How to Use Semrush: The Complete UK & Irish Business Guide

Semrush gives you a clear picture of where your website stands, where your competitors are winning, and which keywords are worth targeting. For businesses in Northern Ireland, Ireland, and across the UK, those insights carry real commercial weight — provided you know how to configure the tool for your actual market rather than the default US database.

This guide covers the core features you need: keyword research, site auditing, competitor analysis, and rank tracking. You will also find guidance specific to the UK and Irish databases that most US-focused guides overlook, including how to configure projects for Google.co.uk and Google.ie, how to get meaningful results on the Pro plan, and how to build a weekly workflow that compounds into real search visibility over time.

Whether you are just starting out with Semrush or looking to get more from an existing subscription, the sections below walk through how to use Semrush, covering each core feature with practical examples relevant to the UK and Northern Ireland market. Read on for a step-by-step breakdown of the platform, a plain-language subscription comparison priced in GBP, and answers to the questions UK and Irish businesses ask most often.

Getting Started with Semrush: Account Setup and Project Configuration

Before you run a single report, it pays to configure your project properly. A misconfigured project — for example, one pulling keyword data from the US Google database rather than Google.co.uk — can produce volume and difficulty figures that bear no relation to your actual market. Getting the setup right takes around ten minutes and prevents a great deal of misdirected effort later.

Setting Up Your First Project

Once you have created your Semrush account, add a project from the ‘Projects’ section in the left-hand panel. Enter your domain without the www prefix, name the project, and you will be presented with a range of tools to configure: Position Tracking, Site Audit, On-Page SEO, and Brand Monitoring.

Start with Position Tracking and Site Audit as your two foundations. They provide the most important baselines: where your pages currently sit in search results and what technical problems need fixing. If you are working on a new site or have never run an audit before, the Site Audit typically produces the most immediately actionable output. If you want a clear picture of what to look for before your first crawl, ProfileTree’s SEO audit checklist for UK businesses covers the key problem categories and how to prioritise them.

Configuring for Google.co.uk vs Google.ie

This is the step most guides miss entirely. When you set up Position Tracking, Semrush asks you to choose your target search engine and location. UK businesses should select Google.co.uk and set the language to English (United Kingdom). If you are targeting the Republic of Ireland, choose Google, ie and set the location to Ireland.

The difference is significant in practice. A keyword with 1,200 monthly searches in the US database may show only 90 searches on Google.co.uk. Running your entire strategy against inflated US figures leads you to prioritise keywords your actual audience rarely uses. For businesses operating across both sides of the Irish border, create two separate projects: one configured for Northern Ireland (Google.co.uk, Belfast) and one for the Republic (Google.ie, Dublin).

Getting local visibility right goes well beyond database settings. ProfileTree’s local SEO guide for businesses across Northern Ireland and the Republic covers the ranking factors that carry the most weight in each jurisdiction, from citation consistency to Google Business Profile signals.

Understanding the Semrush Dashboard

The main dashboard shows a summary of your domain’s estimated organic traffic, backlink profile, and top organic keywords. These figures come from Semrush’s own crawl data rather than directly from Google, so treat them as directional estimates rather than precise measurements. For verified click and impression data, cross-reference with Google Search Console, which reports exactly what Google has recorded.

The left-hand sidebar organises tools into five main categories: SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Content Marketing, and Competitive Research. Most SMEs on the Pro plan will spend the majority of their time in the SEO category. If you are also interested in how your analytics data connects to your broader digital performance, ProfileTree’s guide to free website analytics tools explains how to layer multiple data sources without paying for additional subscriptions.

Keyword Research: Finding Opportunities in the UK and Irish Markets

Keyword research in Semrush works best when you treat it as a series of layered decisions rather than a single search. The Keyword Magic Tool alone generates thousands of suggestions for any seed term. Without a clear process for filtering and prioritising, it can become overwhelming quickly, particularly for businesses new to SEO tools.

Using the Keyword Magic Tool for UK Searches

Type your seed keyword into the Keyword Magic Tool, then immediately change the database to the United Kingdom or Ireland. This single step changes the volume, difficulty, and CPC data from US market figures to locally relevant ones, which will often look very different.

From the results, filter by Keyword Difficulty (KD%). For a newer site or a site with a domain authority below 30, focus on keywords with a KD between 20 and 40. These represent terms where consistent, well-structured content can realistically gain traction within three to six months. For more established domains, the 40 to 60 range becomes viable, particularly if you build supporting content around a topic cluster rather than a single standalone page.

One approach that works well for Northern Ireland businesses is to combine a service keyword with a location modifier. A search for ‘solicitors Belfast’ or ‘accountant Derry’ will show far lower competition than the generic national term, with searchers who have clear commercial intent. The volume is smaller, but conversion rates from local intent searches tend to be considerably higher. For a structured approach to turning keyword findings into a content plan, ProfileTree’s guide to keyword research essentials for terms that actually convert walks through prioritisation by commercial value rather than raw search volume.

Keyword Gap Analysis: Finding What Competitors Rank For

The Keyword Gap tool sits in the Competitive Research section and lets you compare up to five domains side by side. Enter your domain alongside two or three competitors and set the database to the UK or Ireland. Semrush returns a full comparison of keywords, filtered by which domains rank for which terms.

The most useful filter is ‘Missing’: keywords your competitors rank for but your site does not appear for at all. This is your content gap report. Work through the list, discard terms that are clearly irrelevant to your services, and you are left with a prioritised list of topics worth building out.

The ‘Weak’ filter is equally valuable for established sites. These are keywords where you already rank, but at a position lower than your competitors. A page sitting between positions 12 and 20 for a commercially relevant term often needs only targeted improvements to climb into the top ten, which is far more efficient than starting from scratch with new content. If you want to see how this connects to a broader content marketing strategy, ProfileTree’s digital marketing strategy services for UK and Irish SMEs cover how to turn keyword intelligence into a prioritised editorial calendar.

Understanding Search Intent for UK Queries

Semrush labels each keyword with an intent category: informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. This filter helps you avoid a common mistake: optimising a service page for an informational keyword that attracts researchers rather than buyers.

For UK service businesses, transactional and commercial-intent keywords are the priority for service and landing pages. Informational keywords suit blog content and guides, where the goal is to build authority and capture users earlier in the buying cycle. Pay attention to the intent column when building your keyword map; placing content at the wrong stage of the funnel is one of the most common reasons well-written pages fail to convert. For a fuller picture of how on-page optimisation connects to search intent, ProfileTree’s on-page SEO guide for UK businesses covers the practical steps from title tags through to internal linking structure.

Competitor Analysis: Reading the Market Through Semrush

Semrush’s competitor analysis tools do more than show you where rivals rank. They reveal the strategy behind those rankings: which pages attract the most traffic, what backlinks are driving authority, and where advertising spend is being directed. For UK and Irish businesses, this context is often more valuable than any single ranking metric.

Domain Overview: Your Starting Point

Type any competitor domain into the search bar and select ‘Domain Overview’. This generates a summary that includes estimated organic traffic, total backlinks, top organic keywords, and paid search activity. Set the database to the United Kingdom or Ireland before drawing conclusions, as the default US view will show figures that do not reflect your competitive landscape.

The most important figure is not the overall traffic estimate but the traffic trend over the past 12 to 24 months. A site that has grown steadily from 5,000 to 25,000 monthly visitors is doing something structurally right. A site that has plateaued or dropped may have been affected by an algorithm update, creating an opening for competitors to capture the traffic it is losing.

Organic Research: Understanding Competitor Content Performance

Click through to ‘Organic Research’ for a full breakdown of a competitor’s ranking pages. Sort by estimated traffic to identify their most visited content. For each high-traffic page, click the keyword count to see every term it ranks for across all positions.

This is where strategic decisions become concrete. If a competitor ranks for 40 variations of a single topic with one well-structured, comprehensive guide, that tells you the content bar you need to clear. If they have 15 separate thin pages targeting variations of the same term, they are vulnerable to a single pillar page with greater depth and structure.

As Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree, puts it: ‘The goal is not to copy what competitors are doing. It is to understand why certain pages rank, then build something that genuinely serves the reader better. In the Northern Ireland market, especially, adding real local context and practical business examples creates differentiation that generic guides cannot match.’

For businesses that want to understand how Semrush fits alongside the wider SEO tool landscape, ProfileTree’s overview of the best SEO tools for UK businesses provides a practical comparison across paid and free platforms, including when each one earns its place in a workflow.

Backlink Analysis and the Backlink Audit Tool

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool lets you examine the link profiles of any domain. Enter a competitor to see which sites link to them, what anchor text is used, and the authority scores of those linking domains. This is your research brief for outreach: if a local business publication, trade association, or industry site links to your competitors, they are a credible target for your own link-building efforts.

For your own site, run the Backlink Audit tool from your project dashboard. Semrush scores each backlink with a toxicity rating and flags links that may be suppressing your authority. For any harmful backlinks you cannot have removed manually, the tool generates a disavow file you can upload to Google Search Console. ProfileTree’s guide to monitoring and managing your backlink profile explains how to approach disavow decisions carefully, without inadvertently removing legitimate links alongside genuinely harmful ones.

Technical SEO: Site Audits, On-Page Analysis, and Rank Tracking

Semrush’s technical tools are among the most thorough available outside of dedicated crawling platforms. The Site Audit, On-Page SEO Checker, and Position Tracking tools cover the full cycle of identifying problems, prioritising fixes, and measuring the results of your work over time.

Running and Interpreting a Site Audit

Go to your project dashboard and launch the Site Audit. Configure the crawl to match your site’s size: most SME websites with fewer than 500 pages can run a full crawl without difficulty. For larger sites, limit the initial crawl to your most commercially important pages.

Once the crawl completes, Semrush presents an overall site health score alongside categorised error reports. Focus first on the ‘Errors’ category, which flags broken links, missing meta descriptions, duplicate content, and crawlability problems. These are the issues most likely to be actively suppressing your rankings right now.

After clearing errors, move to ‘Warnings’. Common warnings include pages with thin content (under 200 words), slow page load speeds, and images without alt text. Address these in order of the commercial importance of the affected pages, not randomly or alphabetically. Fixing a warning on your most visited service page delivers more measurable value than fixing the same issue on a low-traffic post from years ago.

A structured approach to prioritising technical fixes saves a significant amount of time. ProfileTree’s step-by-step SEO audit checklist provides a practical framework for assessing your site’s baseline before committing to a tool subscription, and it aligns directly with the categories Semrush surfaces in its audit output.

On-Page SEO Checker

The On-Page SEO Checker analyses individual pages against the top ten results for their target keyword. It produces a scored list of recommendations covering content, technical factors, backlinks, and user experience signals. Unlike the Site Audit, which assesses technical health across the whole site, the On-Page Checker focuses on a single page’s ability to rank for a specific term.

The ‘Ideas’ section is the most actionable part of this tool. It groups suggestions by category and estimates the impact of each change on your position. Prioritise ‘Strategy’ and ‘Content’ ideas over minor technical tweaks if your page is already crawlable and indexed. Adding a semantically related section or extending thin content typically produces faster improvements than adjusting technical elements that are already functional.

For guidance on what a strong on-page structure looks like before you run the checker, ProfileTree’s guide to SEO titles and meta descriptions for UK pages covers the fundamental on-page elements that Semrush’s checker will assess and explains how to write them for both search engines and human readers.

Position Tracking: Monitoring Your Rankings Over Time

Set up Position Tracking within your project by adding the keywords you want to monitor. For UK businesses, ensure tracking is set to your specific country and device type. Mobile rankings can differ substantially from desktop rankings for the same keyword in the UK, particularly for local searches where users are often physically looking for a service nearby.

Check your Position Tracking dashboard weekly rather than daily. Daily fluctuations are normal and rarely meaningful. What you are looking for are sustained trends over two to four weeks: pages climbing, stagnating, or dropping. A page that falls from position 8 to position 15 over three weeks warrants investigation. A page that moves between positions 4 and 6 from day to day does not.

Making the Most of the Semrush Pro Plan for UK SMEs

Most Semrush guides are written by agencies running Guru accounts at £229 per month or more. The reality for most UK small businesses is that the Pro plan, at roughly £113 per month, is what they are using. Several features behave differently or are absent at this tier, so it is worth knowing exactly where the limits are and how to work within them effectively.

Semrush Plan Comparison for UK Businesses

Prices shown are approximate GBP equivalents. Verify current UK pricing at Semrush.com before subscribing.

What You Can Achieve on the Pro Plan

The Pro plan gives you unlimited keyword searches, unlimited domain overviews, full site audits with no page-count restrictions, and up to 500 tracked keyword positions. For a focused SME targeting 30 to 50 core keywords across its main service pages, this is entirely sufficient for building and maintaining a competitive SEO programme.

What the Pro plan does not include is historical keyword and ranking data (Guru and above), the Content Marketing Toolkit, or the advanced competitor content gap features. These are useful for large-scale content operations but rarely essential for a business managing its own SEO in-house on a focused, realistic scale.

A practical weekly Pro plan routine for a UK SME might look like this: check your Position Tracking dashboard on Monday for any significant ranking shifts; run a new On-Page SEO check on any page published or updated the previous week; review your Site Audit for any new errors that appeared since the last crawl.

Repeated consistently, this routine compounds into meaningful search visibility improvement over six to twelve months. For a broader view of how SEO tools fit into a sustainable digital strategy, ProfileTree’s comparison of free and paid SEO tools for UK and Irish businesses covers when a paid subscription earns its cost and when free alternatives are genuinely sufficient.

Using Semrush Alongside Free Tools

Semrush works best alongside Google Search Console rather than as a replacement for it. Search Console provides verified click and impression data directly from Google; Semrush provides estimated competitive intelligence. Together, they give you the ground truth about your own performance and the strategic context about your competitive position.

For backlink monitoring at a lower frequency, Google Search Console’s Links report is a reasonable free alternative. For keyword research on a tight budget, Google’s Keyword Planner (available free with a Google Ads account) provides UK search volume data. Neither replaces Semrush’s depth for competitive research, but both complement it for businesses that want to verify estimates against a primary source.

If you are building your first analytics stack and want to understand what data each platform actually provides, ProfileTree’s overview of free website analytics tools explains the practical differences between the main options available to UK businesses.

Conclusion

Semrush is only as useful as the workflow you build around it. For UK and Irish businesses, the biggest gains come from configuring projects for the correct local database, focusing keyword research on realistic difficulty ranges, and treating the Site Audit as a living document rather than a one-off exercise. Start with the foundations covered in this guide, build consistency into your weekly process, and the data compounds into real search visibility over time.

Ready to get more from your SEO efforts? Contact the ProfileTree team, and we will identify the strongest search opportunities for your business. Alternatively, if you want to explore what a managed SEO service includes before getting in touch, ProfileTree’s SEO services page covers our approach, typical timelines, and what to expect at each stage.

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