SEMrush : Full Review, Testing, and Presentation (2024)

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is one of best SEO software of the market.

This tool used in the digital marketing helps you run SEO, pay per click (PPC), social media, and content marketing. For this review, we are going to focus on using SEMrush for SEO.

With SEMrush, you can identify trends that are popular in your niche. It checks your On-Page SEO and helps you improve your pages.

Semrush thus allows you to better understand your page and optimize it for SEO in order to better generate leads.

Additionally, SEMrush helps you identify keywords that are useful for your campaign. You'll learn what keywords your competitors use and how they rank in search engines. This allows you to know how you compare to the competition.

This software is designed for people who need help with digital marketing. If you have limited experience or knowledge, SEMrush makes it easy for you to understand and use SEO.

Who is SEMrush for?

SEMrush N'is not the easiest tool at first glance.

Rather, it is suitable for mid-level or advanced entrepreneurs looking to increase their reach, boost their traffic, and get a better return on investment from their efforts.

If you're ready to take your business to new heights and want to really dig in and do the dirty work when it comes to reporting, analytics, data, and tracking, then SEMrush is the tool for you.

It is not simple but is the most powerful tool to date for managing all aspects of your business for SEO. There are numerous alternatives to SEMrush for all levels and uses in the world of SEO.

SEMrush is suitable for:

• Anyone looking to take their site to the next level
• People looking to increase traffic and search engine rankings
• People who want to spy on their competitors and steal the secrets to their success.
• SEO companies that are struggling to increase search engine traffic.
• Busy people who want to do more in less time.

What is SEMrush for?

SEMrush comes with around 50 tools, making it a complete digital marketing toolkit. From SEO tools to paid ads, it provides everything in one place, from social media to content marketing.

To be precise, SEMrush is mostly used for SEO purposes, such as competitor research, keyword research, link building, ranking tracking, website auditing, etc.

In the next section, I'm going to look at each tool in detail and help you better understand SEMrush.

• Huge keyword database.
• The best ranking tracking tool.
• They offer the largest and the fastest backlink database.
• My favorites: technical SEO and On-page SEO tools.
• For competitive analysis - the most accurate data
• Agency Growth Kit
• Local SEO solution - heatmap and feedback management
• App Center - also has various tools on the market to help you get started.

Interface and ease of use

Semrush's interface is similar to those of competing products like Moz and Ahrefs, including a menu of options on the left that you use to access features on the right.

The menu options are grouped into useful categories:

• competitive research,
• Keyword research,
• Creating links,
• Monitoring of the ranking,
• on-page SEO,
• Reports.

There's a lot of data to manage - it may seem overwhelming at first, but you get used to it quickly (and the point of tools like Semrush is, of course, in giving you lots of data).

Additionally, the data visualization provided by Semrush helps you overcome this feeling of overload — most of the metrics provided are represented in the form of graphs that make the information provided much easier to understand.

However, it would be desirable for Semrush's interface to work better with smartphones - as things stand, it's not “responsive,” meaning that if you connect to Semrush on a mobile device, you're seeing the standard computer interface, which means very small text and lots of pinches and zooms.

Using SEMrush is not easy

On the positive side, Semrush offers a mobile application that allows you to access your location tracking data on mobile devices (it scores 3.7 out of 5 in the iOS app store and 3.5 out of 5 in the Google Play store).

However, it would be better if it also gave you access to some of Semrush's other key features.

SEMrush's mobile application for ranking tracking.

Overall, Semrush's interface is laid out intuitively and is simple to use, but you'll need to use a desktop computer rather than a mobile device to get the most out of it.

Why use SEMrush?

If you're looking to run your SEO campaign by yourself, SEMrush is a great piece of software to use. There are a lot of benefits to using SEMrush.

1. Understanding the performance of your site.

When you run an SEO campaign, it takes time to get results. You then wonder if your optimizations are effective. With SEMrush, you'll get an overview of how your campaign is performing.

SEMrush shows you how well your site is performing. You'll see how much traffic you get through organic means (as well as paid traffic). It will show you if you are seeing an increase or decrease in traffic on your site.

You'll also see how you're ranking for keywords. SEMrush will let you know if you are ranking better or lower for the keywords. This allows you to optimize your campaign to continue ranking for your keywords or improve your campaign to rank higher for them.

2. Find valuable keywords.

Keyword selection is an integral part of SEO. When your audience searches, they use keywords to find relevant search results. With SEMrush, you will be able to find interesting keywords for your campaign.

To find the right keywords for your campaign, you're going to do a keyword research. This allows you to generate a list of useful keywords that your business can use.

In general, you should focus on long-range keywords. These are keywords that contain three words or more. Long-tail keywords are better for your SEO campaign because they generate leads that are more relevant to your business.

With SEMrush, you'll also be able to identify the keywords that your competitors are using. This gives you insight into what keywords your business may be missing so you can reach valuable leads.

3. Understanding the competition.

When running an SEO campaign, a big part of your strategy is to monitor your competition. For example, there are dozens of businesses competing for the same keywords, so it's helpful to know what keywords they're looking for.

By using SEMrush, you can learn what your competitors are doing with their SEO campaign. This will help you improve your SEO campaign, in order to surpass them.

It's also helpful to learn from your competitors. Maybe they have keywords that are generating traffic successfully. If you know what they are, you can take advantage of that knowledge and implement these keywords into your own plan.

SEMrush is a valuable tool to help you understand and compete with your competitors. When you know your competitors better, you create more effective strategies.

4. More traffic retention.

When you get valuable traffic, your next goal should be to keep it. You don't want to put in all the effort to get that traffic and then push it away. It is essential that you work hard to keep your potential customers engaged and interested in your page.

With SEMrush, you can choose to track certain locations, monitor keyword positions, connect to Google analytics, and more.

SEMrush offers all the tools you need to satisfy your existing traffic while attracting new traffic to your page.

5. Earning quality backlinks.

Backlinks are a crucial part of your online presence. These are links that you get from authoritative sites. They help improve the authority and trust of your site.

When you get backlinks, you need to earn them from credible and authoritative sites. Google trusts your site more when you get Backlinks established sites that enjoy the trust of the public.

You'll gain more valuable backlinks with SEMrush. This tool allows you to see where you can gain backlinks if you're not already earning them from a particular authority site.

It's also a great way to see what backlinks your competitors are winning. You'll know how many backlinks they have and can use that information to create a better strategy for your business.

Features

SEMrush offers a lot of different features and services, some of which will be better for your business than others based on your unique goals and objectives, but there is definitely a tool that can help you improve your business no matter what your objective is.

See the following descriptions for an overview of each tool and click on the link to find out more.

SEO Tools (SEO Toolkit)

Keyword Research

We've already talked about the importance of keyword research. So it's no surprise that SEMrush offers tools specially designed to help you find the best high-volume, long-tail keywords for your content and website.

SEMrush offers 6 different keyword research tools:

• Keyword Overview: Get access to all the data you need for each keyword you're looking for.
• Organic research: Analyze your competitors' keyword lists to discover new ways to win.
• Keyword Magic Tool: Generate thousands of new keywords from a single initial keyword.
• Keyword Gap: compare the keyword profile of any website with yours to find competitive gaps.
• Keyword manager: Analyze the Metrics for up to 1,000 keywords to keep an eye on your goals.
• Organic traffic analysis: Integrate Google Analytics data with your store data to compare your performance.

Keywords are such an important part of SEO and are an essential part of building a strong web presence for e-commerce businesses and websites, so keyword research tools are so valuable if you want to increase your traffic.

RECOMMENDED READING: Ways to use the SEMrush keyword research tool

On-page SEO

Google's algorithm is constantly changing, so make sure you're up to date using on-page SEO tools. These tools allow you to check if you are meeting your goals in terms of content writing, link building, keyword usage, and many other SEO essentials.

These three tools will ensure that you are doing everything possible to optimize your website for search engines:

• Site Audit: Resolve site issues and improve your SEO with site audits. With this tool, you are in a position to check the health of your SEO strategy, track your SEO progress, improve security, correct mistakes, and more.
• On-page SEO controller: Generates a list of strategies that you can use to improve the SEO of each web page.
• Log file analyzer: Learn how a Google crawler sees your web pages in order to make the necessary changes to facilitate its navigation.

Local SEO

Are you a “local” business in your area? Optimize your website using these local SEO tools to increase your chances of appearing in the search results of people in your area.

• List Management: List your business in major directories like Yelp, Facebook, Google My Business, Amazon Alexa, and TripAdvisor in one quick and easy entry.
• Position tracking: Track your site's position in the SERPs to make sure you're ranking well in the search results and staying there.
• On-page SEO checker: Use this tool to analyze your competitors' strategies and other industry trends to stay relevant.
• Social media toolkit: Publish and schedule your content to be uploaded to multiple different platforms from one place.

Rankings monitoring

Keep an eye on how your website is performing in Google's search results with these ranking tracking tools:

• Position tracking: Track your site's position in the SERPs to make sure you're ranking well in the search results and staying there.
• Sensor: Track changes and updates from Google to predict the impact your site's SEO efforts may have.
• Rankings: Discover the best performing websites so you can compare their performance, keywords, traffic costs, etc.

Building backlinks

Link building is an essential part of SEO strategy, and with these tools, you can discover new backlinks, check current backlinks, create awareness campaigns to get new backlinks, and also track your overall progress.

If you want to take your SEO to the next level, start working on your backlink profile with these tools:

• Backlink Analytics: Discover and track backlinks
• Backlink Audit Tool: Monitor your backlink profile to keep it clean and to make it work for your site.
• Backlink Gap: Find new backlink opportunities by following competing backlink profiles.
• Bulk backlink analysis: Analyze your competitors' backlinks to find new opportunities.
• Link building tool: Launch awareness campaigns to get new backlinks.

SEO analysis of competitors

The hardest part about SEO is getting ahead of the competition. With these tools, you can closely monitor their strategies and tactics in order to find loopholes or gain the upper hand.

• Organic search: Enter your competitor's domain for information on their SEO strategies and tactics.
• Keyword Gap: compare the keyword profile of any website with yours to find competitive gaps.
• Backlink Analytics: Discover and track backlinks
• Backlink Gap: Find new backlink opportunities by following competing backlink profiles.
• My reports: Gather all of your information into a single PDF file that you can share with your team or customers.

Content marketing tools

Content is king when it comes to your website; this is how you will gain a lot of traffic that you can then turn into customers. Content tools are designed to help you create the best content for relevant keywords to draw people to your site like a butterfly to a flame.

Content marketing

Create a super solid content strategy that achieves your goals and attracts attention with these tools:

• Topic Search: Find high-quality content topics that will appeal to your audience
• Marketing calendar: Manage and plan your content calendar with your team
• SEO content model: Get useful recommendations for creating SEO-optimized content that rivals the top ranks for your target keyword.
• SEO writing assistant: check your SEO and readability score to make sure your content is on track.
• Brand marketing: Find the most important people and platforms in your industry to deliver your content.
• Message tracking: Measure the performance of your content or that of your competitors.
• Content Audit: Easily check your content to find out what's working well and what needs to be updated.

Content Creation and Distribution

Use these tools specifically to help you create quality content and deliver it to the public:

• Topic Search: Find high-quality content topics that will appeal to your audience
• Content Market: Find unique pieces of content that you can post on your site.
• Social Media Poster: Share and schedule social messages, then analyze the results.

Content Optimization

Make your content work for you by using these tools:

• SEO content model: Get useful recommendations for creating SEO-optimized content that rivals the top ranks for your target keyword.
• SEO writing assistant: check your SEO and readability score to make sure your content is on track.

Content Marketing Analysis

Keep an eye on the performance of your content so you can update and adapt it as needed:

• Content Audit: Easily check your content to find out what's working well and what needs to be updated.
• Message tracking: Measure the performance of your content or that of your competitors.

Other characteristics

Yes, SEMrush also comes with other notable features that I didn't review in this review. So I'm just listing a few other notable features of SEMrush here.

• Brand mentions: Brand mention functions allow you to monitor mentions of your brand name on - web forums and social networks like Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Article tracking: Article tracking by SEMrush allows you to track backlinks, social shares, as well as keyword rankings for specific items.
• SEMrush sensor: The SEMrush sensor helps you check SERP volatility as well as algorithm change updates.
• Solution for agencies: If you are an agency and looking to develop it further, Sermush has a solution for that as well.
• SEMrush Academy: Yes, the SEMrush Academy offers short courses that you can take to get certified in the following areas: SEO, content marketing, paid advertising, etc.

Market Research Tools (Competitive Research Toolkit)

If you want to be a solid competitor in your industry, you need to keep an eye on your industry. Use market research tools to track and analyze the strategies your competitors are using, so you can come out on top.

Competitor Analysis

Get all the information about your competitors with these tools:

• Traffic analysis: Compare your site's traffic metrics to those of your competitors so you can develop plans and rebuild.
• Organic research: Analyze your competitors' keyword lists to discover new ways to win.
• Advertising research: Improve your advertising campaigns by gaining insight into the strategies of your competitors.
• Brand monitoring: Stay up to date with who mentions you and what they're saying. You can even track the mentions of your competitors in order to target them and possibly find new distribution channels for your brand.
• Social Media Tracker: Analyze your competitors' social media, track your audience's preferences, and discover new ways to increase engagement.

Market analysis

These tools allow you to get an idea of the competitive landscape in your market:

• Market Explorer: Learn about the size and potential of the market, key players, and traffic generation strategies.
• Traffic analysis: Compare your site's traffic metrics to those of your competitors so you can develop plans and rebuild.

Paid advertising

Learn what keywords and texts your competitors are using in their PPC advertising campaigns:

• Keyword Magic Tool: Generate thousands of new keywords from a single initial keyword.
• Advertising research: Improve your advertising campaigns by gaining insight into the strategies of your competitors.
• Display advertising: Analyze how other businesses create successful display ads
• PLA advertising: Analyzing the performance of Google Shopping advertisers

Monitoring your Competitors' ads

Keep an eye on the online mentions and social media presence of your competitors:

• Brand monitoring: Stay on top of who mentions you and what they're saying. You can even monitor the mentions of your competitors in order to target them and possibly find new distribution channels for your brand.
• Message tracking: Measure the performance of your content or that of your competitors.
• Social Media Tracker: Analyze your competitors' social media, track your audience's preferences, and discover new ways to increase engagement.

Advertising Toolkit

Make sure your ads have the best chance of succeeding by using these tools.

PPC Keyword Research

For example, create your ideal PPC advertising campaign (PPC Campaign) with these tools:

• Keyword Magic Tool: Generate thousands of new keywords from a single initial keyword.
• Keyword manager: Analyze metrics for up to 1,000 keywords to keep an eye on your goals.
• Keyword Gap: compare the keyword profile of any website with yours to find competitive gaps.
• PPC keyword tool: Create the most successful PPC campaigns by building the perfect list of keywords.

The PPC Campaign tool is a perfect ally!

Monetizing the Website

Monetize your audience to the best of your ability using these powerful tools:

• Display advertising: Analyze how other businesses create successful display ads
• On-page SEO controller: Generates a list of strategies that you can use to improve the SEO of each web page.
• SEO writing assistant: check your SEO and readability score to make sure your content is on track.

Market analysis

The market analysis module allows you to have a good overview of your competitors and advertising research.

This module includes various useful tools that you can use, such as: domain overview, advertising research, display advertising, PLA research.

Domain overview modules allow you to get the current performance of your competitors' websites, such as organic and paid advertising keywords, traffic, and other useful metrics.

There is an advertising research module that allows you to get an inside view of the advertising strategies of your competitors.

Yes, this tool is useful, and it allows you to identify their strengths and weaknesses to easily improve your paid advertising campaigns.

The team often uses this feature to see what our competitors are doing and what type of strategy they are applying.

To start using the tool, you need to enter the domain or URL.

For example, here I'm taking the example of the HubSpot domain, they're bidding for about 1K keywords, and they're getting 38.4k traffic from these campaigns.

On the dashboard, you'll see useful metrics like position, keywords, traffic cost (cost per click), position changes, competitors, ad copies, ad history, ad history, pages, subdomains, and more.

Pro tip: By forgetting ad copy ideas, you can simply check ad copy, where you'll find all the ad copies your competitors are targeting.

For each ad copy, you'll find all the keywords they're targeting and other useful details.

Apart from that, SEMrush also comes with keyword research modules that are exactly the same as the ones I explained earlier in this review.

By using the keyword research module, you can easily find easy keywords for your paid advertising campaigns.

There's a useful tool that's new to this section: ad history.

Once you open the ad history search section, you'll see domains, ad traffic, ad keywords, and the timeline.

This ad history report will show you the keyword research report, which contains all the domains that bid on a queried keyword.

And it also lets you know if they have PPC ads in any of Google's top 8 positions.

Social Media Toolkit

Social media management is now essential for any business. So use these tools to make your social media strategy as easy and effective as possible.

• Post for social networks: Schedule and manage posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google My Business from one place in order to save time and always have content ready to use.
• Social media ads: Create, launch, and manage ads on ad platforms facebook. Visualize your low-performing ads in order to adjust and improve them.

Semrush Sensor

In addition to allowing you to check the status of an individual website from an SEO perspective, Semrush also provides a tool - “Semrush Sensor” - to check how the internet is doing general behaves when it comes to search results.

The Semrush sensor tracks the volatility of Google search results to watch for any signs that could indicate an update to the Google algorithm.

This allows you to put fluctuations in your own rankings into a larger context.

Semrush Sensor provides volatility figures globally, or by niche - and you can also set up your own “personal sensor.”

The latter is based on a set of keywords that you have entered for position tracking purposes - if there are significant fluctuations in your rankings, the personal sensor will let you know.

SEMrush Social Media

To be honest, I don't use social media tools a lot.

For the social media management , I use different tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.

Well, I asked my team to try out the social media tool just for that through the SEMrush review.

Yes, I found it very useful for people who want to excel at social media marketing.

SEMrush Social Media

Yes, the social media toolkit allows you to create, analyze, and deliver engaging content.

You can easily schedule your posts, get information, track your competitors, and strengthen your posts.

And the best part is that you can also create ads that are in beta mode at the moment.

For now, in fact, SEMrush only supports the following social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google My Business.

Rates

SEMrush offers a free version of its services, as well as a 7-day free trial for all plans.

To get access to all of their tools, sign up for one of their paid plans.

For example, what's included in the free SEMrush account:

• Daily search for competitors or keywords or a given keyword with up to 10 new queries per day
• 10 daily searches in the Keyword Magic Tool and receive 10 rows of results for each search
• Ability to create and manage a Semrush project
• Track 10 keywords with position tracking
• Audit 100 pages of your site with Site Audit
• 10 SEO Idea units per month
• 2 Research on topics
• Appendix 1 PDF report

For up-to-date information on paid plans, check out their pricing page.

Which SEMrush plan is best for you?

The Pro plan is suitable for freelancers and bloggers as it has all the essential and advanced features you need to excel in your SEO and marketing game.

On the other hand, the Guru plan is suitable for smaller marketing agencies and affiliate marketers looking to take advantage of SEO and organic traffic for a few websites.

Indeed, this plan is also suitable for you if you are looking to improve your paid search game.

And the business plan is more suitable for agencies that want to become SEO and marketing aces for their clients.

Note: SEMrush also comes with a 7-day money-back guarantee. For example, if you don't like the services, you can ask for a refund.

Customer support

SEO tools like Semrush tend to be quite complex by nature, so the availability and format of customer support are key elements for potential users.

The good news is that Semrush offers three customer support channels: phone, email, and chat. This is in positive contrast to competing products, which don't all offer phone support (Moz and Majestic don't even offer chat support).

And, unlike other SaaS products, Semrush makes sure that its contact information is fairly easy to find - a help chat box is visible at the corner of each page, and a phone number is prominently featured in the footer of the Semrush website.

There's no need to go through the boring stage of looking through our help pages before showing you a phone number - help is immediate.

Alternatives

Here is the complete list of alternatives to SEMrush.

I would say that there are only a few alternatives to SEMrush.

The reason is that SEMrush is a complete suite of digital marketing tools, from SEO to content marketing and from social media to paid advertising — it has everything to offer.

However, there are a few SEMrush alternatives that you should try once.

• Ahrefs - starting at $99 per month.
• Mangools - Starting at $29/month.
• Ubersuggest - starting at $12/month.
• SEO Powersuite - $320/year.
• Moz Pro - Starting at $99/month.
• Google Search Console - Free

FAQs

How does Semrush collect data?

Semrush uses its own machine learning algorithms and trusted data providers to present data.

To learn more about how Semrush collects data, check out this Semrush knowledge base resource.

What is the authority score in Semrush?

Semrush uses the Authority Score to measure the impact of links on a web page or domain.

It is similar to Domain Authority used by Moz and Domain Rating by Ahrefs.

How often does SEMrush update its data?

SEMrush uses a live update algorithm to update all of its databases on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

The more popular a keyword is, the more frequently it is updated.

For example, they update 3 million keywords per day in their database in the United States alone.

Final Verdict

While SEMrush is not a tool for the new entrepreneur, the services it offers are powerful, robust, comprehensive, and informative.

Indeed, they have all the tools a seasoned entrepreneur needs to dive into the bowels of their business, whether it's SEO strategy, backlinks, content performance, social media engagement, brand mentions, keywords, keywords, domain authority, advertising campaign optimization, and much more.

If your business is weak in one or more of these areas, SEMrush tools can help you get a detailed, raw look at where your problems are so you can adjust your course of action, improve your strategy, and make better decisions for the future of your business.

Also to read: SEMrush vs Ubersuggest Comparison