Is Semrush Worth It? In today’s Semrush review 2024, I’m going to walk you through how to use Semrush and the best features of Semrush SEO tool which is trusted by the experts. In this Semrush keyword Tool review you’ll get complete information.
I’m going to discuss how Semrush works in the following departments.
- Domain analysis
- Keyword research features
- Page rank tracking
- Backlink analysis
- Link building
- Site auditing
- Ease of use
- Pricing
- Support
Let’s start with the basic and important question! ie Review on Semrush in 2024.
Semrush Review 2024
Semrush is a product or tool that helps you to optimize your website for search engines to rank higher in the search results. It founded in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov and located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
Now Semrush has more than 6 million users base which is HUGE and it’s one of the most popular SEO Tools or companies in the world.
Semrush works for giving you lot of information, which you can use for:
- Create new index web content that is easily attract more traffic
- Find the link-building opportunities
- It helps to change the technical aspects of your blog or website content to get higher search ranking.
For example, Semrush provides you with the most valuable ‘keyword suggestions‘ based on the phrases you typed. These keyword suggestions help you to form the content and write for the blog post which will perform well in the search engine result page (SERPs).
Also you’ll get to know how tough it will be to rank for particular search phrases.
Semrush suggests websites to approach for requesting backlinks.
Semrush has a feature called ‘SEO audit’ which you can run on your website to find if there are any improvements you can make to improve your website to get better search results.
SEO audit is a sample of great features included with Semrush SEO tool. There are many more SEO tools and features in-built with Semrush to help your website to rank higher in the search results.
I’ll go through each in-depth below and also I’ll highlight Semrush’s Pros and Cons.
Let’s start with one of the best features of Semrush called “Domain Analysis“.
Get 1-month free access to Semrush Pro ($119.95 Value)
Domain Analysis
One of the basic tasks most SEO projects start with ‘domain analysis‘. Here you’ll get a simple overview of a domain’s quality from the SEO perspective.
Performing a domain analysis helps to know where the SEO improvements have to be taken. Also you can run your competitor’s website to know how difficult it will be to outrank your competitors in search. Also you’ll get many ideas and suggestions to improve your website and know more about your competitor’s website.
Another important feature of ‘domain analysis’ is, you can run on a website and check if it’s worth contacting the site owner to request a link from his or her site to your website. Getting external links from the high-quality website will definitely help to boost your website in the search rankings. These external links are called ‘backlinks’ and will really help your website to get top rank.
Running domain analysis using Semrush is very simple. All you need is, just enter a domain name whether yours or your competitor’s in the ‘domain overview’ section. Now you’ll get a quick response from Semrush to know how the website performs in the search results.
Domain analysis provides complete metrics include:
An ‘Authority Score’
How many visitors come to the website per month
Number of external links (backlinks) pointing to that website
How many keywords the website ranks for
Anchor text used in links to the website
What are the top performing keywords?
Competing websites
Display advertising stats
From the above metrics ‘authority score‘ is the quick way to get a complete understanding of any site quality.
How Semrush Calculates ‘Authority Score’?
Semrush calculates the authority score based on some factors. Those are:
Backlink data (total number of links pointing to it)
Organic search data (organic search traffic and keyword positions)
Monthly website traffic data.
Here in Semrush the term ‘authority score’ option is hidden in Semrush’s interface. However, now it has been in the center and front of the domain overview section. And Semrush give you a quick response about any domain in terms of its authority score.
The domain overview stats are based on hard data, traffic figures and estimates. However, most of the SEO experts say that those are NOT always 100% accurate. We’ve tested Semrush traffic (estimate) against Google Analytics data. However, you’ll get traffic estimate stats for a website likely to be low, medium and high.
It’s better to treat Semrush’s traffic stats to just identify a website’s popularity. By doing so, you can keep your website in context against your competitors. Also you can identify the websites that are worth contacting for backlinks requests.
The other important metrics provided in Semrush’s domain overview are really useful and get more valuable information for your site and your competitor’s.
The important metrics ‘competitive positioning map’ helps you to see, at-a-glance, where and how a website fits well into a particular niche or market and how it’s been against its competitors.
Another important thing you get from this country based report. It helps you to know from which country a website performs well.
So, it clearly shows Semrush SEO tool is extremely very useful and it gives you in-depth information about how a site performs from an SEO view.
Keyword Research in Semrush
Keyword research data is all about:
Know how many people are particularly searching for a keyword
How tough it is to rank for that particular keyword
Find out who already ranks for that specific keyword
Getting suggestions
Semrush is really doing well to find all above important information about the keywords.
Go to ‘Keyword Overview‘ tool, input the keyword and you’ll get below important information.
- The number of searches / month for that keyword on Google search engine
- It’s ‘keyword difficulty score’
- Complete list of websites that are ranking for it.
You can get this information using domain analysis (per country level).
However, one of the most important metrics brought here is, ‘Keyword Difficulty Score’. Semrush is used to indicate percentage (%). If it’s a higher percentage, it means it’s very hard to rank top for the particular keyword.
Do you want to get keyword suggestions based on the word or phrase you’ve typed?
Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic‘ tool is the best option to get keyword suggestions.
Although this tool is named ‘keyword magic’, however ‘Keyword Suggestions’ tool is the best name for this.
It gives you more valuable keyword suggestions (list of keywords) which are related to your phrase entered. Also you can use the filters to sort them, like:
- Keyword difficulty
- Number of searches per month (for each keyword)
- CPC – Cost per Click (If you’ve used Google Ads then you might have used this term).
However, Semrush’s keyword difficulty tool helps you to make a right decision in terms of which keywords are best as part of your SEO project.
Still, there are 2 improvements that should be made on it.
1. The data we get is for ‘Google Searches Only‘. If the data metrics available for all other search engines then that would be great.
However, the major searches are continuing to be made on Google search (92%). Even though, 2.69% traffic and searches are being done in Bing (Mostly by the USA).
Semrush’ competitors like Ahrefs and Moz give access to those search engines.
Below is the Global Stats (search engine used) as of Febrary 2021.
Google – 92.05%
Bing – 2.69%
Yahoo! – 1.47%
Baidu – 1.33%
YANDEX – 0.65%
DuckDuckGo – 0.64%
2. In Ahrefs’s difficulty score tool – you’ll get the information on how many backlinks you need to rank on top of the search engine result pages.
However, it’s not available in Semrush. If Semrush provides this information then that would be really great.
Semrush’s Content Marketing Toolkit
In addition to keyword research tools, Semrush also offers a suite of ‘Content marketing tools‘ (Guru Plan or higher).
These help you to:
- Find new topics to write about
- Audit your existing content (published posts) from an SEO view
- Target keywords that your competitors use in their posts
- Observe mentions of your brand.
Another best part of Semrush’s content marketing toolkit is ‘SEO writing assistant’. It allows you to review the content by copy and paste into Semrush (you also write copy and get suggestions within Semrush).
Once you’ve completed, you’ll get the right suggestions to improve the performance to get top rank in the search results.
You can increase or decrease word count
Adding certain keywords to your text
Warning is any plagiarized content
However, you have a simple way that simply locates a URL from your site to get all required suggestions. The copy and paste method is really somewhat annoying.
Rank Tracking
Everyone wants to know how a particular keyword performs in the search engine. ‘Rank Tracking’ is the tool that helps to monitor a specific keyword performance over time.
You can easily perform the ‘Rank Tracking’ task in Semrush.
Go to Position tracker section > Enter domain name and keyword(s) which you would like to track.
Now you’ll get a complete report of how your website ranks for all those keywords.
Later on, you can easily monitor the progress of your chosen keyword phrases rank in Semrush.
Same way, you can input your competitor’s website data in the position tracking tool to compare (performance) your website with your competitor’s website for the chosen keywords.
Moreover, you’ll get email updates about your rank tracking progress.
When you compare ‘rank tracking‘ tool with other SEO tools, Semrush’s functionality is very strong. – NO COMPLAINTS HERE.
Backlink Analysis
How well your website performs in the search results based on how many external sites linking (backlinks) to your website.
In general the SEO view is, the more backlinks your site has, the more chances to get higher rank in the search results.
More backlinks = Higher rank in search results.
Semrush has two ways to look for backlinks on a site.
1. Backlink Analysis
2. Backlink Audit
Let’s look on each:
1. Backlink Analysis
Using ‘Backlink Analytics‘, just enter a domain name to get a complete list of all backlinks.
You can get more information from backlink analysis.
- What is the ‘anchor text’ used for each backlink.
- What is the ‘top-level domain distribution (.com, .Gov. .org your website has)
- IP addresses of all backlinks.
You’ll get all data in detail and depth, and the view or report lets you see when a domain gained backlinks and lost backlinks and the value of the links.
This information is more important to improve your site’s SEO efforts or gain your competitor’s backlinks related.
Semrush has a HUGE backlink size and good quality of its link database. As of now, Semrush claims 39 trillion backlinks in its database, whereas Ahrefs claims 25 trillion.
It clearly shows that you could more comprehensive backlink data from Semrush.
I have tested a few different websites to check the performance using different SEO tools.
The number of backlinks found on each SEO tool is almost similar. However, Semrush performed well (small sites) when we compare other SEO tools Ahrefs and Moz.
However, Moz performs better where the sites have bigger backlink profiles.
Backlinks Audits
One more way to get the backlinks details from Semrush is by running ‘backlink audit‘.
The primary need to run this audit is, you can easily find ‘toxic‘ (spam links) of backlinks pointing to your website and determining ‘site health‘.
Backlink audit provides you the list of spam links. You can review those toxic links and upload to Google as a ‘disavow’ file.
This list effectively tells Google to ignore these toxic links. If your site has many links from the spam websites then Google may penalize your website for having poor quality links.
Disavowing bad links is the super way to increase your rank in the search results.
Make sure you’ve read Google’s guidelines on Disavow before starting uploading the spam site list.
Semrush backlink audit tools really work well and easily spot out the poor-quality and spam links. This way you can easily prepare the Disavow file to upload on Google.
Semrush’s Link Building
Link building tool is one of the standout features of Semrush. The process of ‘Link Building’ is very simple by getting other sites linking to your site.
Link building is one of the major parts of SEO project success. Search engines typically award and keep a website on the higher rank that which site has more links pointing to them.
Keep in mind, the linking sites to your website should be high-quality content, ranking and relevant websites.
Link building tool of Semrush works by
- Determine and analyze who are your competitors and what they are ranking for
- Examining your site’s content
- Asking you which keywords you like to rank for.
And then it will analyze websites that are worth contacting for backlink requests or even ask for guest post requests.
Also, it will give you more useful tools. You can easily connect mailbox to Semrush platform and you can easily outreach emails from within the tool.
You can do all these processes with CRM-Style.
Moreover, Semrush gives you the email contacts from wherever it can collect from the website and you can use it as a reusable template shown below.
All these features and supporting tools offered by Semrush are very strong than its competitors. I would strongly suggest my readers to go with the Semrush SEO tool.
Broken Link Building
Broken link building tactic is one of the important SEO tactics by Semrush.
A broken link is one (link) which no longer leads anywhere.
As a SEO tool, it needs to find a broken link, recreating the ‘dead’ content and which is used to point to. And contact the person who used to link to the dead content and request them to link to your website instead.
Broken link strategy is one of the easy and effective ways to build backlinks to your website. As we already discussed, the more backlinks your site has, the more chances to get high rank on the search results.
Semrush’s broken link building tool is one of the easy ways to build more backlinks to your site.
To collect information from Semrush SEO tool,
- Run a backlink analysis report
- Navigate to an ‘indexed’ page section
- Click on ‘Target errors’.
- Now you’re good to export the XLS or CSV file.
You can use the filter option to sort the 404 errors. (404 error – Broken backlinks).
People may feel as this a complicated process, but it’s really worth doing. You can re-import your broken link file to Semrush (email address) and you can outreach using the CRM-style pipeline platform.
Site Auditing
Semrush’s Site audit tool is hugely used by the SEO experts.
In site auditing process, Semrush will completely check out for if any issues which may bring negative impact for site’s search ranking, including:
- Slow-loading content
- SSL problems
- Duplicate content
- Crawl errors
- Missing headers
- Repeated use of keywords
Most of the SEO experts like Semrush’s on-page SEO checker, to scan your entire site and provide you valuable action tips, suggestions to improve every post in a site.
Semrush’s on-page SEO checker suggestions include:
- Keywords to add
- What is the process to be taken in order for your page to appear in ‘Google Featured Snippet’.
- Ways to improve your body copy and meta descriptions
- List of websites to approach for backlinks
- Content length
- Strategies of internal linking
Semrush’s site auditing not only tells you what to do, it explains to you why you should do this.
You can see a ‘Why should I do this?‘ link for each suggestion. When you click on that link, you’ll get a complete explanation. Moreover, you can learn a lot about SEO tools and SEO tactics through these easy tips and suggestions.
Semrush’s site audit is greatly superb. Even though its competitors offer this feature, Semrush wins this race and offers more information.
Semrush Interface and Ease-of-use
The Semrush interface is very similar to its competitors like Ahrefs and Moz. All menu options located in the left and all functionalities will derive in the right side.
All menu options are grouped together as categories like –
- Competitive research
- Keyword research
- Link building
- Rank tracking
- On-page SEO
- Reporting
You may feel overwhelmed in the beginning to see more data to contend with, but you will get to know soon once you start using it.
Yes, Semrush of course provides a lot of data.
Semrush’s data visualization is very in-depth and easily understands the data from all aspects. Most of the data are given in the graphical method which is very easy to understand and take action.
Moreover, Semrush’s interface is specially made to work better with smartphones. It doesn’t mean it has a ‘responsive’ method. When you login with Semrush through a mobile device, you’ll still see the standard desktop interface like small texts and you can do more zooming and pinching with high-quality.
The best part is, Semrush offers an app for mobile that allows you to access your site and post position tracking data. It would be really good, if Semrush offers you access to all other Semrush’s features through a mobile-friendly format.
Bottom line about Semrush’s interface is, its laid out with more fashion and it’s very straightforward to use. However, desktop view and ease of use is better than using a mobile phone to get the most out of Semrush.
Price & Value for Money
If you compare Semrush with other SEO tools based on PRICE only, you may feel Semrush is an expensive ‘SaaS’ (software as a service).
Keep in mind and remember all features we discussed above, you’re NOT just paying only for functionality. You’ll pay Semrush to access a HUGE database, including competitor intelligence.
Semrush Plans
Semrush offers 3 great pricing plans:
- Pro: $199.95 / month
- Guru: $229.95 / month
- Business: $449.95 / month
Also you have an option to create your own bespoke plans like ‘Custom‘ version of platform which is considered by some group of customers. You’ll get more generous limits on queries, users accounts, reports etc.,.
If you want to check out Semrush performance before going for a paid plan, here is a FREE Trial of Semrush.
The Semrush’s standard version lasts for 7 days, however for a limited time you can access Semrush platform an extended 14 – days here.
If you compare the trial periods with Semrush competitors, it’s really better than Ahrefs and Moz.
Semrush – 7 or 14 Days Free Trial
Ahrefs – 7 Days free trial for $7
Moz – Paid free trial for 30 days.
Bottom line of these queries, Semrush is really doing better in terms of TRIAL version also.
What are the main differences between the Semrush plans?
- Number of reports per day
- Number of keywords to track per month
- Access to content marketing (tools)
- Access to historical data
- The more you pay for the plan, the more features you get on the above.
Below are more in-depth aspects of the pricing structure to know and highlight where Semrush SEO tool offers good or bad and value for money.
Seats
The worst part of Semrush pricing in all plans, even ‘Business plan’ $449.95 – You can include only one user account or seat in Semrush.
Still you need one more user account for your organization to access Semrush; you must pay $45 – $100 extra for extra users (based on the plan type).
Semrush’s competitors offer more seats / extra seats and you can increase the users accounts for less charge.
If you feel this is a BIG issue, you can contact Semrush support to negotiate their pricing with user accounts related. You may investigate with the support team about “Custom Plan’ with Semrush.
Projects
You should be aware that few Semrush features will be available or can be used when you add your domain as ‘Projects’.
Key features which are falling under this category is,
- Site audit
- On-page SEO checking and position tracking
- Backlink audit
Based on your Semrush plan, you have the number of projects on the go. For example, the entry level plan – $119.95 per month and facilitates 5.
People who have many business websites and who need to monitor and manage SEO concurrently and do more competitor analysis, it’s a must need to be aware of.
Report Requests
Semrush is very generous when you talk about reporting requests per day. Even in the entry-level plan in Semrush, you can pull over 3,000 domain analysis reports per day.
But you can take only 25 reports per day from Ahrefs’s entry plan.
This comparative generosity will increase as you go up with the pricing ladder.
- Semrush plan $449.95 – 10,000 reports per month
- Ahrefs plan $399 – 250 Reports only per month.
Competitive Intelligence
There are a few features of Semrush in terms of analyzing competitors’ websites, available with a purchase of a ‘competitive intelligence’ add-on.
These are,
- Marketer Explorer – Market players and shares, audience gender, age and behavior, seasonal etc.
- Extended traffic analytics – Engagement of visitors, traffic sources, mobile and desktop, historical data, audience overlap and geographical details.
- Competitor benchmark – Ability to cross comparison up to 5 competitors
- Bulk traffic analysis – Web-traffic data up to 200 prospects (in a click)
- Top pages -Web-traffic data up to 200 prospects (in a click).
It’s a little disappointment that this add-on price would be $200 per month. However, all those metrics could be considered great and worth paying extra.
PPC Data
It’s sure most of the bloggers or website owners are working the combination of SEO and PPC projects. If you’re among the one then Semrush is the best option to go. Semrush is the best SEO tool for PPC and SEO combination if you compare other competitors.
It gives you more PPC data, whereas other competitor’s tools provide your basic information on CPC figures for individual keywords.
Semrush is a great SEO tool and offers you detailed information on CPC competition, live ads, PPC campaign planning tools and distribution data.
Customer Support
Semrush SEO tools are quite complete in nature and customer support availability is really great in the view of users.
The best part of Semrush customer support is, you’ll get 3 channel support like, phone, chat and email.
No other competitors offer phone support to its clients. Semrush is the one and only SEO tool that offers phone support. (Moz even doesn’t offer live chat support).
Unlike other SaaS products or SEO tools, Semrush shows its contact details each page of the Semrush website. The Semrush chat box is visible on the corner of each page and Semrush phone number is listed in the Semrush footer.
In customer support prospective Semrush wins this race by offering great customer support.
Semrush Review Conclusion
Semrush is a really great SEO tool that gives you all the data you need for your successful SEO project. Doesn’t matter, you’ve technical background or not, you can easily manage the Semrush dashboard and all other Semrush categories and menus.
From my experience, Link building and Site auditing tools are great features for your site to rank faster in the search engine.
CRM -Style platform of building backlinks is a great strategy and Semrush offers you a great checklist which you can use to improve your technical aspects through ‘on-page SEO tactics‘.
I would say that the main downsides,
You can work with Google search engine only. However Google is 92.5% of total search engines.
Semrush’ all accounts come with a single user account (seat) and few features can be used as a part of ‘project’.
As a bottom line, Semrush is a very good SEO solution for beginners and experience and offers all information to improve your site’s rankings on the search engine.
We’ll finish the Semrush review with the summary of the Semrush pros and cons and alternatives of Semrush seo products.
Semrush Pros
Semrush is very easy to use and handle.
You can perform the domain analysis in-depth with more results. You’ll get all the information you wanted from a SEO tool.
Even Though, Semrush provides a large amount of data, it’s interface is each tab. It’s graph data and visualization data help to understand everything easily.
Semrush’s link building functionality with CRM -style features help to reach more related websites.
Semrush’s site audition features help to follow a set of instructions easily. Especially, you can make more improvements in terms of technical SEO and ON-Page SEO aspects of your website.
Along with the organic search data, you’ll get more PPC data as well.
When you compare Semrush with its competitors, it is very generous when we talk about the number of reports to pull in a day.
Phone, chat and email, these 3 channels of support in Semrush is great for its clients. It’s not available in Semrush’s competitors’ tools.
A 14-days Semrush trial is great and no others offer.
Semrush Cons
Semrush offers search engine data from only one search engine ie., Google. It’s competitors offer data from all search engines.
It comes with a single user/seat account for all plans. Need to pay extra for buying additional users or seats.
Few key features are available as part of ‘projects’. Semrush limits the numbers or projects.
Few competitive analysis features may cost extra $200 per month.
Why should you use the Semrush SEO tool right away?
It’s very common that all bloggers are working day and night to write more posts to increase the volume of their blog traffic.
However, bloggers never focus enough how they are generating traffic to their blogs.
If you check your blog stats or analytics, you’ll surely realize only 2 or 3 blog posts are bringing traffic to your blog.
When you start using the best SEO tools like Semrush, you’ll easily get to know how your competitors get traffic to their blogs.
Semrush helps you to find the keywords of your competitors which bring more traffic to their website. Now you can write quality content based on the keywords you got from your competitors websites.
This will help you to get a better position for some target keywords in your niche.
Here is a FREE 14-day Semrush Trial to check how well it will support you.
Alternatives to Semrush
The immediate competitors to Semrush are Ahrefs, Moz and Majestic SEO tool. You can review the comparison of Ahrefs vs. Semrush.
From my experience from Semrush, Mon and Ahrefs, I would argue and support through the advantages of Semrush SEO tool.
The best part of Semrush SEO tools is, ‘CRM-Style’ platform helps to get more backlinks by approaching related websites by sending emails within the box.
This is the main advantage of using Semrush SEO tool over other SEO tools.
Semrush’s competitors are very generous in terms of users’ accounts. If you expect only ONE user then I would strongly suggest you to go with Semrush.
If you want many users to manage your SEO tool then you may find any alternative to Semrush like Ahrefs or Moz.
Are you a Chrome user and looking for a SEO tool? GrowthBar is the best option. GrowthBar works well with Chrome extension and very low cost than the products listed above in this guide.
You can try the 5-Day FREE TRIAL of GrowthBar from here.
Do you’ve any thoughts about Semrush SEO tools? Please share with us in the comments section.
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