The Ultimate Guide for In-house Marketers (Using Semrush)

If you are an in-house marketer, you often have to deal with hundreds of tasks for your organization. Responsibilities like keyword research, creating an impactful content strategy, performance monitoring, and link-building can pose serious challenges.

So today, I am here with a detailed guide that can make the job of an in-house marketer a bit easier. But to begin, let me make a thing or two clear. Today, the competition is severe. So, as an in-house marketer, you will need a set of tools to stay competitive.

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I use tools like Semrush, Rank Math, and Mangools for this purpose. You can check out the reviews of these tools on my website. You can check them out and even use other tools that you see fit.

Getting back to business, let’s understand what problems most of the in-house marketers face. Then, we will discuss how you can tackle these problems.

Common Challenges Faced by In-House Marketers

The in-house marketers have to deal with multiple challenges. So, they face many challenges. Here are some:

Identifying Valuable Keywords

Keywords are the base of any marketing campaign. And finding the right one can deliver stellar results for the campaign. But the problem is, the competition is extremely tough. Today. Almost every business is engaged in online marketing.

So, the most commonly used keywords are almost impossible to rank. So, an in-house marketer has to find high-traffic keywords that have minimal ranking difficulty. And that’s easier said than done. An in-house marketer has to sift through millions of keywords to find the right one.

How to Fix it?

I face the same problems when I am creating blogs or working on marketing campaigns. What I do is pretty simple. I use Semrush to find the most useful keywords. Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is an amazing way to kick-start your keyword research.

The tool is well known for its massive database. You can discover the most relevant, high-traffic, and low-difficult keywords using this tool. The tool offers so many filters that you can get highly tailored results. E.g., you can filter the keywords based on their keyword difficulty, location, traffic, and more.

Recently, Semrush has added an AI feature to this tool. Here, you have to enter your domain, and the tool will find the keywords that might be more relevant to your domain! That’s outstanding. Additionally, the tool offers keyword variations and related terms, which helps in building a comprehensive keyword strategy.

Apart from this, Semrush also has a Keyword Gap tool. You can use it to compare your keyword profile with those of your competitors. Let’s say you have a competitor who is ranking very high on SERPs.

All you have to do is add your domain and add their domain, and the tool will bring you the list of keywords that you should be targeting! You get a clear idea about the keywords you are missing.

The ability to segment keywords by intent (informational, navigational, transactional) further enhances the tool’s utility. As an in-house marketer, you can tailor their content to match the intent behind each search query, improving the likelihood of engaging their target audience and driving conversions.

Use Case

Let’s say you are working as an in-house marketer for a health and wellness brand. You are looking for some low-competition keywords for marketing your products and services. A health and wellness brand can use the Keyword Magic Tool to find keywords like very low competition keywords.

E.g., I entered the keyword “Health and Wellness” and filtered the result by selecting the keyword difficulty “Very Easy.” As you can see in the image below, a lot of useful and low-competition keywords popped up! You can pick any of them and get started.

Overall, the Keyword Magic tool slashes the time needed to find the right keywords by almost 90%! Remember, it’s all about working smart and not hard.

Creating and Executing Content Strategies

Content is king, and the king needs a lot of attention. So, the in-house marketer has to design content strategies that align with the organization. But what’s more challenging is to devise a strategy that can help create engaging content that engages the viewers.

After all, it’s the viewers who decide whether the content is worth their time and resources. That’s where the problem lies. An in-house marketer has to walk a tightrope between keeping the content strategies in line with the brand guidelines and engaging the viewers.

On top of that, the content strategy has to be SEO-optimized for better reach.

How to fix it?

So, how do I deal with such issues? Well, I manage my publishing platform. So, I have to create content strategies every month. For that, I use Semrush’s Content Marketing Toolkit. This toolkit helps me find the most trending topics in the market.

The best part? It delivers optimized results around the topics that are being discussed in my particular niche. For starters, the Topic Research tool helps me find out the most trending topics. This helps me create pieces that people are looking for.

Then comes the SEO Writing Assistant. It offers real-time recommendations for optimizing content. The result? I can create content that meets SEO best practices. The tool also analyses the reliability, originality, and SEO of the content. It also suggests keyword usage and tone for the content piece.

The SEO Writing Assistant provides real-time recommendations for optimizing content, ensuring it meets SEO best practices. This tool analyzes the content for readability, originality, and SEO, offering suggestions to improve keyword usage, tone, and structure. This helps marketers create content that is not only engaging but also optimized for search engines.

Recently, Semrush has been blazing all guns on AI! They have a ContentShake AI feature in their content marketing toolkit. Using this feature, you can generate SEO-rich briefs and help create a copy. Using this tool, you can focus on strategic planning and creative aspects while the tool handles repetitive tasks.

You can also use the Post Tracking feature to track how your content is performing across multiple platforms. With such real-time tracking, you can craft content that engages the audience and ranks better.

Use Case:

Let’s imagine you are working as an in-house marketer for an e-commerce site. This site specializes in selling sustainable products. So, you can use the Topic Research tool to find relevant topics. Once you get the topic, you can use SEO Writing Assistant to ensure your content is fully optimized for relevant keywords.

Then comes the ContentShake AI. It can help you generate related articles, such as “Top 10 Eco-Friendly Packaging Ideas.” When you use all these tools, you can take your content strategy creation to a whole new level.

Ensuring Data Accuracy and Reliability

Accurate data is the key to a successful marketing campaign. If you do not have accurate data, you will be burning your cash on multiple marketing campaigns with zero results. On top of that, you need real-time updates on how each of your campaigns is performing, how your audience is reacting to them, and where changes can bring in better conversions. All this relies on accurate and reliable pre and post-campaigning data.

How to fix it?

Semrush offers various tools to ensure data accuracy and reliability. This information is critical in making key marketing decisions. For example, you can use the Traffic Analytics tool to get detailed insights into the website’s performance. The insight includes visitor behavior, traffic sources, and geographic distribution. You can easily understand how users are interacting with your website and which areas have maximum engagement.

Then, there is another tool called Market Explorer. This tool gives you a clear view of your entire niche. With this information, you clearly understand your position in the market. You get information like market share, audience demographics, and traffic trends of your competitors or benchmarks. When you know where you stand, you know what you have to do to beat your peers.

Then, there is an Organic Research tool that offers detailed data on keyword ranking and organic traffic. It can track the performance of your website’s specific keywords. Result? You can identify what keywords are driving more traffic and which ones you should use more.

The best part? You can use this tool to track your competitor’s organic performance, too. It can help identify competitor’s strategies and potential keyword gaps.

Overall, Semrush’s reporting capabilities can help you create very detailed and fully customized reports. You can schedule the automatic delivery of these reports. This will cut your job in half as your seniors won’t bother you for the same. This transparency and reliability in data can help you make data-driven decisions and optimize your strategies.

Use Case

Let’s say you work as a marketer for a B2B software company. You can use traffic analytics to monitor your website’s health and identify the organic sources of your traffic. You can also use the Market Explorer tool to identify from where exactly your competitors are getting their traffic.

You can use it to spy on your competitors and optimize your strategies accordingly. I have already shown you how you can use tools like Organic Research and more.

Monitoring Competitor Activities

No matter what niche you are working in, there will be competition. And if you want to beat them, you gotta know what exactly they are doing. For this, you will have to “SPY” on their campaigns and strategies! Yup, that’s correct. And by spying, I don’t mean you copy-paste what they are doing.

You need to optimize your marketing strategy in a way that it can beat theirs. In fact, in some cases, you’ll have to do what your competitors aren’t doing!

That’s how you can grab a big chunk of their potential customers (by offering something better). But to do all this, you will need a reliable competitor analysis and monitoring mechanism. You’ll have to track your competitor’s keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and overall market position to refine your strategies.

How to Fix it?

Semrush offers a Competitor Analysis tool that can give you open up your competitor’s entire marketing strategies in front of you! All you have to do is input your competitor’s domain, and the job is done. Then, you can use the Organic Research tool that I mentioned previously.

It gives you a better idea about the keywords that are bringing organic traffic to your competitor and their organic traffic trends. Overall, you can do a SWOT analysis of your client using Semrush and optimize your strategy with that data.

We all know how important the backlinks are, right? What if I tell you that you can entirely replicate what your client is doing in terms of backlink management? Yes, that’s correct. The Backlink Analytics tool gives you a detailed look into their backlink profiles.

Benefit? Well, you can identify multiple link-building opportunities. You can also analyze the quality and sources of your competitor’s backlinks. You can develop a targeted outreach strategy using this information and enhance your SEO performance.

PPC campaigns are equally important for businesses. If your competitor’s ad campaigns are killing it, then what’s wrong with following their footsteps? All you have to do is identify what they are doing usingSemrush’s Advertising Research Tool.

It reveals critical information like advertising budgets, what keywords they are bidding on, and which ad copies are most effective. You can use it to refine your PPC campaigns and get better ROI.

You can also use Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool, which I mentioned earlier. You can unlock a massive set of potential target keywords that your competitors are using and you are not.

Once you create content based on these keywords, you can expect a boost in your traffic. Moreover, you can expect even better conversion as these keywords are already converting for your competitors.

Use Case

Let’s say you work as an in-house marketer for a fashion retail brand. Here, competition is tough. So, you pick leading fashion brands like Louis Vuitton, Shein &Temu, and even Nike. You can identify useful keywords using the Organic Research tool to analyze what keywords these competitors are targeting.

If you want to compete against the likes of Louis Vuitton, Semrush gives you access to their marketing strategies, and you are good to go.

You can also use the Backlinks Analytics tool to identify where your competitors are getting their backlinks. Later, you can reach out to these fashion blogs and online magazines for collaboration. Similarly, the Advertising Research tool reveals what platforms your competitors are targeting.

Overall, as an in-house marketer for a fashion brand, you can use Semrush to get the maximum results by just following your competitors. The competitor invests heavily in Instagram ads, which perform well. By allocating more budget to Instagram ads and using similar ad strategies, the retailer can improve their own ad performance.

Scaling Content Production

In-house marketers have to produce a lot of high-quality content. What’s more challenging is to ensure this content is engaging and impactful enough to meet your potential audience’s needs. And when the demand for content creation rises, scaling content creation becomes even tougher. That’s where a lot of marketers falter. The issue is to create content at scale while maintaining quality and relevance.

How to Fix it?

Semrush has a suite of content tools that make it easier to scale content production. Makes it easier to scale content production efficiently while maintaining quality and relevance.

The SEO Writing Assistant ensures that every piece of content is optimized for SEO from the start, providing real-time suggestions for readability, keyword usage, and overall structure. This tool helps maintain a high standard of quality across all content pieces.

ContentShake AI automates the creation of SEO-rich content briefs, which significantly reduces the time spent on research and ideation. By automating these preliminary steps, marketers can focus more on content creation and strategy.

Semrush’s Post Tracking feature allows marketers to monitor the performance of their content across various platforms. This real-time tracking provides insights into how well the content is engaging the audience, which can inform future content strategies and adjustments.

Use Case

An online education platform can use ContentShake AI to generate briefs for blog posts on trending educational topics like “remote learning tools.” The SEO Writing Assistant can then optimize these posts for keywords such as “best tools for remote learning,” ensuring they are easily discoverable by search engines.

Post Tracking helps the platform track the performance of these blog posts, allowing them to adjust their content strategy based on what resonates most with their audience.

Optimizing and Automating Workflows

The old ways of doing repetitive tasks on your own are gone. In-house marketers today have so much to do that they cannot afford to waste their time on such redundant tasks. So, the best way to do this is to automate tasks and optimize the workflow.

That’s the only way to stay relevant and manage the workload. The saved time can be utilized on more creative tasks that can help the organization grow.

How to Fix it?

Semrush comes with a lot of features that can automate your workflow and optimize it. It can help you save a lot of valuable time and resources. For example, the Marketing Calendar tool can help you with planning, scheduling, and managing all marketing activities in a single centralized location.

Overall, this tool ensures that every team member is on the same page and works collaboratively to meet the deadlines.

One more common challenge for in-house marketers is to fix technical SEO issues. The site Audit tool of Semrush can fix this problem easily. It can run site audits automatically and keep you updated on the steps that can ensure better website optimization.

Finally, the Social Media Toolkit can manage your social media posting and scheduling from a single place. With such a centralized control, you can rest assured that all your content management and redundant tasks are automated.

Use Case

Let’s say you are an in-house marketer for a travel agency. So, you can use features like Marketing Calendar to schedule your seasonal marketing campaigns. This ensures all your promotional and marketing activities are coordinated.

Also, travel agencies can use the Marketing Calendar to plan and schedule their seasonal marketing campaigns, ensuring all promotional activities are coordinated. And with the Site Audit tool, you can fix issues like broken links and other SEO tools right away.

The Social Media Toolkit offers you an option to schedule your posts across multiple social platforms.

Performance Reporting

When you are working for any organization, your leadership expects regular reporting from your end. And trust me, creating a detailed report that’s free of clutter is a time-consuming task. There will be hundreds of in-house marketers who would agree with me! You have to integrate multiple metrics and data into the reports to make them more readable and easier to understand.

How to fix it?

Semrush has amazing capability when it comes to creating detailed reports that cover all your marketing activities. You can generate reports by combining data from multiple Semrush tools and details like SEO, PPC, and social media performance.

You can pick from dozens of report templates to do so. If you want something very personalized, you can create a template that includes important metrics and insights.

The best part? Semrush automates the entire reporting process and the report gets delivered to the stakeholders at regular intervals. This ensures all the stakeholders are always up-to-date with the latest performance data. With such tools, you can focus on your core tasks instead of redundant tasks like reporting.

Use Case

If you are working as an in-house marketer for a software development company, this tool can come in very handy. As you know, software development companies can use My Reports to create a detailed monthly report that includes SEO performance, PPC campaign results, and social media metrics.

You can customize the report to your needs and highlight all the key performance indicators (KPIs) for organic traffic growth, conversion rates, and social media engagement. You can schedule the automatic reports, and the stakeholders can get timely updates on manual intervention.

Adapting to Industry Trends

As an in-house marketer, you cannot rely on the old methods as the entire digital marketing niche is evolving. So, you have to stay updated about the latest trends and technology to ensure you remain relevant.

The best way to do that is to use Semrush’s Trend Analysis tools. These tools can help you stay on the top of your game. Help marketers stay ahead of industry changes and emerging trends.

You can get a clear market overview and competitive insights. Result? You can identify new market updates and industry insights. With these insights, you can proactively adjust your new strategies and new trends for better results on all your marketing campaigns.

Tools like Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer give you a very detailed insight into the marketing dynamics. These tools are crucial for marketers to get in touch with the latest industry trends and identify the best opportunities for their organization.

Use Case

Let’s say you are working for a fintech company as an in-house marketer. You can use Semrush Trends to monitor the emerging trends in the industries like banking and cryptocurrencies. With traffic analytics tools, you can identify the competitors and gain better traction.

With Market Explore, you can explore the industry insights of your fintech company and get the best topics for blog posts, whitepapers, and webinars.

Market Like a Pro

Look, I understand working as an in-house marketer is a big challenge. But the thing is, you need to work smart. There are so many tools like Semrush that you can use to enhance your in-house marketing efforts. But I prefer Semrush for numerous reasons. These reasons include:

• Proven track record
• Extensive database
• Exceptional set of tools
• A wide range of tools available
• Centralized control
• Efficient marketing
• Ease of use
• Affordable cost

So overall, Semrush is an excellent way to boost your in-house marketing efforts. You can use it to meet your specific needs and enhance performance. You can find out more about Semrush and its features on my website.

So feel free to explore them. If you want to learn more about some other relevant tools, you can find hands-on reviews on our publishing platform.

Wrapping Up

For in-house marketers looking to enhance their SEO strategy, Semrush offers a one-stop solution. It can address multiple pain points and address key challenges. It has an amazing and easy-to-use interface, reliable data sets, and advanced tools to manage your entire marketing efforts.

I hope this guide will help slash a lot of your in-house marketing woes. If you need any more information, my website could be a perfect starting point. Explore it for further information. Till then, happy marketing.

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