If you are a webmaster or in SEO for quite some time, you would surely have heard about SEMrush. I have also got a lot of queries and feedback requests for SEMrush, so I thought to write an article on this. In this article of SEMrush review, we will be going through this toolkit and what it has to offer & SEMrush pricing.I have been blogging for more than 8 years and have tried many SEO tools over the period but I must say that SEMrush is one of the best blogging tools out there in the market. Let’s explore it more.
SEMrush Review – What is SEMrush?
SEMRush is a renowned all-in-one search engine optimization, competitor analysis, and marketing toolkit that consists of various tools to help webmasters and marketers at various levels. It is a go-to tool for many digital marketing experts to help them manage their brand’s/website’s online visibility. SEMrush was launched back in 2008 and has been in the market for so long now. It is recognized as the best SEO suite according to US Search Awards (2019), SEMY Awards 2019 & MENA Search Awards (2019). Here are a few more stats about SEMrush (at the time of writing this article)-
- 6,000,000 Users
- 810,344,707 domains
- 20,009,888,995 keywords
- 31,324,000,000,000 backlinks
- 45 Tools & Reports
- 142 GEO Databases
It shows that SEMrush is well known and highly trusted by internet marketers everywhere.
SEMrush Review – SEMrush Toolkit: An Overview Of Useful Tools & Features
SEMrush toolkit has all the required tools to boost your blog rankings and increase traffic on your blog. You can use it to find profitable keywords, optimize your content, spy on your competition, optimize your backlink profile, and so on. We will explore every single feature it has to offer in this SEMrush review article. Let’s dive in now.
1) Site Audit
SEMrush Site Audit is perhaps the most intensive and efficient SEO analysis & site audit tool. I know there are other online tools also available to perform audits but they don’t give you accurate or enough information to work upon. Here in SEMrush, you can do an on-page SEO audit and also analyze the technical SEO of your site. It scans your website for 130+ technical & SEO mistakes including site structure, internal linking, broken links, crawl depth, speed, and many others. Below is the snapshot for your reference.
You can see how powerful a site audit is. It has given us so many actionable items to work upon for better ranking of my website including Website Health, Errors/Warning/Notices, Internal Linking, Site Performance, Statistics of Crawled pages, etc. It also helps you to Detect error pages, deal with duplicate content, optimize your internal/external links, optimize HTML tags, correct broken links and images, etc.
SEMrush Site Audit also helps in fixing hreflang, and making sure the site is secure and does not have any AMP implementation issues.
You can switch to different tabs to get more data and take necessary actions accordingly.
You can set this Site Audit to run periodically so that SEMrush sends you audit reports straight to your inbox.
Also Read: Link Whisper – Best WordPress Internal Linking Plugin
2) Keyword Research
The first and foremost thing in order to write content is doing proper keyword research and SEMrush is a super effective keyword research tool.
Using SEMrush, you can find the best-performing keywords for your article to increase your search traffic. It can help you in finding the most profitable keywords in any niche. You just need to enter a keyword related to your article and SEMrush offers you the most accurate data about the specific keyword you enter. The good thing is you can enter multiple keywords (up to 100) in one go (as shown below) –
To explain more, I removed the first two keywords and kept only “Best SEO Tools” and clicked on the Analyze button. You can see the details SEMrush has given for this keyword –
It has given the following useful details –
- Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) Analysis
- Long Tail Keywords to Choose (What are Long Tail Keywords?)
- CPC – (Average cost to advertise for the keyword)
- Keyword Difficulty – An index that shows you how difficult it would be to outrank your competitors in Google’s top 20 for a given keyword),
- Search Traffic
- URL keywords
- Total Search volume (Estimation of monthly searches to help you assess potential search engine traffic for a given keyword).
- Keyword Variations (total of 577 keywords),
- Related keywords (1981 more keywords) &
- Questions based keywords
With these details, you can easily finalize whether the keywords you enter are a perfect match for your article or not.
Another tool provided for Keyword research is – Keyword Magic Tool. Once you hop on to this, you can categorize it on its match – Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match, etc to focus your research. You can also export these details for further analysis or upload it to Google Ads. Here is the snapshot of the same –
Some more stats –
· SEMrush has 20B keywords in its database
· 14M ideas for a single keyword
· Keyword Magic was named the Best Digital Tool at PubCon 2019 Interactive Marketing Awards
3) Position Tracking tool
Once we have finalized the keywords and written an article on them, the next thing to check is how they are behaving in the search engines. SEMrush provides a handy tool called a Position Tracking tool to track the website ranking changes and position of our keywords. This data is updated daily so you’ll always have accurate information in regards to where you’re ranking for your target keywords at all times. It also sends weekly updates on how we are ranking for these keywords along with competitors’ rankings.
Below is a snapshot of a few of the keywords I have been analyzing at this moment.
Here you can see one brilliant feature – SERP Features which shows all the various SERP Features the keyword is triggering and who has those SERP Features. You can expand and go through the keywords to see what are improvements needed for them. This is a wonderful tool to measure your SEO efforts. Apart from this, the Keyword Position Tracking tool also gives you –
- Visibility Trend (Based on CTR to show the website’s progress in Google’s top 100)
- Estimated Traffic (Based on Average CTR of each position in Google’s results)
- Average Position (Average of all your keywords added in Position tracking campaign)
- Ranking Distribution (The distribution of the domain’s organic rankings over time)
- Top Keywords (Best Performing Keywords of your domain)
- Positive/Negative impact (Keywords for which your site’s rankings increased/decreased the most in the selected time period)
4) On-Page SEO Checker
On-Page SEO Checker is one of my favorite features that I cannot miss in this SEMrush review. It helps you to analyze the keyword & pages on your website. You can add or import them into your SEMrush project. It analyzes your content to see if your content complies with all of the on-page and off-page SEO elements, like page title, Heading tags, meta description, content’s relevancy, and quality, backlinks, etc. & provides you actionable strategies to implement on your content. Below are various optimization ideas it provides to increase your traffic –
- Strategy Ideas
- SERP Features Ideas
- Backlinks Ideas
- Semantic Ideas
- Technical SEO Ideas
- Content Ideas
- User Experience Ideas
It also enables you to benchmark your content metrics to that of competitors.
5) Backlink Audit
Backlinks are one of the important aspects of SEO. It has been proved as one of the ranking signals for the search engines to determine the quality of the web pages. SEMrush has a robust backlink analysis tool called Backlink Audit tool to help you in backlink analytics. In this, you just need to enter the domain and SEMrush will audit all of your backlinks through their integration with Google search, Google Analytics.
If you want to analyze numerous domains at once, then you can use the Bulk Analysis feature. You can add up to 200 domains and get their backlinks overviews in one dashboard.
It will show you all the Backlinks, Anchor texts, Referring domains, Referring IPs, Lost & Found Backlinks, etc.
Along with this, it will give you the domain authority score and will analyze the nature & toxicity of your backlinks. Toxicity is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with the latter being “very toxic.” It categorizes them in below categories
- Toxic
- Potentially Toxic
- Non-Toxic
A backlink may be considered toxic if the linking domain:
- Has a suspicious or generally unhealthy backlink profile
- Is non-indexed or recently penalized by Google
- Uses over-optimized anchor texts
- Has low trustworthiness and domain authority
- Has an unusually long, spammy, or over-optimized name
You can review your most toxic backlinks to prevent Google penalties. You can reach out to the website owner to get a backlink removed, disavow (from Google) or whitelist it in one click.
You can also individually go through each of the backlinks that SEMrush has analyzed and examine the toxic scores. You can either decide to keep the backlinks or delete them by adding them to the disavow list.
I recommend performing the backlink audit on a periodic basis as it is very crucial and you need to be proactive about your backlink health. Toxic backlinks can impact your site in a great way.
You can also use the Backlink Gap tool to compare multiple domains and find backlink opportunities. It compares your website with competitors’ websites and finds prospects for gaining new backlinks.
6) Social Media Toolkit
Social Media is an important factor to gain online visibility. SEMrush provides you full-fledged social media toolkit which lets you manage the social media campaigns from here itself.
It offers two tools –
a) Social Media Tracker
b) Social Media Poster
Social Media Tracker
In this, you can add your social media accounts. Once you have added your accounts, you can see how they are performing and various stats available for them. Below is a snapshot of my site (I’ve added Twitter & Facebook for now)
Note: At the time of writing this article, SEMrush provides you the option to add Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest for your SEMrush project.
Here, you can see it is showing various stats such as Followers/Subscribers, Posts/Videos and Engagement, etc. It also brings your top content (by total engagement & engagement rate) & Comparison with your competitors in terms of audience, activity & engagement.
You can switch to your accounts tab to get more information.
Social Media Poster
The other tool in the SEMrush Social Media toolkit kitty is – Social Media Poster. It helps you to manage posts on your various social media accounts. You can schedule posts at a specific time, periodic interval such as every day, week & month, etc. It also has the facility to add posts in the first available time slot in a queue.
Once you connect your social accounts, you can see all the scheduled posts, published posts, drafts, etc.
You can add a new post as shown below:
Another good thing provided here is – Chrome Extension. It enables you to post articles, tweets, and even plain text with a simple click. It even shortens long links via its integration with Bitly to allow you to post easily on Twitter.
7) Organic Traffic Insights
Organic Traffic insights help you to get detailed information about your traffic. It syncs your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to bring you intensive, actionable information. It provides the best-performing landing pages along with keywords, Users, Session, Page, Average duration, Bounce rate, etc. Using this information, you can easily optimize your landing pages with high-traffic-low-competition keywords that are already working for you to get better results faster.
Also Read: How Bounce Rate Is Calculated?
8) Content Analyzer
There is a popular saying that ‘Content is king’. If you want to rank higher, your content should be of high quality. SEMrush has taken care of this aspect too by providing the Content Analyzer tool. It helps you to analyze your content to see how it is performing and how your audience is engaging with it. It also provides important metrics such as poor content, pages you need to rewrite or remove & need to update. Along with this, you can also see content update date, title, meta description, total shares, search queries, visitor sessions, durations as well as bounce rate.
You can also track your or your competitors’ guest posts. Just add the URL of the article you want to analyze and measure its performance by tracking its backlinks, keyword rankings, and social shares.
SEMrush also provides the ability to export these analytics for your reference.
9) Competitive Research
SEMrush does not only help you to understand the metrics of your blog but also enables you to spy on your competitors. Competitive Research is another good tool provided by SEMrush to start the research on your competitors (also known as competitor research). You can go to Domain Analytics and enter your competitor’s domain to start the analysis. SEMrush will provide you all the data required for your analysis in one go. You will find the Authority score, Traffic sources, Top content, Traffic Trend, SERP Features, Keyword by Country, Backlink profile, etc and much more.
It also has one more feature – Traffic Analytics. where you can see the various metrics like Visits, Unique Visitors, Average page visit duration, Bounce Rate, etc. of any of your competitor sites. You will also find common or improved/declined keyword rankings of your competitors. You can easily find new keywords to target on your website.
Another feature of competitive research is Market Explorer. Use this tool to identify the influencers in the niche, discover competitors, analyze new trends, etc.
10) Brand Monitoring Tool
Brand Monitoring Tool is one of the popular tools available in the SEMrush toolkit. It Manages Your Brand Web Reputation. You can Track daily mentions of your brand or competitive brands, Evaluate your PR efforts, find promo opportunities, and analyze your competitor’s communications.
Generally, it is very time-consuming to find your brand mention but SEMrush does this work for you within seconds. You can create your campaigns and give your brand keyword and country.
It alerts you in your inbox whenever your brand is mentioned anywhere on the internet. It also lets you know the brand mention sentiment. One of the good things about using this brand monitoring tool is – you can easily find the content where you have been mentioned but are not linked to. You can approach them and ask them to link the anchor text to your blog. It will give you a plethora of backlink opportunities.
You can also monitor the brand mentions of your competitors, and it frequently unveils really great opportunities for you. You can get alerted whenever they do guest blogging, whenever they are featured, and so on. Again, you can also export the results of brand mentions for your reference and further analysis.
SEMrush Review – Other Useful Features:
a) Advertising Research
SEMrush helps you research the advertising strategies of your competitors to improve your own strategy. You just need to enter your competitor’s domain and SEMrush will provide you with all the details about their advertising campaigns and strategy. You can find their paid search rankings, ad history, paid pages, and a lot more.
b) PLA Research
If you are running PPC shopping ads for your eCommerce store or dropshipping business, this tool can be really useful. SEMrush will display the PLA keywords and positions of any domain. You can also visualize the PLA trend for the domain to formulate your own strategies accordingly.
c) CPC Map
CPC map is a great tool to determine the Google Ads CPC prices all over the world. You can also compare the CPC features across multiple countries and categories using their “compare feature”.
d) SEMrush Sensor
SEMrush Sensor is a great feature provided here. It allows you to analyze one of SEO’s worst problems, unexplained rank fluctuations due to changes in Google’s algorithm. The sensor range is between 1 & 10. The higher the value, the more the fluctuations.
There are a few other features that we have not covered in this SEMrush review.
SEMrush Review – Pros & Cons
PROS:
- All-In-One solution
- Suitable for all types of businesses and agencies
- Wide Range of Features & Tools
- Lots of data to Analyze
- Flexible pricing
- Great Customer Support
Cons:
- A bit difficult for a new user to understand its UI
- Need some technical/SEO knowledge.
- Some of the data, suggestions, and results that SEMrush provides is based on educated estimations as some of the SEO data they examine is based on speculated information.
SEMrush Review – SEMrush Pricing Plans
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. SEMrush provides a lot of tools & features and is a one-stop solution for all your requirements so it is obvious to charge something in return. The good thing is SEMrush is fairly priced and also has various plans and one can choose based on his requirements.
SEMrush Pro Plan: $99.95/month
Includes:
- 10,000 results per report
- 3,000 reports per day
- 5 projects
- 500 keywords to track
- 100,000 pages to crawl
- 5 scheduled PDF reports
SEMrush Guru Plan: $199.95/month
Includes:
- 30,000 results per report
- 5,000 reports per day
- 50 projects
- 1,500 keywords to track
- 300,000 pages to crawl
- 20 scheduled PDF reports
- Branded PDF reports
- Access to historical data
SEMrush Business Plan: $399.95/month
Includes:
- 50,000 results per report (for each of 4 users)
- 10,000 reports per day (for each of 4 users)
- 200 Projects
- 5,000 keywords to track (1,500 per user)
- 1,000,000 pages to crawl (300,000 per user)
- 50 scheduled PDF reports (for each of 4 users)
- Branded PDF reports
- Access to historical data
- Product listing ads
- Multi-user management
In addition to these plans, there is also a custom plan and a plan for enterprise clients.
Fortunately, we have a special 7-day free trial of SEMrush so you can check out all of the features for yourself.
SEMrush Review – Final Words
If you’ve gone through all the features mentioned in this SEMrush review, you would agree that SEMrush is a brilliant tool. It is a must-have tool if you are serious about your business and websites. It has a wide collection of tools in SEO, Research, Content Marketing, Advertising, and social media. Leverage this SEMrush toolkit to your advantage to boost your overall search engine visibility. I would definitely recommend giving this tool a try. SEMrush Pricing is fairly provided with its wide range of features. You can choose the plan according to your business needs or can even get a customized plan made specifically for your organization.
If you cannot spend it on it, for now, I would recommend using 7-day free trial of SEMrush to try SEMrush FREE. It will help you to experience the greatness of this tool without any cost.
In this SEMrush review, I have tried to cover almost all of its major features. I hope you liked this article.
Don’t forget to share it with your friends. If you are already using SEMrush, do share your feedback. Should you have any queries or doubts regarding the SEMrush review, shoot them in the comment section below.
You can connect with me on Instagram Or Quora And Linkedin as well.
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Hey Mohit, i am going to start using SEMrush. thanks for sharing this review. It is really very helpful.
Thanks for the awesome post. I have use many tools, but SEM rush is an excellent and most authentic tool. It is flagship tool for a content writers, PPC, Social media marketers, SEO and many more. Report making tool of SEM Rush is awesome.
I used to have Alexa as my main tool for SEO and switched to SEMrush just a month ago. I have to say SEMrush is so much better. It provide more indepth information. It can crawl more links and keywords, which is super helpful. The only thing I hope SEMrush can change is that they should have a Chrome extension just like Alexa that helps me quickly check the ranking, etc. Currently, eventhough they have a Chrome extension, it always pop-up to a new window, which is a bit annoying.
Very good article.Thanks for sharing..keep up the good work. This is such a gold mine! Thanks for putting this together for us. I’m definitely hanging on to this one and no doubt passing it on!
SEM Rush’s dashboard is so easy to read and provides so much information. It truly is a great product!
Thank you for this extremely informative post!