Y&Y
Y&Y
Guided workflows that turn hours of manual SEO work into a few clicks.
About Semrush
Semrush is a leading SEO and digital marketing platform helping businesses improve their online visibility.
Context
Semrush has powerful data, but getting to an answer takes too many steps. Users were getting lost before they got value.
AI raised the bar.
Marketers started expecting faster answers, less manual work, more automation. The tools they used daily were changing. Semrush needed to change with them.
The goal
Make complex SEO tasks simpler and faster, without adding more complexity to the platform.
My Role
I led the project from discovery through launch, driving research, product strategy, MVP definition, UX design, validation, and delivery.
Discovery
Semrush runs research continuously across many teams, so this project already had inputs to build on. As AI and automation surged, an existing large-scale study had mapped exactly which parts of SEO users were ready to automate. That became our starting point, and told us what users most wanted simplified.
Hypothesis
Take the most popular, core tools and simplify them as far as possible, simpler setup, simpler report, then validate qualitatively how users react.
Even seasoned SEO specialists (5+ years) found it hard to know how to work and what to do. The goal was to strip out the complexity and keep the essentials, without losing actionability.
The existing tool in Semrush
It's complex for users with little experience, who need to know exactly what to do and how.
The same functionality, inside a workflow
As you can see, it's stripped down to the essentials, but without losing actionability.
Alpha testing, 3 initial workflows. Mixed results, but the findings were genuinely useful.
To prioritize, we assessed workflow frequency of use, skill requirements, and time cost. This process revealed three focused workflows.
2 of the 3 workflows were just a simplification of information that already existed in Semrush. That didn't work, users said they had already seen it. The remaining workflow was new: that kind of information isn't easy to find, and it drew a lot of positive feedback.
New workflows testing. 10 in-depth interviews • 40 min each • 3 SEO specialists + 7 non-SEO users.
9 out of 10 users accepted AI-powered, non-SEO workflows as a natural fit for Semrush, validating the product's potential beyond the core SEO audience.
Research insight
AI workflows earn user trust not by using AI, but by showing something the user couldn't see before. This became the filter for every subsequent design decision.
MVP Definition
Discovering uncovered areas of automation opportunities.
The landing page presents a library of predefined SEO jobs.
Each workflow clearly communicates:
Users wanted to understand what happens after clicking Run Workflow.
To make the process transparent, the setup shows:
The goal is not to show more information, but to help users make progress.
Design Principles
If users could find it elsewhere in Semrush, we rethought it.
Users always asked "what do I do now?" We stopped linking out. We put the answer next to the data.
Test concepts before building them, not to spend a lot of time.
The product validated AI workflow automation as a scalable direction for Semrush.
Without a single marketing email, launch announcement, or in-product push:
As a result, the product evolved around guided workflows designed to reduce manual work, simplify research, and help users move from analysis to action faster.
Not every workflow generated meaningful adoption.
Some concepts that seemed promising showed limited demand after launch, reinforcing an important principle:
The challenge is not building more workflows. It's building the right workflows.
As new workflows were introduced, users had more reasons to return to the product and incorporate it into their day to day work.
The success of the initial release led to continued investment in new workflows, some of which later achieved retention rates above 80%.
The learnings from this project also influenced future AI initiatives across the Semrush ecosystem.
