Semrush Tutorial for AI SEO 2025

We're hearing everywhere that SEO is dead. With Google AI overviews and ChatGBT serving up instant answers, it's easy to wonder if that's actually true or just hype. In this tutorial, I'm partnering up with SEMrush to show you how to increase your reach across both traditional search and AI-generated answers. That's because growing your brand in 2025 means meeting your audience wherever they search, not just on Google. I'm David, I've teamed up with Kevin to bring you more great tutorials like this one. Let's dive in. First, let's get you started with SEMrush's new SEO toolkit. From the description below, click the link to get an exclusive 14-day free trial. Normally, that's seven days, so definitely check it out. Now, you won't be charged when you sign up, but keep in mind, this is normally 140 bucks a month. Think about it this way. If you make three to five times that in sales because of SEMrush, then it's totally worth it. So let's figure out your plan in this video. Once you're signed in, you'll see a page like this. And on the left sidebar, you'll see that SEMrush has organized their tools into different toolkits. In this tutorial, we'll focus on the SEO toolkit. So click on this first button underneath the home icon to access it. Don't get overwhelmed by the number of tools here. Remember, you want to attract eyeballs for three reasons, build brand awareness, get leads, and get sales. To help you do that in a world with AI, we've created a simple framework called the Rocket Reach Triangle. You just need to implement the three Cs, content, connections, and corrections. Content is what's on your website. Your audience sees it, Google sees it, and so do LLMs like ChatGPT. While keywords still matter, your content must position your brand as the go-to expert in your space. Connections are also known as backlinks. When high authority sites link to your site, it builds trust, and that boosts your relevance for both search engines and LLMs. And in corrections, you need to fix any technical problems that get in the way of Google or an AI crawler reading and trusting your website. Now to go through the Rocket Reach Triangle, we need a website to study. I've chosen hyperwriteai.com. It's a promising brand, but it's not really mainstream yet. Let's see how the three Cs can help. That starts with the first C, content. It's easy to get caught up in AI hype, but at least for now, organic traffic from search is still important. That starts with keyword research, and for that, I like to use the Keyword Magic tool. You can access that from the side pane under Keyword Research. To start this, we need to choose a target keyword. This can be any keyword. I'd recommend choosing something you think people will search to find your website. Hyperwrite AI is an AI writing tool, so let's try AI writing. You can then click Search or press the Enter key. Now to understand why this is called the Keyword Magic tool, I'm first going to collapse this side pane so we see this table in full screen. This tool takes the keyword that you entered, looks for stats on it, and then finds thousands of variations just like it. This helps you find keywords which are worth targeting. Let's go through each of these columns so you know how to use them. First up is keyword intent. Now there are four types of search intent. Navigational searches are for looking for specific pages. Informational searches are for looking for information on topics. Commercial searches inform purchasing decisions. And transactional searches signal intent to purchase. You'll see each of those types as a letter in this column. Search volume estimates how many searches there are for this keyword each month. Trend shows you the trend in search volume. That helps you identify keywords in decline. KD percentage stands for Keyword Difficulty Percentage. It's a number from zero to 100, where zero means it's really easy to rank in the top 10 for this keyword, and 100 means it's almost impossible. SF stands for SERP features. Examples of SERP features include AI overviews, image packs, video results, and more. In general, more SERP features push search results further down the page. Now if you were trying to get ranked for these keywords, you wouldn't start with the keywords with the most volume. Instead, you'd start with the ones with the lowest keyword difficulty. You can filter for those using the filter list. First, I'd click on the KD percentage dropdown. Then if I wanted to search for the very easy and easy keywords, I'd make a custom range from 0% to 29%. Then I'd click apply. Now there are a decent number of keywords in this space, and the traffic really isn't terrible. Now if you're not starting a site from scratch, I'd encourage you to put your domain inside the domain field. Let's see how the difficulty adjusts when I type in hyperwriteai.com. Let's also remove the keyword difficulty filter so we can see how hyperwrite stacks up. So this table has changed a bit. First notice the search position numbers that appear next to many keywords. SEMrush also estimates how much potential traffic it thinks you can get from this keyword. It also gives you a personalized keyword difficulty percentage. This is like the KD percentage, but it's based on your site's authority. Now keywords are great for organic search, but they're not enough for AI. And to prove it, I just asked ChatGBT what are the best AI writing assistants and what use cases are they each good for? What follows is a short essay on almost 20 tools, but hyperwrite is nowhere to be found. Now why is that? Well, AI rewards depth. If your content only covers a few keywords, you won't be seen as a go-to source of info. So one way to improve your content beyond keywords is to use the questions filter. This can help you find gaps in your topic coverage. And if you fill those gaps, you'll likely be seen as more of an authority. There's more than just keywords that AI pays attention to. We'll cover that in the next section. One last thing to mention here is that some keywords don't drive traffic due to AI overviews. Now if you've used Google in the past year, you've probably seen these at the top of a search result page. And if you click on the SERP features for any keyword, you can see if it includes an AI overview. Okay, so we've started this keyword first, but there is an alternative way. Let's expand the SEO toolkit again. And this time let's go to the organic research tool. This way is domain first. So I'll type in the URL hyperwriteai.com and then I'll click the search button. There's a lot of great information on this page, but what we're looking for is on the positions tab. If I scroll down, I can see a list of keywords that I rank for. My current position in the search rankings is in this position column. Now what you can do is to filter this list using the positions filter up top and apply a custom range from two to 15. This will give us all the keywords where our search ranking is between two and 15. This can help you optimize which keywords you put even more effort into. Now as a footnote, the Google search console will be more accurate than SEMrush when it comes to your keyword search positions. So use this if you have access to it. Now another approach is to see what your competitors rank for, which you don't. To do that, go back to the SEO toolkit and this time open the keyword gap tool. Your domain should already be in the top slot. Then when you click in the next domain field, you'll get some suggestions for competitors. Let's first add Jasper AI. Then let's add more competitors. I'll include copy.ai and also write sonic. Now let's find our gaps by clicking the compare button. You'll first notice this Venn diagram which describes the keyword overlap of each of the domains. Then you'll get some ideas for top keyword opportunities, especially those that are missing compared to your competitors. Then you can view even more detail down below. Use these filters to guide your research. Strong keywords are those where you outpace your competitors. You can see how your search position is higher than everyone else's. Then you can try browsing missing or weak keywords for more ideas. So throughout this process, you'll come up with a list of keywords that you want to target. Once you create your list, you need to build a content plan. Let's go back to the SEO toolkit because you can do that using the keyword strategy builder tool. Now you may have chosen dozens of keywords, but for this step, summarize those into two to five core topics. For example, we could choose AI writing assistant, AI email writing, and even AI story writer. Now, when you click create, SEMrush will expand these keywords into topics that help you build authority across hundreds and maybe even thousands of keywords. This is gonna take a few minutes, so I'll come back when it's done. So here's the cool part. SEMrush has expanded those three keywords into nearly 4,000. What do you do with 4,000 keywords? Well, let's take a look at this diagram below. The keywords are grouped into 10 different topics and each of these rings represents a topic. You can think of a topic as a set of related pages on your website. Topics are supported by a pillar page, which is the circle in the middle of the ring. Then around that pillar page are a number of subtopics. SEMrush has a handy guide on how to use this when you click on how to work with data. Now that we have all these topics, we're on step two. We have to choose which topics and pages are most relevant for us. That requires us to go down to the details section. I'll first click collapse all topics so I can see them at a glance. You can quickly scan the potential traffic versus the keyword difficulty. That might give you some ideas on where to start looking, but I also recommend you try some of the preset filters like best for strategy. This filters the entire page list to those which are probably most relevant for you. So to take this further, let's expand the topic AI writing for business. We see the pillar page as well as various subpages. Some of those subpages are called out for being high potential or even high relevance for us. And if you expand a page, you can see all the keywords that SEMrush believes that you can include on that page. Are you starting to see how this is better than looking at one keyword at a time? I sure hope so. Keep going through these pages to find the most relevant ones for your content plan. Once you've created your plan, you can start creating content immediately. And SEMrush offers tools to help you optimize it for search. You can take any of these subpages and then click create brief or content. You can choose to create a brief in case you need to author content outside of SEMrush, or you can create the article directly in SEMrush. Both of these features live inside of the content toolkit. It's not something we'll get into in this video, but in case you're curious, I have included a tutorial video and a free trial link inside of the description. Now, just writing content is not enough. So let's move on to connections to give all of your pages a boost. Connections are all about backlinks, and backlinks are links from other sites to your sites. Now, each of those sites have a different value. So a backlink from Reddit is more trustworthy than a link from, I hate to say it, but kevincookiecompany.com. The higher the value of your backlinks, the higher you'd expect to jump in search rankings and AI appearances. We're back in SEMrush. Make sure you are on the Home tab to follow along. To check your backlinks, make sure you type your website name into this text box and then click Start Now. You'll be brought to a screen like this. Let's focus on the Copilot section. Copilot is an AI-powered tool which proactively surfaces SEO issues that you might wanna take a look at. Now, in addition to Traffic Drop, it also has a Lost Backlinks section. To show you that, I'll click Show More Recommendations. SEMrush keeps track of backlinks for you, and if it notices that these links get deleted, you'll be alerted here. Let's investigate by clicking on this card. We're now in the Backlink Analytics tool. You can also reach this tool by going to the SEO Toolkit and going to Backlink Analytics. When we scroll down here, we can see all the links that we've lost. These links are all grouped by the domain which they come from, and each of these domains has an authority score. That's what AS stands for. This is a score from one to 100, basically describing how reputable a site is. Well-known, trustworthy sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Amazon will score really high authority scores, and domains you've probably never heard of before will score really low. Here's my suggestion. Instead of focusing on the number of backlinks you may have lost from a site, focus on the authority score. You can click the column header to sort by the authority score. Then to see which backlinks are missing, expand the Backlink section under a specific site. On the left side, you'll see the page you got the backlink from, and on the right side, you'll see the page which is linked. If you click the little open icon next to your link, you can see what happened to your backlink. It looks like this website decided to delete this page. So sometimes you can do something about this by contacting that other website, but sometimes you can't. Let's now check out broken backlinks. You have a lot more control over these. At the top of the Backlink Analytics tool, click on Index Pages. Then click on this checkbox for Broken Pages. Next, rank by the number of backlinks. Broken links send negative signals to both search engines and AI crawlers, and that can push you down in search rankings and hurt your chance of being mentioned by these AI tools. Now here's something weird. The top issue is a broken link to hyperwriteai.com slash comma. You can see who's linking there by clicking on the domain link. Scrolling down, you can see this page has a decent authority score. So it's probably worth it to redirect that slash comma page back to the homepage. So that shows you how to audit your current backlink profile, but what about getting new links? One place to start is looking where your competitors are getting links. To do that, go back to the SEO toolkit and click on the Backlink Gap tool. Just like with the Keyword Gap tool, we'll add three competitors. We'll add Jasper, CopyAI, and WriteSonic. Then I'll click the Find Prospects button. This highlights a big difference between HyperWrite and its competitors. HyperWrite has zero links from these heavy hitters like Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, Amazon, WikiHow, and so on. You can expand any competitor's links to see how they were mentioned. And while it might feel impossible to get someone like Microsoft to mention you, some of these mentions, like Pinterest, are easier than you think. Let's check out this Pinterest mention by clicking on the open icon. You'll see something posted by WriteSonic's Pinterest account. And if we go to their profile page, it's pretty easy to see that Pinterest mentions are part of their SEO strategy. Now, if you're looking for more ways to get backlinks, check out this blog post, which I've linked inside the resources section of the description. I also have a link to this blog post in the description because backlinks work differently for AI crawlers. AI values consensus to understand if a website is trustworthy. So backlink authority still matters, but backlink authority plus community consensus is even more powerful. That's why if you want to show up in AI results, you have to get mentioned on Reddit. On to the final C, corrections. This is about fixing the technical issues your site has, which may impact both your search ranking and appearance in AI answers. Fortunately, SEMrush has a great tool for this called the Site Audit. We're back on the home screen. This time, go to the SEO toolkit and then click on Site Audit. Here, we can check all the SEO issues for HyperWrite. So let's click this Setup link. Now, to perform the audit, SEMrush needs to crawl our website. And in this dialogue, we can change how that crawl works. We're just gonna focus on general settings here, but if you need to configure other settings, make sure you click on the relevant page on the left. First, for this tutorial, I do not want to crawl subdomains. Next, you can select how many pages you want to crawl. If you don't know how many pages you have, here's a quick trick. Go to Google and then search for site colon your website. Then click on Tools, and you'll see about how many pages have been indexed. 1930 pages means let's choose 5,000 from this list. You can choose which pages you want to crawl, and then you can change the schedule. I'm only gonna do this once, so I'll select Once. Now, these audits can take a while, so you might want this email when it's done. Remember to check the other settings if you've got some advanced requirements, and once you're ready, click Start Audit. This'll take a few minutes, so I'll come back to you in a bit. The audit finished, and we're not looking so great compared to top 10% websites. To see the errors, I'll click on the Issues tab. So first up, 1,652 incorrect pages found in the sitemap seems pretty bad. I'll click on the link to learn more. In case you don't know, sitemap.xml is a file that lists a website's important pages in a structured format, so search engines like Google can find, crawl, and index them more efficiently. It looks like the issue here is that all of these links in the sitemap result in page redirects. You shouldn't have redirects in your sitemap. It might cause search engines not to trust your sitemap or even your site. So if anyone from HyperWrite is watching, go fix your sitemap. One thing that's new here in the past couple of months is the AI search issues. This tells you about issues that may impact your visibility in AI search. An example is missing an llms.txt file. This is like a sitemap for LLMs. Let's say you don't know what an llms.txt file is. SEMrush does a great job of explaining these issues when you click on Why and How to fix it. This process can get very technical, but I do wanna emphasize that if your site is littered with these crawl errors, then it can lead both AI and search engines to skip over your content in favor of better structured, more authoritative alternatives. We've covered the three Cs, but now that traffic doesn't paint the whole picture, how do you measure success? Let's take a look at some SEMrush tools that can help. We're back here on the SEMrush homepage. So traffic alone is no longer the goal, but traffic plus brand awareness plus conversions gets you pretty close. You can measure conversions like getting leads or getting sales yourself, and SEMrush can help you measure traffic and awareness. Now remember, Copilot surfaces recommendations every time you log in. So here we're seeing traffic changes and keyword changes. If you click on Traffic Drop, it takes you back to the Organic Research tool. This time it takes us to the Position Changes tab, and you can see from this report on the right that in the last 28 days, traffic is significantly down. If you wanna get a sense of whether this is expected seasonal change, you can go to the SEO toolkit again, and then click on Domain Overview. This organic traffic graph is one of my favorites. I'll first smooth this graph out by clicking months instead of days. I can then see there's a big dip in traffic from June this year to August. And last year, that same dip didn't happen. In fact, August had more traffic than June. So that's how you track traffic. If you wanna track keywords, head over to the SEO toolkit, and this time go to Position Tracking. Like with other tools, you can enter your domain and then click Set Up. First, select your search engine, and yes, you can select Chat GPT or Google AI mode, but it requires an upgrade to the Guru Plan. So let's stick with Google. Then you add where you're searching from. I'll choose the United States. Next, let's enter the specific keywords I want to track. I can copy and paste those. Then I can click Start Tracking. Notice I can also get weekly updates via email, which is a great way to track progress. This then creates a dashboard that will track your keyword ranking position for these keywords every week. Finally, let's cover tracking brand awareness and specifically AI visibility. Check it out by going to the AI SEO toolkit and clicking on Brand Performance. Now, this is a separate toolkit, so I'm just going to show you a preview here using the interactive demo. One important way of looking at AI visibility is share a voice. Here you can see your mentions across Google AI mode, chat GPT, chat GPT with search enabled, perplexity, and Gemini. If you're looking for help to raise your visibility, check out the visibility tool in the toolkit. Scroll all the way down until you see the questions table to give you an idea of the types of prompts that people are asking. You can even expand these questions to get a preview of the answer that these AIs are giving. To dive even deeper, you can go into the questions tool. Scroll all the way down to AI strategic opportunities to get recommendations on where your content should go next based on what LLMs are saying today. Now, this is cool and AI search is certainly growing, but remember, Google still supplies the majority of search traffic and with it the majority of purchase decisions, so don't neglect it. Today you learned how to use SEMrush to boost your brand's reach across both traditional search and AI. We covered the three Cs, content to build authority, connections to prove your authority, and corrections to not mess it up. Thanks for watching and don't forget to try SEMrush using our exclusive 14-day trial link in the description below. See you in the next video.