SEMrush Review: The Best Overall Marketing Tool?

In this SEMrush review, we’re going to cover why SEMrush is the best data tool on the market for online business owners and web entrepreneurs.

We cover:

  • Features (the bulk of it, as there are dozens)
  • Pricing (three tiers for the solopreneur all the way up to large organizations)
  • Pros and cons
  • How you can access a Free Trial

 

semrush

SEMrush

 


 

If you are building a new website and trying to drive traffic to your site, or attempting to take an established blog to the next level, you know it can be a difficult task.

Not only is the competition stiff but Google is regularly changing the ranking algorithm in ways that force site owners to adapt and never get complacent about their progress.

The good news is that there are tools you can use to see what your competitors are doing to rank on the first page of Google and other search engines.

One of the most advanced tools for this purpose is SEMrush.

 

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is an SEO tool that helps to optimize your site for search engines. It’s one of the most popular SEO tools as it offers website owners such a broad array of information.

With this info, you can create content that will help you drive traffic, identify opportunities for link building, and change the technical aspects of your site so that it ranks high in the SERPs.

In simple terms, this SEO tool does all the hard work for you and you don’t have to keep testing what works and what doesn’t.

To get a clear picture of the capabilities of SEMrush, and its limitations, we’ve piece together this SEMrush review.

 

SEMrush Features

SEMrush has practically everything you will ever need in an SEO tool. If you are serious about building a great online business, using just one of the dozens of excellent features can make the tool pay for itself many times over.

Its features allows you to do the following tasks in the various categories:

 


SEO

Competitive Research

Keyword Research

Link Building

Rank Tracking

On Page & Tech SEO

SEMrush

Advertising

Market Analysis

Keyword Research

Advertising Services

Ad Tracking

Social Ads

Social Media

Content Marketing

Competitive Research

 


Domain analysis

For your SEO project to succeed, you will need to do a domain analysis. The goal of domain analysis is to provide you with an overview of the domain quality from an SEO point of view.

You can do a domain analysis on your site to determine if there are areas where you can improve.

Alternatively, you can carry out domain analysis to determine how easy or difficult it is to outrank your competitors in the search results.

Doing a domain analysis on a site will also help you determine if it’s worth approaching the owner to get a link from the site.

This is important as external links from the high-quality sites to your website will help to improve its ranking relative to your competition.

To do a domain analysis, you need to enter your site in the search bar and click on Domain Overview. This will provide you with a detailed overview of your site.

 

semrush domain overview

 

Website audit

Before you try ranking on the search engines, you will need to carry out a site audit.

SEMrush can give you a clear picture of the performance of your site. During the site audit, the SEO tool will look for issues that may be slowing down your site, hurting your ranking. These include:

  • Content that loads slowly
  • Crawl errors
  • Duplicate content
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Missing headers
  • SSL problems

 

The on-page SEO checker will go through your entire site and give tips on how to improve each page. They will provide suggestions on:

  • Keywords you should add
  • Steps you can use to make your page appear on the featured snippet of Google
  • Websites you can contact for link building
  • Content length
  • Strategies to use for linking

 

Competitive analysis

SEMrush has made it extremely easy for you to analyze your competition. To carry out competitive analysis, you should click on:

Domain Analysis>Show entire menu>organic search>Competitors. You will get very detailed information on:

After you determine who your competition is, you can choose three sites. You can then press on ctrl and click on the link’s site. This will provide you with a domain overview of the site.

You will get information such as top keywords, number of backlinks, who their competition is, and how they perform in the search engine rankings.

You can also get detailed information on the organic search performance of your competition. You can see graphs that allow you to see details like the new keywords they are targeting or the link building tactics they are employing.

SEMrush will show all the keywords your competition is ranking for and the one they are trying to rank for.

 

Keywords research

SEMrush also offers a detailed keyword analysis that allows you to drill down the long-tail keywords.

It will also give you keyword suggestions from a phrase you enter that you can use to write blog posts that will do well on the search engine. It will also show you keywords that are easy to rank for.

Some of the details you will get under keyword research include:

  • Number of people who are searching for the keyword
  • How hard it is to rank for the keyword
  • Who is ranking for that particular keyword
  • Keyword suggestions

On top of this data, SEMrush will provide you with information such as the volume and cost per click, and SERP analysis. To use the keyword analytic tool click on Keyword Analytics>Overview.

 

keyword analytics semrush

 

You can then enter a keyword in the search bar and press enter.

 

Backlink analysis

Backlink analysis is another great tool from SEMrush.

For your SEO project to be successful, you will need to pick up other quality links to your site. This is because sites with more quality links are rewarded with better rankings by Google and other search engines compared to those with fewer quality links.

The SEMrush link building tool will help you determine who your competition is, ask for the keywords you are trying to rank for, examine your site’s content, and determine your competition and why they are ranking well.

The SEO tool will then provide you with a list of sites that they think you should approach for a guest posting opportunity.

With the backlink analysis feature, you can see the anchor text used for the backlink, details on the IP address of your backlinks, top-level domain distribution (number of .com, .org. gov links and more), and so on.

You will see the value of the backlinks and when a domain has gained or lost backlinks.

 

Content marketing tool

If you opt for the Guru plan or higher, SEMrush will give you access to several content marketing and content analysis tools that will help you to:

  • Suggest topics to write about that are gaining traction among other sites
  • Complete an SEO audit of your content
  • Identify the keywords used your competitor’s content
  • Determine when your brand gets mentioned.

The SEO writing assistant will enable you to copy your written content or paste an URL into SEMrush for real-time advice.

SEMrush will provide you with suggestions on ways to increase its performance on the search engines. The SEO tool can advise you to increase or decrease the number of words and recommend keywords to add to the content.

 

Rank/position tracking

With rank tracking, you can track the performance of your site in the search engines for a certain keyword. You can do that by visiting the rank tracker part, entering the dimension section, and the keywords you are trying to track.

You will get a report on the performance of your site in those keywords. With time, you can monitor if there is an improvement to your ranking on SEMrush.

With the SEMrush tracker tool, you can compare the performance of your site for a particular keyword, its performance against the competitor.

Finally, you will regularly get emails on the progress of your rank tracking.

 

Broken link building

With broken link building, SEMrush will find broken links that don’t lead anywhere.

The site will recreate that dead content it was repointing to and ask anybody who had linked to the dead content to link to your instead. With this new approach, you can build new backlinks to your site.

To use this feature, you will need to start by doing a full audit of your competitor’s site and click on a checkbox that will identify any URL errors.  You can then create an outreach list that allows you to contact the owner of the domain.

 

Advertising research

You have seen how you can improve your organic ranking using the SEMrush tool.

If you want to see your paid competition, the SEO tool still has you covered.

SEMrush also has an interesting tool that enables you to see the monetary value of your traffic each month. This is taken by multiplying the traffic volume of the queries by their CPC value.

To see your competition, you will need to click on Domain Analytics followed by View Entire Menu, Advertising, and then Competition.

You should add your domain to the search field at the page top.

This will show you:

  • The number of keywords you are competing for
  • The competition for the keyword
  • Traffic is driven by the keyword
  • The ad spend of the competition

 

Keyword gap

The keyword feature that compares your ranking with several competitors.

It can also help to understand any “white space” in your niche. Where is there demand but relatively little competition that you can take advantage of to serve your audience?

The goal is to help you find keywords that the majority of your competitors are ranking for in Google and those that you can compete for. In this case, you want to use sites that are either standard competition (e.g., relative equals) or leaders in the space to help understand what’s working.

 

Pricing

The majority of the leading SEO tools are usually expensive. SEMrush’s options span different levels.

For the solopreneur to the large marketing agency or Fortune 500 company, there are options for everybody depending on what kind of service tier would be most appropriate for your business. But like you have already seen, the SEO tools offer a wide range of data such as competitor intelligence.

There are three pricing plans for SEMrush. These include:

  • Pro which costs $99 per month
  • Guru which costs $199 per month
  • Business which costs $399 per month

You can get a 7-day Free Trial.

 

Pros and cons

The benefits and drawbacks of SEMrush:

Pros

  • Easy to use and intuitive, little learning curve
  • Massive range of great features for webmasters and internet entrepreneurs
  • Provides a variety of data
  • Great tool for outreach
  • A large number of daily reports for all paid plans
  • Offers a free trial period

Cons

  • You can only include one user account
  • Provides data from one search engine only (Google)
  • Not mobile-friendly for those looking to do analysis on the go
  • Site traffic estimates may not be accurate

 

SEMrush

Final Thoughts on SEMrush

SEMrush has almost every feature you need for your SEO campaigns.

It is truly an all-in-one SEO tool that can provide you with mountains of important data in one location.

Whether you want to carry out a site audit, backlinks, or position tracking, SEMrush has something for you. We personally use the “Guru” plan and get our money’s worth every month many times over as a content blog.

We particularly like the keyword research tool that very intuitive and easy to navigate. With this feature, you can see changes in your rankings and compare it with your competition.

If you are serious with your SEO campaigns, this is one tool that is as as close to a must-have as any in the industry. There’s a reason why six million marketers use SEMrush.

 

semrush

SEMrush

 

 

SEMrush: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is Moz or SEMrush better?

We prefer SEMrush as it's more versatile and has more features. It contains PPC in addition to SEO. SEMrush is the better overall value for those looking to do a lot of keyword and backlink research.

Is SEMrush free?

They offer a free 7-day trial for the first- and second-tier plans (Pro and Guru). You can also use it on a limited basis for free, but will have limited use of the features and the ability to pull data.

Which is better? SEMrush or Ahrefs?

SEMrush has a larger domain database and has better site auditing features. Both are great to have. If you could choose just one, we'd probably go with SEMrush.

How much does SEMrush cost?

The Pro plan (startups, freelance marketers) starts at $99.95 per month. The Guru plan (best value, in our view) for small and medium businesses goes for $199.95 per month. The Business plan for marketing agencies and those with extensive web presence costs $399.95 per month. There are also custom solutions available for bigger companies who have greater data needs.

Is SEMrush worth it?

If you have any type of online business, just using one feature is probably worth the monthly cost alone. For those trying to use free tools only, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are good sources of information, but are limiting in the type of data they provide.

Is SEMrush accurate?

The traffic figures from sites like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and SimilarWeb are reasonable proxies, but as third-party estimates they won't be perfect. For the most accurate reading possible, you'll need access to Google Analytics.

What are some SEMrush competitors that are worth looking at?

You can also consider Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest.