If you’re diving deep into SEO professionally, sooner or later you’ll find yourself needing a paid tool to make your life easier. And chances are, SEMrush will be on your radar to consider.

In fact, it was one of the first tools I personally invested in.

Up until then, my approach to SEO was way more hands-on, relying on free applications and a hefty amount of elbow grease.

I can tell you, the shift was game-changing. The amount of time I began to save and the results I achieved soared dramatically.

Since then, I’ve evolved a lot as an SEO professional. And so has SEMrush.

That’s why I thought it’d be a good idea to whip up an updated guide on this stellar digital marketing tool, giving you a fresh look at what it has in store for you today.

I won’t sugarcoat it – this tutorial is a deep dive, but I genuinely believe it’s worth a chunk of your time.

Especially if you’re keen on mastering how to use SEMrush and tapping into all the features it rolls out.

So, enough chit-chat, let’s dive in.

What is SEMrush and What’s It For?

SEMrush is an all-encompassing online tool geared towards digital marketing pros.

Now, I could simply label it as an SEO tool, zeroing in on competitor analysis, audits, backlinks, and keyword insights, among other features.

But that would be selling it short. Way short.

SEMrush, in reality, spans nearly every facet of digital marketing. From organic search optimization to paid advertising, touching on social media and content marketing, and so much more.

Therefore, SEMrush is more than just a tool; it’s a whole ecosystem of SEO and marketing features, and it’s deeply committed to its community.

Two of the most compelling examples of this commitment are its blog, packed with timely and practical content, and the SEMrush Academy, where they offer free digital marketing courses taught by leading SEO experts.

José Facchin (former Country Manager of SEMrush), Antonio López (from ‘El Blog del SEO’ and his successor in the role), and Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) are among the experts sharing content on this platform.

In essence, SEMrush is far more than just a basic SEO tool, and that’s why I want to dive deeper into it in this post. My goal is for you to truly understand its capabilities and tap into its full potential.

SEMrush Pricing

SEMrush isn’t a budget tool. Let me get that straight from the outset.

Because of that, you need to be certain if the price tag is worth it for your digital strategy.

The most basic plan is called ‘Pro,’ which might clue you in that it’s not for everyone. It’s priced at $119.95 per month and comes with its fair share of limitations, as you’ll discover throughout this tutorial.

In addition to the Pro plan, there are two higher-tier options: Guru and Business.

These plans provide added features, but they don’t encompass every tool SEMrush has to offer.

There are add-ons that you need to purchase separately, such as the local pack, trend analysis, or the agency growth kit. So, as you can see, the costs can start to rack up.

It’s true that if you pay annually, you can save a decent chunk of change. Even so, I believe it’s a price that requires some serious consideration before committing.

Especially when you factor in its limitations and the fact that there are other options out there today, like DinoRANK, which are much more affordable and come with a comprehensive set of features.

Can You Use Semrush for Free?

The silver lining is, yes, you can. There are two distinct ways to use Semrush without shelling out a penny.

The first method involves signing up for any of their plans and canceling it within 7 days.

You’ll need to provide your card details, but you won’t be charged upfront.

However, a word to the wise: if you don’t want to be billed, make sure you cancel your Semrush subscription during this trial period. If you forget, once the trial concludes, you’ll be on the hook for a full month’s payment.

The other route is to set up a free account. All you’ll need is an email address and a password.

With the free Semrush account, you can tap into many of its features, though they come with quite a few restrictions.

Differences between the Free Version and the Paid Version

Here are the most significant limitations of a free Semrush account:

• You can only set up 1 project.
• You’re limited to tracking a maximum of 10 keywords in your project.
• Up to 10 searches per day for keywords or domain analysis.
• Only the top 10 results are displayed in lists of keywords, backlinks, and the like.
• Up to 10 total credits for content ideas or on-page SEO improvements.
• Just a single website audit, for a maximum of 100 URLs.

How Does Semrush Work?

Semrush has a clear goal: to assist you in enhancing your business’s digital marketing from various angles.

Therefore, a crucial part of the tool is the management of your own domains.

By doing this, you can register your web projects and track their progress, as well as identify new opportunities to boost your outcomes.

Additionally, beyond just your own websites, Semrush allows you to analyze any domain you set your sights on.

The tool provides you with comprehensive reports on how your competitors are performing, all thanks to the vast amount of data they’ve gathered in their databases.

Using Semrush, we can:

• Get insights into the traffic and ranking data of any domain.
• Analyze our competitors’ backlinks.
• Conduct keyword research.
• Perform audits on our website.
• Enhance our local SEO.
• Discover our competitors’ advertising campaigns and plan our own.
• Manage our social media presence.
• Generate ideas for new content on our site.

But these are just a few of the things we can accomplish.

Up next, we’ll delve deeper into how Semrush operates and explore everything this robust SEO suite has in store for us, from the basics to the most advanced features. Let’s maximize what this renowned tool has to offer.

Are you with me?

Set Up Your Projects in Semrush

One of the main reasons for investing in a premium SEO tool is to track your own websites.

In this regard, Semrush offers a dashboard where you can add the projects you’re working on, allowing you to monitor the outcomes of your positioning and marketing efforts.

Unlike other tools, such as DinoRANK, where you can manage an unlimited number of projects, Semrush has some significant restrictions in this area.

The free plan only allows you to set up one domain, and the most basic paid plan expands it to a maximum of five.

This is a major limitation you’ll need to consider if you have numerous websites you want to monitor.

The project dashboard is split into two distinct sections.

In the upper area, you can add your competitors’ domains. This gives you a quick overview of their relevance and progress.

On the other hand, in the lower section, all the projects we’ve set up are displayed, along with their key metrics.

To obtain most of these metrics, we’ll need to set them up beforehand.

It’s really straightforward. Just click on the link that says “Setup,” and it will display the relevant options. You can even instruct Semrush to send you periodic emails to keep you informed of changes.

If you want a more detailed view of each project, simply click on its name, and you’ll see a dashboard with all the gathered information about it.

This dashboard consists of several widgets that provide insights into your website from various angles.

As I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to set up some of these widgets to use them. You can do it from here as well.

Specifically, the data you can view from this dashboard includes:

• Position Tracking: Monitor your keywords across different devices and locations.
• Site Audit: An overview of your website’s health, including the number of issues and warnings you should address.
• On Page SEO Checker: A set of suggestions that could boost your site’s rankings.
• Backlink Audit: A snapshot of the quality of your backlinks.
• Organic Traffic Insights: A summary of organic traffic, integrating data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
• Link Building Tool: Potential links you could earn.
• PPC Keyword Tool: Keywords for your marketing campaigns.
• Social Media Tracker: Insights into your competitors on social platforms.
• Social Media Poster: Scheduled posts for your social channels.
• Content Analyzer: Overview of your content audits, integrating data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
• Domain Analysis: A quick glance at your website’s key metrics.
• Traffic Analytics: Insight into your site’s traffic based on Semrush data and Google Analytics.
• Organic Keywords: Tracking your keyword performance, including terms where you’re gaining or losing ground.
• Backlink Analysis: Track the number of domains pointing to your site over time.
• Top Viewed Pages: Your best-performing pages, as per Google Analytics data.
• Google Search Console Performance: A summarized view of your Google Search Console data.

As you can see, all this information is just a summary of the data available in various sections of the tool.

In fact, each widget contains links that allow you to navigate to the corresponding section and delve deeper into the data.

SEO Analysis with Semrush

Now that you know how to set up your projects in Semrush, let’s move on to what matters most: SEO.

For this, the tool offers a slew of features that allow us to deeply analyze a domain, whether it’s ours or a competitor’s.

Let’s go through how to use them step by step

SEO Dashboard

Through this dashboard, we get a quick view of all our websites.

To be honest, I don’t see much more use to it than the project dashboard. Its content is essentially the same, but focused solely on those widgets that are more closely related to SEO.

In any case, through this panel, you can get a general idea of how your projects are progressing and, from here, easily navigate to the sections you are interested in analyzing in depth.

In both the project panel and the SEO panel, you can hide those widgets that you don’t use so they don’t bother you.

You just have to click on the X in the top right corner to close them.

The widgets that you are not viewing will be listed at the bottom of the screen, in the ‘Hidden Widgets’ section, so you can enable them again whenever you wish.

This panel, then, is simply a kind of dashboard that provides access to other much more specific SEO functions to improve your positioning, which I will explain in detail in the following sections.

Competitor Research

Studying the evolution of our website is very important. In fact, it’s absolutely necessary if we want to improve our results. However, observing what other pages are doing can be just as, if not more, useful.

Knowing what others are doing gives us a multitude of ideas to apply to our pages or to create new projects.

That’s why this is probably one of the sections you’ll use most often as a Semrush user.

Let’s take a look at all its functionalities.

Domain Overview

We’re facing one of the most important tabs in Semrush. Get used to it because you’re going to spend many hours examining it.

Every time you want to analyze a domain, this will be the screen you’ll see first.

And it’s not by chance. The information it provides is truly impressive, and with a quick glance, we can already grasp the most relevant aspects of the website we’re analyzing.

Although I said website, we can also input just a URL or a subdomain and carry out its individual analysis.

This way, the domain overview is composed of different sections that provide us with a summary of the main data about a domain, subdomain, or URL. From here, we can navigate to other sections within Semrush where this information is expanded.

At the top, you can choose the data to display. It allows you to select the country, switch between desktop and mobile versions, and even load historical data from a specific date.

Next, following a section with the compilation of the most important website metrics, you get an overview of the traffic and the positioned keywords, both for organic and paid results.

Right below that, you have a more detailed breakdown of the organic research, including the top traffic keywords, the distribution of positions in the SERPs, or the brand traffic (searches for your domain name on Google) that you’ve achieved.

It’s also worth highlighting the analysis of your main competitors, with a graphical representation of the relevance of each of them.

Similarly to the organic research, we have the advertising research, with data about the most important keywords and insights about the competition, along with examples of ads.

Finally, the screen provides us with information about backlinks, their types, referring domains, and target pages.

But that’s not all. The top section of the domain overview screen has these three additional tabs:

• Domain Comparison: You can compare your domain with up to 4 competitors to identify improvement opportunities.
• Growth: Contrast your domain’s data for two different time periods and analyze its evolution.
• Country Comparison: Check your domain’s metrics in different countries simultaneously to evaluate where it’s performing best.

The downside is that these comparisons are only available starting from the Guru plan.

Traffic Analytics

In this section, you have all the information related to a domain’s traffic.

It’s similar to the data you get from Google Analytics (visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc.), but the advantage here is that you can access data for any domain, not just your own.

You might notice that the results displayed by Semrush for visits and traffic are somewhat different from those in Google Analytics.

This is because Semrush calculates this data based on its own algorithms that consider domain keywords, their positions in SERPs, and other factors, instead of actual clicks on a website.

Therefore, you should always regard these metrics as an approximation and a reflection of a website’s trend, rather than an exact and real value.

From the Semrush traffic analysis screen, I’d highlight two main functions.

The first is the ability to compare data from up to 5 domains side by side. This is very useful when you want to assess a website’s growth in comparison to its competitors.

The second is the section called ‘Traffic Journey.’ It’s a graphical representation of the main external sources sending traffic to our domain and the most significant destinations to which our website redirects traffic.

I find this feature very insightful for getting to know our audience and their behavior.

Organic Research

The organic research panel provides comprehensive information about the keywords for which a domain, page, or subdomain is ranking in Google’s organic search.

While the overview has its merits, in my opinion, the real value of this section lies in the data tables, accessible through the tabs at the top.

In the Positions table, you’ll find all the keywords for which the domain in question is ranked.

If the domain is yours, you can find ideas here to enhance your articles and curate content. For instance, you can add missing keywords to your texts, introduce semantic variety, or improve your headers with keywords that can potentially drive more traffic.

Now, if you’re analyzing a competitor’s domain, this table, with its advanced filters, becomes your great ally.

Beyond offering ideas to enhance your posts with new keywords, it can aid you in identifying fresh content to grow your website. Particularly, long-tail content that’s easier to rank for.

For instance, you can filter the list for searches with more than 5 words, where the traffic is less than 200, and the keyword difficulty is labeled as ‘very easy.’ This way, you’ll generate a substantial amount of ideas for creating content that’s likely to yield results quickly.

The Keyword Difficulty is a number from 1 to 100 that indicates the estimated difficulty of surpassing the competition within the top twenty positions of the SERPs

On the other hand, in the ‘Position Changes’ table, you will see the keywords for which a domain has gained or lost visibility.

Once again, if it’s your own website, it can give you ideas about where you need to improve your content. If it’s your competitors’ domain, it can indicate the terms where they might be struggling, offering you an opportunity.

The other two noteworthy tables are ‘Competitors’ and ‘Pages.’

The first one, once again, can be used as a source of inspiration from your competitors.

The second one, on the other hand, can give us insights on how to improve a specific article with keywords that weren’t directly present in its content.

Keyword Gap

Semrush’s ‘Keyword Gap’ section offers a functionality that can save us hours of analysis when we’re searching for content ideas for a website.

You just need to enter your domain along with up to 4 other domains, and the tool will show you the common keywords among them.

This way, you can uncover a significant number of keywords for which your competition is ranking, and you might not have even considered them until now.

Moreover, the analysis includes organic, paid, or PLA (Product Listing Ads) keywords.

I find this feature to be a fantastic tool for discovering opportunities based on successful strategies.

If it worked for your competitors, why wouldn’t it work for you?

Backlink Gap

This Semrush tool is quite similar to the previous one, but it focuses on backlinks instead of keywords.

We’ll quickly know which domains are linking to our competitors but not to us.

This way, we can enhance our link-building strategy by including those backlinks that are working best for our competitors.

Keyword Research

If there’s one thing we SEOs know for sure, it’s that we can’t just start writing whatever comes to mind.

If we want our pages to get visits, we need to write about topics that people are actually searching for.

That’s why conducting thorough keyword research is crucial, both at the beginning and throughout the life of a project.

In this section, I’ll walk you through all the tools that Semrush provides to assist you in your keyword research efforts. And as you’ll see, there are quite a few.

Keyword Overview

This is the main screen to kick off your keyword research.

Just enter a term in the search box, and Semrush will provide you with information about its search volume in different countries, trend, CPC, and difficulty.

Furthermore, it will provide you with ideas for other related keywords that you can investigate, categorized into 3 groups:

• Keyword Variations: These are long-tail keywords derived from the keyword you entered, which you can target to improve your positioning.
• Questions: Here, you’ll find frequently asked questions related to your keyword. This allows you to create content that perfectly addresses the search intent, attracting users.
• Related Keywords: In this section, you’ll see semantically related keywords to yours that you can use in your content to enrich it for Google.

Lastly, Semrush displays the Google search results for the keyword you entered. This gives you an idea of the competition and the complexity of ranking for that keyword.

In addition to analyzing a single keyword, you can also do it in bulk. Enter up to 100 terms in the text box, and Semrush will show the most relevant metrics for each of them.

Keyword Magic Tool

Remember the keyword ideas suggested on the previous screen?

Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ allows you to dive much deeper into these recommendations.

The central section, spanning almost the entire screen, features the table listing all the keywords and their metrics.

The top section and the left-hand side contain the tools to filter the results displayed in the table.

So, the filters at the top allow you to select keywords based on their metrics or characteristics.

For instance, we can display only those results with phrase match (containing the keyword terms in any order), with more than 5 words, and that have search volume.

On the other hand, using the side filter, it displays keywords grouped by individual terms, so we can expand them to find a phrase that interests us.

For instance, we can first select ‘best’ and then ‘free’, to see which keywords contain both terms and get ideas for new content.

Keyword Manager

The Keyword Manager is like a Favorites section for keywords. This way, you can keep all the keywords of your interest in one place with their updated metrics.

You can create this set of keywords manually or gradually build it up from other sections of Semrush, such as ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ or ‘Organic Research,’ as you use them.

Additionally, you have the option to organize your keywords into different lists, add labels to them, export them, or send them to other Semrush tools.

Without a doubt, this utility provides us with excellent management of all the keywords that might be of interest to us.

Position Tracking

We’re facing Semrush’s position tracking tool, which allows you to monitor how your website’s performance changes over time for a set of defined keywords.

You can also specify your main organic competitors and compare their rankings for the keywords that interest you.

The section is divided into various tabs, each containing valuable information for analyzing your website’s trends. Among these tabs, I would highlight the following:

• Overview: This provides a table with all your keywords and the recent position changes they’ve undergone.
• Ranking distribution: It shows the keywords in the top 1, top 3, top 10, etc., positions for both your website and the competitors you’re monitoring.
• Pages: This tab indicates which URLs on your website are ranking for the keywords you’re interested in.
• Cannibalization: This helps identify URLs on your domain that are ranking for the same keyword. This feature is available only in Guru and Business plans.

However, while Semrush’s position tracker is quite powerful, I do see a significant drawback: position tracking is tied to goals, and the creation of goals is quite limited.

In other words, if you want to track the progress of your keywords on both desktop and mobile, you need to set up two separate goals.

And if you’re interested in tracking variations across different countries, the number of goals can quickly become overwhelming.

The Semrush Pro plan only allows you to define one goal per project. In the Guru plan, you can create up to 10 goals per project.

So, if you need to track your keywords across different combinations of platforms and countries, you might have to consider the more expensive plans.

Organic Traffic Insights

In this section, we can analyze the combination of data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Semrush.

The panel initially displays a list of the pages on our website along with their GA metrics and the keywords they are ranking for.

From here, we can navigate to each individual URL and see a detailed list of all its keywords, based on Semrush’s databases and our GSC account.

The main objective is to provide us with an easy way to identify those keywords for which we are ranked according to GSC but haven’t been identified by Semrush. These can be recognized easily as they carry a green label that says ‘New’.

This allows us to incorporate those missing terms onto our page that we’re already getting traffic for.

Backlinks Generation

Regardless of what people may say, link building remains a significant part of improving your website’s rankings.

However, it’s true that it’s not just about generating a large number of links, but rather ensuring they are relevant to your specific niche.

That’s why taking a look at what your competition is doing can give you clues on how to approach this SEO strategy correctly, which can be quite tedious in itself.

Semrush, as you might expect, offers several functionalities that greatly facilitate this task.

Here’s the most relevant information about each of them.

Backlink Analysis

With Semrush, you can analyze the backlink profile of any website. Just enter the domain name (or an individual URL) in the search box, and you’ll be taken directly to this panel.

The screen displays a wealth of information about the backlinks of the website in question, similar to what you can find in other similar tools.

I’m talking about data such as the quantity and list of links, referring domains, anchor texts, linked main pages, follow attributes, and more.

I don’t think I’ll be telling you anything new if I say that, among all the information on this screen, the one we’ll use the most in our work as SEO professionals is found in the ‘Backlinks’ tab.

These are the data presented in a table format, complete with corresponding filters and export options to Excel or CSV, which are crucial for conducting in-depth analyses.

However, there are two graphs that, at least for me, stand out due to their utility and originality.

The first one is called the Authority Score, which is a metric unique to Semrush that assesses the domain’s authority.

Semrush’s Authority Score (AS) is a metric unique to Semrush that evaluates the domain from three perspectives: the number and quality of backlinks, its organic traffic, and the naturalness of the link profile.

What’s interesting about this assessment is that the tool doesn’t just display it, but it visually represents the score so that we can observe where the domain is strongest and where it might be slightly weaker.

The other graph that catches my attention is the network graph.

This is a simulation of the most important links pointing to the domain we are analyzing, whether directly or through several hops.

By clicking on any point, we can highlight the path of links leading to the domain in question.

The size of the nodes indicates their authority, and the color signifies whether the domain is relevant to the niche of the analyzed domain (green), irrelevant (gray), or potentially harmful (red).

The graph provides a comprehensive view of the link profile of a domain, including not only direct backlinks but also those in second and third layers (2-tier, 3-tier).

Moreover, it helps us identify link-building opportunities related to a specific niche that could enhance the strength of a particular website.

Backlink Audit

This feature streamlines the monitoring of backlinks for your projects.

Here, you get comprehensive information about all your external links, along with their key attributes and their evolution (new backlinks, lost or broken links).

However, the most intriguing aspect of this section is that it conducts an assessment of all your backlinks, flagging those that are toxic or potentially so.

In other words, Semrush clearly indicates which links could be harmful to your website.

And it gives you the option to remove them.

On one hand, there’s a button that allows you to send an email to the owner of the website linking to you, requesting them to remove the link from their pages.

On the other hand, you can create a .txt file containing a list of links you’d like to disavow, ready to be submitted to Google’s Disavow tool.

The Link Building Tool

This tool provides you with fresh ideas for building links, saving you a lot of the competitive analysis work.

Based on a list of relevant keywords for your project or the competitors you’ve chosen, Semrush offers a set of opportunities for creating relevant backlinks for your website.

Of course, as with all automated recommendations from any software, you should always conduct further research to decide whether the link makes sense or not.

But there’s no doubt that this tool saves you a good chunk of the work.

If you decide to create any of the backlinks it suggests, you can move it to the ‘In Progress’ tab and from there, monitor its status, from reaching out to the website owner to its acceptance or rejection.

Lastly, if any of the requested links are accepted, you can send them to the ‘Monitoring’ tab to keep track of them.

Group Analysis

This feature provides you with the capability to analyze multiple domains simultaneously.

To do this, input a list of URLs into the text box, and Semrush will provide you with a set of general metrics about their backlink profiles.

On-Page & Tech SEO

SEO isn’t just about conducting thorough keyword research or establishing proper internal linking. It’s also crucial for your website to function well and not have any performance or structural issues.

Semrush recognizes this aspect and provides you with a comprehensive set of tools to analyze your site from the perspectives of on-page SEO and technical SEO.

Let’s take a closer look at them

Site Audit

Here, you can conduct an SEO audit of your website. Semrush will analyze your pages for potential issues and improvement suggestions, providing you with a health score for your site.

What’s intriguing about this metric is that it allows you to compare your score with the industry average, helping you determine whether your website is better or less optimized than that of your competitors.

Furthermore, the report provides a breakdown of your website’s health in various areas, such as performance, internal links, or crawlability.

Clicking on any of these scores gives you more detailed information about that specific aspect.

Through the ‘Issues’ tab, you can access the complete list of errors, warnings, and notices.

For each issue, Semrush provides a comprehensive description and a set of recommendations to address it.

Listing Management

If you want your business to appear in online directories, this option can be very useful. However, it comes with an additional cost on top of your Semrush subscription.

By entering your business information, the tool will check which directories your business is listed in, verify if the information is accurate, and suggest new options to expand your visibility.

Additionally, it will check if your information is on Google Maps and Google Business and give you the option to update your details.

SEO Content Template

The first step you should take when writing new content for your blog isn’t opening a blank page and starting to think.

No, it’s not. If you want your new post to have a chance of ranking on Google, you need to analyze the search results for the relevant keywords of the article.

By doing this, you can define a meaningful structure that appeals to Google and gather ideas to include in the text.

This research, which we usually do manually, Semrush does it for us with just a few clicks.

Simply input your keywords, the device, and the country you want to target with the article, and the tool will analyze the top 10 positions on Google to provide you with ideas.

What kind of ideas are we talking about exactly?

Among other things, Semrush will provide you with:

• A list of semantically related keywords.
• The recommended length for the text.
• Suggestions for the title.
• Possible backlinks you could create.

It’s clear that it doesn’t take away all the work completely, as there’s still some research to be done on your part. But it does save you time and simplifies things a lot by having all the information gathered in one place.

On-Page SEO Checker

This tool conducts an analysis of the individual pages on your website to provide improvement suggestions that can help enhance organic ranking.

The main screen gives us an overall view, and next to the list of analyzed URLs, you can see the number of optimization suggestions.

Clicking on the blue ‘Ideas’ button, we can view the breakdown of all Semrush’s recommendations, categorized and with a fairly detailed explanation to assist you in their implementation.

Log File Analyzer

Our web server stores valuable information when it comes to analyzing the SEO of our website, information that we tend to overlook.

I’m referring to log files.

In these files, we have data about every time Google’s and other search engines’ robots decide to crawl through our pages.

The issue is that this information isn’t easy to interpret.

Semrush, through its log file analysis tool, allows you to upload these files from your server and visually represent the information they contain.

This way, you can easily find out when Google’s bots access your website, which pages are the most visited, and whether they’ve encountered error codes.

This is very valuable information when it comes to optimizing your site’s architecture and managing the so-called crawl budget.

Semrush and Local SEO

Local SEO comes with a set of implications that differentiate it from traditional SEO.

Of course, there are many aspects they share.

However, there are certain specific actions that have a very noticeable impact on a website’s visibility for a particular location.

I won’t go into details here, as this topic could span several posts.

These tools are:

• Listing Management
• Review Management
• Position Tracking
• Site Audit
• On Page SEO Checker

The only new addition is ‘Review Management’.

This is a utility that is part of the ‘Listing Management’ tool but has been separated to make it more accessible.

This solution makes it easier for you to manage your online reviews. It connects to over 70 review platforms like Google or Facebook and allows you to view them from a single place.

Moreover, you can respond directly to users and keep track of your brand’s reputation on the internet.

Campaign Management with Semrush

So far, we’ve explored the functionalities mostly related to web positioning.

However, Semrush is not just an SEO tool; it defines itself as an all-in-one suite to assist you with online marketing.

And digital marketing covers a range of actions beyond SEO.

One of these actions is SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which involves advertising on search engines.

That’s why, in this section, we’ll review the features of Semrush to enhance your paid advertising campaigns.

Market Analysis

Semrush allows you to conduct research on the advertising efforts of any domain, which is highly valuable when you want to analyze your competitors’ strategies.

In essence, this tool is quite similar to what we’ve covered in organic research, but it focuses on the keywords for which a specific website is displaying ads.

Thus, you can track position changes for various keywords, the pages being displayed, ad text, and even other websites that are bidding on those terms.

In addition to these features, Semrush also offers the ability to analyze display advertising or, if you have an ecommerce business, conduct a Product Listing Ads (PLA) investigation, which focuses on ads appearing on Google Shopping for your online store.

Keyword Research

If you want to conduct keyword research for your ad campaigns, Semrush offers several tools to help with that.

Some of these tools might sound familiar, as they are the same ones we previously discussed for organic keyword research. Semrush presents them under this section again because they are also useful for SEM purposes.

Thus, we once again see the utilities of ‘Keyword Gap,’ ‘Keyword Magic Tool,’ and ‘Keyword Manager.’

But we also have two new tools.

On one hand, there’s the ‘PPC Keyword Tool,’ which allows you to set up ad campaigns, track the keywords for each campaign, and optimize your PPC campaigns to avoid wasting your budget.

On the other hand, the ‘Ad History’ tool provides us with a very insightful view of our competitors’ campaigns for a specific keyword in Google Ads.

Ad Tracking

Once again, Semrush provides us with direct access to a tool that is already located in another section but also has special relevance for working toward a specific goal.

In this case, it’s the position tracking tool, which we already saw in the SEO section and can also be used to check paid positions.

To do this, simply select the type of tracking in the tracker’s configuration options.

Social Ads

Lastly, Semrush doesn’t forget about social media advertising.

From the ‘Social Media Ads’ tool, you can connect your Facebook account and easily manage your advertising campaigns on this social network or on Instagram.

Managing Social Media from Semrush

Nowadays, having a presence on social media is almost a requirement for any digital project, at least if the goal is to reach as many people as possible.

That’s why Semrush has created a set of tools to help you monitor your results across different social profiles, measure your impact, and make decisions to enhance your digital marketing strategies through these channels.

In addition to ‘Social Media Ads’ for advertising on social networks, you also have features that can assist you with the content you publish.

I’ll mention just two of them, as I consider them to be the most interesting and the ones I’ve personally found most valuable so far.

One of these tools is called ‘Social Tracker.’ It allows you to connect your accounts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to analyze activity through various metrics.

Furthermore, you can also add your competitors’ profiles, and it will display their key statistics.

With this data, you can conduct various analyses to improve your own results. For instance:

• What have your competitors posted that you could also create content about?
• Which of their content pieces performed well?
• What hashtags did they use?
• Which other profiles did they mention?

These are just a few ideas I’m sharing, but I’m sure you can come up with many more.

In addition to ‘Social Tracker,’ the other feature that I find quite useful for social media management in Semrush is ‘Social Poster.

The ‘Social Poster’ tool is like a calendar where you can create and schedule your posts for any of your social media profiles. It’s highly useful for planning your social media activity and managing all your networks from one place.

Semrush and Content Marketing

Up to this point, we’ve explored what Semrush offers us to promote our content, whether through SEO, paid ads, or social media.

But there’s one of the most demanding tasks left. Many would even say it’s the most effort-intensive one.

I’m referring, of course, to creating that content.

How many times have you sat in front of the computer without any ideas about what to write?

Do you think you structure your texts well?

Do you find it challenging to measure the impact of your content?

Semrush can assist you in these tasks through various tools.

The first of these is ‘Topic Research,‘ a fantastic utility that generates a wealth of content ideas related to the topic you specify.

The way it presents the suggestions seems very ingenious to me. It organizes each topic on a card that displays the search volume and the titles of the top three pages ranking for that keyword (along with their respective links).

You can expand this information and get more details such as difficulty, topic efficiency, related questions, and the top 10 linked articles to read.

In addition to this representation, there are three more options. My favorite is the one called the mind map, where ideas are displayed in a circular format.

Clicking on each of them allows you to access their details, which are shown on the side.

In addition to ‘Topic Research,’ you have the ‘SEO Content Template’ tool that we saw earlier, which helps you create the structure of your post to appeal to Google.

Once you’ve chosen your topic and the main information to organize the article, you can use the ‘SEO Writing Assistant’ tool to aid you in content creation.

This tool evaluates the text you’re writing and suggests improvements.

The assessment is conducted from four perspectives: readability (is it easy for the user to read?), SEO (will it rank on search engines?), originality (is the content duplicated?), and tone (does it use a formal or informal tone?).

With these four analyses, Semrush provides an evaluation to give you an idea of the quality of your text.

Furthermore, it will provide you with recommendations to help improve each score. As always, whether to implement them or not will depend on your objectives and your common sense.

Finally, once the post is created and published, we can measure its impact using the “Post Tracking” and “Content Audit” tools.

With the first one, we can observe its reach, based on the number of times it has been shared or the number of media outlets linking to the article.

On the other hand, “Content Audit” gathers your Google Analytics and Google Search Console statistics for the pages you specify, all in one place.

But it doesn’t just display this data. It also combines them to indicate which URLs you should focus on, either because their content is weak, they’re not receiving visits and could be deleted, or because they are receiving visits and could benefit from improvement to increase their impact.

The only issue is that this last analysis is only available in the Guru plan.

Other Semrush Tools

We’ve covered the most relevant utilities of Semrush. But we’re not done yet.

There are still several tools left to discuss that provide an extra advantage to this already comprehensive marketing suite.

Let’s take a look at them.

Trends

With Semrush’s ‘.Trends’ extension, you can track market trends and discover new opportunities within your niche or industry.

However, it’s worth noting that this extension comes at an additional cost on top of your Semrush subscription. And the cost is not low, by the way. Currently, it’s an extra $200 per month that you’ll need to pay if you want access to this information.

Is it worth it?

Well, that depends on your needs. I’ll tell you what it includes, and the decision is up to you, okay?

On one hand, it unlocks various tabs within the ‘Traffic Analytics’ tool. This way, you get a much broader view of the traffic generated by your competitors.

On the other hand, it provides full access to the ‘Market Explorer’ tool, which gives you more specific sector data for a domain, including key competitors, audience characteristics, or trending searches.

Finally, with ‘EyeOn’ and ‘One2Target,’ you can monitor your competitors. You can track their publications, ad campaigns, as well as gather demographic and socioeconomic data about their audience.

Agency Solutions

If you run an agency, Semrush also provides tools to assist in your business growth.

All for an additional monthly cost.

By subscribing to this package, you’ll have a set of tools to receive notifications about contract or bid opportunities, acquire new leads, or set up a specific portal for exchanging information with your clients.

Additionally, Semrush offers a CRM to manage all your client interactions. While it may not be as feature-rich as dedicated CRM software, it can be more than sufficient for many companies, especially small ones.

Reporting

Generating reports is also a feature in this tool.

Semrush has a comprehensive report editor that allows you to create customized documents using data from your projects.

You can configure your reports with your own branding, include the sections that are most relevant to you, and even schedule automatic generation of reports or send them via email to stakeholders.

API

If you enjoy programming or have a specialized development team for creating applications, Semrush offers access to its API.

This way, you can integrate the vast amount of data generated by this SEO suite into your own tools.

However, this comes at a price. The Semrush API is only available in the Business plan, making it primarily intended for larger companies.

Sensor

Semrush also monitors SERPs and Google’s algorithm so that you can stay up-to-date on the factors affecting your project’s ranking.

From this option, you can see the score that Semrush assigns for each day, both for overall categories and specific categories.

In the left column, you can see the different categories and their scores for that day, and clicking on them will provide more details.

The lower the Semrush Sensor score, the less likely algorithm changes will affect you.

Below the score, you’ll find a graph where you can check the days when the SERPs have been more unstable. This way, if you’ve noticed changes in your traffic or positioning that align with those dates, you’ll know the reasons behind them.

Then, you can see a list of which features have been affected by these changes and whether the effects have been positive or negative.

Checking these changes and fluctuations can help you seize new positioning opportunities by identifying trends.

Is DinoRANK an alternative to Semrush?

Semrush is a fantastic marketing tool. There’s no doubt about that.

However, the financial investment it requires is a clear obstacle for many entrepreneurs, especially those who are just starting out or those who manage multiple websites.

Because it’s not only the price that presents a challenge. The set of limitations in some of their plans is also a hindrance.

That’s why I believe DinoRANK can be a viable alternative to Semrush nowadays.

Not for all its functions, but for many of them. Perhaps the most interesting ones.

Specifically, with DinoRANK, you can do all of the following:

• Position tracking. Honestly, DinoRANK has one of the cleanest, most intuitive, and comprehensive keyword tracking dashboards I know of. A panel that keeps improving with each tool update and is one of its main strengths.

• TF*IDF analysis. Direct recommendations on the keywords you should include in your texts based on Google’s Top 10 for a specific search intent. While Semrush provides similar information through various tools, I think DinoRANK presents it in a more direct and applicable way.

• Keyword research. With DinoRANK, you can also conduct your keyword research.
• Content Gap. Similar to Semrush’s keyword gap feature, this functionality suggests new keywords you could work on for your website based on your competitors’ actions.
• On-page SEO audit. An analysis of your website from various perspectives to enhance its positioning. Additionally, you can download a PDF document and use it as a foundation to create a professional report.
• PageRank and internal linking. While Semrush includes options to check internal links and website structure, the graphical representation you obtain with DinoRANK is, in my opinion, much more useful.
• Organic traffic. In DinoRANK, you can view your website’s traffic data and receive recommendations to enhance your pages’ positioning for specific keywords.
• Detection of cannibalizations and thin content. These are two issues that can impact the performance of your pages, and DinoRANK alerts you to them so you can address them.
• Management of external linking and link building. Similar to Semrush, DinoRANK enables you to monitor changes in your external links.
• Competitor analysis and link building. DinoRANK lets you discover the keywords for which your competitors’ web pages are ranked and obtain the list of backlinks for any domain of interest.

As you can see, DinoRANK offers many features that are a clear alternative to those of Semrush.

Sometimes they are simpler, but in other cases, they provide you with more practical and comprehensive information.

However, it’s clear that Semrush is a much larger tool, and so is its price, and there are certain things that DinoRANK may not offer you. At least, not yet.

Some of these functions include:

• Analyzing the traffic of any domain.
• Personalized recommendations for backlink opportunities for your site.
• Analysis of ad campaigns.
• Social media management.
• Enhancing content marketing.
• Market trend analysis.

However, apart from specific features, one of the aspects you should consider when comparing these tools is the limitations they impose on their plans.

For instance, for me, managing a maximum of 5 projects with Semrush’s Pro plan is clearly insufficient.

With DinoRANK, the number of domains is unlimited in all of its plans.

However, keep in mind that while you can create as many projects as you want, the number of keywords to track is limited.

In particular, in its most basic plan, DinoRANK allows you to track 400 keywords, compared to the 500 in Semrush’s Pro plan.

However, comparing these plans doesn’t make sense either, as their prices are very different.

In fact, DinoRANK’s most expensive plan allows you to track 1,500 keywords and yet is still much cheaper than Semrush’s most basic plan.

In conclusion, it’s important to consider everything as a whole and have a clear understanding of what we need for our projects and what is accessory.

Just because a tool offers more features doesn’t necessarily mean it will be much more useful.

Final Thoughts on Semrush

We’ve reached the end of this extensive guide, and if you’ve had the patience to read through all that I’ve shared, I believe you’ll agree with me that Semrush is one of the best SEO tools available in the market.

Is it worth paying for a Semrush subscription, then?

Well, yes and no. Let me explain.

If you’re a small entrepreneur looking to track the progress of your projects, I think Semrush can be a bit expensive, especially considering the limitations of the basic plan.

In my opinion, for this profile, the features for analyzing your competition might be more useful than those focused on tracking your own websites.

However, if you’re a large agency where the budget for tools is not significant compared to the revenue, Semrush’s Business plan offers valuable tools that you can likely benefit from.

In any case, it’s best for you to try the tool yourself and draw your own conclusions. Especially since you can do so for free, as I mentioned at the beginning of the post.

The benefits of Semrush for enhancing digital marketing strategies are clear. However, only you can decide whether you want to include it as part of yours.

One thing I always do with my WordPress setups: install an SEO plugin.

In that regard, Yoast SEO is a no-brainer.

While Rank Math is a strong contender, I genuinely believe Yoast stands as one of the top WordPress SEO plugins out there.

Today, I’m going to walk you through how to set it up thoroughly, ensuring you leave no stone unturned and make Google’s job easy when it crawls your site.

If this is your first time installing this plugin, I think this guide is gonna be a game-changer for you. And if you’ve used it before, you might just pick up a tip or two you hadn’t come across before.

So, let’s dive right in!

What is Yoast SEO and Why Do You Need It?

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin designed to give search engines a clearer understanding of your website, thereby boosting your online visibility.

You probably recognize the significance of managing your page indexing correctly, crafting engaging meta titles and descriptions, or having a well-structured XML sitemap.

Well, with Yoast, you can take the reins on all of these and so much more.

So, if you’re eager to learn what this SEO powerhouse can offer and how to set it up seamlessly on WordPress, keep reading for the inside scoop.

Setting Up the Yoast SEO Plugin from Scratch: A Step-by-Step Guide

Yoast SEO isn’t tough to get a handle on, but it does pack a ton of features designed to enhance the search ranking of your posts or pages. That can feel a bit overwhelming, especially if it’s your first rodeo with the plugin.

If you’re aiming to fine-tune Yoast SEO on WordPress and make sure Google reads every nook and cranny of your site just right, this guide is bound to be a game-changer for you.

I’ll walk you through, step by step, the essential aspects I consider when leveraging this SEO plugin to its fullest.

Let’s dive in!

Installing the Yoast SEO Plugin on WordPress

The Yoast SEO plugin (or SEO by Yoast, as it was called back in the day) installs just like most WordPress add-ons.

Simply head over to the ‘Plugins’ section and click on ‘Add New’.

In the search box, type in “Yoast SEO”. It’ll likely pop up as the top result (it’s the one developed by Team Yoast, boasting over 5 million installations).

Click on “Install Now”, and then hit “Activate”.

There you go! Just like that.

You’ve now installed the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress.

Initial Setup with the Yoast SEO Wizard

To simplify its initial setup, Yoast SEO comes with a wizard that you can run right after installation.

To start, just click on the button that appears on the screen following the plugin’s activation, and it’ll take you straight to the initial configuration tab.

The wizard consists of a sequence of 5 steps through which you’ll set up the plugin’s basic information.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: SEO Data Optimization

In this initial phase, Yoast SEO scans your entire website, mimicking Google’s bot, and extracts the main metadata from your pages to store them in a separate database.

This is referred to as indexables. Their goal is to present your website’s information to search engines in a much quicker and efficient manner, thus enhancing the indexing of your pages.

To set up this step, just click on the “Start SEO Data Optimization” button and let Yoast do its magic. Keep in mind, if your website is vast, the process might take several minutes.

Once it’s done, click “Continue” to proceed with the site setup.

Step 2: Site Representation

Here, you need to fill out your website’s information. Specify whether the author is an individual or an organization, provide their name, and choose the appropriate logo.

Step 3: Social Media Profiles

Now, it’s time for the social media profiles.

If you’ve indicated that the site’s owner is an organization, you can input the social media handles associated with that company here.

If you specified that the website’s author is an individual, you’ll need to fill out the social media profiles in the settings for the respective user account.

Step 4: Personal Preferences

In the next screen, you can choose whether to send usage data to Yoast servers to help enhance the plugin, as well as subscribe to their newsletter.

I personally don’t do either, but if you’re just starting out with SEO, it might be a good idea to subscribe to Yoast’s newsletter for a while. This way, you can get helpful tips straight to your inbox that’ll teach you the essentials of search engine optimization.

Step 5: Wrap up the Setup

This final step is just for your information.

Yoast now has the basic info it needs to manage your website.

But the plugin setup doesn’t end here. We still need to fine-tune how we want search engines to interact with our pages.

So, let’s dive into the most crucial part of Yoast: the settings.

General Site Settings

Right when you enter the Yoast SEO Settings section, you’re presented with a screen to activate the plugin modules you want to use.

As you’ll see, there are features that can significantly boost your website’s SEO, both in content writing and more technical tasks.

You can pick and choose whichever you find beneficial, but these are the ones I typically enable on all my websites:

• Open Graph Data: To embed special metadata for social networks on my site.
• Twitter Card Data: To enhance visibility on Twitter.
• REST API Head Endpoint: So Yoast takes care of ensuring my URLs correctly display all SEO metadata.
• XML Sitemaps: Essential for generating the Sitemap file.

Under the tabs “Site Basics” and “Site Representation” within general settings, you’ll find the website identification details you set up via the wizard, and you can adjust them if needed.

Crucially, in the “Site Basics” section, make sure to check the option “Restrict advanced settings to authors” if you want only site administrators and editors to have the capability to alter specific Yoast settings.

Lastly, under the “Site Connections” tab, you can input verification codes that allow you to register your website with Google Search Console or webmaster tools from other search engines like Bing, Yandex, or Baidu.

Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions with the Yoast SEO Plugin

Within Yoast SEO settings, you’ll find configuration options for the visibility of different content types.

This is the most critical part of the plugin, allowing us to control how our URLs’ meta tags will be displayed and whether they should be indexed.

We’ll see options for configuring the homepage, pages, posts, and taxonomies (categories and tags).

Each of these content types is customized through its own panel, letting us set the default behavior.

For setting up the homepage, Yoast directs us to edit that page and adjust its attributes via the SEO attributes box. Later, we’ll discuss how to do this for any page or post.

For the other content types, the panel offers the following options:

• Show in search results: Turning off this option will ensure that the specific content type in question (pages, posts, or taxonomies) doesn’t appear in the Sitemap and defaults to ‘noindex’. I typically leave this enabled for pages and posts and disable it for taxonomies, but this can vary greatly depending on the specific project.
• SEO Title: This lets us set the default meta title for each content type on our website. We can use variables to fill this out, such as the post or page title, publication date, or site name.
• Meta description: Just as we can configure titles, we also have the ability to customize the default structure for meta descriptions here.
• Social Appearance: If we have the Premium version of Yoast SEO, this section lets us define our content’s settings for social networks.
• Schema: Schema markup is crucial for ensuring search engines correctly understand your website. With this option, we can broadly specify our URLs’ content type.
• Enable SEO controls and assessments: This allows Yoast to display its SEO box on each individual page, post, or taxonomy. I always turn this on.

In addition to everything mentioned, the category settings section includes the option “Show category prefix in the slug.” This allows you to decide if you want the category URLs to be preceded by the /category/ prefix or not.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that, even though I always set a general structure for titles, descriptions, and Schema markup, I subsequently configure all these details individually for each content type using the SEO box.

I believe it’s the most suitable approach if we aim to provide Google and other search engines with accurate information about every URL on our website.

Breadcrumbs on Your Website Thanks to Yoast SEO for WordPress

Breadcrumbs are extremely useful for users as they aid in website navigation, allowing them to see where they are at any given moment.

Yoast SEO offers a feature to add breadcrumbs to your site via a section within the Advanced Settings.

Here, you can customize their appearance and specify on which types of content they should be displayed.

Using Breadcrumbs with Yoast SEO To use these breadcrumbs, you can employ a shortcode which you’ll need to place manually on every page or post where you want to display them. Alternatively, you can activate them in your theme by adding a snippet of code to the PHP files.

Yoast SEO and the XML Sitemap

The sitemap is an essential tool in SEO, as it signals to search engines a complete list of URLs they should crawl when accessing our website.

With Yoast, creating and configuring this sitemap file couldn’t be easier.

All you need to do is activate the corresponding module, as I mentioned in the section where I discussed the site’s general settings.

After enabling this feature, you’ll have your sitemap in XML format accessible through a URL with the following structure: https://yourdomain/sitemap_index.xml

And, as I’ve also mentioned before, if you want to exclude a certain type of content from this sitemap, it’s as simple as unchecking the “Show in search results” box within the settings of that specific content type.

Advanced Features

The Yoast settings section has a subsection for advanced configurations.

Earlier, I mentioned one of these advanced options related to breadcrumbs, but there are several other aspects you can customize. I’ll briefly go over them:

• Crawl Options. This allows you to optimize the crawling that search engine bots do on your website by restricting the elements they should crawl. If you’re not sure about any of these options, it’s best not to tamper with them. I usually leave them as they are by default.
• Author, Date, Format, and Media Archives. These are pages that WordPress itself creates to organize its content and often lead to duplicate content or low-quality content (thin content). Except in very specific cases, I usually deactivate them.

• Special Pages. Here you can configure the titles of pages that are displayed with the results of your WordPress internal searches or when a 404 error occurs.

• RSS. On this screen, you can configure the texts that appear in the RSS entries of your website. This is useful for indicating that your website is the source of the content of these feeds that can be shared on the Internet and that some search engine might crawl.

Additional tools

In addition to all the settings we have seen, Yoast SEO has some additional tools that can be very useful for managing certain aspects of your website.

For example, you can export your Yoast settings to make a backup or import them into another website.

But that’s not all. Yoast also allows you to load the settings from other SEO plugins, such as Rank Math, to make the configuration task easier for you.

Another tool you have at your disposal is the file editor, which will allow you to modify your robots.txt or .htaccess files directly from your WordPress. However, I don’t recommend using this option if you’re not very sure about what you’re doing.

And the tool I like the most is the bulk editor.

You can quickly change the meta title or meta description tag for any URL without having to individually edit it. An option that undoubtedly saves you a lot of time.

Customizing an individual page or post through the Yoast SEO box

We have already seen how you can adjust Yoast SEO globally for your website.

However, while having a default general setting is good to save you some work, if we want Google to interpret each page of our website with the greatest precision, we have to configure each URL individually.

This is what the SEO box (or Meta Box) is for, which Yoast can include, if we activate it, at the bottom of the WordPress editor for each type of content.

Let’s see everything it allows us to do.

SEO Tab

The SEO tab in the Yoast box has many utilities, but without a doubt, the two most important are: the Google Preview and the Advanced Settings.

Through the preview, we can see how Google will display our page in the SERP (or, more precisely, how we want it to be displayed).

Here, you have the option to preview the result for desktop or mobile devices, as well as to modify the SEO title and description.

One thing to consider when editing these meta tags is that Google only takes into account a maximum number of characters. Specifically, 67 for the meta title and 155 for the meta description (though it’s recommended they be somewhat shorter).

Yoast SEO provides us with a color-coded bar (ranging from green to red) to indicate how optimized our tags are in terms of length.

Regarding the advanced configuration, it allows us to specify whether the page should be displayed or not by search engines (index/noindex tag) and whether or not they should follow its links (follow/nofollow).

Lastly, the SEO tab has other utilities through which Yoast evaluates our page from an SEO perspective.

At this point, I must admit that I never pay too much attention to it. I prefer to follow my common sense and not introduce elements into the content in a forced manner that would make them lose their naturalness.

Readability Tab

Through this tab, Yoast SEO conducts a readability analysis and provides us with certain suggestions that, in theory, should improve our texts.

Sometimes, it can give you some improvement ideas, but just like with the SEO analysis, it’s not something I usually consider heavily.

I trust my instinct and experience more when it comes to creating content than what a machine tells me.

Schema Tab

In this section, we can modify the Schema markup of our page or post.

Simply select the page type and article type (if it really is an article) from the dropdown menus to inform search engines about the kind of content they can expect from the given URL.

Social Tab

The last tab in Yoast’s SEO box allows us to adjust how our page will appear when shared on social media, specifically on Facebook and Twitter.

You can configure the image as well as the metadata for the title and description.

How much does the Yoast SEO Premium plugin cost and what are its advantages?

Yoast SEO has a free and a paid version.

The free version is the one that is installed directly from the WordPress plugin repository, while the Pro version of Yoast must be purchased on their website for €99 per year.

In my opinion, the free version is more than enough for most users, especially for those who are just starting out and cannot afford to invest in too many tools.

Does that mean Yoast SEO Premium is not worth it?

Not at all. The Premium version includes several features that can help you further optimize certain aspects of your website’s SEO, in addition to preventing you from having to install additional plugins.

Most important benefits of Yoast SEO Premium:

• Recommendations for internal linking.
• Automatic redirects to avoid broken links.
• Greater control over structured data.
• Preview results for social networks.
• 24/7 support.
• Full access to the Yoast SEO Academy.

In conclusion, Yoast SEO Premium offers very interesting advantages, but as always, the benefits you’ll get from it will depend on your knowledge and also your budget.

Final thoughts

In this post, I have tried to show you how to fine-tune the Yoast SEO plugin step by step, so that it’s easy for you to get it working correctly on your website.

I hope I have achieved that.

In any case, to make it even easier, I leave you with a short checklist on the main aspects you should review when setting up the Yoast SEO plugin.

Don’t forget to do this when setting up Yoast SEO for WordPress:

1. Complete all the steps of the initial configuration assistant.
2. Activate the social media and site map modules.
3. Remove content types that you don’t want to appear in the sitemaps by deactivating the “Show in search results” option.
4. Set a default Yoast SEO configuration for meta tags.
5. Activate the SEO box in all content types you want to index.
6. Always check the SEO box of each page or post before publishing it.

Thanks to Yoast SEO, your website will be ready for the search engine bots to come visit.

However, Yoast SEO alone doesn’t work magic.

If your content is not good, I highly doubt that you can reach high positions in Google’s search results.

But if you publish quality information and follow the steps in this guide, you can rest assured that Google and other search engines will understand your site correctly, and that will be a great help in improving your website’s ranking.

If you’ve been overlooking your website’s load speed, let me tell you it’s high time to start giving it some thought.

Don’t stress, it’s not that tricky. There are free tools out there that make the job a lot easier.

And one of the best I know of is GTmetrix.

In this article, I’ll walk you through why you should be checking your site’s performance and how you can do it using this SEO tool we’re fortunate to have at no cost

Will you join me in this overview of GTmetrix’s features?

What is GTmetrix and why is it useful?

GTmetrix is an online tool that analyzes the load time of your website, gauging its performance and suggesting optimization improvements.

Why is measuring your site’s speed crucial for SEO?

Picture this: You sit down on a bar for a drink.

Minutes tick by, and no one takes your order.

You flag down a waiter, asking if they could serve you, and they assure you they’ll be right with you.

Yet, more time goes by, and you’re still waiting.

Eventually, you grow impatient and decide to leave for another bar.

The same scenario applies to your website. However, instead of minutes, we’re talking about mere seconds or even milliseconds.

If a user visits your site and it takes too long to load, they’ll likely bounce off to another site.

Google is well aware of this, which is why, nowadays, a site’s performance is a pivotal factor in its search ranking.

Tools like GTmetrix enable you to assess the factors impacting your website’s load times, empowering you to take the necessary steps to enhance the user experience.

How to Use GTmetrix

When it comes to using GTmetrix, you have three different modes to choose from, depending on how involved you want to be with the tool.

First off, there’s the most straightforward method, perfect if you just want to conduct a quick, occasional analysis of your site.

You don’t need to provide any personal information. Just enter your website’s URL on GTmetrix’s homepage, wait a few seconds, and you’re set to review the results.

If you’re aiming to keep a basic track of your website, I’d recommend setting up a free account.

You’ll need to provide an email address and, optionally, your name. In return, you’ll get a handful of benefits, such as:

• Certain test configuration options.
• Storage of recent reports.
• Monitoring of your main page.
• Alert settings.
• API access. Lastly, if you’re looking to use GTmetrix in a professional capacity, they offer a PRO version with several premium paid plans.

Let’s dive into the perks they provide.

Differences between GTmetrix’s Free Version and Paid Plans

Depending on your business needs, GTmetrix PRO offers a variety of paid plans to choose from.

From the most affordable option, priced at $13 a month, to a plan designed for larger businesses with more demanding usage.

There’s even an option to customize a plan if none of the available packages suit your needs.

Regardless, the paid plans offer several benefits over the free version. Here are the ones I find most significant:

• Testing from servers located in a wider range of countries.
• Simulation of requests from mobile devices.
• A broader range of test configuration options.
• More comprehensive PDF reports.
• Monitoring of additional pages.
• Expanded API usage capabilities.

GTmetrix Step-by-Step Guide

Next, I’ll walk you through how to use GTmetrix’s main features.

You’ll see it’s not overly complex. It just requires a clear understanding of certain concepts.

By the end, you’ll be able to perform a performance analysis of your websites with ease.

Main Dashboard

For this guide, I’ve used the free version of GTmetrix, as it’s more than adequate for conducting an analysis and basic tracking of our website.

After logging in with our username and password, the tool takes us to a control panel made up of three main areas.

At the bottom, we have two tabs.

• The first provides access to the reports of the tests we’ve already run.
• The second displays the projects we are monitoring.

Furthermore, we can create new tabs based on the filters we set up.

In the upper part of the control panel, we see a text box where we should enter our page’s URL to conduct new tests.

Let’s now analyze the DinoRANK page.

But before we initiate the test, we’ll set up some options.

GTmetrix Analysis Options

Right below the “Analyze” button, there’s a dropdown menu to access the configuration settings.

As you’ll notice, most of the options are only available for the PRO plans.

However, let’s look at what we can set up for our analysis:

• Location. The server location from which the tests will be launched. It’s useful to configure if you want your website to target a specific country. We’ll choose San Antonio to see how the website performs for the USA.
• Device. In this case, we can only select the speed test to be done for desktop (using the Google Chrome web browser).
• Connection. In case we want to analyze a specific type of connection. We’ll leave it as the default value.
• Video. A video will be created showing our website’s loading sequence. We’ll enable this.
• Adblock Plus. To prevent third-party ads from loading. For our purposes, we’ll keep this disabled.

Besides these configuration options, GTmetrix also provides other advanced settings.

In this way, if needed, you can set up authentication to access your website, manage cookie storage, or block URLs with resources you don’t want to load.

There are also more configuration parameters available for the PRO version.

Typically, these additional options aren’t usually required. However, if at some point you want to use them, it’s good to know where to find them.

Analyzing a website and interpreting the results

Once we’ve set up our analysis, it’s time to click the blue “Analyze” button to run it.

Upon completion, GTmetrix displays a page with the results.

At the top, we can see a screenshot of our website, along with a summary of the test configuration.

Next, we receive the overall score that GTmetrix assigns to our website.

This overall score is represented by a letter (from A to F) and is calculated as an average of the following two metrics (in a 70/30 proportion):

• Performance Score. It indicates the performance of our website, based on the parameters measured by Google’s Lighthouse tool.
• Structure Score. It gives us an idea of how our website is constructed in terms of implementing best practices for achieving good performance.

Alongside the GTmetrix scores, we also get a view of the main metrics from Google’s Web Vitals.

Lastly, at the bottom, there are a series of tabs through which we can access more detailed information that we will explain next.

Summary Tab

The summary tab gives us an overall view of the page’s performance.

The most intriguing part, in my opinion, is at the beginning and it’s a graphical representation of the website’s load time.

We can see how the page’s content is displayed over time, as well as the moments when the main metrics used in the analysis take place.

Following this, we have GTmetrix’s recommendations to improve the website’s loading times.

This list is merely a quick view of what we’ll find in the Structure tab.

Lastly, the Summary tab displays a graphical representation of our page’s resource distribution from two perspectives: the size they represent and the number of requests made for each resource type.

In this way, we can get an idea of the impact these resources have on the page load.

Performance Tab

In this tab, we find the details of each metric.

Firstly, we see measurements from Google’s Lighthouse tool, applied to the parameters for which we’ve configured our speed test in GTmetrix (location, device, connection, etc).

These metrics are:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP). Time taken to display the first complete image or text on the website.
• Speed Index. Time at which the page elements become visible.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Time taken to paint the largest element on the website.
• Time to Interactive. How long it takes for all elements to load to allow full interaction with the page.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT). Time, post FCP, when the page is blocked due to script execution and doesn’t allow any interaction.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Indicates if there are elements that change position during page load. The assessment of these 6 metrics determines the page’s Performance Score, which we’ve already discussed earlier.

On the other hand, this tab displays other metrics which, while not directly influencing the Performance Score, do provide information about the web performance

If you want to understand what each of these metrics means, simply click on the question mark icon next to them.

GTmetrix vs. Google Pagespeed

Insights Even though both tools are based on Google’s Lighthouse software, the metrics they display can slightly differ. This is due to the different configuration settings for the tests, which can yield varying measurements based on their specifics. Factors like server locations, the hardware used, or the connections of the networks utilized by each tool can somewhat affect the outcomes. Regardless, these differences shouldn’t be substantial, and either of the two applications is valid for assessing a website’s performance.

Structure Tab (structure)

This section is likely the most practical part of the report, as it points out the actions we can take to enhance our website’s performance.

Each recommendation is color-coded based on the impact it would have on your website if implemented.

They are also tagged with the metrics that could be improved by executing them, allowing you to filter the results based on these tags.

By expanding the details of each action, you can view a brief description of it, the resources that would be affected, and a link to more information on how to implement the improvement.

‘Waterfall’ tab

In the ‘Waterfall’ tab, we get a graphical and detailed view of the requests made to fully load a web page.

In this way, we can see, in chronological order, all the resources that are requested to display all the elements of the page.

We have several columns (URL, response code, resource size, etc.), but the most interesting one is undoubtedly called ‘Timeline’.

This displays the time it takes for a specific resource to load using a color scale that indicates the different sequences of the load:

• Brown. Time it remains blocked.
• Teal. DNS resolution.
• Green. Connection to the server.
• Red. Sending the request to the server.
• Purple. Waiting for the response.
• Gray. Receiving the resource.

Hovering over the resource, we can see more details about these requests, as well as other related metrics.

Lastly, if we click on each row of the table, we will access the details of the resource request and the response.

Tab Video (video representation)

Do you remember the configuration option that allowed us to create a video of the loading sequence? In this tab, you can see the result.

Thus, you can easily see how the elements of your website are loaded.

Additionally, to make the task easier for you, there are time stamps on the video indicating the key moments of each metric, and you have the option to play it back at a reduced speed.

Tab History (history)

The last tab provides access to the history of your requests.

If you’ve run the same test multiple times, from this section you can track the progress through various charts.

Comparison of Reports

GTmetrix offers you the ability to compare reports with each other.

In this way, you can observe variations in a website’s performance under different configurations (locations, devices, connections, etc).

You could also compare two different pages, for example, to study the differences with your competitors.

Thus, the report comparison screen displays all the analyses, one after the other.

In the upper part, we observe their main metrics. At a quick glance, we can see the most important differential aspects.

Below, we have more extended information, grouped into several tabs through which we can compare:

• The loading sequences.
• The performance metrics.
• Optimizations in the structure.
• The succession of requests.

Finally, in the last tab, we have different charts that contrast the most outstanding metrics.

Monitoring and alerts

One of the utilities of GTmetrix is the ability to monitor certain web pages.

However, in the free version, this functionality is restricted to a single report and only for those tests you have set up with the default web server (Vancouver, Canada).

Therefore, if you want more flexibility, you’ll have to pay.

To track a report, you just have to indicate it through the ‘Monitor’ button that appears on the right side of the page and specify the tracking frequency.

In addition, you can set alerts.

Again, the option is located in the buttons on the right side of the page.

You just have to define different conditions that the metrics you want to monitor must meet, so that GTmetrix sends you an email if they are met at any time.

GTmetrix API

GTmetrix has an API to integrate its measurements into other applications.

This API operates based on credits. In the free version, they are practically symbolic and increase according to the payment plan you subscribe to.

However, if you use GTmetrix occasionally, the limitations of its free version might be more than enough for you.

Among the existing applications that use the API, it is worth highlighting a WordPress plugin that allows you to consult GTmetrix metrics directly from the CMS itself.

Conclusion and Opinions

GTmetrix is a very useful tool for improving the performance of a web page.

It not only provides you with metrics to assess the loading speed and behavior of the page but also guides you on how to optimize it.

And the best part is that you can use the tool for free.

If you don’t want to, there’s no need even to sign up.

However, if you have a website and want to improve it, I would recommend opening an account.

You have nothing to lose and will have access to many more options, which I’m sure will help you enhance your website’s performance.

The WP Rocket plugin is so much more than just a caching tool for your website. You’ll see what I mean when you dive into its settings and discover everything it can do for you – like boosting your site’s loading speed.

As you probably know, page load speed is a big deal when it comes to website management, since it directly impacts the user experience.

If your site takes forever to load, there’s a good chance users will get impatient and bounce off to find what they’re looking for elsewhere.

On the flip side, a nimble website encourages visitors to stick around longer, increasing their dwell time and, in turn, boosting your standing in Google’s eyes.

This translates, as you might already know, to better rankings.

WP Rocket is regarded by many as the best cache plugin for WordPress available right now.

You’ll see a significant uptick in your website’s performance the moment you activate it, and even more so after a few tweaks in its settings.

So, keep reading and pay close attention to the tips I’m about to share if you want to get the most out of it.

What is WP Rocket and how does it work?

WP Rocket is a comprehensive plugin designed to boost your website’s performance. It’ll assist you in managing your cache and enhancing your site’s load speed, ensuring users enjoy a top-notch browsing experience.

What is caching in WordPress?

Caching is a storage area where copies of a website’s final files are stored, which will be served as responses to user requests. In other words, when someone visits a page, WordPress needs to make multiple requests to the database to construct its final content.

Thanks to caching, the number of these requests is cut down. This is because previously generated page copies are stored and it’s these copies that are served to users, resulting in much faster response times.

But WP Rocket isn’t just about enabling cache for your WordPress.

WP Rocket goes above and beyond to optimize your website’s overall performance.

And we’re going to delve into it in this post. Ready to join me?

Price of the WP Rocket Plugin for WordPress

The first and most important thing you should know that WP Rocket is a premium plugin for WordPress and, as such, it is a paid add-on.

There are 3 pricing plans available, depending on your specific needs.

The basic plan costs €59 per year and allows you to activate it on only 1 WordPress installation.

If you want to use the plugin on unlimited websites, you’ll need to get the Infinite license, which costs €299 per year.

Is WP Rocket available for free download?

I hate to break it to you, but as of now, there’s no free version of WP Rocket.

What you do have is a 14-day trial period.

So, if you purchase a license and it doesn’t meet your expectations, you can easily request a refund without any fuss.

It’s a recommended route if you’re looking to test out this plugin before fully committing to a purchase.

Practical WP Rocket Tutorial

If tech jargon isn’t your thing, hearing about cache plugins or WPO improvements might give you a slight shudder.

But, fear not, WP Rocket is far from intimidating to handle.

To make things even smoother for you, I’ll walk you through how to set it up to unleash its full potential.

You’ll see, you don’t need to be an expert. With just a few tweaks, your website will start soaring like a rocket.

How to Install WP Rocket

The first step, naturally, is to download and install the plugin.

As we’ve mentioned, WP Rocket is a premium plugin, so you’ll need to head over to their website and purchase the plan that best suits your needs.

Once you’ve secured your license, you can download the .zip file from your user account, which will allow you to install WP Rocket on your site.

Installing it in WordPress is no different than any other premium plugin. Just navigate to the “Plugins > Add New” section and, from there, click the “Upload Plugin” button at the top.

We’ll see a screen where we can select the .zip file we had downloaded and install it in our WordPress.

Once the installation is complete, all that’s left is to click the “Activate plugin” button.

From that moment, WP Rocket will start enhancing the performance of our website.

Step-by-Step WP Rocket Configuration

I’ve noticed that many users, when using WP Rocket, simply activate it and let the plugin do its thing.

It is true that with the default configuration a good optimization is achieved.

What are the automatic functions that WP Rocket performs upon activation?

1. Page, browser, and WooCommerce cart caching management
2. GZIP compression
3. Cross-origin support for web fonts
4. Support and detection of plugins, themes, and hosting environments
5. Optimization of loading Google fonts
6. Disabling WordPress’ automatic conversion of characters to emojis

Now, even though the enhancements are significant, I have to emphasize that without making some tweaks, you’d be missing out on many opportunities to optimize your website.

Next, I’ll outline which features you can adjust with WP Rocket and share the settings I typically apply to most of my sites.

Cache Activation and Clearing

WP Rocket enables its caching functionality as soon as you activate the plugin.

From that moment on, your pages will start being cached, and as a result, your users will experience much faster loading times.

If, at any point, you want to refresh the cached content, you can do so from the main settings tab of the plugin or from the top menu of your WordPress installation.

And what if we don’t want to use WP Rocket’s cache?

WP Rocket doesn’t provide an option to disable the cache directly.

Therefore, if you want to deactivate WP Rocket’s cache but still want to use some of its other optimization features, you’ll need to download the following plugin from their website.

In addition, WP Rocket allows you to adjust some cache-related parameters. Let’s take a look at them.

Firstly, we have the option to enable cache for mobile devices.

If you have a responsive website, meaning the sizes and positions of your page elements adjust to the device’s dimensions, you’ll want to check this option.

Nowadays, nearly all websites, especially those built with WordPress, are responsive. So, this box should typically be checked.

On the other hand, there’s an option right below it labeled “Store files separately for mobile devices.” This setting isn’t about being responsive, but rather about entirely different operations based on the device.

If you have a plugin or specific development causing distinct behaviors depending on whether the site is loaded on a desktop or mobile, you’ll need to check this option.

Additionally, WP Rocket also allows you to enable cache for logged-in users. This feature is handy for membership sites or online stores.

However, whenever you enable this option, you should check its proper functioning and, if necessary, exclude certain URLs that should not be cached because their content changes frequently.

Finally, we can define the cache lifespan, which means how often the data is typically renewed.

Generally, the default option of 10 hours is quite balanced, and it’s the one I usually keep. However, on pages that don’t undergo frequent changes, you can increase it to 24 hours.

Optimizing CSS and JavaScript Files

One of the aspects that often raises doubts when it comes to improving website speed is everything related to loading CSS and JavaScript files.

And it’s not without reason. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can end up breaking your website.

What happens if something goes wrong?

The main advice I can give you when working with WP Rocket’s CSS and JavaScript optimizations is to apply one option at a time and immediately check your website. Test each optimization separately. One by one.

This way, if something doesn’t work, you’ll know what to deactivate to make things function properly again.

And don’t worry about testing.

WP Rocket doesn’t make these modifications directly on your website but uses internal copies to serve your pages, so there’s no risk of breaking anything.

Simply disable the option causing the issue, and your website will return to normal.

In this section, we will explore the meaning of each configuration, which ones you should activate, and how to achieve good results with minimal risk.

CSS File Minification

Let’s start with CSS files, and the first option we encounter is the one that allows us to minimize the file size.

If you have ever seen a CSS file, you may have noticed that, to make it easier to read and understand, the programmer uses spaces and line breaks to separate statements. They might even add comments to explain what each instruction does.

While these actions are useful for programming, they also increase the file size, resulting in extra work for the server when transferring them over the Internet.

With this WP Rocket option, the size of CSS files is reduced by eliminating these aesthetic resources, leading to faster loading times.

It’s an option that I always recommend activating.

Combine CSS Files

The next aspect we can configure is combining CSS files into one. This reduces the number of requests to the server.

WP Rocket itself does not recommend enabling this option if your site uses HTTP/2, as it does not provide any advantages in that case and may cause more problems than benefits.

Considering that nowadays most hosting services support the HTTP/2 protocol, it is usually unnecessary to activate this option.

If you are unsure whether your website implements the HTTP/2 protocol or not, you can check it here.

Optimizing CSS Delivery

When you request a web page, it needs to load its styles to be displayed correctly. Otherwise, you would see a web page without any appearance or structure, with all elements misaligned.

However, not all styles are necessary for the initial view.

CSS optimization does precisely that: it decides which styles a page should load initially to be displayed correctly, so it doesn’t have to wait for the complete reading of all CSS files before showing it to the user.

WP Rocket offers you two modes to optimize CSS delivery:

1. Remove unused CSS: This is the recommended option and the one I typically use. Additionally, if you notice that a particular style is not loading correctly, you can indicate it in the exclusion box so that WP Rocket always takes it into account.
2. Load CSS asynchronously: WP Rocket analyzes the files to generate the critical CSS path (styles that are strictly necessary) and loads them at the beginning of the page. The remaining styles are loaded in the background once the page is displayed to the user.

Minify and Combine JavaScript Files

As we saw with CSS, WP Rocket allows you to minimize JavaScript files to make them smaller and also combines them into a single file.

I usually activate the first option but not the second one.

Defer JavaScript Loading

Similar to the asynchronous loading of CSS, WP Rocket allows JavaScript files to load at the end of the page, so they don’t interfere with the initial rendering and the process remains as fast as possible.

I usually activate it as well, and if any file causes issues, I exclude it using the lower box.

Delay JavaScript Execution

Another feature that WP Rocket provides to improve JavaScript loading is delaying its execution until the user interacts with the web page.

It’s a powerful improvement that I usually activate, but it can also cause certain issues.

That’s why it’s essential to conduct a thorough review of your website to make sure everything works correctly. If any JavaScript function fails, you can exclude it using the designated boxes or simply disable this enhancement.

Improve Media Loading (Lazy Load)

We all know that images and videos, due to their size, are the resources that often have the most significant impact on a website’s speed.

The Lazy Load option allows us to defer the loading of these elements until the user reaches the area of the page where they are located.

Furthermore, WP Rocket offers an additional functionality for YouTube videos, allowing us to automatically replace the video with a preview image. This way, we use a lighter resource (the image), and the video will only load when the user clicks on it.

Regarding images, WP Rocket also provides an option to enable a feature that completes missing width and height attributes in the HTML.

This improves rendering in the browser, as it knows the space the image will occupy before fully downloading it, avoiding any displacement of elements as we navigate through the page.

In my opinion, all the media-related options are very useful, and I typically activate them on my websites.

Resource Preloading

Traditionally, a cache fills up as users make requests.

So, when a user visits a page and if that page isn’t cached yet, it gets created and stored, speeding up access for the next visitor.

Resource preloading accelerates this process. WP Rocket’s bot automatically crawls your site, stashing away copies of all the pages in the cache.

This way, users will always see updated versions of your pages and access them much more quickly.

Therefore, enabling the Preload option is highly recommended.

Furthermore, WP Rocket offers other additional configurations to further improve the loading of your pages.

Let me briefly explain what these additional configurations consist of:

1. Enable link preloading: This allows the browser to download the content of an internal link in the background when the user hovers over it. This way, if they click on the link, it will open much faster. It’s an option I find very useful to have activated.
2. DNS prefetching: If you want to speed up requests to external URLs linked on your website, you can specify the domains you would like to load faster. To be honest, I don’t use this option too often.
3. Preload Fonts: Sometimes, Google PageSpeed Insights recommends preloading the fonts of our website to improve performance. Here, you can specify the paths to the font files you want to preload.

Advanced WP Rocket Rules

For most users, there’s typically no need to tweak anything here. But, if you have advanced knowledge and want more control over WP Rocket’s operations, this section can be a game changer.

For instance, you can choose which pages, cookies, or user agents shouldn’t be cached, as well as decide which URLs should always be purged when you make updates.

I can’t provide a one-size-fits-all guide for setting this up since it’s highly specific to each individual site.

However, if diving deep into the technical side doesn’t intimidate you, give these options a once-over. You might just find a fix for certain issues on your site.

Optimize the Database

The database of your website is not static; it accumulates files generated over time.

Therefore, you’ll need to clean it from time to time to remove unnecessary “junk” it’s just taking up space and slowing down the loading speed. The WP Rocket plugin allows you to clean the database with just a few clicks.

In addition to cleaning up entries, you can also delete comments, where you’ll have the option to remove all the spam that may have entered your page, as well as the discarded comments found in the trash for any reason.

You also have the option to clean up transients, which are temporary information generated by plugins or the theme being used. These transients can create thousands of records that may slow down the database queries.

You can perform this cleanup without any problems. Don’t worry about it affecting your website, as if any of these transients are necessary, they will be regenerated.

Finally, you have the option to optimize your database tables or schedule automatic cleanup.

How to Configure a CDN with WP Rocket

WP Rocket can also help you manage your CDN if you’re using services like KeyCDN, StackPath (formerly MaxCDN), or RocketCDN, the premium solution offered by WP Rocket distributors at an additional cost.

What is a CDN?

A CDN is a network of servers that store copies of the static elements of your website, such as images, CSS files, or JavaScript, to load them faster.

To enable the use of a CDN in WP Rocket, you should first sign up for a CDN service with your preferred provider and then activate the corresponding option in the plugin.

Once done, you’ll need to add the CNAMEs you obtain from the CDN service itself you are using.

WP Rocket allows you to rewrite URLs and exclude specific files. Additionally, you can use CNAMEs for certain file types, such as images.

However, you may have noticed that when talking about CDNs, I didn’t mention anything about Cloudflare. This is because, if you use Cloudflare, WP Rocket has a separate add-on for managing it, along with the other CDNs, all from the same control panel. Let me explain it to you in more detail:

WP Rocket and Cloudflare

As a user of Cloudflare on several of my websites, I can tell you that the features included in the WP Rocket plugin for managing Cloudflare are quite convenient.

You can find and activate the Cloudflare add-on in the “Add-ons” tab within WP Rocket.

To use it, simply enter the API data, which you can find in the general information section of each of your domains within your Cloudflare account, along with the email address you used to sign up.

Once you have connected your WP Rocket installation with Cloudflare, you will have access to the following settings:

1. Enable Development Mode: This allows you to make changes to your website for several hours without worrying about Cloudflare’s caching.
2. Activate Cloudflare Optimal Settings: This option ensures compatibility with WP Rocket based on tests conducted by its developers. If you encounter any errors when installing WP Rocket, this option can provide a solution.
3. Use Relative Protocol: Enable this option only if you are using Cloudflare’s Flexible SSL configuration and are fully aware of what you are doing.

One thing that has always been a bit inconvenient for me when using Cloudflare is having to log into my account to clear the cache every time I make a change on my website that is not reflected automatically.

With the WP Rocket plugin for Cloudflare, besides having the option to enable development mode, I can now clear the cache directly from my WordPress with a simple click of a button

Indeed, Cloudflare has many more functionalities than WP Rocket allows you to control, but just with what the plugin offers, I assure you that you’ll save a considerable amount of time.

Heartbeat – The Synchronization Between Server and Browser

The WordPress Heartbeat API synchronizes the browser and the server, enabling real-time data transfer.

It intervenes in various processes of your WordPress, such as admin panel notifications, auto-saving and draft revisions, real-time data, etc.

If you try to reduce some of the tasks performed by Heartbeat, you can lighten the load on your server.

WP Rocket makes this process straightforward as you can simply enable the checkbox labeled “Control Heartbeat.”

There, you can reduce the activity of Heartbeat, deactivate it completely, or leave it unrestricted.

More Tools and Extensions

I mentioned earlier about the integration of WP Rocket with Cloudflare.

However, that’s not the only extension the plugin offers. In the Add-ons section, you can find other plugins to enhance compatibility with various utilities, such as Varnish, Sucuri, or the WebP image format.

Furthermore, the Tools section allows you to export your WP Rocket configuration to a JSON file and import it into a new plugin installation.

From this section, you can also manually update the inclusion and exclusion lists.

These lists are continuously updated on WP Rocket servers to ensure the proper functioning of the plugin and are automatically downloaded every week.

If, for some reason, the download hasn’t occurred on your WordPress, or if you notice any issues with WP Rocket’s functioning, you can manually download the latest version of the file from this section.

Finally, the Tools tab allows you to revert to a previous version of the plugin if you discover any problems with your website after updating to the new version of WP Rocket.

Is WP Rocket Worth Buying? Final Thoughts

Throughout this walkthrough of WP Rocket’s features, you’ve seen that it offers much more than just caching solutions, making your website lighter and more responsive to user requests.

Some users argue that there are free plugins out there that can perform almost all the tasks WP Rocket does, questioning the need to invest in it.

However, one of the standout benefits of WP Rocket is its comprehensive suite of features. This means you won’t need to clutter your site with multiple plugins, which, as you may know, can hinder performance and stability.

Plus, the straightforward configuration of WP Rocket’s features is a stark contrast to the more complex setups required by some free plugins.

Consider the time it might take to configure five separate plugins, for example, versus what you can accomplish with just a few clicks in WP Rocket.

So, if you’re in the market for a full-fledged caching plugin for your site, I’d recommend giving WP Rocket a shot. You’re bound to notice the difference.

Position tracking is the basic tool that anyone who wants to position a website should have.

It doesn’t matter if it is a personal website or e-commerce with thousands of products for sale.

If you want to position a keyword, it is not enough to do keyword research, create the content and that’s it.

You have to measure and check if you’re doing it right.

What is Can I Rank for?

Can I Rank is a position tracking, that is to say, it is in charge of monitoring the most important keywords of your website.

Besides, as they advertise on their homepage, they have incorporated AI to provide specific advice based on the data they collect from your website.

However, as you will see later on, this tool also has features related to link building and social media management.

All these features include the option to let the tool itself take care of the necessary actions as well as the option to contact an SEO from the team for advice.

Let’s take a step-by-step look at all its features.

Add a project

As with almost all SEO tools, the first thing you will need to do to start using Can I Rank is to add a project.

The tool itself will guide you step by step.

First, enter the website and the main keyword:

Then, so that Can I Rank can be more precise, it will ask you to enter a category in which you have special interest and even a specific URL that you want to position.

You can skip this step if you do not want to focus so much your positioning actions.

Finally, enter a maximum of five competitors in your niche. As before, you can skip this step if you’re not interested.

Analyzing Can I Rank opportunities

Once the tool has analyzed all the data you have provided in the process of adding project, it will take you to the opportunities screen, where it will make different suggestions related to the positioning of your website.

In our case, it offered us a list of possible sites to get a backlink based on our competitors’ links, but it can suggest keywords to work with, for example, or anything else it thinks might help you.

As you can see in the screenshot, after each suggestion Can I Rank gives you three options:

• Do, accept the suggestion and perform the action
• Delegate, let the tool act for you
• Decline, reject suggestion

Once you have done so, they will be distributed in the different tabs so that you can control which actions you have completed, which ones are still in progress, and which ones you have delegated to the tool as a task manager.

Step 1. Increase traffic with new content

This is the first step recommended by Can I Rank. In this option you will find something similar to a keyword research that the tool performs on the keyword you indicate.

Below, you will find the data of the keywords you have added: search volume, CPC, geolocation… and a button that says Analyze.

If you press it, Can I Rank will show you the percentage of chances you have to position this keyword.

And here you have two options: get suggestions from the tool to know what steps to take to position that keyword or chat with one of the Can I Rank experts to give you a hand.

Below this information, you have a graph with the list of your main competitors for that keyword analyzing the relevance of each one of them according to the page, domain, etc.

Step 2. Improve positioning

Now it’s time to check how your keywords are distributed in Google SERPs. Can I Rank will detect the main keywords you have positioned, but you can also include a specific keyword and the URL for which you want to position it.

At the bottom, you will see the keywords list that Can I Rank has detected along with their position in the SERPs and the URL they rank for.

Besides, clicking on Analyze will show you the percentage of improvement the content has to maintain and surpass the current positioning for this keyword.

Part 3. Promote content

This option focuses on link building actions to promote the content. To do this, you have to select a specific URL of your website or the entire domain, the type of website to put the link on (pages linking to your competitors, forums, reviews, directories…) and the domain of one of your competitors.

Just below you will see a URLs list where you can get a backlink to your website. Can I Rank shows you percentages related to website authority, relevance and dofollow links.

You can also delegate the action of getting backlinks or manage them on your own by marking if they are already done or if they are pending.

Build your website’s authority

After these three main steps, Can I Rank offers you more opportunities to continue working on your website and its positioning.

In this section you will find a list of actions to take to improve the authority of your website in Google’s eyes. As always, you can discard them, do them by yourself or delegate them.

Increase followers in social media

This menu will only be useful if you have a social media strategy parallel to your SEO strategy. What you will find, as in the previous section, are some tips to get followers.

Settings to your website

Finally, in this section you can change some configuration details that will affect the module data we have been looking at.

Also, you can check the report boxes to receive them in your email every week and see how your site is progressing through this tool.

Conclusions on Can I Rank

Although Can I Rank is a tool that keeps its promises, the truth is that it has an interface that can be slightly confusing, in addition to the fact that it is completely in English.

The social media sections and authority boosting offer tips that may fall short for professionals but will certainly be useful for beginners.

It provides very precise information and concrete data to work on, but it is not convincing because it is not intuitive to work with.

It has a free but rather limited option with which you may be able to start the initial work on a website but, sooner or later, you will need to upgrade or go to another tool.

The following plan costs 49 dollars per month, an average price for this type of tool.

However, I would like to offer you an alternative: DinoRANK. Take a look at their prices.

The Starter plan costs 29 euros per month and offers not only position tracking but also other features to fully manage the positioning of a website from the same platform:

• Keyword research
• Semantic Prominence
• Link Building
• Cannibalizations
• Internal linking
• SEO Audit
• And much more

Therefore, if after trying Can I Rank for free you have decided that it is not for you, try DinoRANK and you will see the difference.

When you work on an online website, you sometimes need to do small, seemingly simple tasks that can take longer than expected.

For example, reduce an image’s weight, check if a word is correctly spelled, create a favicon…

Sometimes a quick Google search will show you online tools that can help you with these tasks, but you don’t always get it right the first time, nor are these tools as free or effective as they seem.

When you have a lot of experience under your belt, you usually have your own repository of tools saved in your Google Chrome bookmarks, for example, but when you take your first steps, it can mean the world to solve some of these tasks.

That’s why we bring you Pre-Post SEO, a website that condenses dozens of online tools to make your life easier (even if you’ve been in SEO for many years…).

What is Pre Post SEO?

Pre Post SEO is a repository of free online tools that you can use from a single platform.

As these tools are free of charge, they have somelimitations that can be removed by resorting to one of the payment plans.

However, the free option is perfectly fine for solving pitfalls easily and quickly.

Its tools are divided into four thematic blocks:

• Writing and education. Everything related to text content.
• Domain tools. Tools related to domain management and analysis.
• Website management tools. Features focused on more technical aspects.
• Other tools. A variety of modules related mainly to code, image, text conversions…

Once you access the tool of your choice, you will see that it is very easy to use the platform as it contains only the necessary elements to perform your task.

Besides, below you will always find a small tutorial, so you know how to use it and you have an online support chat on the right side of the screen in case you need more help.

Pre Post SEO advantages and disadvantages

Before we tell you what some of the best Pre-Post SEO tools are, we’ll analyze both the pros and cons we’ve found.

This way, we can help you decide; althoughbeing free tools, you can test them yourself without investing any money.

Pros

• Payment plans are quite economical for what it offers, and you have the option to make monthly or annual payments.
• It has integrations with Google Chrome and WordPress that make it easy to use some tools while working.

Cons

• Customer service is somewhat deficient.
• Their SEO tools are too basic and don’t work too in-depth.
• It’s unsuitable for working a website completely, you will always need specialized SEO tools.

Below we are going to analyze some of the most useful and best performing Pre Post SEO tools.

Content-related tools

As you can see in the image, you have 24 content-related tools. The most popular among users (and which even has a direct access in the main menu) is its plagiarism detector.

In the free version you can check texts of up to 1,000 words, which can be 1,500 if you sign up. If you want to analyze more, you will need to access a payment plan.

As you can see in the image, besides indicating the plagiarism percentage in a text, it provides you with three other options: grammar check, plagiarism removal through a paraphrasing tool and downloading the results as a PDF file.

If your content contains plagiarism, the URLs where the same text is found will appear. In the options, you can exclude URLs, so the tool doesn’t consider them.

Another tool for plagiarism is the text compare, where you can compare texts that are in documents or in a URL or even copy and paste it directly, and the Diff Checker, which works very similarly.

One of Pre Post SEO’s greatest values is its anti-plagiarism tools.

You also have the “Article rewriter”, that is, a spinner in which you can copy and paste a text to obtain another derivative that you can use without creating duplicate content.

However, it is not too refined, and you will probably have to do manual retouching to get a valid text. After all, you have to do it anyway when using any free spinner.

Below you will find a web comparison tool where you can check the percentage of similarities between two pages: title, meta description, keywords, text…

It can be useful to see how competitors are working out certain aspects of their websites compared to yours or even to check if someone is replicating these details on their pages.

An interesting option if you are starting out in SEO is the URL checker, as it will tell you if the structure and form of your URLs are friendly regarding positioning.

In other words, it will check that your URLs don’t contain meaningless numbers, single characters, etc… making them unreadable to Google and difficult for users to remember.

When you have experience, you know very well what structure the URLs should have, but at the beginning it may be harder to know to what extent a URL is more or less friendly.

A curious feature is the uppercase generator, which is actually used to change a content’s formatting, whether it is a couple of words, sentences or whole paragraphs.

Enter your content and convert it to uppercase. If you enter it in uppercase, you can convert it to lowercase.

Of course, we could not miss a Word Counter that includes the reading time, and a code ratio comparator and text that a website has.

This way you will be able to know if you may be adding too much code to your page that may be hurting the loading speed, for example.

Another curious feature is the ratio of keywords per total number of words of the content, since it doesn’t ask you to indicate which is the keyword of the text, so it’s supposed to detect it.

Another interesting tool is the readability checker as it provides a lot of data about your content, such as the total number of words after removing stop words, the number of unique words (guarantee of semantic richness) or the average number of words per sentence.

Besides, it has a direct access to the grammar checker that will tell you the grammatical errors and typos in the text.

This way, you can optimize your content by combining these two PrePostSEO features.

PrePostSEO has a word combiner that you can use to create long-tail keywords to rank faster.

You can also use it to create your own spinner texts by combining synonyms and formatting them to generate derivative content.

The backlinks verifier is used to check for backlinks to a URL from a list of webpages you provide. It will not only tell you if it exists or not, but also if it’s nofollow and what anchor text it uses.

You will also find a spell checker where you paste the content, indicate the language and the tool will tell you which words you need to correct by highlighting them and indicating the correct form.

There are also features focused on non-text content such as reverse image search. You upload an image to the tool and it will tell you which URLs it appears in so you can give it context.

And finishing with the content tools, we found a curious but useful one: What is my IP? As soon as you access this feature, it will tell you which IP number corresponds to your current browsing session.

Domain Related Tools

Now we’re going to analyze the PrePostSEO features related to domain management. As you can see, these are slightly more technical but easy-to-use tools that will allow you to detect errors on your website and obtain useful information.

Let’s start with the DA and PA checker (Domain Authority and Page Authority, MOZ metrics) that will tell you what they are and besides, it gives you the direct link to check how many pages are indexed by Google under that domain.

You can do this with bulk websites and download it into an excel, so it’s a good way to quickly analyze pages where you might be considering getting a backlink.

And with a similar goal you have the Alexa rank checker. You can use it to compare your score with your competitors or to see the metrics of potential websites on which you want to place a link.

The XML sitemap generator is handy because, in just a few seconds, it creates for you the sitemap in XML, HTML and text format so that you can upload it to your domain’s root folder and then send it to Google through Search Console.

The blog search engine is also related to link building since, by entering a keyword, it allows you to find forums, blogs, websites, social media accounts, etc., where that keyword appears.

Depending on the platform you choose, you can include footprints that will segment the search to make it more specific so that you can find blogs that accept guest posts or even government or educational websites.

The URL extractor provides you with a list of all the URLs of a website, both internal and external.

With the domain age checker, you can analyze up to 10 websites at the same time to know their age with an accuracy that includes day, month, year, hour, minute and second. If you’re considering buying expired domains, this option may be useful.

And closely related to this point is the reverse IP checker, that is, you tell the IP to the tool, which tells you how many domains are registered under it. This can be useful to try to detect the websites of the same company, for example.

Its malware checker is effective in that it connects to Google’s Transparency Report, specifically to the Site Status section according to Safe Browsing, so the information is reliable.

PrePostSEO’s backlink builder isn’t one of the most effective tools because it generates “trap” links that, although they are not harmful per se, are not going to be of any benefit in terms of your website’s ranking.

Much more interesting is the broken link checker to find out which URLs are returning a 404 error. When you use it, don’t panic when you see the list because PrePostSEO shows all your website’s URLs to indicate which one’s work and which don’t.

Be careful! This section ends with a Google pagerank checker which is a metric generated by PrePostSEO using Google search results and Moz score.

Tools related to web management

Again, we are facing a more technical tools section. You probably don’t know what many of the acronyms you see in the image above refer to, so we are going to explain what each of these features consist of.

First, we find two options related to the DNS of your website: one of them will allow you to know which they are and the other one in which propagation status they are in case you have just bought a domain.

The IP location finder is very practical as it allows you to know where a specific IP is from. You can analyze up to 50 at the same time, which is useful in case someone has tried to access your administration panel or if you are receiving traffic that is hurting you.

If you manage several websites (e.g., niche websites), you may be interested in the Google Index Checker where you can include up to 1,000 URLs to see if they are already indexed.

You also have a tool that transforms emoticons and special characters into HTML codes so that you can insert them into any web page. In the same way, you have a favicon generator, the small web icon that appears in the tab.

And here we come to a very interesting tool when it comes to optimizing a web page: an HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON minifier. You just have to paste the code and it returns it to you minified so you can place it on the website. Of course, you must know very well what you are doing.

Next, you have an RGB to HEX converter, which allows you to get the color codes in both formats or pass them from one to another depending on the programming language you are using. You can also create your own color using the red, blue, and green bars and get the codes at the same time.

If you have several websites (for example, if you are niche) you have a server status checker. You can enter up to ten domains to check if everything is okay, something practical if your websites are hosted on different hostings.

The spider simulator combines several options that we have already seen before: it replicates what Google spiders will find when accessing a domain: title, meta description, internal links with anchor text… which you can use to check your website, but also those of your competitors.

HTML viewer is also very interesting, as it shows you the HTML code of any web, so you can see how its structure has been created or, in case it’s yours, detect any possible error.

There is also a feature that allows you to easily crop any image you upload to the tool, either freely or by giving it a specific format for social media.

This is a very practical option if you want to adapt an image for Instagram, whether for the feed or stories, for Facebook, for a YouTube thumbnail…

Format Converter Tool

Finally, there is a large section dedicated to the conversion of formats of all kinds, the section undoubtedly most used by PrePostSEO users.

Nowadays, there are so many different formats of codes, texts, audio, video, etc., with different compatibilities that sometimes you may need to change the format of a file.

Here you will find some of the most frequent conversions:

• Conversions between decimal, octal, binary, hex format…
• ASCII Format Conversions
• Conversions from .txt format to PDF, binary, images…
• Roman numeral conversions

And let’s not forget the large number of calculators it offers:

• Adsense Commissions
• PayPal Commissions
• Call to Click of a Keyword
• Coins
• Discounts
• Percentages

And other tools such as a password generator, a text editor, a name generator, or a binary code translator.

Is Pre Post SEO worth it?

Now that we’ve finished this tour of Pre Post SEO, you may have come to one conclusion: already many free and paid tools provide the same features.

Although the advantage of Pre Post SEO is having all these tools gathered in a single platform.

This is the perfect web to have it fixed in your bookmarks bar and to resort to it when you need to perform small actions like the ones we have just seen.

Keep in mind that it’s free and has limitations, but even so, it can help you save time on some tasks and eliminate some pitfalls.