How to Use SEMrush for Keyword Research and Site Audits

SEMrush is a comprehensive digital marketing platform used by SEO professionals, content marketers, and PPC managers worldwide. It combines keyword research, competitor intelligence, backlink analysis, technical site auditing, and rank tracking in a single interface.

For small business owners and marketers new to SEO, SEMrush can feel overwhelming at first. This guide focuses on the features you’ll use most often: finding keywords to target, spying on competitors, and running a technical audit to uncover issues holding your site back.

Keyword Research With SEMrush

Start in the Keyword Magic Tool. Type a seed keyword — a broad term related to your business — and SEMrush returns thousands of related keyword suggestions along with monthly search volume, keyword difficulty (KD), cost-per-click for paid ads, and search intent classification.

Use the filters to narrow results. Filter by keyword difficulty below 40 if you’re working on a newer site — these are typically easier to rank for. Filter by minimum search volume to remove keywords that generate almost no traffic. The ‘Questions’ tab is particularly useful: it surfaces queries phrased as questions, which are ideal for blog content and featured snippets.

Once you have a shortlist, add keywords to a Keyword Manager list. From there you can export them to a spreadsheet or group them by topic cluster. Topic clusters — where one pillar page covers a broad topic and supporting pages cover subtopics — are an effective content architecture strategy, and SEMrush’s grouping tools make planning this easier.

Competitor Analysis and Organic Research

The Domain Overview tool lets you enter any competitor’s domain and see their estimated organic traffic, top keywords, backlink count, and paid advertising activity. This is invaluable for benchmarking your own performance and spotting gaps.

The Organic Research report shows you every keyword a competitor ranks for, along with their position and estimated traffic from each keyword. Sort by traffic to find their most valuable pages, then ask whether you have equivalent content on your own site. If a competitor is generating significant traffic from a topic you haven’t covered, that’s a content opportunity.

The Keyword Gap tool compares your domain to up to four competitors and highlights keywords they rank for that you don’t. This is one of the fastest ways to identify high-priority content gaps in your strategy.

Running a Site Audit

SEMrush’s Site Audit crawls your website and flags technical SEO issues in order of severity. Set up a project for your domain, configure the crawl settings (number of pages, user agent, schedule), and run your first crawl. A full audit of a small business site typically completes within a few minutes.

The audit groups issues into errors (critical — fix immediately), warnings (should be addressed), and notices (lower priority). Common findings include broken internal links, pages with missing meta descriptions, images without alt text, redirect chains, pages blocked by robots.txt, and crawlability issues. Each issue includes an explanation and a recommended fix.

Schedule the audit to run weekly or fortnightly. This gives you a rolling record of your site’s technical health and alerts you to new issues introduced by site changes or CMS updates.