SEM Rush-The First Look

 SEMrush 

I have chosen to conduct my project on ACE Adventure Resort, where I have worked in the marketing department for nearly 3 years. Prior to my time in the marketing department, I worked as a zipline guide, so I a strong connection to the company and want it to succeed. While my company recently began using SEMrush, I have not worked in it much in my position as social media coordinator. I’m excited to learn more about the program so I can share my knowledge with my company. I chose to use my Guru account instead of my business account for this project so that I can explore the functions of SEMrush on my own. In exploring SEMrush I am astonished by how powerful the tools are and I find the data to be really incredible. I’m really looking forward to learning more about everything that I can use it for in the coming weeks. 

I have also set up a project for my blog, Blogging Bricker. 

What does SEMrush do? 

SEMrush utilizes 11 different tools so that improvements can be made to your website based on the findings. This is important as it uses real data so that you can make changes to improve your site’s visibility, implement keyword strategies, and learn from the data over time in order to constantly make improvements to your website. With SEO, things are ever-changing and evolving, and SEMrush allows users to keep up with the health of their website. 

Site Audit

Perhaps one of the most important tools offered by SEMrush, the Site Audit crawls your project website and determines the overall health score of your site by completing 120 SEO checks  (Site Audit, 2016). At the time of writing this, I am still waiting for my site audit on both my blog and ACE’s website to be completed, but I am excited to see how they do and will update next week on their health score. Once these scores are determined, I will be able to see the number of broken links, duplicate content, and other website issues. Because the site audit is so important, I will determine my strategy moving forward based on the results. 

 

Position Tracking

Position Tracking allows users to rank based on chosen keywords (Position Tracking, 2016). 

In my project for SEMrush, I set up position tracking. This allows me to view how ACE Adventure Resort is performing in comparison to our competitors. The primary competitors are located close by to ACE Adventure Resort in the New River Gorge Region of West Virginia. The New River Gorge was recently adopted as the nation’s newest national park, so the area stands to experience significant growth in tourism in the coming years. 

The competition rafts the same rivers and offers similar activities to ACE. Two of the companies, New & Gauley Adventures and River Expeditions are much smaller outfitters, focusing primarily on whitewater rafting. The third competitor is as large as ACE, Adventures on the Gorge. Adventures on the Gorge offers similar resort-style accommodations, ziplining, on-site dining, and they have a pool. ACE offers the same, but with a lake waterpark instead of a pool. I chose the following keywords to track against ACE’s competition: Gauley River Rafting, West Virginia Rafting, New River Rafting, New River Gorge, and Whitewater rafting. When compared to Adventures on the Gorge, ACE has higher visibility, but ranks slightly lower on average (Adventure on the Gorge ranks 5th, ACE ranks 7th). 

Conclusion

I am fascinated by the data provided by SEMrush, and I’m looking forward to gaining more insight into the platform through this class in the coming weeks. Once the Site Audit is completed, I plan to dive deeper into SEMrush to determine the best strategy to implement for ACE and for my Blogger site.

References 

Position tracking. (2016, August 16). Retrieved February 22, 2021, from https://www.semrush.com/kb/32-position-tracking

Site audit. (2016, August 16). Retrieved February 22, 2021, from https://www.semrush.com/kb/31-site-audit