Every year we tell you about the changes SEMrush introduced to make the lives of SEO, PPC, social media, content, and other digital marketing professionals a bit easier. This time we decided to top the updates and upgrades list with some ideas on how we can help your business reach new frontiers in 2020.
Not Just Bigger But Better
First of all, in 2019, we launched three new tools to cover the needs of Amazon sellers, digital marketing agencies, market analysts, growth managers, and more.
As for SEMrush data, we have increased our backlink database to an unbelievable 21.4T and empowered it with major improvements in the data-gathering algorithm, a more efficient crawling queue, 450 million seed keywords, and quadrupled server size. This put SEMrush at least a bit ahead of the competition. And, of course, there is more!
With these amazing results, SEMrush was deservedly recognized with these rewards:
- The Best Digital Tool at the Interactive Marketing Awards in Florida.
- The Best SEO Software Suite at the European Search Awards, US Search Awards, and UK Search Awards
- The Best Search Software Tool at the UK Search Awards
- The Best use of PR in Search Campaign at MENA Search Awards 2019.
Now, let’s look at the new and improved tool options for our users.
Specialty Products
Oppty — More Than Just Lead Generation
Can you imagine an agency-oriented lead generation and qualification tool that does all the work for you? Then try Oppty! It runs on big data and helps you identify prospects who are highly likely to be interested in your offer.
Sellerly — an Amazing Solution for Amazon Sellers
Sellerly is a simple tool for split testing Amazon listings that lets you boost conversions of your product pages by finding the best combination of the main elements driving sales: price, image, title, and description.
And even better, it is free!
SEO
Position Tracking Mobile App
The Position Tracking Mobile App, available for iOS and Android, lets you keep an eye on all your Position Tracking campaigns at any given time.
With the Landscape report, it takes almost no time to review a domain’s visibility, estimated traffic, position changes, and more. There are also 11 widgets that display all the key data from the Position Tracking tool. And if you see important changes you need to share with others, you can export the information to a PDF report and send it to your teammates or customers in a matter of seconds.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Mobility. You have your domain rankings literally in your pocket. Whether you travel or just work out of office, the data on each of your Position Tracking campaigns is always at hand.
Expanded Listing Management
To continue and improve our fruitful collaboration with Yext, SEMrush has expanded the coverage of the Listing Management tool to the UK and Australia. Now digital marketing professionals from these countries can be sure that their valuable digital knowledge data (name, address, phone number, hours of operation, etc.) is consistent across all 80+ of the most searched directories and services such as Facebook, Google, Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps, Bing, and many more.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Control. As mobile search will continue to gain momentum this year, you need to take control of what is published and shared about your business.
Google Data Studio Integration
As SEMrush has joined the 150 sources of data available in Google Data Studio, you can now pull data from Domain Analytics and Position Tracking, finding statistics on any domain and/or tracking a website’s rankings for a specific set of target keywords.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Customization. Create more informative dashboards and reports for the needs of your business.
Enhanced Organic Research
Besides further expanding our databases, and serious page load and graph plotting speed gains, Organic Research has more good news to share. In addition to researching root domains, subdomains, or separate URLs, you can now check subfolders too. It lets you understand the organic performance (traffic, positions, SERP features, keywords, and more) of a website’s regional versions, blog sections, etc.
Another great new feature is tracking the ranking history of a particular keyword (available in the Positions and Position Changes tabs). You can learn about the competitor pages that gain rankings for your target keywords and estimate the success of their optimization efforts.
2020 Competitive Advantage: In-depth analysis. You can target regional versions or specific subfolders of your competitor’s domain.
Site Audit: New Capabilities
Website migration is usually associated with serious changes in its location, platform, structure, content, design, or UX that can adversely impact search engine visibility. However, you can avoid this by using the new features of Site Audit: Crawled Pages export, Crawling by URL list, Crawling of a password-protected site, and Crawling of a site closed for robots.
2020 Competitive Advantage: No hassle site migration. With these and our comprehensive site migration checklist based on the recommendations from Google and industry experts, you’ll be able to fully control the crawling process and export and filter the resulting data.
Competitive Research
Market Explorer
The relatively young Competitive Research toolkit got quite a few updates this year, and one of the most significant is the Market Explorer tool, which lets you gain a full overview of a niche or an industry in a few clicks. By entering just one domain, you will be able to:
Get a list of the relevant sites to the chosen domain and estimate their market shares.
Look at the traffic of the chosen company in detail and compare its performance against the industry trends.
Size the market traffic and see where it comes from.
Find out the main interests of the in-market audience.
Explore the market audience’s demographics.
2020 Competitive Advantage: A comprehensive view of the competition. Look at the whole industry or narrow the focus to your closest competitors to fully uncover the market potential.
Traffic Analytics
We are also proud to say that the highly acclaimed Traffic Analytics tool has become even better since its triumphal relaunch. Here is what you have at your disposal:
If you enjoy gathering intelligence for multiple competitors, Bulk Analysis is what you need. It lets you collect traffic metrics for up to two hundred prospects/potential partners/media platforms.
Some more helpful data can be obtained from the Top Pages and Audience Overlap reports, which were extremely popular with SEMrush users last year. The Top Pages report helps you understand which campaigns, content, or product categories work best for your rivals.
The Audience Overlap report shows how much the audiences of two websites match. It comes in handy when you need to look at the audience of not just a competitor but a publisher or prospective partner.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Flexibility. Analyze your competitors’ traffic from the perspective you like most.
Competitive Intelligence Add-on
If you enjoy getting data on the fly, please welcome our Competitive Intelligence Add-on, which combines the power of Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer and will always be at hand.
You can also purchase the Competitive Research Bundle, which includes the entirety of the main SEMrush software suite in addition to the Competitive Intelligence add-on for one price.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Profitability. Get the tools that are essential for your business for a great price.
Content Marketing
Content Marketplace
Need copy that drives traffic and engagement? You will find it at SEMrush Content Marketplace. It provides experienced English speaking writers, respect for deadlines, fixed rates based on word count, and up to three rounds of corrections included in the rate.
And there is more:
All the work is already done; we will find the right copywriter to suit your needs.
Optimized content upon request.
The service is available to all SEMrush users.
Payments are made directly through the SEMrush dashboard.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Full cycle. Outsource all stages of content creation, from ideation to editing.
Brand Monitoring: Track Your Mentions Just Anywhere
The Brand Monitoring tool is pushing the limits in terms of both geography and networks. With the latest updates, you can track mentions of any word or phrase, including your brand name, on the web, Twitter, Instagram, and even forums like Reddit or Quora, and react quickly to any reputation risk.
By default, mentions are collected from up to 10 locations in all languages. You can filter them by a specific language.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Awareness. Be the first to react should the need arise, and even check out your competitor’s brand mentions.
Improved SEO Writing Assistant
Our incredibly popular SEO Writing Assistant has a new design. The main metrics of your text, such as readability score, SEO, originality, and tone of voice consistency, are now shown as separate scales, and the most critical text issues are highlighted.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Engagement. Win the attention of your audience with original, easy to read texts.
Marketing Calendar
Data on the efficiency of your marketing campaigns are now more detailed. The Marketing Calendar has been improved to display current campaign status, the list of collaborators, the number of current tasks, a campaign budget, and deadlines.
You can now see holidays and events from the Social Media Events Calendar using filters to find more relevant days for your activities. Another bonus — the calendars can be shared with clients or partners who don’t have a SEMrush account through external linking to improve your teamwork.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Time management. Stay in control of your campaigns’ deadlines throughout the year.
PPC
Display Advertising: Audience Targeting
To help marketers save ad spend by delivering their message to those most likely to be interested, we launched the Audience Targeting widgets in Display Advertising. You can use the report to analyze different ad placements or compare your audience against your competitors.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Cost-effectiveness. Expand your marketing funnel and find new niches you might miss. Don’t waste your budget on those who are not likely to be interested in your product.
AdSense Benchmarking
This year we have introduced a completely new solution for those who want to monetize their websites through AdSense. The AdSense Benchmark Tool lets you predict how much a website can potentially earn from AdSense banners based on SEMrush’s estimations of the CPC, CTR, and traffic volume.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Realistic thinking. Scale your expectations to avoid over or underestimating your website’s potential.
Improved Advertising Research
Apart from adding new tools and reports, we continue working to improve the overall functionality of the Advertising Toolkit. In 2019, we increased the accuracy of the Advertising Research tool, expanded its keyword databases, and introduced the Preview and Top 5 Competitors features.
These two features will let you detect the 5 strongest competitors for each keyword you have in the Positions tab or see the number of active ad campaigns and ads for the domain you are currently researching.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Time-saving. Get a quick but informative overview of your competition to see if your campaigns need tweaking.
Social Media
Instagram is Back
The temporary disconnection of Instagram from the Social Media Tracker caused by the unexpected changes to this social network API platform was quite an affliction for many of our users. We worked hard to bring it back as soon as we could, and at the beginning of 2019, we managed to do it.
Currently, you can schedule posts, track your Instagram business account, and monitor your rivals’ performance to gain new ideas and see how well you stand up against the competition.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Coverage. Manage your posting and scheduling on all major social networks.
Boosting and Detailed Metrics in the Social Media Poster
As the next steps to full social media automation, we introduced the boosting option for posts that you might want to promote on Facebook or that are suggested by the new Top Posts to Boost functionality based on their engagement rate.
Now you can run your boosting campaign right from the Social Media Poster and get the detailed metrics of all the boosts you have (Total paid reach, cost per 1,000 reached, etc.).
2020 Competitive Advantage: Automation. Find the most potent posts and boost them in a few clicks.
LinkedIn Competitor Audiences in the Social Media Tracker
We also made some changes to make the monitoring of your and your competitors’ LinkedIn business pages easier and have the corresponding data added to the Overview report, PDF reports, and automated emails you get from the tool.
Now information about your rivals’ follower count is found in Social Media Tracker, and everything related to the performance of your own page has been moved to Social Media Poster.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Usability. Track your rivals and export the data without switching between the tools.
Other
API
This year, the SEMrush Analytical API (Overview Reports, Domain Reports, and Keyword Reports) data processing capabilities had a remarkable increase in speed.
The Keyword Reports section was appended with Batch Keyword Overview, allowing you to process 100 keywords through one request and Phrase Questions providing a list of phrase questions relevant to a queried term.
We also changed Domain Reports and Overview Reports to let you find out the SERP Features for a specific keyword and check if the domain you are looking for is present in any of these.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Comfort. Get the most accurate and well-filtered data for your request.
Projects
Managing your projects also became easier. Now you can assign up to three tags to each project and use them for filtering of sort your projects by the tools or metrics you are tracking.
2020 competitive advantage: Usability. Save time managing your projects.
My Reports
Monitoring your competitors on a regular basis is a digital marketing must. To help you streamline this process, we offer the Competitor Analysis template in My Reports, which just does the work for you.
Find it in the template gallery, customize to your needs, and enjoy a monthly overview of your rivals’ online performance delivered right into your mailbox.
2020 Competitive Advantage: Finesse. Create and deliver detailed reports with minimum effort.
Stay Tuned
The year is just beginning, so you can expect a whirlwind of updates to come, such as a new tool for content marketers, new content formats and languages in the Marketplace, and further Keyword Magic tool enhancements, to name but a few.
To avoid missing any important updates, check out our latest news or follow SEMrush on social networks.
If you have any thoughts regarding any of the listed updates, feel free to leave your comments right here.