How to Use Semrush and SEO to Win Your Next Freelance Client

Here’s something most freelancers never figure out: the best freelancers don’t just do better work than everyone else. They show up differently than everyone else.

While the average freelancer walks into a discovery call and starts asking a client what they need, the smart freelancer already knows. They’ve done the research. They’ve pulled the data. They sit down across from a potential client and say, “I noticed your website has some pretty significant technical issues holding back your traffic—and I found three keyword opportunities your competitors are currently owning that you’re completely missing.”

That’s not just impressive. That’s a closed deal.

The difference between those two freelancers? SEO tools. Specifically, platforms like Semrush—and knowing exactly how to use them to position yourself as the obvious choice before you’ve even sent a proposal.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to use Semrush to win more freelance clients, command higher rates, and turn one-time projects into long-term relationships. Whether you’re a web designer, developer, content strategist, or marketing freelancer, this approach works—and most of your competitors have no idea it even exists.

This article is sponsored by Semrush.

Why SEO Data Is a Freelancer’s Secret Weapon

Let me be straight with you: SEO tools aren’t just for SEO specialists. That misconception is costing a lot of talented freelancers real money.

Think about what an SEO platform like Semrush actually gives you: a full picture of how any website is performing online, where its traffic comes from, what its competitors are doing better, what content is resonating, what technical problems are quietly killing its rankings, and what opportunities are sitting there untouched.

That’s not SEO data. That’s business intelligence.

And when you walk into a client conversation armed with that kind of intelligence about their business, you stop sounding like a freelancer pitching for work and start sounding like a strategic advisor who already understands their problems. Clients don’t negotiate on price with strategic advisors. They say, “How soon can we start?”

That’s the shift you’re going for.

What Semrush Actually Is (And Why It’s Worth Learning)

Semrush describes itself as an online visibility management platform, and that description is accurate—but it undersells what the tool actually does for someone in your position.

At its core, Semrush gives you access to a staggering amount of data: billions of keywords, trillions of backlinks, and information on hundreds of millions of domains worldwide. But the thing that makes it powerful for freelancers isn’t just the scale of the data. It’s how usable and actionable the platform makes that data.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s inside:

Keyword Research

Semrush’s keyword research tools let you see exactly what people are searching for in any industry or niche, how many people search those terms each month, how competitive those terms are, and what related questions real people are typing into Google. For a freelancer, this means you can walk into any client conversation already knowing what their potential customers are looking for—and whether the client is showing up to meet that demand.

Competitive Analysis

One of Semrush’s most powerful features is its ability to break down what any competitor is doing online. You can see which pages drive their traffic, which keywords they rank for, how their domain authority stacks up, and where they’re winning versus where they’re vulnerable. This is gold for client pitches. Nothing makes a business owner’s ears perk up faster than showing them exactly where their top competitor is beating them.

Site Audits

Semrush can crawl any website and produce a detailed technical audit showing errors, warnings, and improvement opportunities. Slow-loading pages, broken links, missing metadata, Core Web Vitals issues, duplicate content—it finds all of it. For a freelancer, this is one of the fastest ways to demonstrate immediate value to a prospect.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks—links from other websites pointing to a client’s site—remain one of the strongest signals in Google’s algorithm. Semrush’s backlink tools let you see who’s linking to a client’s competitors, which of their articles are earning the most links, and which opportunities exist for building new ones. For content and SEO freelancers, this is particularly valuable.

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Content Marketing Tools

Semrush includes a full suite of content tools, including a topic research feature that surfaces trending content ideas in any niche, an SEO writing assistant that analyzes content in real time, and a content audit tool that evaluates existing pages. These make it much easier to build out content strategies that are actually grounded in what people want to read.

Put all of this together, and you have a platform that gives any freelancer—regardless of their specific specialty—a huge leg up in understanding a client’s digital presence and identifying exactly where their help would make the biggest impact.

The Pre-Call Research Habit That Changes Everything

Here’s the habit I want to challenge you to build: before every discovery call with a potential client, spend 10 to 15 minutes researching them in Semrush.

Most freelancers skip this step entirely. They show up to calls and ask questions like, “So, what are your goals?” or “Who’s your target audience?” Those aren’t bad questions—but they’re questions a stranger asks. They’re not questions an expert asks.

When you do your homework in advance, you can walk in already knowing their goals, already understanding their audience, and already seeing their gaps. Instead of asking generic questions, you’re making specific observations:

“I noticed you’re ranking on page two for —you’re one or two strong pieces of content away from page one, and that’s a significant traffic opportunity.”

“Your top competitor is getting substantial traffic from a type of content you’re not producing at all. That’s worth discussing.”

“Your site has a few technical issues flagged in an audit I ran—things that are likely affecting your search performance right now.”

That’s the kind of thing that makes a potential client lean forward in their seat. It signals that you actually understand what you’re doing. It signals that you’ve already been thinking about their business. And most importantly, it signals that working with you is going to be different from working with the last three freelancers they tried.

This research takes less than 15 minutes. The return on that investment is enormous.

How to Run a Quick Site Audit Before a Client Call

One of the most effective tools in Semrush for freelancers trying to win new business is the Site Audit feature—and using it on a prospect’s website before you ever talk to them can be a genuine game-changer.

The idea is simple: you run Semrush’s crawler on their domain, and it produces a report showing you every technical SEO issue the site has. What you’re looking for—and what you’ll present to the client—is a clear picture of what’s broken or underperforming and how fixing it will help them grow.

Common issues the audit will surface include pages with slow load times (a direct ranking factor), images that haven’t been optimized, Core Web Vitals scores that are dragging down performance, broken internal and external links, missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, and pages with thin or duplicate content.

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Here’s why this is so powerful for sales: every one of these issues is a specific, solvable problem. And when you present those problems to a client—along with a clear explanation of why they matter and how you’d address them—you’ve transformed the conversation. You’re not pitching your services anymore. You’re presenting a diagnosis and proposing a treatment plan.

Clients respond to that very differently than they respond to a portfolio and a rate sheet.

Using Keyword Research to Uncover Real Opportunities for Your Clients

Here’s something worth understanding about most business owners: they have no idea what their potential customers are actually searching for online. They’ve made educated guesses. They’ve gone with their gut. But they’ve rarely looked at the data.

That’s where you come in.

Semrush’s keyword research tools let you quickly identify the terms people in any industry are actively searching—including how often, how competitively, and in what context. Armed with that information, you can show a potential client where their audience is and whether they’re currently showing up to meet them.

Even better, you can identify the gaps: high-value keywords that are getting consistent search volume but that the client isn’t ranking for at all. These are pure opportunities. They represent real people with real intent, actively looking for something the client offers—and not finding them.

When you present this kind of research, you’re not just showing a client what SEO could do for them in theory. You’re showing them a specific map of where their traffic is hiding and how to go get it. That’s a fundamentally different conversation—and it’s the kind of conversation that leads to bigger projects, longer engagements, and better rates.

How to Use Competitor Research to Create an Unfair Advantage

Nothing gets a business owner’s attention faster than competitive intelligence. When you can sit down with a prospect and say, “Here’s exactly what your top competitor is doing online—and here’s where you’re losing to them”—you have their full attention.

Semrush makes this remarkably easy. Enter a competitor’s domain and you’ll see their top organic keywords, their highest-traffic pages, their backlink profile, and their content strategy at a glance. Within a few minutes, you can build a clear picture of what’s working for them and why.

But here’s where the real value comes in for your clients: you’re not just identifying what competitors are doing. You’re identifying what your client could do better.

Maybe a competitor has a high-ranking blog post that’s driving significant traffic, but the post is thin, poorly structured, or out of date. That’s an opportunity to create something more comprehensive and authoritative that could outrank it. In the SEO world, this approach is sometimes called building “skyscraper content”—you find what’s already working, then build something taller.

When you present this kind of specific competitive insight to a potential client, you stop being a vendor they’re evaluating. You become someone who already has a strategy for their growth. That’s an entirely different value proposition—and it commands an entirely different rate.

Building a Backlink Strategy That Impresses Clients

If you’re offering any kind of content, SEO, or digital marketing services as a freelancer, understanding backlinks is non-negotiable. And Semrush’s backlink analysis tools make this area much more approachable than it used to be.

Backlinks—links from external websites pointing to your client’s site—remain one of the most powerful signals in Google’s ranking algorithm. The more authoritative sites that link to a client, the more Google trusts them. And the more Google trusts them, the higher they rank.

With Semrush, you can quickly identify which sites are linking to your client’s competitors and which pieces of content are earning those links. This gives you a clear starting point for a backlink outreach strategy: find the sites that are already linking to similar content in the space, create something even more valuable, and reach out with a genuine, relevant pitch.

This approach works far better than generic outreach because it’s targeted. You’re contacting sites that have already demonstrated interest in linking to content like yours. And when you can say, “I noticed you linked to this article about X—we published a more comprehensive guide that your readers might find even more useful,” that pitch converts at a much higher rate than cold link requests.

More importantly, showing this strategy to a client before they’ve hired you demonstrates that you’ve already been thinking about how to grow their authority. That kind of proactive thinking is rare—and it’s extremely valuable.

Turning SEO Insights Into High-Value Freelance Services

Here’s the bigger picture I want you to see: learning to use a platform like Semrush doesn’t just help you win individual clients. It expands the services you can offer—and by extension, the value you can charge for.

Freelancers who understand SEO and know how to use data intelligently can offer things like comprehensive SEO audits, content strategy development grounded in real keyword research, competitor analysis reports, backlink outreach campaigns, and technical optimization projects. These aren’t one-off deliverables. They’re ongoing strategic services—the kind that lead to long-term retainer relationships instead of one-time projects.

One of the biggest challenges most freelancers face is the feast-famine cycle: you work hard to land clients, then you’re so busy delivering work that you stop marketing, and before long you’re scrambling again. Retainer work is the antidote to that cycle. And offering SEO-driven strategy services is one of the most natural ways to create recurring revenue, because good SEO isn’t a one-time project. It’s an ongoing process that clients need consistently managed.

Think about what this could mean for your business: instead of landing a $2,000 website project, you land a $2,000 website project plus a $1,500/month retainer to manage ongoing SEO and content strategy. That one client now represents $20,000 or more in annual revenue—from a relationship that started with a 15-minute Semrush research session before your first call.

Getting Started Without Feeling Overwhelmed

I’ll be honest: the first time you log into a platform like Semrush, it can feel like a lot. There are a lot of features, a lot of data, and a lot of directions you could go. That’s normal. Don’t let it stop you.

The most effective way to get started is to keep it simple and focus on what’s most useful for client acquisition first. A practical starting workflow looks like this:

Step 1: Run a Site Audit on a Prospect’s Domain

Before your next discovery call, plug the prospect’s URL into Semrush’s Site Audit tool and let it run. Review the top issues it surfaces and pick two or three to mention in your call. You don’t need to understand everything—just enough to have an intelligent, specific conversation.

Step 2: Look Up Their Top Competitors

Use Semrush’s Organic Research tool to identify who’s competing with the prospect for their key search terms. Look at the competitor’s top-performing pages and note what topics seem to be driving their traffic.

Step 3: Identify a Few High-Value Keywords They’re Missing

Use the Keyword Gap tool to compare what the prospect ranks for versus what their competitors rank for. You’ll quickly spot terms competitors are winning that the prospect isn’t targeting. Those are your talking points.

Step 4: Build a Simple One-Page Summary

You don’t need a formal report. Even a simple document summarizing three or four findings—presented professionally—is enough to distinguish you from every other freelancer who showed up to the call without any preparation.

Semrush also has an excellent training academy with courses that walk you through the platform in depth. If you’re serious about adding SEO strategy to your service offerings, it’s worth spending a few hours there. The fundamentals aren’t hard to learn, and the payoff in client confidence and project value is significant.

Making SEO Research a Regular Habit

The freelancers I’ve watched build truly sustainable businesses—people who consistently have full pipelines, strong rates, and clients who stay—have one thing in common: they never stop learning about their clients’ industries.

They don’t just do the research before a pitch and then forget about it. They check in on keyword rankings regularly. They monitor what competitors are publishing. They look for shifts in search trends that might represent new opportunities for their clients. They stay ahead of the curve.

That kind of ongoing intelligence is what transforms a freelancer into an indispensable partner. And when a client sees you as indispensable, they don’t shop around. They don’t negotiate hard on your rate increases. They refer you to other people. They stick around.

Even spending 30 minutes a week reviewing your clients’ SEO data in Semrush is enough to stay informed and generate new ideas. Over time, those small investments compound into something significant: a reputation as someone who’s always ahead of the game, always bringing fresh insights to the table, always earning their keep.

The Bottom Line: Data Turns Freelancers Into Advisors

Here’s the hard truth about competing as a freelancer in today’s market: if you’re only competing on the quality of your execution—your design skills, your code, your writing—you’re competing against an enormous pool of talented people. Many of them charge less than you do. And without a clear differentiator, price becomes the deciding factor for too many clients.

But when you bring strategic intelligence to the table—when you show up to a conversation already knowing what a client’s problems are, already having a clear point of view on how to solve them, and already demonstrating that you’ve been thinking about their growth before they’ve paid you a single dollar—you’re playing a completely different game.

Tools like Semrush make that possible for any freelancer willing to invest a little time in learning how to use them. And the investment is genuinely small compared to the return: better clients, bigger projects, longer engagements, and a business that doesn’t keep you up at night wondering where the next check is coming from.

You’ve got this. Now go do the research.

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