In this blog, we will explore practical steps on How to Grow Your Blog Traffic Using SEMrush 2023. From audience analysis to content optimization, we will uncover the key strategies that can propel your blog’s growth in the ever-competitive online realm.
Building a successful blog requires not only compelling content but also effective strategies to attract and engage a growing audience. In the dynamic landscape of digital marketing, SEMrush emerges as a powerful tool to supercharge your blog’s traffic in 2023. By harnessing SEMrush’s comprehensive features and insights, you can optimize your blog’s visibility, understand your target audience, and create content that resonates with them.
Join us as we dive into the world of SEMrush and discover how it can empower you to expand your blog’s reach, connect with your audience, and achieve remarkable success in 2023.
How to Drive Traffic to a Blog?
There are actually several sources you can target to attract traffic to your blog. These include:
- Direct traffic: When a visitor arrives directly on your website (i.e. they typed your URL into their browser).
- Referral traffic: When a visitor has clicked a link on another website to arrive on your site. This link can be within that site’s content, or as part of a directory, for instance.
- Paid traffic: When a visitor arrives on your site by clicking on a paid advertisement (such as a search ad or a display ad).
- Email traffic: When a visitor arrives via a link in one of your emails.
- Social traffic: When a visitor arrives via a link on your social media feeds.
- Organic traffic: When a user searches for a particular term or query in a search engine, and your content appears as a result. The user then clicks on that result, taking them to your site.
For a new blog, though, it’s a good idea to target organic traffic. These visitors are actively looking for the information that your content provides, and, as a result, they are more likely to engage with that content (and possibly even become leads).
What’s the difference between high quality and low quality traffic?
Before we get into techniques for growing your traffic numbers, let’s explore the concept of web traffic more deeply. It’s easy to assume that traffic is just a number. The more the better, right? Honestly, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
If you’re going to put resources into generating traffic, make sure the traffic you’re driving to your site is high quality. This may mean different things to different businesses, but generally, high quality traffic consists of customers who fit your business’s buyer persona.
So, before you get into the technical aspects of traffic generation, make sure your buyer personas are defined. This way, you’ll be able to benchmark the impact of your efforts beyond simply tracking site visits.
New Features Of Semrush To Grow Your Online Business:
1. Site SEO Audit
Semrush now offers a complete site SEO audit with every plan (including their most basic “Pro” plan) which lets you find all of the SEO issues on your blog.
You can set up your site audit as a “campaign” and let it run at specified intervals (every week, every month, etc.).
I have set up weekly reports for Jobszag as this blog is big and very active. What I like is that I only need to set up Site Audit once, and it will automatically send me a weekly report once the audit has been completed.
- Bonus Tip: If you are setting up Site Audit for the first time, you have an option to select different crawlers. By default, the Semrush desktop bot is selected for crawling, and you can change it to the Google desktop or mobile bot. I prefer the Google bot and suggest the same for you as it’s better to see the SEO report from Google’s perspective.
2. Social Media Analytics
This feature is in beta, but it is available for all current Semrush customers.
Social analytics is a very important aspect of SEO and is often overlooked by bloggers.
This feature of Semrush lets you audit your Facebook, Twitter, and G+ account.
You can also check your competitor’s social media account to measure how well you are doing against them.
- (At this time, Semrush’s “Social Media” tool only supports the above-mentioned reporting.)
Your goal is to always get the green mark in your weekly report.
What I like here is the comprehensive detail on everything, including number of updates and engagement rate.
If you have a close competitor, you can get vital data like how often they are updating their social media account, and you can plan your strategy around their marketing campaign.
Since this tool is still in beta, I have a couple of suggestions:
- YouTube integration: Having YouTube here would be really helpful. These days, all bloggers are quite active with video blogging, and YouTube is always the platform of choice. I have mentioned earlier about VidIQ for YouTube users, and having that kind of data (data shown by VidIQ or TubeBuddy) would make Semrush’s social media feature an idle choice among video bloggers.
- Improve engagement: Optimizing social media accounts based directly on a competitor’s report would also be very useful (especially for newbies).
3. SEO Ideas (You will love this)
This is a holy grail for bloggers who understand the importance of keyword optimization.
The SEO Ideas tool simplifies the tasks associated with web page optimization.
By auditing your landing pages that appear in Google SERPs and comparing them to your competitors’ pages for the same keywords, Semrush will give you recommendations for your optimization strategy and keyword targeting that could improve your search engine ranking.
You need to manually add all the pages of your website and add in keywords for which you want to get ideas. The report will be generated instantly.
Here’s what that looks like:
The coolest part is that it automatically pulls up landing pages with keywords based on your position checker settings. (I talk about the keyword position checker in the next section.)
This tool analyzes the top 10 pages ranking for the same keyword (in Google) and suggests changes on how to improve your rankings.
For backlink building, you also get suggestions for domains where you should try acquiring a backlink for higher ranking.
Here is an example of an SEO Ideas report page:
- You should not miss their SEO Ideas statistics page, which is a dashboard in itself.
Here you can find the pages which need optimization (provided you have added them as mentioned above).
This is one feature that is under-utilized by many Semrush users, and it really is something that you should not miss.
4. Keyword Position Tracking
Tracking your keyword position is probably the most important aspect of your website’s SEO.
The keyword tracking feature is the reason I started using Semrush regularly.
Recently, they have just made a bunch of changes, and their tracking now includes:
- Support for local SEO
- Tracking keywords based on device
What I like most about this feature is the ability to add keywords directly from Google Analytics. This really helps speed up the process.
In the below image, you can see some keywords which have been picked from my Google Analytics account.
The “Sandbox” is where suggested keywords are shown, and you can add or remove keywords as you wish.
Don’t forget to check the “Send me weekly updates” section. You will receive a weekly email where you can track which keywords’ rankings have improved and which keywords have lost their ranking.
Semrush Can Do A Lot More
I have been a long time user of Semrush and it’s only because they keep raising the bar and adding new features which are amazing.
Not only did Semrush help me grow my main blogs, but it also helped me keep the SEO of my micro-niche site up-to-date. Usually, these micro-niche sites are ‘set it and forget it’, so manually keeping track of their SEO progress is a real pain. But Semrush has stepped in and made this process a breeze.
If you are using Semrush already, log in to your dashboard and start playing with these awesome features. If you don’t yet have an account, you can use the link below to get a 14-day (completely free) trial with access to all of these cool features included.
So now it’s your turn to let me know: How’s Semrush working out for you? What’s your favorite feature? Do share your review and experiences with me in the comments below.
