visibility score, its estimated audience reach in AI answers and its total mentions. More importantly, it identifies topics/prompts where your competitors are mentioned and you are not. This is the AI equivalent of a keyword gap. And if you'll notice, the filters work the same way they did for the keyword gap tool. For example, I'll switch the filters to prompts and missing. According to this, the top missed prompt for the NYT is what are the best gifts for dads on Father's Day. You can see that it's missed by hovering over the mentioned column. NY Times.com says missed and nyost.com says mentioned. This is a particularly good way for small businesses to outshine their competitors. If you can answer common questions in your niche, you'll be in a great position to increase your organic traffic. Additionally, you can gauge the relative share of voice in AI. See if one competitor dominates most AI answers in your niche while others are barely present. That helps you assess who is really nailing the AI game. By researching competitors, you'll uncover growth opportunities for your own site. Use these insights to refine your AI and SEO strategies. Target the gaps, learn from others successes and mistakes, and attract more customers. But Simrush can do more than simply identify content gaps. It can even help you write professional informative articles using Simrush's built-in generative AI. Let's see how. Chapter 8, content creation and optimization. This is where you take all the keywords, prompts, and topics you found and turn them into highquality pages. We'll cover four main tools in this chapter. Topic research to brainstorm content topics ideas and find popular questions. SEO content template to generate an SEOfriendly content brief for a given keyword. SEO writing assistant to get realtime optimization advice as you write contents. works in Google Docs, WordPress, or directly in Semrush. Onpage SEO checker to audit and get recommendations for existing pages targeting specific keywords. Let's get to it. In the left sidebar, make sure to open SEO and toward the bottom, click topic research. Enter a broad topic, for example, housing. Select a country, keep it US, and click get content ideas. It'll take Samrush a few minutes to search, so I'll see you shortly. Once it's done, Samrush will show you a bunch of cards, each representing a subtopic related to your search query. Each card shows the subtopic as a phrase, for example, affordable housing or housing market, the search volume, the top headlines within that subtopic, for example, United States housing market and prices. Click show more and you'll also see keyword difficulty percentage, topic efficiency, a SEMrushon calculation that considers volume and keyword difficulty and tells you whether you should pursue the topic. For example, under affordable housing, the score is high, meaning the volume is high enough and the keyword difficulty is low enough that competing here makes sense. Top questions, user questions related to this subtopic and related searches that are very similar. You can save something you found interesting by clicking the little icon to the right of each headline or question. Now they're all in your favorite ideas list. Think of topic research as the blueprint that the SEO content template will turn into a polished article. Speaking of that, let's go ahead and open it. This tool analyzes the top 10 Google results for a given keyword and generates an outline with recommendations to outperform those competitors. All you have to do is enter a keyword or a set of keywords that you want your article to focus on. My keywords will be housing affordability, housing market, New York City housing, and Mamani housing policy. Press enter on your keyboard after typing each keyword to separate and log them for the tool. Next, select the location and device you want to optimize for. I'll use the US and keep phone. With that done, click create content template. This process will take a couple of minutes, so I'll see you when it's complete. And we're back. The tool will begin by citing the sources it used to generate the outline, but we're interested in the key recommendations section. It contains semantically related keywords to include in your article. So, words and phrases commonly found in the top pages. For my example, the top three are rent guidelines, board, mayor, elect, and interest rates. Backlinks, a list of domains that the top pages backlink to. You want to dig a bit deeper and investigate each to ensure it's a reliable, unbiased source. Recommended readability score calculated using the flesh readability tests. A score of 50 indicates that these articles should be understood by the average high schooler. For marketing pieces, you want to see a much easier score, like 70 or 80. Text length, the average length of the top 10 pages. To get a far more robust outline, click export to doc. that will save this template as a Word file that you can use as a starting point or attach to an AI tool. Let's open the document to see how long it is. It clocks in at a staggering 83 pages. Obviously, it won't be perfect. You'll want to go through it and delete irrelevant entries, bad sources, etc., but it'll make writing your next article much easier. It also helps that the tool considers formatting. After all, AI really likes clearly structured data with clean breaks in between. Now, instead of simply jumping right to the next tool, I recommend taking the downloaded document, putting it into Chad GPT or your LLM of choice and instructing it to use the information and guidelines to turn it into an article. When you're done with that, copy everything and hold on to it. All right, now that we have the initial draft of the article, it's time to use the SEO writing assistant to polish and perfect it. Go ahead and open the tool. The template we just made will be listed here under your recent SEO template. Go ahead and click quick check. Paste the AI generated article into the field here. The text will be quickly analyzed and the SWA will immediately provide several metrics. Overall score, an aggregate score out of 10 for the content's SEO friendliness, readability, originality, and tone. I started with a 7.1 out of 10, which Samrush considers a good score. Pro tip, don't chase a perfect 10 out of 10 score. Use your judgments. As we will see, the article is not perfect, but perfection shouldn't be the goal. Context matters. The goal is to cover the topic thoroughly and naturally using only reliable sources and relevant keywords. Readability. We see our articles flesh readability test score. Mine is a bit too difficult, coming in at 34 rather than 50. It's close, but I want to improve the readability before publication. Word count. It shows your word count versus the recommended range. Though a tad shorter, my article is still considered acceptable. Title issues. It'll check your title and let you know if there are any issues. For example, mine is way too long, so I'll rename it the housing market in New York City. Content issues. This section works similarly to the previous one. Identifying potential issues and recommending solutions. For example, ours wants us to consider splitting long paragraphs, rewriting difficult sentences, using more active voice, and replacing overly complex words. The swa can actually do this for you. For my example, I'll click the first highlighted paragraph, then click split. After a second, I'll accept the change. Now, I'll select the first sentence and click simplify. There we go. I recommend going through and implementing most of the AI suggestions here. Take the time to doublech checkck each edit. That's it for readability. Scroll back up to the circle and click on originality. Give the article a quick scan and ensure there are no plagiarism issues. Click check. This will take a little bit to finish. There we go. The article is 100% original. Let's move on to tone of voice next. This section analyzes tone, casual, neutral, formal, and how consistent you are throughout the article. Given that this article is covering a relatively complex topic, somewhat formal strikes the perfect balance. I saved the best for last. Let's move to SEO. It will check if we used all the target and recommended keywords created by the content template. Beneath that is another section called alt attribute issues. In short, it just tells us to add visuals or infographics to break up the wall of text. Far more important are the link issues it identified. You'll need to find reliable sources to backlink to. Still, after using the SCT and SWA, you'll have a piece of content that is SEO optimized from the start. It targets the right keywords, covers related terms, is of proper length, uses the right tone, and is the perfect reading level for your audience. Once you publish content on your site, you want to use the next tool to make sure everything's as it should be. The onpage SEO checker is like a personal consultant for pages you already have. You give it a URL and a target keyword you want that page to rank for and the tool that analyzes your page and compares it to the current top ranking pages for that keyword. Go ahead and open the tool. You'll be prompted to add your domain. Select the name of your folder. Keep the location set to the United States, but open the drop-own menu and switch device to phone. Click continue. Next, you'll need to add pages to optimize. While I'll be going with autoimp import for the sake of time, you want to go through this manually and add your pages one by one. Start with your most important ones like your homepage and your key product pages. With that done, click crawler user agents. While you can only crawl the desktop version of your site, make sure to switch this to Google bot. Click collect ideas and I'll see you when Semrush is done doing its thing. All right, so that's done. Semrush will now provide recommendations categorized by type. Strategy ideas. These are highle suggestions such as adjusting title tags or combining similar pages. Backlink ideas. Identify authoritative websites that link to your competitors but not to you. User experience ideas. You need a Google Analytics account paired with Semrush. And if you do, Semrush can analyze all your user data and suggest design or content changes to help you retain users. Technical SEO ideas. Address technical issues that negatively impact your SEO, such as dead links, SER feature ideas. If the page has a keyword that triggers a featured snippet and your page isn't optimized for that, it'll suggest making the page more snippet friendly. Semantic ideas, related words or phrases to your keyword. Content ideas, recommendations related to the pages text content. For example, include stock market in H1 or add semantically related keywords. To get a more detailed view of each suggested edit, click the blue ideas button next to any page. That will give you a detailed breakdown of the categories we looked at earlier. All the tools we've looked at so far have focused on researching, writing, and optimizing content as well as technical SEO. Now, let's see how we can generate additional backlinks and boost your site's authority. Chapter nine, link building and brand strength. Back links are tough to get organically and buying them is against the terms of service for Google and other major search engines. That's where the link building tool comes in. It streamlines the process of finding backlink opportunities and managing outreach to potential prospects. To get started, we'll need to build a link building campaign. Look at the left sidebar and select the link building tool. Enter your domain name or select your folder to get started. That will pull up this window where you'll see the keywords we started tracking back in chapter 4. While you can add more keywords, I'm going to keep going for the sake of time. Hit competitors in the bottom right. This is where we'll enter the websites we want to outperform. While the autofill feature has done a pretty good job in my case, it'll have a tougher time getting accurate competitor information for small or medium-sized businesses. Take the time to find up to 10 of your competitors and enter their domains. Once you're done, click start link building. So, what exactly is the tool doing? Well, it's identifying websites that link to your competitor's websites, but not to yours. In other words, it's using your opponent's backlinks against them. I'll see you in a couple of minutes after the tool has done its thing. Using that input, Seamr generates a list of prospects, the websites it deems potential link sources along with reasons. For example, they link to a competitor or have an article on a related topic. Exactly how many prospects you will get will vary. I got over a thousand, but a small business will get far less. That doesn't really matter. Each prospect is valuable. Let's see why. Click view prospects. This page looks overwhelming at first glance. So, let's talk about how to navigate this page and start contacting potential prospects. Here's a typical workflow. First, review the prospects. Browse the list and decide which are worth reaching out to. Smrush provides information such as the site's authority score, its website type, and a priority rating. You can filter or sort by these metrics. At the top of the page, you can also add specific keywords you want the link building tool to take into account when identifying prospects. This is a great way to make sure the site you'll ultimately reach out to shares your interests and covers the same content. Outreach and Seamrush. This tool includes an email outreach module, though you'll need to integrate your email with your account. I'll show you how it works. I'll click to in progress. Now, open the in progress tab at the top of the page. Here is where you can view a prospect's information, including their contact info. Pro tip: For many prospects, Seamrush will find an email address or contact form, but not always. Sometimes you will need to do some leg work and search. Even if Samrush identifies a general email, it's always worth the effort to find an employee to serve as your initial point of contact. Browse their website and look through their personnel. Reach out by clicking contact. Take the time to write a friendly, professional email. Get the most out of placeholder fields that personalize emails for you. Whenever you're done, send the email directly through Semrush. It will log it and wait for a reply. And that's it. You'll want to track the progress of each prospect, and you can quickly do that by looking at the status bar associated with each prospect. If the prospect was willing to backlink to your site, then you'll want to switch them to monitor by pressing the check mark icon. Pro tip two, focus on quality prospects. Getting one link from a high authority relevant site is far more impactful than 10 links from lowquality sites. Samrush's scoring helps you make decisions here. Link building is time consuming, but the link building tool streamlines the process by identifying leads and tracking outreach. As you earn back links, you should see improvements in position tracking and authority score over time. All of this is a great way to improve your brand in the eyes of search engines and AIs. Speaking of AI, let's round out the video by taking a look at SamRush's new AI visibility toolkit. Chapter 10, AI visibility toolkit. This toolkit helps you manage and improve how your brand shows up in AIdriven search results. The toolkit includes several important reports on AI visibility, visibility overview, competitor research, prompt tracking, and brand performance. Each report helps you succeed in the AI search landscape. We touched on some of these tools earlier and some will be brand new. Let's work our way through them. Starting with the visibility overview, enter your root domain and click check AI visibility. I'll walk you through everything the report has to offer. Just know that this page is comparable to the domain overview tool we looked at back in chapter 7. Front and center is your AI visibility score, a number from 0 to 100 that tells you how visible your brand is to AIS. Don't be discouraged if your website is underperforming. This is a new area to optimize and you're already ahead of the curve by watching this video. Next to your visibility score is the monthly audience. the total number of visitors to your website from all sources. Beneath that are mentions and cited pages, both of which are AI only. As you can see, AI will be a small part of your overall search volume. Out of a monthly audience of over 1.3 billion people, the New York Times was only mentioned 133,800 times in AI generated answers, even though those answers cited close to half a million pages. The main takeaway, however, shouldn't be that AI accounts for only a fraction of the overall search volume. Instead, it should be the rate of AI searches increased by 20% in a single month. That means AI searches are a small but rapidly growing way to find information. At the top of the page, click the drop-own menu labeled all AI platforms. This is where you can choose to sort the data by a single model. By the way, quick reminder. If you would like to try this tool out for yourself, you can use the link in the description of this video to sign up to Semrush 1. Using our link, we'll give you an exclusive extended 14-day free trial. Now, below the headline metrics, you'll find the topics and sources table. This is where you should spend most of your time. It lists topics or prompts and shows whether your brand appears for each one. There are several different views, so let's take a look at each of them. Starting with your performing topics. Topics and queries your content already answers. Topic opportunities. Topics where competitors show up in AI answers but you do not. Think of these as content gaps. Cited sources. External websites that are most cited in AI answers for your niche. Since all of Simrush's tools overlap, you probably want to try to build backlinks to as many of these sites as you can. Source opportunities. sources that are often cited for answers where competitors appear but you are not. Again, think of this as a content gap problem. Cited pages, the pages on your domain that are getting cited in AI answers. With this in mind, consider the differences between a page that does get cited and one that doesn't. Why is that? Is the layout or structure different? Next up, we have the AI competitor research tool. Let's open it. We covered this tool in great detail back in chapter 7. So, I won't be going over everything in detail again. Enter your domain and up to four competitors and click run competitor analysis. You'll get a side-by-side comparison of you and your competitors, showing you how your AI visibility score compares to theirs and how you stack up against the competitors on topics, prompts, and sources. In short, competitor research shows you who is winning in AI search and why. Go ahead and open the next tool in the sidebar, prompt research. In many ways, this tool is similar to keyword research. The only difference is that rather than identifying what people search for on Google, you're trying to figure out what people ask AI platforms. Let's get started. Type hurricane and weather tracking into the topic box and press enter on your keyboard. As usual, we have key metrics at the top. the total AI search volume for our topic, the number of topics related to our topic, the number of prompts related to those topics, the intent behind those prompts, as well as the number of brands mentioned and the source domains cited in answers. You can sort your answers by topics, prompts, brands, or source domains. I'll stick with topics and expand the view under hurricane and weather tracking. Now I can see the top prompts related to this topic. The AI response, the brands mentioned, and the sources cited. Speaking of brands, let's move on to the next suit of tools, brand performance. So far, the tools we've examined in the AI visibility toolkit emphasized quantity, specifically how frequently your content appears in AI generated responses. This section focuses on quality, particularly the context in which you are cited. It's broken into four separate reports. Brand performance, perception, narrative drivers, and questions. These reports all build on each other. Let's open the first tool. Enter your domain and press analyze. Though I'll set the target location to the United States, if you have a small business, I recommend selecting a state, city, or county to get more relevant results. Regardless, keep the target language English. Click get started. You'll arrive at the brand performance report. There are four main data points. Insights, share of voice versus sentiments, overall sentiments, and share of voice. Let's look at each one. Share of voice tracks brand mentions in AI answers within your industry and compares your slice of the market, your share of voice against the market. In this example, you can see that the New York Times is leading the conversation with 18% followed by the Washington Post at 6% etc. Overall sentiment places your share of voice in context. In other words, it tells you whether the AI had something good, neutral, or negative to say about your brand. This insight is vital for reputation management. How, you may ask? Well, because the AI visibility toolkit is about more than simply improving your business in the eyes of large language models. After all, all AIs browse the web to find answers. That means if they speak favorably or negatively about your business, it's because your customers are. Share of voice versus sentiment combines the prior to metrics, allowing you to see how you stack against the competition on all fronts. Insights are AI generated recommendations to help you outperform the competition. Let's move on to perception. We'll see a few duplicative metrics, but I want to talk about four. Competitive perception by platform, favorable sentiment over time, key sentiment drivers, and AI strategic opportunities. Competitive perception by platform compares your overall sentiment score to that of your chief competitors, allowing you to see how different AIs talk about you and your rivals. For example, we can see that the New York Times is leading, but the BBC is close behind. Favorable sentiment over time will track how you and your competitors overall sentiment changes over time. This chart is updated weekly and will keep you in the loop. Key sentiment drivers essentially tells you what comprises your overall sentiment score, showing what the AI says you do well and where you can use some improvements. AI strategic opportunities builds on what you see in key sentiment drivers section of the report, essentially offering recommendations on how to improve your brand's image. It also assigns a time frame to each recommendation, helping you prioritize. All right, let's move on to narrative drivers. This part of the report essentially identifies what the AI says your business is known for, whether it's good or bad. Let's scroll past the topline metrics to break down by question. This is where you can view the most commonly searched questions related to your brand as well as the AI generated answer. These can be divided into two categories, non-branded and branded answers. For example, the top non-branded question is which global news outlets are considered newspapers of record? Switching to branded questions, it is how does New York Times global climate coverage compare with The Guardian and The Economist. Of course, at the bottom of the page, you also get more AI strategic opportunities to help boost your visibility and consumer sentiment. Finally, let's move to questions. The name says it all. This report lists the questions people ask AI about your brand or related to your industry. For example, we can see the topic distribution, the themes or topics people ask questions about, and query intent distributions, why people ask the question. Scrolling down, we see a much more in-depth breakdown of each topic, letting us identify on a per topic level why people are browsing the New York Times. At the very bottom of the page, once again, is another set of AI strategic opportunities identified by Seamrush, flushed with detailed recommendations and a clear timeline. We have one last tool to talk about, prompt tracking. Prompt tracking is identical to the position tracking tool we set up in chapter 4. But instead of tracking how you rank for Google keywords, you'll be tracking AI prompts. Setting it up is straightforward. Open the tool. Click plus create SEO project in the upper right corner. Enter your domain and give the project a name. You'll get a popup saying you already have projects for this domain. That's okay. We're just creating an AI only position tracker. Click create SEO projects. Under targeting, select either Chad GPT or Google AI mode as the AI you want to track. I'll go with Chad GPT. Select the United States at the location and click continue to prompts. All right. Like we tracked keywords, you can track multiple prompts at once, but they must occupy their own line. I'll use the top four prompts we identified using the prompt research tool. Show me weather apps, best weather forecast, weather radar app free, and what are the best tools to get real time weather radar updates. Click add prompts to campaign. For now, uncheck send me weekly ranking updates via email and click start tracking. This will take a few minutes, so I'll be back. Once it's done, click apply. You'll land on the competitors discovery tab of the report. Here we can see our top 10 competitors and their visibility scores. Scrolling down, you can see the same information, including the number of prompts from your tracked ones, the competitors are ranking for, and the average position that domain ranks for in Chad GPT's answers for that prompt. Now, go ahead and open the overview tab. Today we can see that the New York Times wasn't visible for any of our track prompts. Below in rankings overview, we can see a prompt byprompt breakdown of these missed opportunities, including the estimated daily search volume for the topic. You'll also get an AI visibility score for each prompt you track, making it easier to track your progress over time. If you haven't signed up yet, make sure to click the link in the description below. We're offering an extended 14-day free trial, so you have two full weeks to test drive these tools and start seeing results yourself. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next