How to Use Semrush to Improve SEO: A 6-Step Workflow for 2026

• Amol Ghemud
• How to Use Semrush to Improve SEO: A 6-Step Workflow for 2026
• Published: August 21, 2024

Contributors: Amol Ghemud
Published: August 21, 2024

Summary

How to use Semrush to improve SEO: run a monthly 6-step loop of Site Audit, Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Gap, Backlink Gap, On Page SEO Checker and Position Tracking. This guide covers the setup, filters and metrics for each step, 6 common mistakes, and how to pair Semrush estimates with Google Search Console data.

Most teams open Semrush, run a few reports and log off. Rankings don’t move because the data never turns into a routine. If you’re working out how to use Semrush to improve SEO, the answer is less about any single report and more about running the right tools in the right order, every month.

This guide sets out that order in 6 steps, from Site Audit to Position Tracking, using the tool names Semrush uses in 2026. Disclosure: upGrowth is a Semrush partner. Every feature, limit and menu location below was checked against the Semrush Knowledge Base in September 2026.

How to Use Semrush to Improve SEO: The 6-Step Workflow

To use Semrush to improve SEO, run a monthly loop: fix technical errors in Site Audit, pick realistic keywords in Keyword Magic Tool, find competitor gaps with Keyword Gap, earn links with Backlink Gap, improve pages with On Page SEO Checker, then measure the results in Position Tracking.

Order matters. Fixing crawl errors first means the pages you optimize later can be crawled and indexed properly. Tracking comes last because it tells you which changes worked, and that feeds the next month’s audit.

The table maps each step to its Semrush tool and how often we suggest using it. Every tool listed sits in the SEO Toolkit except My Reports, which works across Semrush.

What Is Semrush and How Does It Work?

Semrush is a search marketing platform that estimates keyword, ranking, traffic and backlink data for any website and packages it into toolkits you can buy separately. Most SEO work happens in the SEO Toolkit, which Semrush says holds more than 20 tools and reports.

The Semrush toolkits

Semrush now sells 8 toolkits: SEO, AI Visibility, Traffic & Market, Local, Content, Social, Advertising and AI PR, according to its subscription plans page. This guide sticks to the SEO Toolkit, with a short detour into Traffic & Market for competitor channel data.

Where Semrush data comes from

Semrush partners with third-party providers to collect Google results pages for its keyword databases, runs its own backlink crawler, and builds traffic estimates from a panel of over 200 million anonymized internet users. That makes it strong for research and competitor comparisons. Its numbers are still estimates, and your own Google Search Console data remains the record of what actually happened.

Set up your first project

1. Create an account: Semrush’s free plan includes 1 demo project and 10 reports per day across its main tools. Most toolkits offer a 7-day free trial, with exports disabled during the trial.
2. Add a project for your domain: when you create your first project, Semrush configures and launches Site Audit for that domain automatically.
3. Pick the right database: Semrush covers more than 140 regional databases. For Indian search, choose India (IN).
4. Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console: tools such as Organic Traffic Insights and On Page SEO Checker can then pull in your real data.

Semrush lists current plan prices on its own pricing page, so check there before you budget. The free plan is enough to learn the interface. You’ll need the SEO Toolkit for full keyword exports and for Position Tracking beyond 10 keywords.

Step 1: Run a Site Audit to Fix Technical SEO Issues

Start with Site Audit, because new keywords and links won’t help pages Google can’t crawl properly. The tool crawls your site, sorts problems into errors, warnings and notices, and gives each issue a “How to fix” explanation.

Configure the crawl

• Scope: enter your domain, subdomain or subfolder, and tick “Crawl all subdomains” if you audit the root domain.
• Crawl source: let the crawler follow links on your website, or crawl from your robots.txt sitemap, a sitemap URL or an uploaded list of URLs.
• Page limit: Pro and Guru SEO Toolkit plans crawl up to 20,000 pages per audit; Business crawls up to 100,000.
• Schedule: set a weekly re-crawl on a fixed day. Daily and one-off crawls are also available.
• User agent: choose SiteAuditBot (Desktop) or SiteAuditBot (Mobile). Semrush also lists an OpenAI-Search option.

Semrush’s Site Audit configuration guide walks through each setting.

What to fix first

Semrush calculates a Site Health Score between 0% and 100% from the errors and warnings found, relative to the number of checks performed. Work through issues by severity:

• Errors (most severe): broken internal links, pages returning 4XX or 5XX status codes, missing title tags, duplicate content and hreflang conflicts.
• Warnings (medium severity): pages without an h1, images without alt attributes, slow-loading pages, redirect chains and loops, and low word count.
• Notices (least severe): orphaned pages, pages with only 1 incoming internal link, and AI search items such as a missing llms.txt file.

Semrush’s own quick-improvements guide suggests prioritizing Site Performance and HTTPS issues, since those can give the quickest results when fixed. The thematic reports (Robots.txt, Crawlability, HTTPS, International SEO, Performance and Internal Linking) group related issues so developers can fix them in batches.

Turn the audit into tasks

An audit improves nothing until issues get fixed. Send issues to Trello or Zapier from the Issues report, then give every error an owner and a deadline. Our rule of thumb: errors within the week, warnings within the month, notices during your next content update. For the fixes themselves, our technical SEO checklist covers each area.

Step 2: Find Keywords with Keyword Magic Tool and Keyword Overview

Keyword Magic Tool turns 1 seed term into a table of related keywords split into topic groups, and Keyword Overview shows the metrics you need to judge each one. Choose terms by intent and difficulty, not volume alone.

Generate keyword ideas

1. Open Keyword Magic Tool in the SEO Toolkit and enter a seed keyword, such as “accounting software”.
2. Set the database to your target country (India is IN).
3. Choose a match type: Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match or Related.
4. Use the keyword groups in the left sidebar to drill into subtopics, and click Questions to find question-style queries for FAQs and blog posts.

Read the 4 metrics that matter

• Volume: the average number of times per month a keyword was searched on Google in the selected database.
• Keyword Difficulty (KD%): a 0 to 100 score for how hard it is to reach Google’s top 10, based on the referring domains, follow and nofollow link mix, and Authority Score of the pages already ranking.
• Intent: informational, navigational, commercial or transactional.
• CPC: what advertisers pay Google for a click on a PPC ad, a useful signal of commercial value.

Semrush’s Keyword Difficulty guide labels 0 to 14 Very easy, 15 to 29 Easy, 30 to 49 Possible, 50 to 69 Difficult, 70 to 84 Hard and 85 to 100 Very hard. Paid plans also show Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD), which estimates how hard it will be for your specific domain to reach the top 10. Free users see 10 results per report in Keyword Magic Tool and can’t export.

Filter for keywords you can actually win

Our starting filters for newer sites (an upGrowth rule of thumb, not a Semrush setting): volume of 100 or more, KD% under 30 (the Very easy and Easy bands), and an intent that matches the page you plan to build. Established domains can push into the Possible band (30 to 49) and beyond. Where PKD is available, weigh it above generic KD%.

Intent is where most keyword lists go wrong. A commercial query like “best CRM software India” needs a comparison page, not a blog post explaining what a CRM is. Our keyword research guide covers intent mapping in more detail.

Build clusters with Keyword Strategy Builder

Keyword Strategy Builder (previously Keyword Manager) analyzes up to 10,000 keywords and groups them into topics, pillar pages and subpages. Send your filtered list from Keyword Magic Tool, then use the output as your content plan: a pillar page for each topic, with supporting articles linking back to it.

Step 3: Analyze Competitors with Domain Overview, Organic Rankings and Keyword Gap

Competitor research shows which keywords and pages already work in your market. Use Domain Overview for a quick snapshot, Organic Rankings for a competitor’s keyword list, and Keyword Gap to see exactly which terms they rank for and you don’t.

Domain Overview

Enter a competitor’s domain and set the database to your market. Domain Overview shows estimated organic and paid traffic, backlinks, top organic keywords with intent, and an AI Visibility Score with the pages cited in AI answers. Note which pages and topics drive their traffic, because those are the formats your audience already rewards.

Organic Rankings (formerly Organic Research)

Organic Rankings lists the keywords a domain ranks for, its ranking pages, position changes and SERP features. Run it on your own domain too, and sort for keywords where you sit in positions 4 to 20. Those pages already rank, and a sharper title, stronger internal links or a deeper section can often move them up. In our experience, this is the fastest win in Semrush.

Keyword Gap

1. Open Keyword Gap in the SEO Toolkit and enter your domain plus up to 4 competitors (5 domains in total).
2. Choose organic, paid or PLA keywords.
3. Review Missing: keywords all your competitors rank for and you don’t.
4. Check Weak (you rank lower than every competitor) and Untapped (a competitor ranks and you don’t).
5. Export the list as Excel, CSV or PDF and filter it with the KD% and intent rules from Step 2.

Semrush’s Keyword Gap manual defines all 7 categories. Before you copy a competitor, work out why they rank. Check whether they win on content depth, backlinks or page experience, then build something measurably better.

Competitor traffic channels in Traffic & Market

To see where competitors’ visits come from beyond search, the separate Traffic & Market Toolkit splits estimated traffic across 8 channels, including AI assistants, organic search, paid search, email and display ads. Semrush notes these numbers might differ from what you see in Google Analytics, so use them for benchmarking, not reporting.

Step 4: Using Semrush for Backlink Building Strategies

Semrush supports link building at each stage: benchmark your profile in the Backlinks tool, find sites that link to competitors but not to you in Backlink Gap, and review risky links in Backlink Audit. The pitching itself is still your job.

Benchmark your profile with the Backlinks tool

Enter your domain in Backlinks to see Authority Score, referring domains, anchor text, and new and lost links. Focus on unique referring domains rather than total link count. Semrush says new backlinks are added to its database within an hour of being published and the interface updates every 15 minutes, which also makes it a quick way to spot a competitor’s fresh coverage.

Find prospects with Backlink Gap

1. Open Backlink Gap and enter your domain with up to 4 competitors (the tool compares up to 5 sites at once).
2. Use the Best, Weak, Strong, Shared and Unique filters to find referring domains that link to competitors but not to you.
3. Sort by Matches (how many of the compared domains each site links to) and filter by Authority Score.
4. Add the strongest prospects to your outreach sheet and remove domains you’ve already contacted.

Earn the links

• Useful resources: pitch a specific article that fills a gap on the prospect’s site.
• Broken link building: find broken outbound links on relevant sites and offer your page as the replacement.
• Better linkable assets: improve on content that already attracts links in your niche, then show it to the sites linking to the older piece.
• Digital PR: pitch data and expert commentary to journalists. Semrush’s separate AI PR Toolkit covers journalist lists, pitches and coverage tracking.

Use Backlink Audit with caution

Backlink Audit flags suspicious links with toxic markers and can build a disavow file for Google. Treat it as a review list, not an instruction. Google’s disavow links help page says that in most cases it can assess which links to trust, so most sites won’t need the tool. Disavow only when many spammy or artificial links have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action.

Step 5: Optimize Existing Pages with On Page SEO Checker and SEO Writing Assistant

The Semrush tools for identifying on-page SEO issues on existing pages are Site Audit, for sitewide technical problems, and On Page SEO Checker, for page-level ideas benchmarked against the top 10 Google results. SEO Writing Assistant then checks new and refreshed copy as you write.

On Page SEO Checker

1. Import target pages and keywords from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Organic Rankings, Position Tracking or a file.
2. Start with pages ranking in positions 4 to 20 (our recommendation), where improvements show up fastest.
3. Review ideas across 7 categories: strategy, SERP features, semantics, content, backlinks, technical SEO and user experience.
4. Tackle the ideas marked with the lowest difficulty first, as Semrush’s own guide suggests, then work up.

The On Page SEO Checker manual explains each idea type. Usage draws on monthly SEO Idea Units, so point the tool at pages that matter commercially.

SEO Writing Assistant

SEO Writing Assistant analyzes copy in real time for SEO, readability, originality and tone of voice, with recommendations based on your top 10 Google competitors. It works as a Google Docs add-on, a WordPress plugin and a Microsoft Word add-in, and scores content from 0 to 10. We aim for 8 or higher before publishing, but read the suggestions critically: a keyword recommendation is never a reason to stuff a paragraph.

Topic Research for content ideas

Topic Research generates subtopics, popular headlines and the questions people ask about a topic. Guru and Business plans get unlimited access, while Pro and free users get 2 searches in total, so plan those carefully.

Step 6: Track SEO Progress with Position Tracking and My Reports

Position Tracking monitors your rankings daily for the keywords you choose, by device and location, and My Reports turns that data into scheduled reports. Pair both with Google Search Console, which shows your real clicks and impressions.

Set up Position Tracking

1. Pick what to track: a root domain, subdomain, subfolder or URL. Semrush recommends starting with the root domain.
2. Choose the search engine (Google, Bing, Baidu, ChatGPT or Google AI Mode), the device and the location, down to city or ZIP code. You can’t change the original location and device after setup.
3. Import keywords from your Step 2 list, Keyword Magic Tool, Google Search Console or a CSV file, and tag them by topic or funnel stage.
4. Add up to 20 competitors per campaign and set up triggers so you’re notified about ranking changes.

The Position Tracking overview lists keyword limits by plan: 500 on Pro, 1,500 on Guru and 5,000 on Business.

Metrics to watch

• Visibility: a single percentage for how visible you are across tracked keywords. Investigate if it falls for 3 weeks in a row.
• Estimated traffic: projected clicks from your rankings. Compare it with actual organic traffic in GA4.
• Average position: useful for trends, not for decisions about individual keywords.
• SERP features: which features you appear in, including AI Overviews and featured snippets.

Pair Semrush with Google Search Console and GA4

Semrush estimates what could happen, while Search Console records what did. Google’s Performance report shows clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for your queries and pages. Organic Traffic Insights combines Google Analytics, Search Console and Semrush data in 1 dashboard. When the numbers disagree, our explainer on the data mismatch between GA4 and Google Search Console shows why.

Automate reporting with My Reports

My Reports builds reports from Semrush tools plus sources such as GA4 and Google Search Console, and can email them on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule. A monthly report that maps ranking changes to organic sessions and conversions keeps the next audit focused on what earns revenue.

Common Mistakes When Using Semrush for SEO

Most Semrush accounts underperform for process reasons, not missing features. These are the 6 mistakes we see most often.

Running audits without fixing issues

Site Audit only pays off when its findings get fixed. Every crawl should end in a task list with owners and deadlines.

Chasing volume without checking difficulty

A keyword with 50,000 monthly searches in the Very hard band (85 to 100) is a vanity target for a new site. Check KD% or PKD before you commit a page to it.

Ignoring search intent

Semrush labels each keyword’s intent. A page built for the wrong intent struggles to rank however well you optimize it, so match the format to what searchers expect.

Copying competitors instead of analyzing them

Keyword Gap shows what competitors rank for, not why. Copying their pages without a clear improvement wastes budget.

Tracking too many keywords

A long, untagged list in Position Tracking creates noise. Start with 50 to 100 keywords that map to revenue, tag them by funnel stage, and review the most valuable ones weekly.

Treating estimates as facts

Semrush volume and traffic figures are estimates. Validate big decisions against Search Console and GA4 before you move budget.

Watch: How to Use Semrush to Improve Your SEO Strategy

This upGrowth video walks through the core Semrush SEO tools. Some menus in the video may look different from the 2026 interface described above.

How to Use Semrush to Improve SEO: FAQs

Your Next Move: Build a Monthly Semrush Routine

How to use Semrush to improve SEO comes down to repetition: audit, research, compare, build links, optimize and track, every month. Start with Site Audit this week and put its errors on a task list with owners.

Still comparing platforms? Read our Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison, or browse our round-up of free SEO tools if your needs are lighter.

Want a team to run this workflow with you? Book a strategy call with upGrowth or contact our SEO team, and bring your Semrush project or Search Console data.

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About the Author

Amol Ghemud

Optimizer in Chief

Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.