The Best of SEMrush 2018: Learn From Our Top Guest Authors

This year our guest authors blew us away with the time and effort they put into writing, and with the outstanding information they provided in their articles. Last year we chose the best article for each month, but we couldn't do that this year — there was too much greatness. There is so much to learn from the following articles; I highly suggest you scroll through them and learn from a fantastic group of experts. 

On behalf of the editing team, I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone that contributed to the blog this year. We love learning from you, and we know how much effort you put into creating your articles. What I said last year perfectly sums up how our team feels:

"You are the backbone of our blog and your willingness to share your strategies and insights are truly awe-inspiring to our entire team. We thank you all and are honored to work with you."

Search Intent

The Complete Guide: How to Identify Intent in Search

by Anna Corbett — @AnnaAppenzeller

How to Use Search Intent for Your Business 

by Chris Beck — @BeckCr6

Snippets

How to Earn Google Featured Snippets for Mobile: Large-scale Study 

by A.J. Ghergich — @SEO

Advanced Techniques to Be the Featured Snippet: Position 0 — a Guide

by Jason Barnard — @jasonmbarnard

Analytics and Analysis

How to Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Land High-Quality Guest Posts

by Dustin Christensen — LinkedIn

Google Analytics Guide: 10 Actionable Tips to Boost Your Traffic and Ranking by Baruch Labunski — @Baruch_Labunski

How to Increase Organic Traffic to a Page Through UX Analysis

by Luca Tagliaferro — LinkedIn

Brand SERPs You Really Should Be Tracking (and Improving)

by Jason Barnard — @jasonmbarnard

Step-By-Step Guide: SEO Pruning with SEMrush

by Kevin Indig — @Kevin_Indig

SEO

TF-IDF: Advanced On-Page Optimization 

by Christina Sanders — @ChristinaHSan

7 Ways to Fail at International SEO

by Aleyda Solis — @Aleyda

Learning Technical SEO

by Kevin Indig — @Kevin_Indig

Using SEO to Drum Up and Automate Lead Generation

by Helvis Smoteks — @Linkody

Here Are 7 Killer Steps on How to Win at Local SEO

by Paul Paquin — @PaulJPaquin

Everything You Need To Know About Voice Search For A Powerful SEO Strategy

by Chris Giarratana — @CJGiarratana

Strategy 

How to Protect a #1 Ranking (When Your Pesky Competitors Are Trying to Take You Down)

by Hunter Branch — @RankTree

Are You Making These 9 Common Google My Business Mistakes?

by Jason Brown — @keyserholiday 

What NOT To Do When Writing a Meta Description 

by Gabka Koscova — @Gabkaa

How to Increase Your Click Through Rate With Emojis

by Garrett Mehrguth — LinkedIn

Content

Want Authority Backlinks? 5 Strategies for Creating Link-Worthy Content

by Jawad Khan — @WritingMDestiny

How to Make Your Blog One-of-a-Kind In a Niche

by Lesley Vos — @LesleyVos

Social Media

Your Best Content Should Reside...On Instagram?

by Ksenia Emelyanova — LinkedIn

7 Ways To Increase Your Organic Facebook Reach

by Alexander Porter — @SearchItSocial

How to Host a Successful Reddit AMA

by Brent Csutoras — @brentcsutoras

PPC

How to Skyrocket Profit on Google Ads (6 Best Ways)

by Paul Paquin — @PaulJPaquin

9 Common (and Costly) Google Ads Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

by Shirish Agarwal — @shirish_aga

Marketing

How To Create An Express Content Benchmark With SEMrush In Under An Hour

by Ying Lin — LinkedIn

Landing Page Considerations For High-Involvement Decisions

by Shirish Agarwal — @shirish_aga

Email Personalization Advancements: Emails in the Era of Hyper-Personalization

by Kevin George — @emailmonks

Ecommerce

How to Stop Losing Shoppers During Checkout

by Maria Borysova — LinkedIn

Understanding the Content Marketing Funnel For Ecommerce Businesses

by Greg Shuey — @Shuey03

You Can Write For Us In 2019!

We are making a lot of changes to our blog in 2019, and we are constantly on the lookout for true experts that live in the trenches day in and day out. These are the people that can offer true value, valid strategies, and experienced insights. 

The criteria for publication is not easy, but if you are willing to work with us to make your articles better, we promise to do our best to promote you and your work throughout our community, and the industry. If you would like to contribute, please review our publishing guidelines before submitting.

We have two main priorities:

1. Educate our readers.
2. Be a resource for our community.

We also want to thank our SEMrush columnists for their hard work this year. Columnists are chosen based on their experience, writing ability, and successes for writing for our blog, and we are looking for more columnists in 2019. If you had a favorite SEMrush article this year, please let us know which one it was in the comments below.