“Like A Crystal Ball For Your Marketing?!” | The Growth Booth #90

Aidan

Welcome to another episode of The Growth Booth. This is episode number 90, and today we are going to be doing something a little bit different. We're going to be talking about a trade tool, something that has become very much a secret weapon for me, something that I think about as being a little bit like a crystal ball that can let me see into the future a little bit, and also a barometer to help me gauge where I'm at.

Now, there are some trade tools that can almost make or break your online business. In my experience, the tool that we're talking about today, Semrush, is one of those. This is a tool that I've been using for over a decade now, so if nothing else, that should show you how important it's been in my business. I've convinced the Senior Marketing Research Manager at Semrush to come along and join us here today to answer a few questions and to give a few ideas about some of the things that you can do with Semrush that you may not already be aware of now. His name is Fernando Angulo. I hope I pronounced that right there. Fernando, thanks for joining us on the call today. 

Fernando

Thank you, Aidan, for having me here today. I'm happy to share any useful knowledge that I have. 

Aidan

Just to begin with, I'd love if you can explain briefly what Semrush does. What are the sort of the primary challenges that it helps online businesses, online marketers like me solve? 

Fernando

Well, in a short way to say it, Semrush is an online visibility platform. It's a SaaS platform that enables businesses globally to run search engine optimization, pay per click, PPC, content marketing, social media, and competitive research campaigns. You can get from Semrush measurable results. You can see how your environment is working in a concrete niche. You can see insights and solutions. You can build your own platform using our API solutions as well, API data. You can manage your team, you can work across different channels, different marketing channels. And of course, you can see what is happening now and create a forecast for, “Okay, I want to go the next three months or six months with this strategy,” you can forecast those results as well. So, just in a few words, Semrush is an online visibility platform. If you want to be visible, you need to use tools to do that in this online industry. 

Aidan

Yeah, you've touched on a few of the different ways that we use Semrush in our business. I think one of the main ways that come to mind is we sort of try to establish guide rails, if you like, with our content marketing. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of saying, “I'm going to create a blog post about this” or “I'm going to publish such and such ecommerce product” without putting any thought into “Am I ever going to be able to get ranked for the keyword associated with that blog post?” 

And if I did get ranked, is there actually any traffic there? So we use it as a research tool. This is where I think about a little bit like a crystal ball, because I can see, “Okay, well, this particular keyword that I might want to build a blog post around has got an estimated search volume, so a certain number of people searching for it, and it's got a difficulty level of whatever that may be.” And then I can sort of use that to strategically plan out my content. I think in the past and a big mistake I've seen a lot of people make is they just put content on the web and then expect traffic to come. It may have worked 20 years ago, but it doesn't work now. So that's one of the ways that we use Semrush. 

Another thing that we use it for is a bit like a barometer or a feedback mechanism, and it lets me know if I'm on the right track. So if we've gone out there and we've put a content marketing plan in place and we're strategically going to try to get rankings and traffic and visibility around a certain group of keywords, how are we actually progressing with that? Because if you don't have something to give you feedback, then you may be close to a breakthrough. You may be close to getting on the first page of Google, for example, but you wouldn't know it. That's kind of almost like a GPS system for online visibility. 

The other thing that I use Semrush for a lot is spotting opportunities because I log into the interface and it tells me what my keyword rankings are, different visibility metrics, and sometimes I spot one which is close to becoming highly visible, so close to becoming a keyword that's right at the top of Google. In fact, I found one the other day related to a baby monitor, and I wasn't expecting us to get any rankings for that, but we're starting to get pretty good rankings. If I put just a little bit of effort into this, then we can get much higher rankings and cash in with more traffic as a result. 

So that's some of the ways that I've been using it lately, and I know that some of the audience who listen to this podcast would be able to use it in a similar way. You mentioned a whole range of other ways that it can be leveraged, so I'm keen to dive into some of those shortly. I've sort of shared some of what my most popular features are. What would you say are some of the most popular Semrush features for online businesses that you've seen, and how have you seen other people using it? The most popular features, if you like. 

Fernando

Fantastic. Yes, the way you explain it, how you are using it is brilliant. That's the way that you need to be using it. Creating this plan and then the action points, the strategy behind your plan to accomplish that plan is fantastic. In the way of content creation, in the way of establishing that barometer where you say “Okay, I can go this way or that way,” having that holistic view about what is happening in your industry, that's a great way to start. Actually, when people are using Semrush, they are using it for several purposes, but the most interesting part, I will say, well, for me, because I'm a market research manager for the last five years, I'm in the digital marketing world for the last ten years, is to start with a goal. Setting goals with Semrush is just amazing. You should start with a tool that is called Market Research, which is a trends platform where you can see where exactly you are in the industry.

If you are in the healthcare industry, automotive industry, finance industry, wherever industry you are working on right now, you need to identify yourself, how far you are from the leaders of the market, how established you are as a competitor, because we are in a competitive landscape, all of us. You need to be aware about your market share. These terms are very technical in an economic way point of view, but market share is really important to identify your strengths and weaknesses. 

For example, with market research tool, you can identify the sources of traffic that are the most popular for your competitors and the ones that are bringing more success to them. Just for an instance, most of the people are using organic traffic for their own benefits, which is great. You can do it, that establishing your keyword plan, doing your keyword research, creating content based on keyword questions or with keyword phrases. You can enable that, the Power of Organic Search. 

But that's not the first source of traffic. The first source of traffic for basically any industry is direct traffic. In direct traffic, you can have basically everything. You can have brand exposure, you can have your brand awareness there, you can have even your social media results. You can have everything. That's why you need to be focusing on what is working in your industry. Just as an example, I can tell you that for example, in the gambling industry, the most popular source of traffic is not organic traffic. It's referral traffic. So with referrals in the gambling industry, doing partnerships between each other, there are several sources for acquiring traffic. That's something that is working really good for them. 

If you are open to establish a business or to go into the gambling online business, you need to be aware of that. Just doing SEO is not going to work there. In other industry, in the healthcare industry, so basically, the second largest provider of traffic, source of traffic, is also not SEO. It’s basically paid advertisement. Because you have so many SEO sources for SEO competitors for the healthcare industry, you can have there Wikipedia… I don't remember. 

Aidan

Mayo Clinic is a big one? Mayo Clinic is another one?

Fernando

Oh, yes, you can have that as well as reference. You have so many reference, but you need to be aware that most of the clinics are doing paid advertisement there. You need to be sure that, “Okay, I'm going to be running some ads here, how expensive it's going to be, how large I need to be, my budget for this year or for the next six months to be, and in which platforms that I need to promote my services.” All that aspects of goals needs to be at the very start of your online overall strategy. 

Then many people are using also tracking systems. That's the second part. You set up a goal, you have your strategy, your tactic points. Then you need to be measuring what is happening inside of each single category. So you are working on your SEO, how good your website is performing, technically. You need to have your site audit. You need to be aware about how good your web page is, how good the Google bot is crawling all the pages that are important for you. If you have landing pages, you are creating them, they are being indexed by Google. 

You have the possibility to index all those landing pages as well. Then you need to track your results in paid advertising as well. You need to see how well your budget is running, not only because you are spending money, but you need to see how good you are spending your money. You need to be aware about the ROI of the money that you're spending and also see how well your ads are performing in comparison with your competitors. If your industry is large enough to see how all the platforms that your competitors are running ads, let's say not only in the displayed advertising network or in Google Ads, for example, you can see how well they are doing on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube, or how well they're performing on TikTok, for example, or on LinkedIn. You can see all the difference there.

Just to finish this part of how to use it because the spectrum of using Semrush is huge, you can be aware about, let's say you have products on Amazon, how well these products are being visible for your list of products and compare them, the Amazon listing that you have with the Google listing that you have, you have your product listing ads on Google. You can check that. “Okay, maybe it's a good idea to have it on Amazon. Maybe it's a good idea to change the titles, the headers, the description of my product, because this is working here and there.” So comparing, measuring, setting up a goal again, tracking all that. That's the holistic system that tools like Semrush are helping. 

Aidan

That's amazing. We've covered a huge amount of things that Semrush can do right there. If people are listening to this and they want to find out more, by the way, you can head over to thegrowthbooth.com/Semrush. We will make sure that we include links to that in the show notes and everywhere where this podcast and video are published. And again for thegrowthbooth.com/Semrush, which is S-E-M-R-U-S-H. 

Now, I want to recap on a couple of interesting points that you made there. Firstly, I'd never thought about using it for Amazon, but that's a great idea. We sell a lot of products on Amazon. A lot of our people that listen to this show sell products on Amazon, so that's a good tip. Another thing you mentioned was Semrush can be used to assess a niche market, or an industry, if you like, and give intel about what's working in that niche. So if someone is building a website around, for example, dog training or some very specific topic, they can assess the existing competition, the other pages that are out there right now, and find out where are they getting their traffic, what are the types of keywords that they are going after. 

Then, if you want to go ahead and build your own website around, let's say, dog training, for example, you can use Semrush a bit like a doctor, where you go into the doctor and you get a full assessment of how healthy you are. Semrush can do that. In fact, this is something we do on a regular basis where we run an audit of our website. We identify all the different errors and issues or potential issues that it's got so we can fix them. And inevitably, when we fix those, we start getting better results. 

So, for example, it will identify if we've got broken links, it would identify if certain pages haven't been optimized in a very strategic way. I think about that as a little bit like going to the doctor and having a full body checkup and just seeing how healthy you are.

So, a couple of points there just again, about how I sort of think about this and relate it back to what we and what a lot of our listeners are doing with online business. How would you say Semrush is different, or what unique points does it have compared to some of the other tools out there? Obviously, there are dozens of different search engine optimization tools, dozens of different content marketing tools. What would you say makes Semrush different? 

Fernando

That's a great question. For sure, I will make the strategic point for making this differentiation point. The way that we are changing as the industry is changing, we are flexible with all the processes that we have. In some cases, some of the features that we have launched, they are massively accepted by our users because they need it, and they need it because we also internally we have a big marketing team inside of Semrush, around 50 or 80 people that are working with our tools as well. We're using them in a daily basis and we say “Okay, this new feature needs to be there because we need it,” and we ask some of our partners that “Okay, what do you think about this feature? What else you will add to them?” Having these brainstorms with clients, with the internal teams, we are able to launch these type of features and once we are sure that this feature is finished, we publish it and we see that “Okay, that was a really nice feature, right?” 

But that's not always the situation. We are really open to experiments. We promote this cultural thing that is called the experiment culture. Also when something is not working, we say “Okay, it's great that it's not working because right now we know that one thing is not working. Let's try the next one,” and the next one, maybe the next one, maybe in the third or 15th iteration, it’s going to be working. So we work a lot with experiments. Right now, the tools that we have published are the ones that we say, “Okay, there is a great value with them,” but we have other tools that people are not using them because the industry is also changing. We are not afraid to say, “Hey, sorry, guys, we need to shut down this feature because there's not much benefit for us, even for you. We're going to be closing it or we're going to be working to make it better.” 

This flexibility to change that is one of our key features. If you were seeing or if you were visiting Semrush for the last six months, in the last six months, we have changed a lot. If you visit Semrush in the last three years, oh, it's a totally different Semrush. We have right now a part of Semrush that is called the App Center. You will see there tons, tons of feature for different startups that are joining to this Semrush App Center and they are promoting their services. Our team, they are just reviewing them and say “Okay, we don't have this in Semrush, but this can help you also with your strategy, with your marketing plan.” 

I don't know any other tool that has an App Center joining the forces of, let's say, tools that are working in the areas that we have no features with or in the areas that they are just for a certain purpose. For example, we have a tool that is meant to be working only with reviews for advertisement. You can create your ad and you need to be sure that “Okay, how well this ad will run with this audience, with this target location, how will this perform?” We have a tool that asks directly people that are in that industry and you can receive in terms of minutes or a couple of hours all the reviews that you want from that advertisement. That's something that we didn't have in the past. Many other tools, they don't have. We have that in our App Center, the recommendation apps for advertisement. 

Also, we have different tools that are working with AI. Just for instance, our writing assistant is one of the best ones. I will say that because I tried a different other spectrum of tools. It's one of the best ones because you can see there the SEO equivalent for scoring, how good it’s going to be working for SEO, how good it’s going to be working for human interest, how well-structured the content is in terms of tone of voice. 

If you are writing a content for a blog in the legal industry, there needs to be a very technical language to be addressing those certain users. But if you are writing a post about for the hospitality industry, for a vacation blog, whatever, the tone of voice needs to be different. And those approaches means to be very logical, right? But this will make it more easier for any user to write posts in different industries. So if you're an agency, this is the best tool that you can have for your writers. Just checking the total amount of scoring for the writing assistant, you can be sure that the content that you are creating is for an evergreen piece of content, not only for just a couple of months or three months. This is going to be something that is going to be lasting for a long time. That's the purpose of SEO. 

We have several tools to work for every single part, but the most convenient one to use that makes the difference in our industry are the ones that we are also using internally.

Aidan

One of the things that I've always been impressed with Semrush is that I feel like, having used it for over a decade, there's a really strong foundation of intelligence that we can draw into. So for example, search volume is one of them that I keep coming back to, competitive analysis. We can look at things like the domain authority or the page authority of another competitor, for example, or even to assess how well we are doing. 

Something that I've noticed a lot though, and you've made a couple of mentions of it, is the industry and the way that people getting traffic is changing. It's not always that the number one source of traffic is going to be organic in the search engine. Sometimes, it's referral. What have you seen change more in regards to that, with visibility and the way that websites are getting traffic maybe over the past few years? Are you seeing that, generally speaking, there's a lot more social traffic happening, there's more referral traffic happening? Or is it very much industry-specific? 

Fernando

Yeah, I will say that it's pretty much industry-specific, but we have the numbers for the global traffic acquisition situation in 2022, for example. There in the first place is direct traffic, the first source of traffic for basically every single industry. By far, the second largest source of traffic for all the industries is organic. If we go deeper, it's going to be certain difference between organic and referral. Then the third largest amount of traffic is referral. Then we go lower. The numbers are pretty much really low, like 1% or 0.8% with the global traffic, which is social media traffic is really low. But the impact of social media traffic goes really high on direct traffic. The results of social media are not always visible in terms of global traffic, but in terms of brand awareness are really good for direct traffic. Then the last amount of traffic, the last source of traffic, by far the number is really low, but it's paid traffic. 

In total numbers, in absolute numbers, the result means that you have millions of possibilities, you have even billions of possibilities for user acquisition. But the thing is how good these users are targeted, how good these users are selected for your own purposes. If you are targeting the whole world, that's not going to work for anyone because the interests are so different. The target proposition that you need to build, your buyer persona, your perfect user needs to be the one that your business needs. 

Even for those big monsters like Amazon or Apple or even for Google users, the situation is changing a lot. During the pandemic, the situation was totally different from anything we were expecting in 2019. Just for an instance that in 2019, 2020, and 2021, the situation, the fluctuation between users that were using desktop devices and mobile devices is going to be totally different than the situation that is right now. Mobile users are of course the number one, but they are not the number one by far. In countries, for example, like in the U.S., the amount of users using PC devices are slightly lower than mobile devices. During the pandemic, the pandemic's deal was like 50% of the users were using mobile devices, 50% of the users were using desktop devices. Right now, the situation is not that different because people are using desktop devices. So in any case, if you are building a website, don't only concentrate on mobile devices because desktop is there. People are still wanting that experience of desktop device. The dynamics for this is totally different for every single region in the U.S. They are using desktop device, mobile devices. 

If we go to Asia, in Asia the situation is completely different. Most of the people, like 79%, are using mobile devices. In countries, for example, like Brazil, the mobile using is around 85%. So you can say that “Okay, we are not in a mobile device world yet. Maybe we're not going to be there,” but still you need to be aware about what devices your users are using and you need to build a better experience for mobile devices or a better experience for desktop or the same experience for both of them. 

I will always say that you need to know really well your users first, then go from the traffic sources, then go for the strategy. If the strategy is direct traffic, which is basic for everyone, it's good to have in mind to do more awareness campaign. If the traffic source, the first one is referral traffic, you need to be aware about how many partners you have about if you are running an affiliate program or you need to be part of a certain group. If you are a marketplace, you need to be aware about how well you are competing with these giants like Amazon or eBay or other companies. 

So having the knowledge, knowledge right now is power, and having the data to benefit from the knowledge that you possess, that's something that makes totally the difference. 

Aidan

I think if you don't have a tool like Semrush as part of your marketing toolbox, it's almost like you've got a blindfold on and you're just guessing and just trying to see what happens, but that's a very reactive approach to marketing, whereas when you start leveraging data and making data-driven decisions, then you're taking a proactive approach to marketing. To your point about understanding on a niche by niche or industry by industry level where the traffic is coming from, as a marketer, this is like gold dust because I can see, “Okay, my competitor is getting traffic and most of it is organic. Okay, let's dive into that a little bit deeper,” because I only need a tiny slice of the pie to do very well with that traffic. Or maybe I identify that a niche might have a disproportionately high amount of social traffic, even though it's one of the smallest traffic channels. There may be an opportunity there, but I can only discover those opportunities if I've got the tools to help me do it. You really can't do this unless you've got tools. I think that's why Semrush has become one of the most, if not the most important tool in our marketing toolbox, certainly our content marketing toolbox. 

This has been a real opener. I think that the best thing for people to do if they're interested to learn more, would be to go and set up a free trial. The kind people over at Semrush have given me a 14-day pro trial, which you can get by going to thegrowthbooth.com/Semrush. We'll include that link with the show notes, and that way you can go in and see firsthand all of the power that's at your fingertips.

The other thing that I'll add, Fernando, you've mentioned a huge amount of different possibilities, things that we could do with Semrush. One thing that I want to compliment the people over at Semrush on is when I log in, it's not overwhelming. I feel like, “Oh, there's a lot here, but I can navigate around, I know how to find things.” And to our listeners here, I think you'll experience that yourself if you want to go and take a look at Semrush. If you are going to use Semrush, one of the first things that I would do if you've got an existing website is run an audit of it, see where you're performing well, see where you could do better. That's absolutely something that you could do using the free trial and also drill down into identifying where some of the different opportunities are that you can leverage.

So, Fernando, look, I'm conscious of time here. I don't want to take up too much more of your time, but thank you so much for taking half an hour out of your day today and coming here and giving our audience an overview of some of the things that Semrush can do. We'd love to get you back in the future and maybe do a deep dive into one or two of the different features because there is so much that we could talk about here. So once again, Fernando, thank you so much for tuning in here today. 

Fernando

Thank you for the invitation. And just to add to that, one of the greatest things about our industry is that you can get the data and you can go as granular as you want. You want to see the sources of traffic, that's one thing, but you want to go deeper and see the reasons behind the success or the failure of your competitors, you can go exactly to the URL, exactly to the piece of content, exactly to the description of the product that is working really well, or the one that is performing really bad. You can go granular as it is, and you can perform an audit of that single landing page and see that “Okay, there's no way that Google bot is indexing that page,” or you can go “Okay, this is being promoted on social media,” or how much money the company is investing in promoting that on Google Ads or in Google Ads display network, for example. 

Going granular as you want is the only thing that is the main thing that you can do in our industry. If you want to learn more, I also invite all of you to go to Semrush Academy. We have a great academy. I'm a professor there as well. I have several courses on market research, on content marketing that you can enroll for free, of course. 

Aidan

That's fantastic. Thank you, Fernando. 

Fernando is the senior market research manager, and I think we can all learn a lot by going and checking him out at the Semrush Academy. We'll make sure we include those links as well. That's a wrap for today. I look forward to getting another show out to you next week. Thanks for listening. And as always, you can watch this episode over on YouTube, if you want to. Just go to YouTube, do a search for The Growth Booth, you can head over to thegrowthbooth.com, navigate to episode number 90 or you can listen to it wherever you like to listen to your podcasts on Spotify, on Apple Music, wherever it may be. That's a wrap for this one. I'll see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.