SEMrush is a powerful SEO tool to help your website or content perform better. In this SEMrush review, we take a closer look at what it can do and how to supercharge your online marketing.
Since it’s entirely Cloud based, SEMrush works on all platforms including macOS and Windows.
If you run a small business on your Mac or work in marketing, then knowing how your online content is performing compared to the competition and how it can be improved is essential.
SEMrush takes hours of painstaking research and presents it to you in seconds saving you precious time and money for your content marketing and SEO research.
However, there’s a lot to take in so here we break it down and take a closer look at SEMrush.
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SEMrush Review: Overview
SEMrush is a powerful online marketing tool that can be used by websites and companies of all sizes.
The tool has grown from simple keyword research to offering everything from competitor analysis, site audits and backlink tracking to content analysis, social media management, toxic link analysis and much more.
SEMrush provides an almost bewildering range of tools to help users improve their website’s SEO, analyze their competitors’ strategies, track their website’s rankings and run successful PPC campaigns.
Here are the best features of SEMrush in more detail.
Keyword Research
Undoubtedly one of the best features of SEMrush is its keyword research tool.
The keyword research tool allows users to find new keyword opportunities, analyze competitors’ keywords, and track their keyword rankings.
The tool also provides data on the search volume, keyword difficulty, and estimated CPC (Cost-Per-Click) for each keyword.
This can help you optimize your website and content for better search engine visibility.
SEMrush also provides a long list of related keywords along with data on search volume, competition, and keyword difficulty.
This makes it easier for you to identify high-value keywords to better target your SEO and PPC campaigns (more on PPC later).
Like many of SEMrush’s tools, you can get lost for hours analyzing keyword variations, related keywords and keyword difficulty using the keyword research tool.
Competitive Analysis
Another powerful feature of SEMrush is its competitive analysis tool.
This feature enables users to analyze their competitors’ online marketing strategies, such as their traffic sources, organic and paid keywords, backlinks and more.
SEMrush’s domain analysis tools allow users to track competitors’ search rankings, top-performing content and backlink profiles, to help identify areas for improvement in your own online content strategy.
Again, you can spend hours pouring through this data and reveal things that you would take hours or days of research ordinarily.
Site Audit
SEMrush’s site audit tool provides a detailed report of your website’s technical health, identifying issues that may be impacting your SEO performance and providing recommendations for improvement.
This scans your website and identifies technical issues that may be impacting your SEO performance.
The tool provides a detailed report with recommendations for fixing any issues it finds, allowing users to quickly improve their website’s overall health and search engine rankings.
Quite likely, SEMrush will find issues with your site although it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s harming your SERP rankings but it’s advisable to get them checked.
Backlink Analysis
SEMrush’s backlink analysis tools provide insights into the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to your website and can help you identify opportunities to improve your link building strategy.
There’s also a toxic backlink analysis which can take a few hours to run depending on the size of your site but will indicate how many potentially harmful backlinks are pointing to your site.
Whether you need to disavow these in webmaster tools is another question as Google has it’s own mysterious ways of working out which backlinks are toxic and which are not but again, it’s worth investigating further.
PPC Advertising
If you run PPC advertising then SEMrush can even monitor the performance of them.
SEMrush’s PPC advertising features allow users to create and optimize ad campaigns, track their performance, and analyze competitor ad strategies.
This reveals the main paid search competitors, keywords they are bidding on and see examples of their live ads.
Social Media Management
SEMrush’s social media management tools make it easier to schedule and publish posts, track engagement, and analyze social media metrics across multiple platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
This even includes an AI writer which can produce articles for you although this service costs extra to an SEMrush subscription.
Content Marketing
SEMrush’s content marketing tools provide insights into your content performance, competitor content strategies, and recommendations for improving your content strategy.
This tool is only available in the Guru and Business plans but makes it quicker and easier to make targeted content briefs.
Local SEO
If you have a physical office or business presence then SEMrush has Local SEO tools in the Guru and Business plans.
SEMrush’s local SEO features provide insights into local search rankings, track local listings and reviews and help businesses optimize their online presence for local search.
Reporting
SEMrush’s reporting features allow users to create customizable reports to track and analyze key metrics, making it easy to share insights and results with team members and stakeholders.
You can customize this by country and both desktop or mobile performance. You can also choose to use wither SEMrush Traffic analytics or Google Analytics if you have connected your account to it.
SEMrush Downsides
For small businesses and individuals, the main downside of SEMrush is the price.
Although you can use some features for free for as long as you want, it is very limited in terms of the number of requests and amount of data you can access.
For medium to large businesses however, SEMrush is competitively priced compared to most SEO and content marketing research tools such as Ahrefs.
Note that some tools are only available in the higher level Guru plans though so you may have to upgrade your subscription to enjoy certain features.
The time savings and amount of data you can obtain from it are well worth the price.
Some tools have also been removed from SEMrush such as the Brand Monitoring tool although you can use the Media Monitoring app instead from the SEMrush app center.
Probably the one thing we found hardest with SEMrush was processing all the information it delivers. SEMrush gives you a lot of tools – which is great – but it can feel utterly overwhelming at times.
There’s also the danger of getting completely lost in all the data which may not be as important to your rankings as you think it is.
For instance, SEMrush may indicate you have a lot of toxic backlinks which may panic you into trying to remove them all even though Google is pretty good nowadays at working out which backlinks are genuine and which are damaging your domain.
If you have the time to analyze all the data that SEMrush offers however, you’ll discover things about your site and competitors that you never even knew before.
SEMrush Pricing
SEMrush has three pricing plans.
Pro ($129.95/m) Guru ($249.95/m) and Business ($499.95/m) with a discount of 17% if you pay for these plans annually.
The Pro plan is limited to 5 projects going up to 40 projects in the business plan. The number of keywords tracked is limited to 500 and 500 respectively too.
The Pro plan gives you Keyword, backlink and domain analytics but only the Guru and Business plans include historical data, content marketing tools and Looker Studio integration.
The Business plan also offers a Share of Voice metric for social media analysis and API access for integration with your own in house software or apps.
You can also f which is pretty good although the amount of data you can process and request you can make it very limited.
Is SEMrush Worth It?
Although you can find some of the information that SEMrush reveals from Google Analytics for example, it certainly makes SEO and marketing research a lot easier and quicker.
SEMrush will save you time but not just that, will reveal far more information than you’d normally be aware of.
In fact, you can link it to your Google Analytics account to enrich the data it delivers giving you the best of both worlds.
If you’re serious about online marketing or SEO then we think that SEMrush is definitely worth the price.
You can try SEMrush for free to judge for yourself.