The Tortoise and the Hare: Lessons Learned by a Semrush Beginner

If I may toot my own horn, I am a content queen. I can write well, manage a marketing communications team, and create a solid strategic plan. Unfortunately, this expertise can make me want to jump into the deep end of new integrated marketing and communications topics…without a life vest. Now that I’m soaking wet from a course on website analytics and SEO, I realize that Semrush can be a great tool to guide a SEO newbie—even an experienced one, ahem—who wants to learn everything but needs a step-by-step guide to do the research, set benchmarks, and draw conclusions. 

Figure 1: Edited version of the "clean all the things" meme (Brosh, 2010). 

I was a hare, and it was time to be a patient tortoise. They’re better swimmers anyway.

As a WVU Reed College student I’m given temporary access to the powerful (and ordinarily expensive) search engine marketing tool Semrush, so I began following their training as I tried out various features. Semrush Academy, as it bills itself, provides free recorded courses presented by industry experts so any registered user can become “an all-round [digital marketing] specialist” (Semrush, n.d.). At first, as I mentioned, I wanted to breeze through the first few modules, since I’d already gotten my feet wet through researching the keyword phrase “plus size workout clothes” for my IMC class’s discussion board. As I watched each video, though, I saw how deep each topic could go. Although I’m not yet done with the training module, I’ve already had several “aha” moments.

The starting line: Fun with keywords 

Semrush’s online courses start with a guide to conducting competitive research. Michael Fleischner (2020) recommended Semrush (among other tools, including Moz) for its ability to “automate a lot of…work” (p. 29) since it can “provide insights into why certain sites or page[s] rank they way they do” (p. 57). The organic research lesson walks you through the features and menus that will help make sense of the second lesson, which is where I first got excited: keyword analytics. 

As I mentioned, earlier this week I researched plus-size clothing, falling into a David and Goliath matchup between one fashion blogger and a review by one of Oprah’s websites. I decided to return to that topic to see keywords among several major players compared to one upstart brand, Universal Standard, which sells upscale basics in women's sizes 00 to 40. 

Clothing retailers, whether brick-and-mortar or direct-to-consumer or somewhere in the middle, are a fascinating subject of study during the pandemic, since sales are down across the board, including in the plus-size subcategory (see fig. 2). This makes marketing, and SEO in particular, an intense arena in this industry. 

Figure 2: The plus-size clothing market had slow and steady growth until the COVID-19 pandemic (IBISWorld, 2021).

The competitors I chose for Universal Standard focused on plus-size jeans, which is probably this brand’s most popular item. In Semrush’s organic research tab, “universal standard jeans” was the third highest organic keyword, after searches for the company name itself (see fig. 3). 

Figure 3: Organic searches show the popularity of the brand's denim (Keyword, 2022).

The keyword gap report includes a keyword overlap Venn diagram, which a user can click on to show only those keywords in a given section. Universal Standard, or US as it’s sometimes shortened, has only 6,800 keywords and very little overlap with the four competitors I chose: Lane Bryant, Torrid, Eloquii, and Dia (see fig. 4). Note that I manually added these; the suggested competitor URLs were mainly sites with similar names, not similar products—perhaps a result of US using so few keywords and having overall weak SEO.

Figure 4: Universal Standard has far fewer keywords than its competition, so I zeroed in on the overlaps (Keyword, 2022).

When I viewed the overlap between US, Eloquii, and Lane Bryant—the only section of US’s keywords that had more than one brand overlap—I started to see more denim keywords appear. Specifically, I found a high volume of searches for wide leg jeans, which is one of the latest on-trend denim styles (Laplaca, 2021). In the keyword overlap with Eloquii and Lane Bryant, this is one keyword where Universal Standard dominates: high rise wide leg jeans. 

Digging deeper: Exploring the report’s filters and columns

The intent column of Semrush’s keyword gap report is where I started to get excited. I first found this keyword in the default view of the report, Shared, which shows all the common keywords in the diagram section that I’d selected with no filtering. The “high rise wide leg jeans” keyword also appears at the top of the Strong filter in this three-website face-off. By opening the drop-down carat next to this keyword, I saw the “mini keyword overview” (Semrush, 2021) that previews the full keyword research report (see fig. 5). 

Figure 5: A pop-up preview of the keyword overview (Keyword, 2022). 

Lo and behold, I saw my wide-leg denim article (Laplaca, 2021) in the top five SERP results—and it’s a keyword-rich page. I also saw semantic search guidelines under the Questions section, including a question on how to style them, which yet again leads me to the trends article. Revisiting that page, I note that Universal Standard’s products don’t appear. Here is a clear opportunity for the brand to reach out to bloggers and journalists with high SERP to get their denim included. Since the keyword has a relatively low keyword difficulty rating of 49%, there’s room to chase this one while the trend is hot. The search intent isn’t transactional, but more attuned to consumer research, as indicated by the commercial and informational tags in the Intent column. This indicates the searcher is looking for an answer to a question and/or seeking brands and services that offer what they want. If paid search is an option as well as organic, the CPC for this keyword of $1.02 is perhaps worth a trial balloon.  

Cross-referencing my Semrush knowledge with SEOquake

To get another view of the SEO among these three retailers, I plugged all three homepages into Semrush-owned SEOquake using the Chrome browser extension. This yielded a few 10,000-foot views of their sites that gave some context to the keyword gap research (see fig. 6).

Figure 6: The SEOquake browser extension allows quick on-the-fly comparison of URLs (SEOquake, 2022).

The Google index column displays how many indexed pages each domain has, and it’s clear that Lane Bryant and Eloquii are both much larger than Universal Standard. The brands are also older than US, though, so this is perhaps unsurprising. One fascinating find is that Eloquii, another relatively recent upstart, has far more SEMrush backlinks than both US and Lane Bryant combined. It’s worth digging into this to see if Eloquii is emphasizing SEO in a way that’s worth emulating or if they “resort to gray methods,” as the Semrush blog put it (Terenteva, 2020).

 

Final thoughts: Into the deep water

I can see how many types of business could benefit from Semrush once they zero in on gaps and opportunities. Rather than clicking around and going a few inches deep into every section in a project, after an initial overview that allowed me to “determine the structure of SEMrush at a high level” (Reed College, 2022), I stopped and took time for a deep dive into keywords. I’ve now begun digging into the keyword research lessons, such as the video lesson by Greg Gifford from Wikimotive (Semrush, 2020), to see what else I can learn that could translate into actionable insights for future brands that I manage. I can’t wait to play with the keyword magic tool more!

What were some of your eureka moments when learning about SEO, whether you’re fresh or seasoned? What do you feel like you’ve just scratched the surface of? 

References

Brosh, A. (2010, June 17). This is why I’ll never be an adult. Hyperbole and a Half. Retrieved from http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html 

Fleischner, M. (2020). SEO Made Simple 2020: Insider Secrets for Driving More Traffic to Your Website. Kindle Edition.

IBISWorld. (2021, Apr. 27). Plus-size women's clothing store market size in the United States from 2009 to 2021 (in million U.S. dollars) [Graph]. Statista. Retrieved from https://www-statista-com.wvu.idm.oclc.org/statistics/1081844/plus-size-women-s-clothing-store-market-size-us/ 

Keyword gap. (2022, Feb. 15). Semrush [search results]. Retrieved from https://www.semrush.com/analytics/keywordgap/?q=universalstandard.com&searchType=domain&keywordType=organic&compareWith=eloquii.com%3Adomain%3Aorganic%7Clanebryant.com%3Adomain%3Aorganic&db=us 

Laplaca, A. (2021, Dec. 31). I found 21 fresh ways to wear the denim trend that’s dominating—you’re welcome. Who What Wear. Retrieved from https://www.whowhatwear.com/how-to-wear-wide-jeans 

Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. (2022). Week 5 lesson: SEO – on-page optimization and technical SEO, introduction to SEMrush. IMC 642: Web Metrics and SEO. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_174310_1&content_id=_8900885_1&framesetWrapped=true

Semrush Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.semrush.com/academy/ 

Semrush Academy. (2020, July 7). SEMrush keyword research tools | lesson 5/8 | SEMrush Academy [YouTube video]. Retrieved Feb. 14, 2022 from https://youtu.be/tI1Vlwj-jrA 

Semrush Academy. (2021, July 19). How to analyze your keywords | lesson 2/14 | Semrush Academy [YouTube video]. Retrieved Feb. 14, 2022 from https://youtu.be/HdxBRamz6Qo 

SEOquake. (2022, Feb. 15). Compare URLs/domains [Chrome extension results]. 

Terenteva, E. (2020, Sept. 18). SEO competitor analysis: Keywords and backlinks. Semrush Blog. Retrieved from https://www.semrush.com/blog/conduct-keyword-and-backlink-analysis-with-semrush/