In affiliate marketing, success can hinge on the smallest details such as the tools and technology that you choose to use to gain a competitive traffic advantage. Having a strong tech stack is paramount, and Semrush is a platform that has the potential to be a game changer for affiliate marketers, regardless of the industry they operate in.
This comprehensive review of Semrush Guru and Pro tools will give you an insight into what you could currently be missing out on building, when it comes to a competitive advantage for your affiliate program or business.
While Semrush started off as an SEO and PPC platform, its offering has now developed into a fully fledged marketing platform used by over seven million online marketing professionals around the world to manage their Social, Media and Local Search strategies.
Indeed, over 30% of Fortune 500 companies have invested in utilising the platform’s features for their affiliate and digital marketing teams. Its aim is to allow affiliate and seo marketers to build, manage and seek opportunities to drive incremental growth with a specific focus on discovering where SEO and PPC traffic and keywords are creating opportunities to scale.
We’re focusing on the Semrush PRO and GURU platform solutions to differentiate the tools and uses as a guide for digital and affiliate marketers who want to use proven technologies to scale.
Semrush: The toolbox for a modern-day affiliate marketer:
Semrush comes with a variety of tools embedded in their marketplace designed to help today’s modern start up and scaling affiliates gain access to a variety of tools to make life simpler and enable targeting traffic sources to convert as easily as possible.
Getting Started with Semrush PRO
Semrush Pro is the baseline offering for digital marketers or affiliates and is a tool that is the ideal companion for those starting their affiliate marketing business or looking to revamp their SEO strategies.
It provides all of the tools mentioned above and comes with a limit of 500 trackable keywords and 10,000 results per report. These levels should be more than enough for a small but growing affiliate to stand out from the competition.
You can view more details on Semrush’s pricing page.
As standard, the Semrush Pro Toolbox includes:
1 The Keyword Magic Tool:
When it comes to search performance, an affiliate can live or die by the keywords that they choose to target. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to know how competitive a particular keyword or phrase is, which is where Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool comes in.
With a simple click, the tool can conjure up a plethora of high-performing keywords. Affiliates can instantly see data on keywords that they are looking to target (including Trends, Search Volume and Cost per Click) as well as a proprietary score that indicates how difficult it will be to rank for a particular term.
For affiliates wanting to go further, the Keyword manager provides a more in-depth analysis of up to 2,000 keywords at a time.
The Keyword Manager provides a wide range of information on your keywords including:
- The most accurate search volumes
- Keyword density
- Competitive density
- Click potential
- Intent.
You simply need to give the tool up to five seed keywords and Keyword Manager will automatically create a list of clustered keywords for you.
With the Keyword Magic Tool and associated Keyword Manager, you can instantly uncover the keywords that will bring traffic to your site and resonate with your audience.
2 Backlink Analytics:
If you’re looking for SEO success, then analysing the links coming into your website is just as important as targeting specific keywords.
Semrush takes the pain (and time!) out of this process by providing the most accurate Analytics Scoring on the market
The Analytics tool analyses all links coming into your (or your competitor’s!) site. It provides a comprehensive view of your backlink profile and breaks down all inbound links by a variety of metrics such as:
– Domain
– Category of domain
– Link type (image, text, frame etc)
– Link Attribute (Follow, Nofollow sponsored etc)
The Backlink Audit Tool is similar but is designed to highlight any harmful links that may put you at risk of a penalty. Semrush uses over fifty parameters to provide you with up-to-date warnings on any toxic domains that may be linking to your content.
Finally, the Backlink Analytics tool also provides a Network Graph report that shows you the domains linking to your site that are providing the most significance. This significance is determined by a wide range of factors including:
- Higher Authority Score
- Relatively low number of outgoing links to your website
- Relatively low number of outgoing links to other websites
Used together, these tools can help to build a formidable link strategy that will take your SEO rankings to the next level.
3 Position Tracking:
Once you’ve got your keywords and your backlink profile sorted out, you’re going to want to see what effect they’ve had on your rankings.
Well, Semrush’s Position Tracking does that for you in real-time daily updates to track changing positions with accuracy. Up to 1,500 keywords feature provides real-time insights into your rankings (or those of your competitors) across Google and Bing which help you make informed decisions about how to maintain or improve your position.
What’s more a Sensor tool is built into the platform to track signs that Google’s algorithm could be changing so that you can stay ahead of your competitors and take advantage of any subtle changes that may push you ahead of them in the SERPs.
4 Site Audits:
Your website might be looking great, but do you know what’s going on behind the scenes?
If you don’t, then there’s no need to worry as Semrush provides a Site Audit tool that will scan your site and provide you with an in-depth report covering more than 140 technical and SEO mistakes (including advanced reports on JavaScript rendering and CWW).
As such, you can ensure that your website is not just visually appealing but also structurally sound. Any issues that are found are divided into three categories and you can prioritise which issues you want to fix first to ensure that you’re enhancing your site’s performance and user experience.
Elevate Your Traffic with Semrush GURU:
Now, let’s turn our attention to Semrush’s most popular plan – Semrush Guru. Designed for the seasoned affiliate marketer, Guru takes your strategies to the next level with its advanced features and insights.
It increases the keywords that can be tracked to 15,000 and also allows 30,000 results to be delivered per report
Aside from simply raising the levels of the platform’s main tools, Guru also provides a suite of additional features.
Helpful tools available from the App Center
Historical Data and Trends at your fingertips:
A tool that provides access to historical data, allowing you to identify patterns and capitalise on emerging trends before your competitors even notice.
Content Optimisation:
Webmasters everywhere recognise that content is king. However, that is only true if the content resonates with your audience.
Semrush provides a range of Content Optimisation tools to give you the power to analyse the performance of your content and fine-tune it for maximum impact.
Generate unique content on demand with ContentShake AI
If the idea of churning out valuable, unique content on a regular basis is your idea of a nightmare, then you’ll be pleased to hear that Semrush can do it all for you.
ContentShakeAI is a new app that relies on AI to generate long-form articles and short-form social media posts for you in under a minute.
The process starts with asking you for a topic that you’re looking to write about and then comes up with a variety of options for blog posts of around 1,000 words and multiple blog posts based on the particular social media platform that you’re wanting to post on – currently the platform supports Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter/X Instagram
After selecting where you want to make the post, you can make selections around the tone of voice and the type of post you want to make, at which point, ContentShake will automatically generate multiple posts for you and display them in a simple WYSIWYG editor, where it is easy to make small changes to the content or larger changes to the overall style of the posts.
Long-form articles for blog posts work in the same way. You’re asked to input some keywords around the content that you want to generate. ContentShake will then show you some ideas based around those themes.
You can simply select the idea that you want to take further and ContentShake will generate a unique article of around 1,000 words based on the topic of your choosing in real time.
The tool even has a WordPress integration meaning that you can publish the finalised article directly to your website without having to copy and paste.
ContentShake AI is both intuitive and incredibly useful when it comes to consistently publishing valuable content to your audiences across all channels
Influencer Analytics
Designed more for brands and agencies, Influencer Analytics is a discovery tool that is designed to uncover influencer’s reach and performance across YouTube, TickTock and Twitch.
The idea behind the analytics is that a brand can find and analyse the performance of influencers that will help promote their brand.
From there, they can make data-driven decisions on what influencers to work with, get reports on any campaigns that they decide to run and even analyse how their competitors are performing/
Influencer Analytics is not included directly in the Semrush Guru package. It requires an additional subscription which can be paid on a monthly or annually basis.
AdClarity
If you’re buying display media to promote your products, then another app that you’ll want to check out is AdClarity.
The tool is a competitive intelligence app which analyses several different metrics (such as price, placement and image type) across a variety of banners. It pulls together performance data in real time from 51 global markets and over 650,000 publishers.
The information that the app returns helps media buyers understand which publishers, ad-networks and/or agencies are providing the best ROI for their advertising budget. On top of that, you’d also be able to measure your competitor’s campaigns to understand what is best working for them and to benchmark your own performance.
Similar to Influencer Analytics, the AdClarity app does not come as a part of the Semrush Guru subscription. It requires an additional monthly/annual payment
Push Semrush data into Google Looker Studio
For those of you who are looking to take advantage of the huge amount of data that is available to the online marketer, the Semrush Guru account also allows Semrush data to be added to your Google Looker Studio.
Using the two tools in this manner is a great way to visualise data from a range of different sources and find the various trends that can make all the difference to your campaigns.
It’s also a great way to generate reports for your various affiliate programs. This can help to show them how your promotions are going and underline the areas where they can support you further.
If your campaigns are producing, then they’re also a great tool to have in negotiating a higher commission structure.
Which Semrush plan is best for you – Pro or Guru?
A tool like Semrush can be the ultimate partner for staying ahead of the traffic analysis game whether you go with their PRO or GURU package. It really does depend on what you want to achieve and where you are in your business journey just how deep you want to dive into the data.
However, if you’re new to the affiliate industry, run a small business or are perhaps a solopreneur, the suggestion is that you start with the PRO solution. As you start to improve your SEO and/or build your affiliate program and partner recruitment out to discover new niches you can level up to a Guru account and continue to use the additional tools and functions the Guru package offers.
Either way Semrush is an excellent tool to deliver relevant industry insights that are provided via data driven marketing analysis. You will uncover keywords that you wouldn’t have thought about otherwise, be able to generate quality content in a quick time and align your brand across multiple channels. In short, it offers seriously good power to take your business to the next level at a good price.
If you’re more experienced, run a large number of sites or perhaps even head up your own agency, then head straight for the GURU package. The plan comes with more data, higher restrictions in terms of the searches you can run and a number of extra tools. Not only that, the data can be exported from the platform for you to be able to do your own modelling.
For more information, and to sign up for a free 7-day trial, head on over to www.semrush.com
_________________________________________________________________________________________
