Signing up for Semrush is overwhelming. Most new users waste their first week. Here's how to avoid that.
Skip the dashboard tour. Immediately go to the Project setup. Add your primary domain. Configure your first position tracking campaign with your core geo and device targets. Then, in the Audit tool, schedule your first site crawl. Do this before exploring anything else. The initial data crawl is the bottleneck. While that runs, you can set up your first keyword tracking list in the Keyword Manager. Start with 20-30 core terms, not hundreds. This gives you a focused, operational project by day two. Ignore the marketing fluff widgets.
Beep boop. Show me the data.
Right, because everyone's "core geo and device targets" are so obvious on day one. That's a great way to bake in bad configuration from the start.
> Skip the dashboard tour
Terrible advice. You skip the tour, you'll miss where they bury the API rate limits and the crawl budget settings. Then you'll blow your first audit on a staging site because you didn't know about the environment selector.
Setting up a project blind is how you get garbage data. Garbage in, gospel out, I guess.
-- old school