#7 Ways SEMrush Can Help Businesses Grow in 2017 By monitoring your online reputation, researching your rivals' promotional activities, and finding referring domains with high authority and SEO potential, you can effectively generate an effective marketing buzz around your brand.

Do you expect 2017 to be ripe with fresh opportunities or teeming with new obstacles to overcome? The digital world is rapidly changing and evolving. At the same time the competition continues to grow. To stay ahead of your rivals, you need to defend your market position and maintain your competitive edge.

But it's easier said than done. What in particular should businesses do?

The good thing is SEMrush is constantly trying to deliver the best tools to help you achieve success and outdistance your competitors.

This post offers an overview of how the following SEMrush reports and tools can help businesses thrive in 2017.

1. Get a better understanding of your competitors

Understanding competitive landscape is important to plan your marketing campaign and make informed decisions. Using SEMrush's analytics reports you can get insight into your competitors' strategies that contributed to their success and their areas of missed opportunities that you can capitalize on. The multiple reports will help you see your rivals' best keywords, discover your new organic competitors, analyze their ad copies and keywords, uncover their advertising strategies and a lot more. Besides the ability to discover terms and phrases your competitors are getting traffic from, you can also compare keyword rankings of up to five domains.

When analyzing and evaluating your competitors, make sure to track your own progress. SEMrush will show you if your traffic — both organic and paid — trend up or down, and if your rankings are improving or getting worse for your main keywords.

2. Conduct a more effective keyword research

To expand your brand's online visibility and establish credibility, you need to build a well-planned SEO strategy, focusing on certain keywords. A thorough keyword research is an inevitable step in developing a strong SEO strategy. What's more, it's important to keep searching for new terms and phrases to target on a regular basis, because your audience's preferences might change. You need to keep abreast of trends and new topics to create content around them.

Just type your keyword into the search box, and SEMrush will then display the Keyword Overview report. You can switch between desktop and mobile results and pick from 30 different locations to get insight into keywords within the markets you target. Using the Phrase Match report you can discover variations of the queries that contain the exact term or phrase you specified. The Related Keywords report provides you with a list of words that are semantically related to your query, including singular and plural forms, misspellings, acronyms, and abbreviations. These two reports help you discover the different keyword variations that are associated with a particular root word and expand your keyword research.

3. Discover new advertising opportunities

It can be quite expensive to advertise online today. Indeed, paid media is one of the toughest parts of any business. To wisely plan your advertising budget strategy and make sure your PPC campaigns don't burn up your company's money, you need to make your advertising decisions based on data. SEMrush will show you what works and what doesn't for your competitors.

Using the Advertising Research report you can analyze your rivals' advertising campaigns and get insight into their PPC traffic, including the number of keywords they bid on, estimated traffic they received from these terms and estimated cost for bidding on them. You can benefit from your competitors' experience, avoiding their mistakes.

4. Discover fresh ideas and supercharge your content marketing

From time to time, every writer struggles to come up with new content ideas. This writer's block can strike anyone, whether you're a newbie or an experienced content creator. Whatever the case, why not to use some help to get more ideas for your content marketing?

You can use SEO Ideas, a powerful tool for writers that will provide you with related words to include in your content based on who is ranking for the keyword you're targeting. You'll discover the most used terms and phrases and see how many of your competitors used each related word in their content.

The SEO Content Template report will help you create new SEO-focused content. The tool provides a template of ideas and recommendations for how to create your content to optimize for your certain keywords. These recommendations include suggested content length, how often to place your keywords in content, ideas for building backlinks and a lot more.

5. Build a strong personal brand

One of the most effective ways to gain advantage in business is having a strong personal brand. In the digital era it's more important than ever to invest your efforts in building your brand. It helps businesses gain individuality and get access to better deals and relationships. When you have a strong personal brand, clients will naturally want to come to you.

To discover new opportunities for promoting and marketing your brand through word of mouth, you can use Brand Monitoring tool that enables you to collect and sort online mentions of your and your competitors' company, product or service. By monitoring your online reputation, researching your rivals' promotional activities, and finding referring domains with high authority and SEO potential, you can effectively generate an effective marketing buzz around your brand.

6. Avoid making common SEO mistakes

If you want your website to rank well in search engines, you need to understand the basics. Very common mistakes prevent site owners and webmasters from getting the desired ranking. Nevertheless, developing your basic technical SEO skills will allow you to fix all issues your site has and improve your Google SERP position.

7. Find SERP features that are worth optimizing for

Over the past several years, the landscape of Google features has significantly changed. The search engine now displays multiple features, including Knowledge Graph, Local Pack and Featured Snippet to name a few. If you want your business to be competitive you need to take into consideration all the SERP changes and develop a plan how to take advantage of them. You should adapt you digital marketing strategies to the changes Google makes.

The latest SEMrush widget added to the Organic Research report allows you to see if any special search engine results are displayed by Google for keywords your competitor is ranking for. You can also check the percentage of terms and phrases that trigger a particular SERP feature. This information will help you analyze the benefits of different SERP features and discover new opportunities to improve your rankings.

In conclusion

In the ever-changing digital world it's important to be adaptive, flexible, and agile. You need to embrace the changes and shape your marketing strategy in accordance with how online environment changes. With careful planning and the use of effective tools you can open new opportunities, improve your messaging and strengthen your marketing efforts.