How to Make the Most of the Free 7-Day Semrush One Trial

A week goes fast, but its enough time to get meaningful SEO insights with a Semrush One free trial when you know where to focus.

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

You can complete all steps in just a few hours and end up with something concrete: a ranking baseline, a list of content gaps, a backlog of technical issues, and a snapshot of how your brand appears in AI search.

Step 1: Check Your Traditional SEO Rankings

Use Organic Rankings to see which keywords your domain ranks for, which pages are ranking, and how those rankings are trending to get a baseline of how your site is currently performing in traditional search.

Simply enter your domain into the Organic Rankings tool.

You’ll see: 

• How many keywords you rank for and the overall trend
• How much estimated traffic comes from those rankings
• Branded vs. non-branded traffic 

Next, check the Top Pages report tosee:

• Which pages generate the majority of traffic
• Where the largest positive or negative traffic changes appear
• Whether key commercial or category pages are trending up or down

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

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

Step 2: Set Up a Position Tracking Campaign

Position Tracking lets you monitor your daily rankings for a specific set of target keywords. 

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

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

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

Once tracking begins, look at the “Landscape” reportfor a high-level snapshot of how your keyword set is performing. Review:

• Visibility—how visible your site is across the keywords you're tracking
• Estimated Traffic—approximated traffic based on current rankings
• Average Position—the average ranking across your keyword set

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

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

Step 3: Perform a Content Gap Analysis

A content gap analysis shows you where competitors are getting visibility and you're not. Using your Semrush One trial, you can find gaps on two fronts: traditional SEO rankings (Keyword Gap) and AI search visibility (Competitor Research).

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

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

In the“Top Opportunities”widget,look for these filters:

• Missing—keywords competitors rank for that your site doesn’t
• Weak—keywords where you rank, but competitors rank higher than you

Note: Not every missing keyword is worth pursuing. Focus on gaps that are actually relevant to your products or services. 

Scroll down to the“All keyword details for:”table to see how each competitor performs for the same keyword. This helps you prioritize opportunities where multiple competitors already rank well.

For example, the “Weak” filter for the above image shows that each of allbirds.com’s competitors rank higher for relevant terms like “purple flats,” “ladies slip on sneakers,” and “mule sneakers womens.”

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

The top of the report benchmarks your metrics against competitors. The bottom shows your gaps — topics where competitors are mentioned by AI more than you. These are your opportunities to create content and catch up.

Use both tools together to build a gap analysis that spans traditional and AI search. Then plan how you'll target the topics where your brand is missing or weak. 

Pro tip: Export the "Missing" and "Weak" lists from both tools before your Semrush One trial ends. You'll have a ready-made content roadmap when you're done.

Step 4: Run a Site Audit

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

To run your audit, open the Site Audit tool and choose how many pages to crawl (and how often).

Once the crawl completes, review the “Overview” report for:

• Site Health—an overall measure of how technically sound your site is relative to others
• Errors—issues of the highest severity detected during the audit
• Warnings—issues of medium severity detected during the audit

For example, in the screenshot above, the audit gave allbirds.com a Site Health score of 65%, identified 1,072 errors, and identified 538 warnings. The audit also flagged specific issues that should be addressed quickly, including invalid structured data items across 942 pages. 

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

Pro tip:Export the full list of issues before your trial ends to have a technical SEO to-do list you can work through later.

Step 5: Check Your and a Competitor’s Backlink Profiles

Reviewing your backlink profile reveals which websites link to you and how authoritative your site is. 

And if you review competitors’ backlink profiles, you’ll have a greater sense of how authoritative you are in your niche and even identify some prospects you can contact to gain even more backlinks. 

Analyze your backlink profile with the Backlinkstool, which draws from Semrush’s backlink database of more than 43 trillion links.

Enter your domain into the Backlinks tool and review the “Overview”report for the following:

• Authority Score—Semrush’s estimate of a domain’s overall quality based on its backlinks, organic traffic, and spam signals
• Referring Domains—the number of unique domains linking to you
• Backlinks—the total number of links pointing to your site

The Backlinks tool also lets you add competitor domains using the drop-downs 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 fall behind competitors. 

Step 6: Check Your AI Visibility

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

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

• AI Visibility Score: An overall measure of how frequently your domain appears in AI-generated responses relative to competitors
• Mentions: How many times your brand is referenced in AI answers
• Citations: The number of times AI answers cite your domain as a source
• Cited Pages: The number of your pages that appear in AI citations

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 regularly in AI responses but still has room to improve its presence.Run the same Visibility Overview report for a competitor, scroll down to the “Topics & Sources”section, and click the“Cited Pages”tabto see their top-cited pages and the number of prompts referencing each page.

The patterns you see in the “Topics & Sources” table can reveal new topics worth covering.

Turn Your Semrush Free Trial Into an Action Plan

In just one week, you’ll have a clear baseline for your search performance and a set of tasks to act on to start seeing improvements.