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Looking for Semrush reviews? Well, you’ve reached the right place. Today, I’m going to review Semrush and analyze all their toolkits in detail.
Semrush is an all-rounder SEO suite for businesses and blogs. It helps you find profitable keywords, spy on competitors, audit websites, build authoritative backlinks, and much more from one place.
If you are running a website, Semrush is an essential tool to analyze the latest market trends and grow your traffic. From keyword research to content optimization to marketing, it will guide you in each step with accurate information.
In this review, I will cover various features of Semrush including:
- Keyword research
- Competitive research
- Backlink analysis
- Backlink audit
- Rank tracking
- SEO audit
- Content marketing
- Social media posting
- Advertising
Let us get started.
Table of Contents
What is Semrush?
Semrush is the most comprehensive SEO tool, having a database of 25.7 million keywords, 808 million domains and 43 trillion backlinks till this writing. Over 10 million users across different industries use it to get content ideas and track competitors.
This platform was founded by Oleg Shchegolev, in late 2008, to deliver equal opportunities to all. If used properly, it opens up endless opportunities for you.
Semrush comes with over 55 apps to enrich your campaigns relating to content marketing, SEO, competitor analysis, advertisement, link building, and many others. It can help you generate guaranteed results without hiring any SEO developer or marketing specialist to manage relevant tasks.
Key Points
These are the main key attractions of Semrush,
Semrush is a one-stop solution for all your needs. It will help you find profitable keywords, analyze top 100 ranking pages, track your rank positions daily, promote content on social sites, analyze competitors, and more.
If you are struggling to build traffic and generate sales, there may be some issues in the strategies you apply. In such a situation, do proper research to get content ideas and build high-authority backlinks. You can’t do it easily using a free SEO tool.
For keyword research, some people rely on Google Keyword Planner. But it is mainly designed for advertisers who want to market their products through Google websites. It has several limitations and content creators can’t achieve expected results using the tool.
You may find various SEO tools on the web like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, etc. But Semrush beats them all. It delivers the most accurate data with frequent updates and infinite filters. Its unique built-in tools let you manage various tasks like rank tracking, link building, marketing, and so on from a single dashboard. You can’t expect these kinds of features from any other SEO tool. So whether you are running a business or blog, Semrush should be in your bucket.
Semrush Review
Semrush offers more than 55 tools in the following categories,
Let us explore them.
SEO
Key features of Semrush’s SEO bundle,
1. Domain Overview
Visit Semrush and enter a domain address to get its full metrics. Under Domain Overview, you can fetch the following details for each domain,
By default, Semrush displays worldwide statistics for the domain you entered. But you can filter them by country and device type. For that, you should apply relevant filters from the top of your screen. It also provides historical data to get the domain’s previous state from Google search results.
2. Traffic Analytics
Head to Traffic Analytics, to make a close look at your competitor’s traffic channels. Find their main traffic locations, sources, top pages, bounce rate, and more.
Add a competitor to compare the current domain with one or more similar niche websites. Semrush will tell you how many visits each domain gets per month, how long visitors stay on pages, main referral sources, and so on.
Switch to Top Pages, to find popular posts of competitors. Semrush will list them along with their unique page views and traffic distribution among different channels. Copy those URLs one by one and paste them on the top search box to grab more details.
On the next screen, Semrush will display the following details for each URL,
- Monthly search traffic created by each page
- How many backlinks it has?
- Ranking keywords by country
- SERP features
- Traffic and keyword trends
- All organic keywords
- Organic competitors for each page
- Backlinks and referring domains
- Anchor texts
Develop more detailed content on the same subject and contact referring domains you found on the last step for backlinks. Inform them that your article is detailed and contains more information than the page mentioned in their post. If your article is of good quality, they will consider linking to it.
3. Organic Research
Organic Research is another part where you can monitor search traffic and track rankings for any website. In this section, you will get an idea about the following,
- Organic keywords
- Ranking position changes (daily)
- Major competitors
- Top pages
- Total traffic
- Traffic cost
By default, Semrush will display results for the United States. But you can change it from the top to get organic metrics for other locations.
4. Keyword gap/Backlink gap
Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap are other major tools in Semrush’s Competitive Research kit. As the name indicated, they will help you detect the gap between your website and competitor’s websites.
Enter up to 5 websites and compare them to find your missing keyword and backlink opportunities. Export less-competitive keywords to an Excel sheet to develop relevant content and fill the keyword gap accordingly.
In the same way, prepare a record of your competitor’s best backlinks using the Backlink Gap tool and outreach to referring domains to get mentions from them. It is not easy as we know. Even though, creating high-quality articles and frequent follow-ups with the respective domain owners will help you smoothen the link-building process to some extent.
5. Keyword research
Keyword research is the first step in creating viral content. You should find out what readers are searching for in your target location.
Semrush lets you search for up to 100 keywords at the same time. Enter your keywords and select a target location to analyze.
Wait for a moment. It will bring different variations of your keyword on the next screen. Being organized in multiple categories, you can visit each section directly to view main keywords and others.
Scroll down to find what pages are ranking for your keyword in the top 100 positions. SERP analysis also contains metrics like search traffic, ranking keywords, backlinks, etc so you will get a clear idea about the competition.
Click on view all to explore keywords. It will open Keyword Magic Tool to make a close look at your keyword combinations.
Semrush will show keywords with their search volume, search trends, keyword difficulty, CPC rate, competitive density, etc. Click a keyword on the main screen to get its individual metrics and variations.
Sometimes you may need to locate keywords having certain words in them like Amazon, Facebook, etc. Semrush lets you filter such keywords easily. On the left side, you can see a small column. Scroll down through it and click a keyword to view matching keywords. For instance, click on ‘Amazon’ on the left-side column to display keywords relating to Amazon affiliate marketing.
If you want to detect less competitive and profitable keywords, apply filters from the top to display only those keywords for which you can rank easily.
Semrush will show keyword density in a 0-100 index. If KD% falls in between 0-39, they are easy to rank keywords. Similarly, you can also consider keywords having KD% of 40-59 as there is a chance to rank for them. But it is difficult to rank for other competitive keywords (KD<60) and you should compete with top-level domains in the category. So it’s better to target keywords in the 0-39 range. It is safe.
Click here to activate a free trial on Semrush and find less-competitive, profitable keywords easily
6. Backlink Analysis
Link building has a major role in SEO and traffic generation. But you should find out relevant opportunities first. For that, monitor your competitors and know how they build backlinks to the content.
Semrush has a vast database of over 34 trillion backlinks and 1.4 billion referring domains. It also crawls 17 billion URLs every day. So you will get accurate information about any link on Semrush.
Semrush shows all your competitor’s backlinks, referring domains, their categories, link attributes, top pages in the order of the number of backlinks they have, and more on the backlink analysis page.
Filter backlinks by various conditions like link attributes, types, etc. Dofollow links with high Authority Scores are more valuable than others. Getting mentions from those sites will help you boost your search engine presence and rankings. At the same time, Nofollow links may be easy to get. Analyze referring pages to know more and contact authors to find possibilities if any.
7. Backlink audit
Google considers backlinks to determine your search engine rankings and divert more traffic to your pages. Backlinks from top-authority websites and trusted sources will add more value to your online business.
At the same time, links from spammy websites will negatively affect your SERP rankings and may even send your domain to Google’s blacklist. So you should monitor backlinks at frequent intervals and remove toxic links as early as possible. But how do you know whether links are toxic or non-toxic?
Semrush audits your backlinks and displays them with a toxicity score. Backlinks with a 60-100 toxicity score are dangerous, and you should disavow them at any cost. Domains having a toxicity score of 45-59 are potentially toxic, but it is unnecessary to remove them all. Analyze them thoroughly before taking any step.
How to disavow your toxic backlinks?
Select your toxic backlinks from the Semrush dashboard (under Backlink Audit) and click on the Disavow button on the top. Now it will ask you if you want to disavow a single URL or an entire domain. Choose the domain option to disavow all backlinks you got from the same domain.
Semrush will generate a disavow file that you need to upload on Google webmaster tools. Alternatively, you can contact respective domain owners to remove backlinks from their sites. For that, select toxic backlinks that you want to remove and click on remove from the top.
Switch to the Disavow tab to download the disavow text file generated in the last step.
Click on Export to Txt to download the file. Visit the Google Disavow tool and choose your domain profile to upload the text file.
On the next screen, click on Disavow links once again and choose the file to upload. Finally, click on Submit. Done.
For link removal, visit the Remove tab on the same Semrush page and contact domain owners directly. Semrush lets you contact them using a pre-defined template and message. But you can customize it if needed. Collect their email address, send emails, and make follow-ups- right from your Semrush dashboard.
8. Rank Tracking
Semrush allows you to track all keywords with daily position updates using a competitor research tool.
Enter your domain on the search box and choose Organic Research from the drop-down box or from the sidebar menu to view your ranking keywords.
Alternatively, you can track certain keywords using Semrush’s Position Tracking tool. For that, create a project first. Add keywords you want to track and set a target location and a device type. That’s all. Now you are ready to go. Semrush tracks its ranking positions and sends weekly updates to your email address.
9. SEO Audit
SEO audit is one of my favorite Semrush tools. It is a great tool to scan your website and detect various issues that affect your search engine performance and traffic.
Semrush’s SEO audit will help you to detect the following issues,
- Broken internal JavaScript and CSS files
- Insecure content
- Broken internal links
- Broken external links
- Broken internal images
- Sitemap.xml issues
- AMP related issues
- Pages returned 4xxx, 5xx error codes
- Pages with duplicate H1 and title tags
- Images without alt attributes
- Robots.txt issues
- Broken canonical URLs
- Malformed links
- URLs blocked from crawling
- Nofollow external links
- Many more
Semrush will audit your site and point out the exact URLs where you are facing issues. Fix them to improve the site’s score and get more traffic from search engines.
Click here to run a free SEO audit on your site to boost its search engine performance & traffic
10. SEO Content Template
SEO content template is a simple and powerful tool to craft search engine-loving content.
Open it from the left pane and enter a topic to search. Semrush analyzes the top 10 pages ranking for the keyword and comes with recommended keywords, backlinks, average text length, etc. Change your target location to get localized suggestions.
Switch to the Real-time content checker tool to check content as you type. It will tell you if your texts are readable, SEO-friendly, and original.
11. On-Page SEO checker
On-page SEO checker helps you to optimize old blog posts and divert more traffic to them. It scans your content and lets you know if there is any keyword stuffing. Avoid repeated keywords to improve ranking positions.
Semrush will also suggest related keywords and backlink sources which are useful to attract more audience from organic search queries. The ideas appear with current and potential traffic so you can prioritize tasks according to the page visits they may generate.
To compare each content with the top 10 SERPs, visit the Benchmarking tool on the same page. It displays suggestions covering average content length, referring domains, readability score, and others. Make changes accordingly to enhance your content visibility and traffic.
Local SEO
Are you running a business? Do you want to collect more leads from local searches and increase your profit? If so, use the Local SEO bundle from Semrush.
Key features of Semrush’s Local SEO bundle,
It serves your business information to over 80 listing directories around the world. Edit your contact details, track local rankings, analyze search trends on Google Maps, and much more- from one place.
Semrush allows you to create attractive business profiles and respond to reviews on Google My Business and Facebook without leaving the dashboard. Local SEO is a perfect toolkit to improve your business visibility and optimize pages for more traffic. It is an add-on service, and you should pay $20/mo for basic location, and $40/mo for premium location listings.
Advertising
Do you want to spy on your competitor’s advertising strategies and their paid keywords? Head to the Advertising toolkit on Semrush to view paid search positions of any site with daily updates, ad copies, ad history, and traffic volume.
Key features of Semrush’s Advertising bundle,
Find how much traffic they get from ads for what keyword and from which place. Create an effective marketing campaign to promote your relevant products or pages to outrank competitors. Semrush can uncover rival’s target audience gender, age, interests, and top countries to steal even their hidden strategies.
PLA Research is a major part of the advertising bundle. It is useful to monitor Product Listing Ads of your competitors. Discover their ranking positions, keywords, search volume, and trends to sell similar products through your online stores and market them in the right way.
Change the database location and device type to monitor traffic from all sources. Semrush is an essential growth hacking tool for businesses and enterprises to reveal new possibilities and dominate the industry.
Semrush has added a social media ads manager to their platform recently. It helps you to create and run ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram in a few clicks. Monitor their performance and optimize them using built-in options to reach more audiences.
Click here to activate a free trial on Semrush and create an effective marketing plan for your business
Social media posting & tracking
Do you know Semrush can promote and track your social media posts also?
Semrush has built-in options to schedule and analyze social media content. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business to automate promotions. So you don’t need another social media marketing tool if Semrush is with you.
Key features of Semrush’s social media tool kit,
Semrush will analyze your social media audience to detect their geographical location, gender, active time, etc, and suggest the best time to post. Schedule posts accordingly to get maximum engagements and clicks on your links. It also provides statistics like post reach and engagement rates for each content, so you can re-design campaigns or change schedules if needed.
Content Marketing
Semrush’s Content Marketing kit comprises 6 unique tools,
Enter a topic to get content ideas. Semrush will show trending posts that match your keywords in different categories.
Expand a card to view the sub-topic search volume, keyword difficulty, and related questions. Each title appears with a grey-color + icon, click it to mark the topic as your favorite. You can mark as many topics as favorite, switch to the Favorite Ideas tab on the top to see them all.
Click the SEO content template icon that appears next to the topic to get Semrush recommendations on how to prepare a high-quality article on the subject. It will analyze the top 10 ranking pages for your target keywords and displays them along with the recommended text length, suggested backlinks, etc.
Add maximum keywords to your content so there will be more chance to rank it higher on search results. If you are not familiar with the subject, order articles from Semrush Marketplace and its cost start at $40 per content.
SEO Writing Assistant is another powerful tool for content marketers. It will analyze content as you type to make sure that it is easy to read and SEO-friendly.
Sometimes, you will get mentions from top-authority websites but not links. Semrush will detect such mentions using the Brand Monitoring Tool and lets you contact sources to get backlinks from them.
As a content creator, update articles frequently to make them fresh and boost their search engine rankings. Outdated content doesn’t add any value to your marketing efforts and business. So it is better to rewrite or remove them.
Find outdated, low-performing content on your site using Semrush’s Content Audit tool. It will examine your posts and display them on multiple content sets like Rewrite or remove, need to update, poor content, etc. Analyze each page and apply necessary modifications to increase your overall web performance.
Competitive research
Semrush is a matchless tool to analyze your competitors, track their organic keywords, and even steal backlinks.
Key features of Semrush’s Competitive Research kit,
We saw these tools in previous sections. So I am not going through them again. With Market explorer, you can compare your site with similar niche players to identify how much market share each contributes.
Monitor traffic trends and compare it with your growth. Find countries that divert most traffic to your pages and from what type of audience. Go to Traffic analytics to view your popular pages, subdomains, traffic sources, and many other things.
Finding where your brand is mentioned is a time-consuming task. Semrush will track such mentions using the Brand monitoring tool and lists relevant posts with the domain’s authority score, traffic, and other metrics.
Identify top influencers in your industry and contact them for partnership or link-building opportunities. Monitor mention trends and compare your brand mentions with competitor’s mentions to analyze your popularity.
Semrush Pricing
Semrush has three subscription plans- Pro, Guru, and Business.
Pro
- Starts at $108.33/mo (annual subscription)
- Domain & Keyword Analytics (3000 reports per day)
- 5 website projects
- 10 social media profiles for posting
- 50 social media profiles for monitoring
- 55+ advanced tools
- Keyword tracking (500 keywords)
- Mobile ranking
- On-Page SEO checker
- Keyword Magic tool
Guru
- Starts at $208.33/mo (annual subscription)
- Domain & Keyword Analytics (5000 reports per day)
- 15 website projects
- 30 social media profiles for posting
- 100 social media profiles for monitoring
- 55+ advanced tools
- Keyword tracking (1500 keywords)
- Mobile ranking
- On-Page SEO checker
- Keyword Magic tool
- Content Marketing Platform
- 800 SEO templates
- Plagiarism checks
- Historical data
Business
- Starts at $416.66/mo (annual subscription)
- Domain & Keyword Analytics (10,000 reports per day)
- 40 website projects
- 50 social media profiles for posting
- 300 social media profiles for monitoring
- 55+ advanced tools
- Keyword tracking (5000 keywords)
- Mobile ranking
- On-Page SEO checker
- Keyword Magic tool
- Content Marketing Platform
- 2000 SEO templates
- Plagiarism checks
- Historical data
- PLA analytics
- Share of Voice
- API access
The Pro plan is best for bloggers and startups. It comes with domain analytics, keyword research, social media posting, and SEO audit features. You can generate up to 3000 analytics (domain & keyword) reports per day and 10,000 results per report. Semrush allows Pro users to crawl 20,000 pages per project and a maximum of 1,00,000 pages per month.
If you want to extend limits and access historical data about competitor websites, upgrade to the Guru plan. It lets you add up to 15 website projects with full access to the content marketing platform, keyword cannibalization reports, and multi-location/device tracking abilities. Guru plan users can generate 5,000 reports per day with 30,000 results per report. Thus, it will open more keyword and content-building opportunities for you.
The Business plan is best for businesses and agencies as the name indicated. It gives you more freedom to access data and download reports. As a Business plan user, you can download 10,000 analytics reports per day with 50,000 results per report. It also allows you to create white-label reports and share with clients with or without editing access.
Click here to visit Semrush and choose a subscription plan to grow your business or blog (7-day free trial)
Conclusion
Semrush is the #1 SEO tool in the market. It delivers the most accurate data on keyword research, competitor analysis, content marketing, and many others to divert maximum benefits to your business.
Find low-competition keywords in your niche and analyze top-ranking pages to write a comprehensive article around the topic. Make sure you address all the relevant keywords you’ve found through keyword research and spying on competitive pages to get clicks from all matching search queries.
Link building is another major part you should focus. Run a backlink analysis of your competitor’s pages to detect their top-authority backlinks. Create a more detailed content and contact referring domains to inquire chances to earn a backlink from them.
Guest posting, broken link building, and relationship building are other popular ways to build high-quality backlinks for your website. Google places a lot of importance on authentic backlinks, so having them is essential for your pages to rank high in the SERPs. Semrush is a great tool to discover new link building opportunities and strengthen your link profile. Learn how it helps you to achieve this, in this post.
Don’t forget to audit your website and existing links frequently while building new backlinks. Otherwise, there can be various consequences from your organic traffic decrease to getting Google penalty.
Monitor your search ranking positions and if there are serious declines, update the content with more information. Read top-performing pages to steal new related keywords and outreach bloggers in your niche to create new backlinks.
Semrush is perfect for businesses, agencies, and freelancers to grow traffic and generate more revenue. It helps you to uncover new content opportunities, optimize pages and strategies, spy on websites, and dominate your niche market.
If you are not using Semrush means, it means that you are missing lots of growth opportunities. Don’t do that. It is the complete marketing suite combining SEO, content marketing, PPC, and social media sharing on the web. No other tool can beat it.
Click here to visit Semrush and choose a subscription plan to skyrocket your web traffic (7-day free trial)
