I’ll show you a shortcut 😉
Want to get rid of your fear and know what to blog about in 2022?
To get guaranteed reader love with a lot of visitors?
Doable research is the key.
You’ll learn about using the Semrush 14-day free trial.
And after reading and applying the detailed steps, you can:
- Generate a year’s supply of proven blog post ideas
- Conduct a basic SEO analysis of any niche and competitors
- Never waste time wondering what to write about again
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Grab a Free 14-Day Trial of SEMrush (Worth $50) and Start Getting Organic Traffic to Your Blog ASAP
Click this button and grab the special offer from I Wanna Be a Blogger and Semrush.
Fill in all the data. You don’t have to pay anything. Just don’t forget to cancel your subscription within 14 days.
Here’s what you need to do now:
Remember that you can use all of the great features of Semrush only after you have followed all the steps and activated your account.
Now let’s skip the theory and move on to practice so that you know what to write about.
Know the Competitors. Let’s Find Them?
If you don’t know a single competitor (they are your allies, not your enemies!), then search Google for a phrase from your niche or a list of the best blogs.
For example, you have a blog (or starting it) about improving writing skills. You want to analyze your niche and competitors to:
- Write without guessing
- Don’t waste time
- Understand what to blog about
- Get free organic search traffic
Just Google it (how to improve writing skills or best writing blogs).
Load each website and quickly review if it fits your topic and niche.
Select one relevant blog with moderate domain authority (an indicator of their SEO strength) from the results. Moz Chrome extension will help. Look for blogs with DA <50.
Find highly specialized blogs rather than sites about many topics. It will give you more accurate results.
Found a suitable one?
OK. Use it in Semrush for analysis.
If you see that it has a little search traffic (<10,000), it’s better to find another one.
To use Semrush reports even after the free trial period ends, be sure to save all data (Google Drive is great).
And to search for topics of your future blog posts, it’s worth setting up a Google spreadsheet.
For You, I Created a Free SEO Competitive Analysis Template Where You Can Save All The Data. Make a Copy of This Spreadsheet
Click here to open it and make a copy. (If you do not have Google Drive, sign up—you’ll need a Gmail account.)
Create a separate folder and place the Competitors-Colleagues spreadsheet there.
And upload all Semrush export files there for your convenience.
After Registering Your Free Trial Pro Account, Enter Your Competitor’s Domain into Semrush. The Report Will Be Loaded, and You’ll Start Collecting Data into Your Spreadsheet
Copy this data and enter it into your spreadsheet:
- Organic Search Traffic
- Referring Domains
Go to the Menu on the Left to Organic Research and Write Down the Data
Copy this data and enter it into your spreadsheet:
- Keywords
- Traffic Cost $
Go to the Pages Tab
Write down how many pages a competitor has:
- Organic Pages ()
And then click on the Export button to save the file with all the pages to your Google Drive.
Don’t forget to upload it to your created folder (drag it or use the context menu and Upload).
Open This File on Google Drive and Highlight the Second Column’s Data to Find Out What Competitor Pages are Getting 80% of Search Traffic
After that, select the data in four columns of these pages (you can expand the first column in width to see the full URLs of the pages) and copy (CTRL + C or CMD + C).
Go to your spreadsheet, and in the second tab, paste this data.
In the first column, enter the URL of the competitor’s homepage and multiply it for all rows (click on it, and then double-click on the small square). It will be easy to sort the data.
Select and Copy All URLs of the Pages and Then Return to SEMrush. In the Left Menu, Go to Link Building> Bulk Analysis
Paste the copied pages and click the Compare button. This way, you will know how strong these pages are in terms of SEO and how many inbound links they have. The less, the easier it is for you.
Export the data to an Excel file and upload it to a folder on Google Drive.
Open the File. Select Only Data in Columns Authority Score | Backlinks | Domains. Copy and Paste Them into Your SEO Template
To make it visually convenient to filter and sort later, I advise you to highlight each competitor’s data with your colored background. (Select all rows first.) For example, like this:
Bonus Semrush Tip #1: Open the Organic Research Report and Go to The Positions Tab. Export All the Keywords for which This Blog Ranks on Google
You will need this report when you determine which competitor topics are right for you.
You can filter all keywords by URL of the page.
It will tell you which keywords a particular page is ranking for. And when writing your blog post, you can make a plan and content based on these phrases.
To limit the number of keywords in Semrush (there is a limit of 10,000 keywords per export), you can leave only those in TOP-3 or TOP-10 of Google (60% of traffic goes only to the first three positions).
Don’t forget to upload the export file to your Google Drive.
Bonus Semrush Tip #2: As Long as You Have Free Access to Semrush, Download All of the Competitors’ Backlinks
Go to LINK BUILDING> Backlink Analytics to the Backlinks tab. You can limit the list by excluding all nofollow links, as follow links are more important for SEO. Export Excel file and upload it to Google Drive.
Bonus Semrush Tip #3: Find Out How Strong a Competitor’s SEO is
The Competitors-Colleagues spreadsheet on the Blank of Colleagues Tab has a column SEO Traffic/Pages. You can fill it out to see how strong a competitor’s SEO is.
Those with the highest score are worthy of detailed study.
How did they write blog posts, revealed the topic, and formatted them?
They will serve as examples of the right SEO for you.
The formula in this cell is simple: (Number of pages getting 80% of traffic / Total number of pages) * 100
=(E2/D2)*100
Perform this calculation for each competitor.
You can see that, for example, the site jerryjenkins.com has search traffic = 196300 per month, with a total of 134 pages, of which 22 pages get more than 80% of all traffic. Therefore he knows how to use SEO for blog posts, and it is worth learning from him.
When you fill in all the data, you will see how much time you can save by knowing which blog posts to write. Take a look at the example www.writerswrite.co.za — 4535 pages, and 80% of traffic only gets 12.
Imagine how long it took to write 4523 blog posts? 🙂
Bonus Semrush Tip #4: Find More Competitors
It’s easy to do.
Go to the Organic Research section in the left menu and select the Competitors tab. The competitors of the analyzed blog will be listed below.
As you can see, there are a lot of them. They are sorted by the number of common keywords. Pay attention to the Traffic column!
Choose the ones with the highest traffic.
If you already know your niche competitors, it will be easier for you to navigate and choose for analysis. If not, go to each website and see if it suits you. (You can export the entire list and upload it to Google Drive for future reference.)
Repeat the Same SEO Analysis Steps as for the First Competitor Blog
Fill in all the data in your spreadsheet. Also, don’t forget to export Semrush’s files and save them to Google Drive.
- Domain Overview: Organic Search Traffic, Referring Domains
- Organic Research > Overview: Keywords, Traffic Cost
- Organic Research > Pages
- Link Building > Bulk Analysis
- Organic Research > Positions
- Link Building > Backlink Analytics
You End Up with Something Like This SEO Spreadsheet with Two Tabs Filled in Thanks to a 14-Day Free Semrush
And here begins the most exciting and useful for you.
You can filter and sort this data to find the easiest blog post topics that will get the most Google traffic.
First, change the format of all numbers (as they are incorrectly identified as text when copied) so that the sort works correctly. Just highlight them all.
Now you can sort and filter.
What’s the most important thing?
AS (Authority Score) is Semrush proprietary metric used to measure the overall quality of target and influence on SEO. The score is based on the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic search traffic, and other data.
The strength of a page depends not only on the quality of the content but also on the referring sites.
Sort the data by column AS to find the pages with the lowest link weight.
You will see that many pages have AS=0. Still, there are links in the Links column and referring domains. There may be multiple links from the same domain, so you should always focus on this indicator, not links.
Why?
Because these links are from low-quality sites with automatically generated content, and you can easily verify this. Navigate to Link Building> Backlink Analytics and enter any of these pages.
Go to the Backlinks tab to see these links.
This is a great opportunity for you.
Suppose you write a more valuable blog post and comprehensive than a competitor and get at least a few links, or your domain’s overall authority is higher than your competitor. In that case, you can count on getting its traffic.
You can sort the entire list by traffic (column T) to determine what interests your audience the most.
You can define the topic by the name of the URL.
Or find out the most linked pages (column RD) to know which blog posts in your niche attract the most links and create something similar and better. This way, you can grow your domain authority.
Or find pages without backlinks but with a lot of traffic. This will be the easiest target.
SEO can seem terribly time-consuming and therefore scares off newbies.
Time passes anyway.
And in a year or two, you will have an asset that will bring dividends in the form of free traffic, customers, and constant income.
Semrush is a vital tool for blog owners because it helps to:
- Know what your audience needs
- Save your most precious resource—your time
- Get more visitors and income
I’ve shown you only a small part of Semrush’s features, but these are some of the most useful for you.
You’ll have 2 weeks. Check out other helpful Semrush reports:
- Search for keywords, topics, and blog post ideas with the Keyword Magic Tool
- Find common backlinks of your competitors through the Backlink Gap
But most importantly, evaluate your niche first.
Now you will no longer blindly guess, but you will know what to blog about with the guarantee of getting a lot of free Google traffic.
And you will save hundreds and thousands of hours on writing what matters and brings results.
Do you remember an example of how one of the blog owners wrote 4535 blog posts, but only 12 brought traffic?
You have the advantage!
Act right now.