Beginner’s Guide to use SEMrush for SEO Growth

You’ve probably heard that SEMrush is one of the best tools out there for SEO, but maybe you’re feeling stuck on where to start. Or, you might have opened it once, glanced at all those charts, graphs, and numbers, and quickly closed the tab because it felt overwhelming. Trust me, you’re not alone — many beginners feel the same way at first! The good news? SEMrush doesn’t have to be confusing. In this step-by-step tutorial, I’m going to walk you through how to use SEMrush in a simple, straightforward way that anyone can follow. Whether you want to track your website’s performance, find new keywords, spy on competitors, or improve your rankings, this guide will break it all down without any complicated jargon. So, let’s jump in and start making SEMrush work for you!

What is SEMrush and Why Should you use it?

SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO and digital marketing tool designed to help you optimize your website, track keyword rankings, analyze competitors, conduct backlink audits, and more.

Here’s what makes it valuable for SEO:

• Comprehensive site audits
• Deep keyword research capabilities
• Competitor analysis tools
• Position tracking for SEO performance
• Backlink monitoring and outreach features

To use SEMrush effectively, it’s important to know not just what each tool does — but how it fits into your overall SEO strategy.

Step 1: Create Your SEMrush Account and Set Up a Project

How to Create Your First SEO Project

1. Sign Up:
   • Go to SEMrush.com.
   • Create an account. You can choose from the Free Trial, Pro, or Guru plan, depending on what you need.

The box in the middle of the screen clearly says “Enter your website name”. This is where you need to type in the address of your website Once you’ve typed in your website name, the button you need to click is the purple one right next to the box, which says “Start now”.

Your SEO Project Dashboard

After successfully entering your website, the next interface will be your main SEO Project Dashboard within SEMrush. This screen provides an immediate overview of your website’s key performance metrics, such as Site Health, Visibility, Organic Traffic, and Backlinks, along with quick links to various SEMrush tools and AI-driven recommendations. It essentially serves as your central control panel for monitoring and managing your website’s SEO progress.

Step 2: How to Use Keyword Overview

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. To use SEMrush smartly, you’ll want to understand how to dig deep into keyword data using the Keyword Overview tool.

Here’s what its features allow you to check:

• Keyword Difficulty: Instantly evaluate how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 search results for a specific term.
• Competition: Understand the level of competition for the keywords you enter.
• Trends: See the popularity trends of keywords over time.
• Personalized Data: Option to “Enter domain for personalized data” to get more tailored insights (an AI-powered feature).
• Location-Specific Data: You can specify the country (e.g., “US”) and even a more precise location to get localized keyword data.

This overview shows:

• How much traffic a keyword gets: It displays monthly search volume both locally and globally, helping you estimate potential visitors.

• How hard it is to rank: The keyword difficulty score (e.g. 100%) tells you how competitive it is and how much SEO effort is needed.

• What type of content already ranks: By analyzing intent and trends, you can see if people are looking for blogs, product pages, or informational content.

The Keyword Magic Tool is a powerful feature in SEMrush that helps you find the best keywords for SEO and content strategy. By entering a seed keyword, you get a large list of related keywords along with useful data to guide your planning.

Key Points to Focus On:

• Keyword Volume: Shows how often people search for that keyword monthly.

• Keyword Difficulty (KD): Tells how hard it is to rank for that keyword.

• CPC (Cost Per Click): Useful for paid ads—shows how much advertisers pay.

• Intent Type: Understand whether the keyword is informational, transactional, or navigational.

• Filters & Match Types: Use broad, phrase, and exact match to refine your results.

• Related Keywords: Expand your content with other useful keyword ideas.

• Updated Data: Check how recent the keyword data is to ensure relevance

the best keyword to target is “restrict content learndash” because it has a clear informational intent (I), which is ideal for creating helpful blog content, and a very low Keyword Difficulty (KD) of 10%, making it easy to rank on search engines. In comparison, other keywords like “grant WordPress user only learndash access” (KD 14%) and “learndash review” (KD 25%) are also good options but slightly more competitive. The main keyword “learndash” has high difficulty (KD 44%) and is navigational in intent, which makes it harder to rank unless you’re the brand itself.

Step 3: How to Set Up Position Tracking

Curious how your keywords perform in search results? This is where Position Tracking comes in.

“Keywords” section of a position tracking campaign setup, where users input keywords they want to monitor for their website’s search engine rankings. You can add keywords one by one, import a list, and organize them with tags, while keeping an eye on the keyword limit.

Here are the key aspects:

• Keyword Input: Users enter keywords in a designated box, either individually or in bulk.
• Keyword Management: Options to add common tags, import keywords, and clear the input.
• Campaign Overview: Shows the number of keywords added and the remaining keyword limit.
• Data Upload Time: Crucially, once you “Start Tracking,” it typically takes about 1 day for the initial keyword ranking data to be fully collected and displayed in your dashboard, as the system needs to crawl and process search engine results.

Step 4: Ensure Your Website is Technically Healthy

Even if you write killer content, a slow or broken website will push you down the rankings. Use SEMrush’s Site Audit tool to catch technical issues.

Run a Site Audit:

1. Go to your project and click on “Site Audit.”

2. Click “Set up” and choose how many pages to crawl (start with 100–500).

3. Click Start Site Audit.

You’ll get a dashboard showing:

• Errors (serious problems)

• Warnings (issues that should be fixed)

• Notices (general improvements)

Pay close attention to things like broken links, missing meta descriptions, or slow load speeds.

Step 5: How to Analyze Competitors Using Domain Overview

Want to know what your competitors are ranking for? SEMrush’s Domain Overview gives you x-ray vision into their SEO game.

Here’s how to spy smartly:

1. Go to Domain Overview under Competitive Research.

2. Type in a competitor’s URL (like yourblog.com or topcompetitor.net).

3. Click Search.

The information presented outlines the initial stages of setting up and tracking a website’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance: first, by demonstrating how to configure a keyword tracking campaign, including adding target keywords and noting that it typically takes about one day for the initial ranking data to be fully collected and displayed; and second, by providing a summary of a website’s overall SEO health, showcasing its authority score, organic traffic, contributing keywords, backlink profile, and highlighting areas where data (like paid search traffic or competitor analysis) is still pending.

Step 6: How to Use On Page SEO Checker

Now, let’s boost your existing content. SEMrush’s On Page SEO Checker tells you exactly how to optimize pages based on data-driven suggestions.

Set it up like this:

• Keyword Tracking Setup: Defining keywords for ranking monitoring; initial data upload typically takes one day.
• Domain Performance Overview: Summary of authority score, organic traffic, and backlink profile.
• Site Audit: Technical health report, detailing errors, warnings, and key web vital performance.

These suggestions are golden. Following them step-by-step can really move the needle.

Step 7: How to Create Your First PDF Report

Showing results matters, especially if you’re working with clients—or even just tracking your own progress. SEMrush allows you to create sleek, professional PDF reports.

Here’s how to create one:

1. From your dashboard, click on “My Reports.”

2. Click “Create Report.”

3. Choose a template or build from scratch.

4. Drag and drop widgets like Site Audit Summary, Keyword Rankings, Competitor Analysis, etc.

5. Add your logo or notes (optional).

6. Click Export to PDF or schedule it to be emailed weekly/monthly.

And just like that, you’ve got a visual report that tells your SEO story.

Final Words

You don’t have to master all SEMrush tools on day one. The best way to use SEMrush is to focus on what you need right now—track a few keywords, clean up your technical SEO, and slowly start exploring new features. As your confidence grows, SEMrush becomes less like a toolbox and more like your SEO sidekick. Have questions about a specific tool? Want to know how to use SEMrush for local SEO, content writing, or backlinks? Drop your questions in the comments—I’m here to help.

Interesting Reads

 Software for Wholesale Management 

Inferences From The WordPress Survey 

 Software for Amazon FBA Sellers