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Leaders
March 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 9
“It used to be a channel play. You only needed to concentrate on your SEO, but things have changed. Now you have to think about all the distribution channels – Google and all the social media platforms. You need to be visible in all those places.”
Google black box
One of the ways SEMrush has done this is to crawl the net looking for content and links and then analyses all this data in the quite similar way as Google. The keywords it offers up to its clients are thus not guesses but recommendations based on similar methodology to what Google uses.
Google now accounts for more than 50% of referral traffic sent to digital publishers, according to the web analytics firm Parse.ly, compared to 27% from the second-biggest referrer, Facebook. Together, Google and Facebook control about
56% of the US digital ad market, according to eMarketer; competitors like Amazon and Snap, Inc. each have less than 5% of the market.
“We probably have the second most extensive crawler after Google in terms of crawling intensity,” says Levin. “Its bigger than some of
the other search engines like Bing. Google is a black box with content going in and search results coming out. What we do is shine some light on what happens in between.”
SEMrush uses a “freemium” model. What that means is that there is a very basic and limited free version of some of the features, but where SEMrush makes its money is from happy punters upgrading to the premium service (starting at $99 / month) to unlock more features and better quality recommendations.
“We wanted to make these tools available to marketers. For small sites looking to improve their ranking in a search result and maybe the free version is all they will ever need. But for the bigger companies maintaining their ranking is important.”
SEO is becoming more sophisticated. After signing up to SEMrush, the software crawls your
own site and analyses it. Then for any given page it offers recommendations of key words and phrases that will promote traffic.
“At the end of the day it is up to the owner of the site to decide what they want to do. We don't do that for them,” says Levin. “the publisher still needs to do the heavy lifting.”
The default choice for most websites is to gain as many views as possible. To do that there are a few keywords that have the broadest reach that you could use. However, these words means content competes with a very large number of other sites and many sites will get lost in the mosh as a result.
An alternative is SEMrush will offer other keywords that are not quite as popular but have a lot less competition, but focus on a narrower audience. If that audience happens to be one
the publisher is particularly interested in then using those keywords might be a better choice: the audience it brings in may be smaller, but it is better defined and consequently may be easier to monetise.
Putting keywords in the right place is also important. The title of a page is an obvious place to place a keyword. And there are still those SEO boxes to fill out at the bottom of the publishing form. But placing keyword phrases in the body of the text is also useful. For this SEMrush offers a text editor that looks at your content and suggests changes to make sentences and paragraphs more visible to the Google bots.
Keywords is only one of the aspects of the SEMrush service and it is already being used by some of the big names in the publishing business to boost their public profile, including the likes of Forbes and Newsweek.
Another aspect of promoting content is getting links. This can be done internally (adding links to your own content) or externally (getting other sites to link to your articles) via “backlinks.”