How We Use Semrush to Increase Traffic to Our WordPress Blog

Semrush is a search engine marketing (SEM) platform that gives you the data you need to increase traffic to your WordPress-themed blog, even with only the free version.

In this article, we explore how we’ve been using Semrush’s keyword research features to identify WordPress-related keywords and create content for them, as well as the traffic increase we’ve enjoyed as a result.

Key Takeaways

• Semrush is a SEM platform with free keyword research features.
• You can use these features to identify keywords that are relevant to your target audience.
• Once you’ve identified keywords, you can filter them by difficulty and create content for the easiest keywords in an attempt to start getting traffic to your website.
• Over the course of months or a year, you should start seeing a significant increase in traffic.

Why Semrush?

We already used Semrush for our projects for clients, so it just made sense to stay within a platform that we already know. But in addition to familiarity, Semrush is a very solid SEM platform with the following features (among others):

• Detailed competitive analysis. It allowed us to understand competitors’ SEO strategies and how to outperform them.
• Keyword performance monitoring. Real-time tracking of the ranking of the most relevant keywords for our blog.
• Identification of performance issues. Semrush detected pages with high load times, which negatively impacts the user experience.
• Redirects to 404 pages. We found broken links directing to non-existent pages. These damage the user experience and also cause indexing problems.
• Meta tag issues. Several pages had overly long or missing meta descriptions and titles, affecting optimization in search results.

How We Improved Our WordPress Site’s Traffic Using Semrush’s Keyword Research Features

While Semrush’s features help us identify, monitor, and resolve issues, improving our website’s traffic ultimately came down to executing a content creation plan for over a year. 

Here’s an overview of how we used Semrush’s free version to identify content creation opportunities and some of the results it has gotten us over the past 2 years.

Step 1: Research a Keyword That Is Relevant to Your Site

As a WordPress development agency, our niche is clearly WordPress. As a result, our keyword research must focus on keywords that incorporate “WordPress.”

However, when you’re just starting out as a website with a low authority score in search engine results, which means you have a lower chance of ranking close to the number 1 spot in search results, you need to be selective of the keywords you use to create your content.

For example, if we were to go to Semrush’s main dashboard right now and click on Keyword Overview, then type in wordpress, we would see these results:

For now, we can ignore most other metrics and focus on Keyword Difficulty.

Notice how in the screenshot, you can see that the keyword wordpress has a keyword difficulty of 100% – Very Hard.

This means that if we were to create a blog post or any other type of content to rank on the first page of results when someone searches “wordpress,” we would have an extremely hard time.

It would require extremely optimized content, many backlinks, and likely content promotion efforts. This means it’s unrealistic for us to target such a broad, unspecific, and highly competitive keyword.

Instead, we should aim for less competitive and more specific keywords.

Step 2: Identify Keywords That Your Content Has a Higher Chance of Ranking for

So, the plan is to aim for less competitive and more specific keywords, but how do we do that? Semrush’s free features allow us to filter keywords based on various criteria, including difficulty and traffic, the ones we care the most about right now.

Go to Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to start filtering keywords and find the most relevant and approachable for your site right now.

Type wordpress in the search bar and click on Search or press Enter or Return.

As you can see, the Keyword Magic Tool presents results for multiple search queries, all of which include wordpress in them.

So, we created a list of search queries relevant to our niche, WordPress. However, you can see on the KD% (Keyword Difficulty %) column that some of these keywords still have pretty high scores for a relatively new and unproven site.

What do we do now? Filter by difficulty. Above the results, you will see a taskbar with various buttons. Click on KD%, and some dropdown settings will appear. 

Since we want to rank in the easiest keywords, you can click the Very Easy button or select a custom difficulty range. In our experience, we recommend staying between 0 and 20 for the first months or even the first year. Click Apply.

As you can see, now every keyword has a difficulty of 20 or less.

This difficulty range will allow you to start ranking with high-quality content that incorporates the targeted keywords.

Step 3: Learn to Target Keywords

Now that you have a list of relatively easy-to-rank keywords that match your niche, the task is to select the specific keywords you want to target with your content.

Ideally, you would find a keyword with high traffic, low difficulty, and relevance to your brand.

To do that, click on the Volume column to sort all keywords from most volume (traffic) to least volume. It helps you immediately identify the keywords with the most potential to bring traffic to your site.

Now, let’s review an example of a keyword we targeted that is currently ranking fairly high to illustrate the process. Notice the wordpress if plugin is active function​ keyword.

It has fairly high traffic for this difficulty range.

It also has an Informational intent. Intent is a metric that determines why people are searching for this particular keyword. An Informational intent means that people are looking for the answer to a specific question.

If you want to increase traffic to your website with content, then you will mostly target keywords with Informational intent, since you will attract people that want answers and you can demonstrate knowledge by providing it.

If you have a feeling that this might be a good keyword to target, then search for it on Google and confirm what type of results you get from it.

Step 4: Google the Keyword

You can use any search engine, but Semrush provides data based on Google results, so we’re using Google in this case.

Once you’ve identified a keyword you’re interested in, Google it. In this case, the results for the wordpress if plugin is active function​ keyword return various forum threads of users asking how to determine whether a plugin is active.

These results confirm that users searching this keyword indeed want to find an answer to the question of, “Is there a WordPress function that allows me to determine whether a plugin is active?” If you make a high-quality post answering this question, there is a good chance it will rank near the top.

While this googling step may seem unnecessary, it’s actually important, as sometimes a keyword will pop up with an Informational intent, yet when you actually search for it, the results are much less clear.

If you create content for keywords with unclear search intents, you may end up wasting your time since your content will end up targeting nothing in particular.

Before moving up to some tips on how to create content, consider also filtering your Semrush keywords so that you only receive questions. To do that, click on the Questions button on the top-left side of the keyword results.

This is a much more direct way of learning what specific questions your audience wants answers to.

2 Tips for Writing High-Quality Content for Your Keywords

Now, the content itself.

While we are still growing our online presence and can’t possibly claim to be experts in content creation or marketing, we have learned a few useful strategies to create content that actually provides answers to user questions and brings some traffic to our site.

Here’s a summary of what we have learned.

Be Specific and Provide Screenshots if Necessary

While this may be different for other brands, most of our website traffic comes from blog posts where we break down a process into simple steps to help beginners get a hang of WordPress.

If you plan on making this type of content your site’s bread-and-butter, then it is important to prove through your writing that you actually went through the process of solving whatever problem you’re targeting.

For example, we once targeted the keyword wordpress test if current page is a page. Users were searching for a way to determine whether the current page in the loop was of the post type Page.

The function is_page does just that and we created a basic guide for how to use it. In this guide we provided PHP snippets of how to use is_page and screenshots of the results of the custom function we applied.

We’ve seen many guides for solving WordPress problems that provide few or no screenshots of the process or results. This is confusing for users who are inexperienced in navigating interfaces or solving a particular problem and makes your content less useful.

Use Artificial Intelligence Carefully

Artificial intelligence is very useful to quickly create content, find quick answers to technical questions, and more.

However, one of the problems with using AI for content creation is that the content it returns is necessarily generic, since it’s essentially an average of the information it has about any given topic.

This is not a problem if you’re providing a simple definition or feeding it an article you just wrote so it helps you produce an introduction or conclusion.

But it can be a problem when you ask it to provide a detailed process to solve some WordPress issues, especially the ones that are more specific, new, or there are few resources available for solving them.

In general, you should use AI for content production only when you can fact-check what it returns to confirm it is true and up to date.

The same goes for using AI for generating code for your content. Only use it when you can confirm that it works and are able to refactor it if necessary.

The Results of Our Content Creation Efforts

By following the recommendations outlined above, we greatly increased organic traffic to our website over the past 2 years. It’s been a slow process and the results have really only showed up in the past year, so you may need to grind at it for a while before the benefits kick in.

However, we can vouch for the effectiveness of the methods we describe in this article.

Here’s a Google Search Console graph of how our traffic has increased in the past year and a half of content creation efforts.

Be Aware of Technical Issues That Affect Your SEO

Sometimes, your traffic can take a hit as a result of reasons other than your content. In our case, some time ago we implemented a prerendering solution.

Unfortunately, one of the side effects of this particular system was that once we exceeded a certain usage limit, it would prevent the indexing of new pages and blog posts due to their associated costs within this solution.

Our development team noticed this and deactivated the system, leading to new pages and posts being indexed correctly.

This adjustment, along with our ongoing keyword strategy, has helped us increase traffic over time.

The idea is not to be afraid of any tech solution out there, but to be aware of its potential consequences and know that even if your content is good, some technical issues with your site may be preventing it from reaching its intended audience.

Semrush’s Data Helped Us Increase Traffic to Our WordPress Blog

The data provided by Semrush has helped us understand what our target audience is looking for and given us clear goals that would help us reach it with high-quality content.

However, always remember that the real magic comes from high-quality content that actually answers the questions your audience has. That’s where the grind lies and where you’ll get the best results.

By following the steps in this post and creating unique content that your audience wants, we are hopeful that you will get positive results over time.

If you found this post useful, read our blog and developer resources for more insights and guides!