How to use Semrush for SEO, traffic and AI search?

Few tools concentrate this much search data in one place. Anyone running the website of a higher education institution knows the routine: scattered spreadsheets, paid media reports living apart from organic ones, and no reliable view of the competition.

Learning how to use Semrush removes most of that friction, because it puts keywords, traffic, backlinks and technical faults on a single screen, with the same date range and the same country filter applied to all of them.

The risk sits somewhere else. The platform serves so many numbers that a team can spend weeks browsing without producing one decision, so the value lies in knowing which report answers the question the team has today.

What is Semrush and what is it actually for?

Semrush is a paid search data platform that shows, for any domain, which terms bring visits, how much organic and paid traffic the site receives, who the direct competitors are and where the technical faults sit. It exists to replace guesswork with documented decisions inside SEO strategies.

Caption: How to use Semrush in practice means chaining the reports: domain, traffic, keywords and visibility inside AI answers.

Describing the tool by menu ages badly, because the interface renames and relocates things every cycle. Describing it by capability lasts longer, and that is how the company itself organizes its own catalog.

The research side covers keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink analysis and market analysis. That is the layer answering where demand exists and who already captures it.

The production and correction side covers content creation, technical site audit and digital PR for link building. That is the layer turning a diagnosis into a task with an owner and a due date.

The tracking side covers daily rank monitoring, marketing reports and local search visibility. That is the layer proving whether a quarter of editorial work moved anything at all.

For an education institution, the most direct use is comparative. You find out which terms competitors use to capture interest in undergraduate admissions, graduate programs and distance learning, and how much of that demand is already yours.

How to use Semrush on the first login?

How to use Semrush on the first login means configuring three things before reading a single number: the domain project, the country and language of search, and the integrations with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Without them, the reports compare your site against a global average that is not your reality.

The project is the umbrella for everything else. Registering the institution's domain is what enables the technical audit, the position tracking and the content monitoring for that specific site.

The country choice changes the entire output. A Brazilian domain analyzed against the United States database shows residual traffic and a competitor list nobody on the marketing team would recognize.

When you type the domain, use the clean address, with no protocol and no www. In our case, the correct entry would be simply mkt4edu.com in the search box.

After that, define the reference competitors by hand. The platform suggests organic competitors by keyword overlap, and the automatic list usually mixes news portals and course aggregators with the institutions actually competing for the same student.

What is domain analysis and how do you read that report?

What is domain analysis in day to day practice: the report that returns, for any address, the list of ranked keywords, the estimate of organic and paid traffic, the backlink profile and the competitors disputing the same terms. It works identically for your site and for the one you want to catch.

The useful reading starts with position distribution. A domain with many keywords sitting between fourth and tenth place has more available gain in the short term than a domain with a handful of first places.

Then look at the evolution curve. Steady growth points to authority being built, while an abrupt step down usually signals a technical problem or lost content, and it is the right moment to investigate an organic traffic drop.

Comparing domains side by side is the feature that pays off most in education marketing. With your address next to two or three competitors, the tool returns the keywords they share, the position each one holds and the search volume behind them.

The gaps are what matter in that table. A term where three competitors rank and you do not appear points to a missing topic, and a term that is only yours points to an advantage worth defending.

The backlink profile closes the diagnosis, and provenance weighs more than volume, since education portals and academic partners sustain authority better than generic directories.

How organic traffic works and what separates it from paid?

How organic traffic works, in the short definition: visits arriving through unsponsored results, earned by content relevance and domain authority. The difference between paid traffic and organic traffic is marginal cost, because a paid click stops the moment the budget runs out and an organic one keeps arriving while the page ranks.

Both reports carry the same blocks of information, which makes a side by side comparison straightforward:

• Top keywords, the terms that carry a visitor to the institution's website.
• Competitive positioning map, which crosses traffic volume with keyword count for each competitor.
• Distribution by organic position, which shows how many terms sit in each ranking band.
• Main competitors, which lists who disputes the same set of keywords.

The paid report answers a different question. It shows which terms competitors are paying for, which exposes the hottest commercial intent in the market before you open a paid traffic campaign of your own.

Combining the two is the smartest use. Terms that are expensive at auction and weakly served by the first page of results are natural candidates to become organic topics, because the return accumulates instead of evaporating with the budget.

Is SEO worth it? When a board asks that question, this crossover is the most concrete answer available: cost per click avoided, multiplied by the volume of organic sessions in the period.

The same arithmetic is what turns is SEO worth it from an opinion into a line on a spreadsheet the finance team can verify on its own.

How to find keywords and which types of keywords to prioritize?

How to find keywords in Semrush starts with a seed term typed into the search bar, which returns monthly volume, ranking difficulty, cost per click, semantic variations, related questions and the current results page. From that base you choose by potential and by effort, never by intuition.

The types of keywords organize themselves by length and by intent, and each group plays a different role on an institution's website. Here is how that breaks down:

*The four groups of keywords and the moment each one pays off most for an education institution.*

A new domain gains traction through the long tail. Those are terms with little dispute and very specific intent, typed by someone who already decided to study and only needs to pick where.

An established domain can go after head terms. Reaching first place on a disputed term tends to produce disproportionate return, even though the timeline is long and the editorial investment continuous.

One caution runs across all four types of keywords: brand terms never leave the radar. Losing your own institution name to an aggregator or a competitor is a silent loss, visible only in the position report.

How to run SEO audits and fix what holds the site back?

How to run SEO audits with the tool means crawling the site through the configured project and receiving an error list classified by severity. The report separates critical errors, warnings and notices, and that hierarchy is what sets the order of work with the technology team.

Critical errors block crawling or indexing. Pages returning a 5xx response, an unintended block in robots, a long redirect chain and a wrong canonical tag all belong to this group.

Warnings affect experience and content interpretation. Duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions, images without alternative text and broken internal link chains weigh on the whole, even when none of them sinks a page on its own.

An audit only becomes a result when each error gets an owner and a deadline. Running the report every month without closing a single item is the most common way to waste a subscription.

Three problems repeat on institutional sites: discontinued program pages still indexed, old admissions calendars competing with current ones, and duplicate campus versions of identical content. Those three account for much of the diluted authority.

It pays to pair the audit with the SEO best practices already applied to the blog, so that technical correction and editorial optimization move inside the same cycle instead of alternating quarters.

When the volume of fixes exceeds what the internal team absorbs, dedicated SEO consulting usually speeds up prioritization.

How to do on page SEO with support from the tool?

How to do on page SEO with Semrush involves two chained features: the content template, which analyzes the best positioned pages for a term and suggests a structure, and the writing assistant, which grades the text while it is being produced. Both advise, and neither decides for you.

The content template accepts a set of keywords and returns recommendations on semantically related terms, text length and readability level, based on what already ranks for that query.

The risk is treating that output as an answer key. Content that only replicates the average of the first page gives a search engine no reason to rank it above that average.

The writing assistant plugs into text editors and grades readability, keyword usage, originality and tone of voice during production. It cuts rework, though it remains a surface level checker.

An on page optimization checklist applied before publishing resolves what the software cannot see: real subheading hierarchy, internal coherence and link anchors that describe the subject instead of the destination.

Those SEO best practices mark the point where SEO strategies stop depending on software and start depending on editorial judgment, which is also why two institutions on the same subscription produce very different results.

How to use Semrush for SEO for AI and measure AI search?

SEO for AI is the discipline that measures whether a brand appears inside answers generated by assistants, not only in blue links. Semrush groups this work into three named capabilities: AI visibility, AI brand sentiment and prompt research. Together they cover presence, tone and demand.

AI visibility monitors which answers cite the brand, on which assistants and how often. It is the equivalent of rank tracking, applied to AI search, where no fixed position exists to defend.

AI brand sentiment looks at the content of the mention. It records how the models describe the institution, its programs and its competitors, which matters most when the generated description is outdated or simply wrong.

Prompt research targets demand. Instead of search volume per keyword, it maps what people actually type inside generative AI tools, with intent and comparative performance by brand.

On the size of the shift, the available public data calls for caution. A study published by Semrush found that 44.3% of the pages ranking in Google's top 10 appeared in at least one AI generated answer.

The base for that study was 10 randomly selected SaaS queries in February 2026. It is a small sample, useful as an indication of movement, not as a measurement of the market.

The same material reports that visitors arriving from AI search convert 4.4 times better than visitors from traditional organic search. That is a self reported figure, worth treating as a quality signal while independent studies accumulate.

The practical consequence is that generative AI became a channel to measure, not a trend to comment on. Anyone already tracking SEO in the AI era noticed the ruler moved from average position to citation frequency.

The editorial work sustaining that presence is the same as organic, with extra weight on factual clarity and named sources, as the material on being cited by AI details step by step.

Structuring it with method is the object of optimization for large language models, the LLMs behind every assistant answer, and it runs on the same editorial calendar as the rest of the SEO strategies.

What changes for Semrush under Adobe?

Semrush now belongs to Adobe, which closed the acquisition on April 28, 2026. In that announcement, Adobe states that Semrush customers of all sizes can expect continued investment and an expanded product roadmap as the two companies fully integrate.

For anyone using the tool today, the official communication is direct. The customer questions answered by Semrush on the same date state that there will be no immediate changes to current services, agreements or points of contact.

What those two sources do not say matters just as much. Neither establishes an integration deadline, a combined product shape or a change in commercial policy, so any claim in that direction would be speculation.

The defensible reading is continuity in the short term. Contracts stand as they are, and the capabilities described in the vendor's own catalog remain available exactly as before.

The practical recommendation for a marketing team at a higher education institution is contractual hygiene. Record the renewal date, keep the contracted scope in writing, and follow the official announcements from the vendor.

Frequently asked questions about how to use Semrush

Where to start with Semrush in the next cycle?

Start with the diagnosis, not with production. In the first two weeks, configure the project, run the technical audit and close the critical error list, because new content on a site with indexing problems returns far less than it should.

In the second month, build the keyword map from the competitor comparison and pick ten to fifteen long tail terms to attack first. That selection fits a realistic editorial calendar and gives SEO strategies a measurable result inside the quarter.

From the third month, add the AI layer. Track brand mentions in generated answers with the same discipline you apply to positions, and correct the content wherever the generated description is wrong.

The last step is budgetary, and it is usually the one postponed longest. Before hiring reinforcements to execute all of this, it is worth comparing the cost of an internal structure against automated alternatives.

The breakdown of how much an AI SDR costs, the Sales Development Representative role operated by AI, opens the cost composition item by item and shows where that trade starts to pay.

A well conducted SEO analysis is what separates an expensive subscription from an operation that produces enrollments. The tool delivers the data, and the institution's SEO strategies decide what to do with it.