Track SEO and AI Visibility in SEMrush One (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: SEMrush One is a single pane of glass to track your brand in traditional search and AI platforms side by side. Today, I'll teach you how to use it and what metrics are important to track even if you're completely new to SEO and AEO. I'm David, I've partnered with SEMrush for this video and I work with Kevin to bring you more great tutorials like this one. Stay tuned for an extended free trial of SEMrush One. Let's dive in. Before ChatGPT, life was simple. You chose target keywords, you built a bunch of content for them, and then you slowly clawed your way to the top of Google. People clicked your links, saw your website, and converted into happy customers. You were happy, life was good. Now, people use ChatGPT and other AIs for search. Google pushes AI overviews over the standard search result links. Turns out, people like this. This means fewer people on your website and probably less sales. This impacts the big brands too. Check out HubSpot's traffic, which has been cut to a third of what it was two years ago. Now you're not so happy. Here's what's really happening. Google still has 90% of search engine share, but more than half of searches don't result in a click. When AI overview is present for a keyword, that no-click rate can grow to 83% or even higher. But don't be fooled, even 40% of 16 billion searches a day is still a lot of clicks you can win. Now, we've also heard reports that AI-referred traffic converts at higher rates than search traffic. However, one meta-analysis showed it underperformed. And yeah, you should be suspicious of all of these stats. People are really complicated. They'll see your brand in AI and then Google it a week later to make a purchase. Now, does that get tracked as an AI conversion or a search one? So HubSpot realized that vanity metrics like traffic aren't the goal. Ultimately, you care about conversions, whether it's from search or from AI. So how do you influence that in a world of AI? The answer is generating brand demand. So how do you measure how much people care about your brand? Well, it's different for every brand, but you need to track this data every week. First, traditional SEO isn't dead. Track your rankings for the keywords that you care about and also track branded search demand, which is people searching for your brand's name directly. Then on the AI side, track the prompts you care about showing up in and measure your share of AI voice. That's how often your brand name shows up in an AI answer and how often you're cited. And notice I said how often, not showing up first. Then you tie those visibility metrics to conversions. You can measure the correlation between the two and then run experiments to see what actually increases purchases. So now let's do this with SEMrush 1. Head to the link in the description below to double your free trial length to 14 days. Once you sign up, you'll land on your SEMrush 1 dashboard. During the signup process, you filled in your website, which appears here. I'm using Pipedrive CRM. They're a CRM for small businesses. We're not affiliated with them, but they're a great SEO case study. First things first, let's find some keywords to track. Go over to the second menu option. This is the SEO Toolkit and then click on the Keyword Magic Tool. This is a great place to try your own ideas for keywords and SEMrush can help you refine them. I'm gonna start with small business CRM and see where it takes us. Okay, so your focus should be drawn to this giant table on the right side. This has a list of related keywords to what you typed in. Notice, for instance, that the top keyword here is best CRM for small business, not small business CRM. Before we get into the columns and what they mean, go ahead and type in your domain into this text box where it says enter your domain for personalized data. This adds a ton of valuable information. For example, notice that your current position in the search result page now shows up next to every keyword where you rank. Next, search volume per month is important to keep an eye on. Make sure you're not selecting keywords that basically nobody searches for. Next, it's on to keyword difficulty and personalized keyword difficulty. These are rankings from zero to 100, which denote how difficult it will be to rank for that keyword. You can see the basic ranges here. The lower the value, the easier it is to rank. Now, personalized keyword difficulty showed up because you put your domain in. SEMrush examines your site to see how well it matches the given keyword and then adjusts that keyword difficulty. If you've just started your website and you don't have a lot of authority yet, I'd start with the very easy and easy keywords. You can filter those by clicking on the keyword difficulty percentage filter and then typing in zero to 29 in the custom range and then hitting apply. That'll give you some good keyword ideas to start building content around. One other column that's easy to miss is the SERP feature list. You can click on the number to see all the features on that search results page. And one you should pay attention to is AI overviews. And these keywords can be great candidates for prompt tracking, which we'll cover a bit later. Another strategy to find good keywords is to click on questions. You might have to drop your filters to find these, but building content around questions is a great way to build your authority. Plus, you'll see many of these also have AI overviews attached to them. If you'd like to filter keywords by whether they have an AI overview, click on advanced filters, then SERP features, then AI overview and click apply. Now, as you go through all this keyword research, you're gonna find a lot of keywords that you wanna rank for. The fastest way to start tracking your position for each of them is to check the box next to the keywords that you're interested in, then click on send keywords, then position tracking, then click apply. This leads to a new tool called position tracking. You'll wanna select the same domain from the dropdown list and then click send keywords to start tracking them. Now, before we go to the position tracking tool, let me show you one more place you can source keyword ideas from. Move your mouse back over the SEO toolkit icon and this time click on organic research. Type in your domain and then press enter or click the search button and you're brought to an overview of your domain. At the top of the screen, click on the positions tab and then scroll down until you see the search positions table. This gives you the keywords that you currently rank for, your current position for each of those keywords and any SERP features you show up in for those keywords. Now, what might be interesting for you is to find the keywords where you have a real chance of nabbing the top slot. A shortcut for that is to narrow the keyword list to those where you're in positions two through 15. So follow along and use this positions filter and you'll see much more relevant results. You could also choose to filter by intent. SEMrush has four different categories of intent. They're pretty straightforward. Informational means that the user is looking for information. Navigational means they're trying to get to a certain site. Commercial means they're investigating making a purchase and transactional means they're looking to make a purchase. So let's see what commercial and transactional keywords Pipe Drive is fighting for. Now, keep in mind that this table might not always be up to date. The recommended solution to find keywords you already rank for is to set up the Google Search Console. So now you've assembled some keywords, let's look at the tracking. Head back to the SEO toolkit icon, this time click on position tracking. If you don't see anything here, you can create a new SEO project for your domain. Otherwise, click the project you just created by sending keywords over. Let's look at the keywords we just uploaded by clicking on the overview tab. When you start tracking keywords, SEMrush takes a snapshot of your current position. And over time, you'll see how your current position changes compared to the position of your first snapshot. You can also add more keywords here by clicking the add keywords button. Notice you can only track 500 keywords. That should be enough if you're just starting out. So you should see the pattern here. First, you choose the keywords you wanna rank for. Then you add content and create backlinks for your site to improve those rankings. You track those changes inside this position tracking tool, and then you assess the impact on overall conversions. Now we'll follow the same pattern for tracking prompts. Move your mouse over to the third icon in the sidebar, that's the AI visibility toolkit, and then click visibility overview. Enter your domain here and then press enter or click check AI visibility. First things first on this page, make sure you filter the data to the country where you wanna track conversions. Ignore this data up top and scroll down to the topics and sources section. This table has a large database of prompts and they're grouped by topic. You can expand any topic and see the prompts being grouped. For any of these prompts, you can see whether your brand was mentioned in the text, how many brands total were mentioned, and how many sources were cited. You can also view a snapshot of the AI models response. Now remember, AI models are probabilistic. You won't get this same answer if you go ask Google the same question. But the purpose of the snapshot is to give you a possible answer as well as summarize the brands mentioned and what sources are cited. Now just like with keywords, you can also track prompts. Click the monitor button to track all prompts in this topic and click the monitor icon to track a specific prompt. I recommend checking out your topic opportunities list. These are topics where your competitors have mentions but you don't. But if you're an established brand like Pipedrive, you might find this a little messy. For example, even though A-B testing and optimization is a super popular topic, Pipedrive's contributions would be limited. You can drill in further by going to the competitor research tool. You'll also find that under the AI visibility toolkit in the left sidebar. HubSpot will select a few of your competitors to analyze but you can change any one of them. And down below, you'll get some ideas for topics and prompts where your competitors are mentioned but you aren't. I recommend filtering to missing or weak topics first. This will show you how many mentions you have in a particular topic area versus your competitors. Then you can expand each topic and see specific prompts. Now some of these might not be relevant to your brand so it's up to you to do the filtering. None of these topics so far are standing out to me as a Pipedrive user. I could go through multiple pages and look for more or I could go through another tool in our tool belt. That one's called prompt research and you can access it from the AI visibility toolkit and clicking on prompt research. Here you can search for topics directly. The obvious thing to search for is small business CRM. You'll want to wait a few seconds for this auto-suggest to come up so you can map to an exact topic in SEMrush's database. Small business contact and CRM management sounds perfect so let's click on that. We've got 257 prompts in this category. That should be plenty and these look great. Best contact database, best CRM platforms, best CRM software. These are great candidates for tracking. To track any one of these prompts, click the monitor icon on the right side. Be intentional about the target platform. You can choose Google AI mode, chat GPT or even both by hitting add target. You'll also need to specify a location as well as a language. You can add as many prompts as you wish down below. Just keep an eye on your prompt usage. When you're ready, click on start tracking. Now, before we head over to the prompt tracking tool, let me show you one more place you can search for prompts. Head over to the AI visibility toolkit. This time click on questions under brand performance. Type in your domain and then click analyze. It'll take a few minutes so while you're waiting, check out what pipe drives looks like. Scroll down until you get to the topic analysis and pattern section. You're gonna get some really good ideas for questions that aren't just about conversions here. For example, check out this super specific improvement question which would make a great article. If I'm starting from scratch with no CRM, what's the smartest way to set up pipe drive so my pipeline doesn't become a mess in six months? You can't track prompts directly from this page so just copy and paste the ones that you like into a text file. Now remember, those are all ideas to find the right prompts to track. Now, let's look at the tracking. You'll find that under the AI visibility toolkit. Go all the way down to prompt tracking. You might not see a project here. That's fine, just create a new one. Type in your domain and then click create SEO project. This UI is also used by position tracking so make sure you choose an AI model like chat GPT or Google AI mode. We'll start with the United States here too. Next, it's time to add all the prompts you wanted to track. After you fill in your list, that's one prompt per line, click on add prompts to campaign. Check or uncheck this option depending on whether you want email updates and then click start tracking. It'll take several minutes to start tracking. When it's done, it'll ask you to confirm your brand name. This is very important to get right because if you give SEMrush the wrong brand name, it will impact how often it thinks you're mentioned in prompt responses. Once you're doubly sure you have the right brand name, click apply. We'll skip past this landscape view. I want you to head directly to overview so we can see your prompt performance. After a few seconds, this loads up and we're scrolling down to the rankings overview table. This table has all the prompts that you've set up for tracking. Over time, you're gonna check for at least two things. Are you moving from unmentioned to mentioned and are you improving your share of voice in the response? That AI visibility number is a proprietary SEMrush metric which estimates how much of the prompt response your brand name dominates. You can also track position changes over time but be careful with this. Pipe drive was called fourth here because this URL was cited fourth in the citations list. You can see that by viewing the prompt response which you can access by clicking on this magnifying glass. You'll see there's citation number one, citation number two, number three, a few repeats and then we get pipe drive down here. Even though technically this is the fourth citation, this whole response is about pipe drive so raising that position is likely not a top priority. As you track prompts for longer, you'll also see their change in position over time. Now these prompt responses can change every day so you wanna be in here daily checking your mentions, your position changes and your AI visibility changes. This table plus the position tracking tool for organic search will really help you understand the SEO and AEO impact of your content. There's one more piece of traffic to pay attention to and that is called branded traffic. To access that, go to the second icon that's the SEO toolkit and then click on domain overview. Then type in your domain or click it if you've already accessed it. Then scroll down to the traffic section and uncheck organic and paid traffic. Branded traffic represents how many people come to your site directly by searching your brand name. The higher you push AI visibility, the more brand awareness you create. And in theory, that awareness should drive people to search for your brand and interact with it more. So overall, branded traffic can be a good leading indicator of your SEO efforts. Two tactics before we move on. First, you can change the timeframe of this view by clicking the text in the top left and second, you can export all of these individual data points by clicking the export button in the top right. So we spent all this time covering the metrics to track. Now let's actually move them. I'll cover this at two levels for you, strategy and tactics. Strategy first, head over to the AI visibility toolkit and this time go to brand performance. If you followed along, you should have a report here, otherwise go ahead and create one. This entire page gives you a great executive dashboard on where you stand with AI visibility. I personally like that this isn't just about raw data comparisons. There are plausible explanations for why things are the way that they are and meaningful topic extraction so I can see where we outshine our competitors and vice versa. But this data can still be hard to prioritize and that's why at the bottom of this page, there's an AI strategic opportunity section. Here you can see insights categorized into short timeframe, medium timeframe and urgent timeframe. Each strategy is divided into an insight, the data behind the insight and recommendations to address it. Some of these recommendations will extend beyond the SEO team, so make sure your organization is on board. Moving into tactics, let's talk about content creation. Head back over to the SEO toolkit and then go to the keyword strategy builder. The really old way of doing things was to create pages for each keyword. Now we're creating content that targets hundreds of keywords per page. It's tough to brainstorm that content structure so that's where this tool helps. Click on seed keyword based and type in some of the keywords and maybe even some of the prompts that you wanna target. Then click the create button. SEMrush will expand these keywords into topics that help you build authority across hundreds or even thousands of keywords related to the original set. This'll take a few minutes so I'll come back after it's done. When it finishes, you'll get this really fancy looking graph which calls out three components of your content strategy. The first is the topic. Those are the rings in the graph. This topic CRM benefits is led by a pillar page, the importance of the CRM system. That page alone targets 28 keywords. Then there are dozens of subpages around that pillar to bolster your authority in the topic. You can browse the specifics down below in a table format. I recommend you start by collapsing all topics so you can see all the topics at a high level. Then figure out which one's most aligned with the prompts and keywords you wanna impact. Then expand it and then start writing pages corresponding to the pillar page and the subpages. And if you need additional help, check out the page filters. Best for strategy, for example, will help you target high volume, low difficulty keywords. The last tactic is a reality check back in the prompt tracking tool. You're gonna hear a lot of people telling you what works and what doesn't work for AI visibility. The reality is what works for someone else might not work for you. So to actually track the impact of your work, don't create content for all prompts at once. Split your prompts that you're tracking in half and then create content for one half only. You can never do this perfectly, but you're trying to isolate what impact your changes have versus the model algorithms themselves. My final piece of advice is that you create an operating rhythm. Get into the position tracking tool, the prompt tracking tool every week. Check what's changed. When you find content formats that work, stick with them. And honestly, just get out there and improve something every single week. Time to put this to work. You'll spend a ton of time making content for your site, so track your progress. Measure keyword positions over time, prompt mentions, and AI share of voice. Get started today with SEMrush 1 using the link in the description below. I'm David, and I'll see you in the next video.