How to Use Rush One’s 7-Day Free Trial

The week goes by quickly, but it’s enough time to get meaningful SEO insights with Semrush One free trial if you know where to focus.

This guide covers the six best steps you can take during your seven-day Semrush One trial.

You can complete all the steps in just a few hours and end up with something tangible: a ranking baseline, a list of content gaps, a backlog of technical issues, and a summary of how your product appears in AI searches.

Step 1: Check Your Traditional SEO Rankings

Use Organic Rankings to see what keywords your site is ranking for, what pages are ranking, and how those rankings are trending to get a baseline of how your site is doing in general search.

Just enter your domain into the Organic Rankings tool.

You will see:

• How many keywords are you listening for and the overall trend
• How much traffic is estimated from those rankings
• Branded traffic versus non-branded

Next, check the top pages report to see:

• Which pages generate the most traffic
• Where large traffic changes for the better or for the worse appear
• Whether the commercial or category keyword pages are trending up or down

This information from Top Pages helps you quickly identify which parts of a site contribute the most to its organic visibility. For example, the “Traffic” column below shows some of the top pages on allbirds.com including collection pages, product pages, and information pages on topics such as shoe care.

Both reports provide a pulse-check for any website’s SEO. So you can use them for your site, but also for any competitors to quickly research what works for them.

Step 2: Set up a location tracking campaign

Rank Tracking allows you to monitor your daily ranking for a specific set of target keywords.

Use it to track visibility in both traditional search (Google, Bing), and AI search (Gemini, ChatGPT, AI Mode).

Because Position Tracking is updated daily, the sooner you set it up, the more data you’ll collect during your Semrush One free trial.

To start a Local Tracking campaign, create an SEO project and add your domain, target keywords, and target location.

When tracking starts, see “The landscape” is a high-level summary report of how your keyword set is performing. Review:

• Visibility-how your site appears for all the keywords you are targeting
• Limited traffic-limited traffic based on current levels
• Middle position-rank average for your entire set of keywords

The metrics above give you a quick view of whether your visibility is improving or decreasing for your specified keywords. Reviewing this report during your trial helps you stay on top of major rate changes and fluctuations.

Pro tip: Add one or two competitor sites to the campaign, so you can compare rankings, visibility, and share of voice directly.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Gap Analysis

Content gap analysis shows you where your competitors are visible but you are not. Using your Semrush One trial, you can find gaps in two parameters: traditional SEO ranking (Keyword Space) and AI search visibility (Competitive Research).

Keyword Gap compares your search engine ranking against competitors and reveals the keywords they rank for that you don’t. It’s a quick way to uncover new content opportunities.

Open the Keyword Gap tool and enter your domain and up to four competitor domains, then start the comparison.

In the “Top Chances” widget, check out these filters:

• There is none-competitor keywords rank for what your site doesn’t
• Weak-keywords where you rank, but competitors rank higher than you

Be careful: Not all missing keywords are worth tracking. Focus on niches that are relevant to your products or services.

Scroll down to the “All keyword data for:” table to see how each competitor is performing for the same keyword. This helps you prioritize opportunities where many competitors are already well ranked.

For example, “Weak” image filter above shows that each of allbirds.com’s competitors ranks high for related terms such as “purple flats,” “women’s slip-on sneakers,” and “women’s mule sneakers.”

In the AI ​​Visibility Toolkit, Competitive Research reveals your gaps in AI visibility.

The top of the report shows your metrics against competitors. The bottom shows your gaps – topics where competitors are mentioned by AI above you. This is your chance to create content and get involved.

Use both tools together to create a gap analysis that combines traditional and AI search. Then plan how to target topics where your brand is lacking or weak.

Pro tip: Remove the “Missing” and “Weak” lists from both tools before the end of your Semrush One trial. You’ll have a content roadmap ready when you’re done.

Step 4: Do a site inspection

Site Audit scans your website for technical issues that could affect search performance and organizes them into clear priorities.

To start your test, open the Site Test tool and choose how many pages to crawl (and how often).

When the scan is complete, review “Overview” report that:

• Site Health—an overall measure of how technically sound your site is relative to others
• Mistakes– the most critical issues discovered during the research
• Warnings-matters of moderate severity discovered during the research

For example, in the screenshot above, the study gave allbirds.com a Site Health score 65%pointed out 1,072 errorsand identified 538 warnings. The study also flagged some issues that should be addressed immediately, including invalid structured data elements across 942 pages.

Issues with structured data can prevent search engines from displaying enhanced search results called rich snippets that can show review stars, images, and more.

Pro tip:Issue a full list of issues before the end of your trial so you have an SEO to-do list to work on later.

Step 5: Check Your Profiles and Competitive Backlinks

Reviewing your backlink profile reveals which websites are linking to you and how much authority your site has.

And when you review your competitors’ backlink profiles, you’ll have a great sense of how much authority you have in your niche and identify other prospects you can contact to get even more backlinks.

Analyze your backlink profile with Backlinkstool, which pulls from Semrush’s backlink database of over 43 billion links.

Enter your domain into the Backlinks tool and review the “Overview”report as follows:

• Approved Points-Semrush’s rating of a domain’s overall quality based on its backlinks, organic traffic, and spam signals
• Referencing Domains-number of unique domains linked to you
• Back links-the total number of links pointing to your site

The Backlinks tool allows you to add your competitor’s domains using the dropdown at the top of the report. So you can quickly see how strong your backlink profile is compared to competitors.

In the screenshot above, allbrids.com has 15.8K referring domains, 170K backlinks, and an Authority Score of 54. These metrics all track competitors.

Step 6: Check Your AI Visibility

Assessing your AI visibility (a measure of how you are mentioned, cited, or referenced in AI responses) helps you understand how you are doing in AI search and identify new opportunities to better compete.

Go to Overview and enter your domain to analyze how often your site appears in AI-generated responses. In the Visibility Overview report, review the following:

• AI Visibility Score: An overall measure of how often your domain appears in AI-generated responses relative to competitors
• Say: How often your product is indexed in AI responses
• Quotes: Number of times AI responses cite your domain as a source
• Pages Cited: Number of your pages from AI

For example, allbirds.com has an AI Visibility score of 42/100, 13.6K mentions, 1.1K citations, and 999 cited pages. The brand appears frequently in AI responses but still has room to improve its presence. Use the same Competitor View report, scroll down to “Articles & Sources“section, then click”Pages Cited”tab to see their top citation pages and the reference number for each page.

The patterns you see in the “Topics and Sources” table can reveal new topics to cover.

Turn Your Semrush Free Trial into an Action Plan

In just one week, you’ll have a clear baseline of your search performance and a set of actions you can take to start seeing improvement.