When it comes to SEO tools, most over-promise and under-deliver. After years of testing, I’ve found one that stands out: Semrush .
It’s the only tool I’ve relied on to grow traffic, improve rankings, and outperform my competitors.
In this review, I will break down
- Advantages of Semrush
- Where Semrush falls short
- My thoughts on Semrush's SEO and PPC features
- Is Semrush worth the monthly fee?
In the end, you’ll know if Semrush is the right tool to take your SEO strategy to the next level.
Backlinko and Semrush Special Offer: 14 Days PRO Trial
With Semrush, you can analyze your data, track your rankings, and discover valuable insights that help you tailor your content and strategy more effectively.
Domain Overview
This is a general overview of the website’s overall SEO and PPC marketing efforts.
If you want to dig deeper, you can get detailed information about your site’s organic traffic, PPC activity, engagement metrics like bounce rate, your site’s top competitors in Google searches, and more.
This report is helpful if you want a quick overview of how much traffic your site is getting from SEO or Google Ads.
You can also get useful insights into any website’s backlink profile. Including its top anchors and referring domains.
Therefore, domain overviews are great for getting a high-level understanding of your website or your competitors.
But you can use Semrush’s other tools to extract more specific data about your website.
Reveals any company's website traffic
Monitor website traffic of your competitors, potential customers, and potential partners.
Traffic Analysis
Traffic analytics can show you more detailed information about your website traffic. This includes where the traffic comes from, how users interact with your site, and even how many of them make purchases.
Traffic Analysis will also show you non-Google sources of traffic to your site.
For example, Semrush estimates that Backlinko has 803.4K unique visitors per month.
This estimate includes organic traffic generated through SEO. But it also takes into account YouTube, social media, other blogs, and direct traffic.
How accurate is this number?
According to our Google Analytics, we have received 451K unique visitors (“Users”) in the last 30 days.
So at least from this example, Semrush’s traffic estimate is a bit higher.
But it’s still useful to measure a site’s traffic and where those visitors are coming from.
This can help you understand which marketing channels your competitors are using.
(And what works.)
You can then adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Organic Research
Organic research can tell you how much traffic a website gets from Google and how that traffic has changed over the years.
The focus here is on organic traffic (hence the name).
And the way the tool calculates the numbers may produce some differences from traffic analysis.
But the real value of this report is that it provides a regularly updated list of keywords that your site ranks for in Google organic search. You can find this in the “Rankings” tab.
In my experience, reverse engineering your competitor’s keywords is one of the best keyword research strategies in the world.
Semrush is one of the best SEO tools on the market that takes this approach.
This is because Semrush has a huge database of more than 25 billion keywords. And they update this list all the time.
Therefore, organic research is a great place to start analyzing what content to create.
Speaking of keyword research…
Keyword Magic Tool
Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is one of the most powerful tools on the market. It allows you to find thousands of relevant keyword ideas in seconds.
You simply enter a seed keyword and the tool will come up with a ton of related search terms.
You can also filter and sort them based on the following metrics:
- Search volume
- Keyword Difficulty
- Search Intent
Only show keywords that are relevant to your business and that you can rank for.
Additionally, if you add your domain name, you’ll get AI-driven, personalized data related to your website.
This makes the Keyword Magic Tool a very useful way to find keyword ideas that will drive real results for your business.
Backlink Analysis
Next up is Semrush’s backlink checker feature. The backlink analysis tool gives you access to useful data about your backlink profile and that of your competitors.
Overall, I think Semrush’s backlink checker is pretty good.
This is because Semrush has a huge link index. And it can find new pages and backlinks quickly.
While I prefer Ahrefs Link Explorer UI, Semrush’s is still pretty good.
Specifically, they have dozens of filters you can use to find the backlinks you’re looking for — like those that are active and not marked as “nofollow.”
Overall, Semrush’s backlink checker is comparable to Ahrefs in many ways .
It has a solid index. There are also tons of features like domain authority metrics (called “authority score” in Semrush), anchor text breakdown, the number of links a site has received over a period of time, and more.
Semrush’s backlink tool even has some cool features that Ahrefs doesn’t have.
For example, Semrush actually breaks down a website’s referring domains into different categories.
For example, 25% of our backlinks come from sites in the “Marketing” niche. Another 25% come from sites that Semrush considers to be “SEO and Marketing.”
I think that sounds about right.
Backlinko specializes in digital marketing and SEO. Therefore, it's normal that most of our links come from other websites related to these topics.
But if I analyze our competitors, this kind of data can help me understand if our competitors are getting links in a certain market that we are not. I can adjust our link building efforts accordingly.
Semrush will also show you a list of websites with similar link profiles.
This is extremely useful if you are launching a link building campaign.
Why?
Because it helps you find the right sites to reverse engineer. After all, if a site has a link profile similar to yours or your competitors, it probably means they’re getting links from the places you’re looking to get links from.
Advertising Research
Most SEO tools add PPC functionality as an afterthought.
But that’s not the case with Semrush. They’ve been focused on PPC since day one.
They continue to invest significant resources into their PPC competitive analysis capabilities.
In fact, you can use Semrush to see almost any ad your competitors are running and how much traffic those ads are bringing in.
They even estimate the cost per click, giving you an idea of how much the site spends on Google Ads each month.
This is already extremely valuable information.
But the real highlight here is the ability to see the exact ads your biggest competitors are currently running .
If you're familiar with Quality Score, you know that an important factor is your ad's click-through rate (CTR). The higher the CTR, the less you typically need to bid.
If you see that a competitor has been using a certain ad for months or years, you know that ad is getting a good CTR. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be using that ad.
For example, the Ad History tab shows that Amazon consistently ranks its ads first for the term “owala water bottle.”
This keyword is likely to generate a lot of sales, so the ad has been running for over a year.
If you want to see more ad copy and keywords to use as part of your PPC campaign, go to the Competitors tab. You’ll get a list of sites bidding on the same keywords.
Just to be clear: Semrush isn’t just for PPC ads.
They also have a powerful display advertising feature in their app center called AdClarity.
Not only can you see their display ads:
But you can even get a list of specific sites where they advertise:
Overall, advertising research is one of the best features of Semrush.
But combine it with the Ad Clarity app, and you can get some pretty powerful advertising data.
Market Explorer
Market Explorer is designed to show you the landscape of a particular market.
For example, when I put Backlinko into the Market Explorer, it shows me both “established players” and “game changers” that are growing rapidly.
You can even see which sites are driving the lion’s share of traffic in that area.
What's the use of this?
Well, let’s say you’ve just taken on a new client and they’re in a field you know nothing about.
You may need to spend days researching to determine who your competitors are and which websites are well-known.
Semrush’s Market Discovery Report makes this kind of market analysis much easier.
Keyword Overview
Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool allows you to perform in-depth analysis on individual keywords.
In this report, you can view your keyword's search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC estimates, and more.
You can see the first page competition for that keyword in the search engine results page (SERP).
I like this feature because it gives you tons of keyword ideas.
Specifically, Semrush generates keyword ideas by variations, questions, and “keyword strategies” (with example pillar pages and topic clusters provided).
For example, here are Semrush’s variations for the keyword “social media marketing.”
Yes, there may be some long-tail keywords here that you hadn’t thought of . But for the most part, it’s not great for discovering new keywords. (That’s what the Keyword Magic Tool I discussed earlier is for.)
On the other hand, the list of related "questions" is really helpful.
This is because it will generate questions that I might not have thought of myself (which is also the point of using a keyword research tool).
Keyword Gap
Keyword Gap compares your keyword rankings to a handful of your competitors.
The idea here is that you can find many keywords that your competitors rank for in Google, but you don’t.
Overall, the effect is very good.
Note: This assumes that the competing sites you are placing are at or close to the same level as you in terms of authority and overall SEO. And that these sites are actually relevant to your business.
For example, when I analyzed some competitors, Semrush found a list of keywords that I should optimize for.
You can even get a list of terms that both you and your competitors rank for.
This way, you can find keywords that you already rank for, but could potentially rank higher with some on-page optimization or link building.
So instead of spending time producing brand new content, I should be working on improving that page.
While the Keyword Gap Tool is great not only for finding gaps in your keyword strategy, it’s also great for finding opportunities to build on what you already have.
Special Research
Topic research tools are more applicable to content marketing rather than straight SEO.
Here’s how it works:
Type in the topic you want to write about on your website. Semrush will find a bunch of related topics. And specific content that is performing well.
For example, when I put "plants" into this function, it lists a bunch of similar topics.
I can then click the “Show More” button to get more ideas about that topic cluster.
For example, title, question, and related searches.
This makes it a great tool for inspiring new content ideas.
SEO Content Templates
Semrush’s SEO content template scans the top 10 organic search results for the keyword you want to rank for.
It then finds words and phrases those pages use in their content.
The idea here is that these pages rank well in part because they cover a topic in depth and use the types of LSI keywords that Google might understand as being relevant to that topic .
To be clear: LSI keywords are not a panacea for SEO. But using them can help Google understand how relevant your content is to a given keyword. This may improve your chances of ranking well.
It also shows you backlinks you might want to acquire, as well as readability and word count suggestions.
Finally, it will also show you how your competitors are using your target keywords.
This way you can get an idea of how often and where they use keywords.
You can also jump into the SEO Writing Assistant using the Live Content Check tab.
This will show you more suggestions on the SEO, readability, tone, and originality of your content.
SEO content templates and writing assistant tools are great for quick on-page optimization of your content.
Location Tracking
This is the rank tracking feature of Semrush. You can use it for both organic and paid rankings.
Like any good rank tracker, this tool can show you how your rankings are changing over time, your site’s overall search engine visibility , and your ranking distribution.
You can even see a cannibalization report. This report shows you when multiple pages are competing for the same keyword.
For those running paid advertising campaigns, being able to track your Google Ads ranking is also ideal.
You can use this data to ensure your campaign budget is being spent efficiently and to identify underperforming ads.
Therefore, Semrush’s position tracking tool is an essential tool for monitoring your SEO and PPC campaigns.
On-site audit
Semrush also has a super in-depth SEO website audit tool built in.
In my opinion, this is one of the better SEO audit tools on the market (on par with Ahrefs).
That’s because their “Site Health” percentage score makes it easy to assess your site’s overall technical SEO health.
But if you want to delve deeper, you can.
For example, if you run an e-commerce website with thousands of pages, Semrush will scan all of them.
And gives you lots of things you can do to improve your site’s crawlability, indexing, internal linking, and overall performance.
For example, Backlinko has a Site Health Score of 71%.
That's not bad. But, as you can see, there's a lot of room for improvement.
Specifically, some of my pages have larger HTML sizes (which affects page load speeds). The tool also tells me that I need to cache more CSS.
Some of these are definitely nitpicky things that won’t necessarily have a big impact on your rankings. But fixing many of the little issues on your site can lead to measurable results.
So if you want to make sure your website’s technical SEO is 100% accurate, Semrush’s website audit tool is a great way to do it.
Link Building Tools
Most SEO tools will provide you with a lot of data. But the final decision is up to you.
Semrush’s link building tool aims to change all that.
Semrush’s link building tool ties Semrush and sending outreach emails together, without the need to open one tab to access Semrush and another tab to send outreach emails.
This way, you can actually get the important work done (outreach) without leaving the platform.
You can use this feature for link prospecting (finding sites that might link to you).
You can also use this tool to send outreach emails and track the results.
This simplifies the process from finding relevant prospects to actually acquiring links.
While you still need to create quality content and have a website that people want to link to, there’s no doubt that the Semrush link building tool does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Semrush Support
Semrush provides live chat functionality after logging in:
Overall, their support has been excellent and fast.
They also have a help center that provides guides on specific tools and other aspects of the Semrush SEO suite.
Semrush Pricing
Here’s a full breakdown of Semrush’s current pricing:
They have three main levels:
- The Pro plan ($139.95 per month) is great for those who have multiple websites (“projects”) and want to track their performance, and who don’t need certain features like content marketing tools or Looker Studio integration.
- The Guru plan ($249.95 per month) gives you access to content marketing tools, as well as higher page crawl limits, more tracked keywords, and a greater number of projects in your site audit.
- The Business plan ($499.95 per month) adds higher limits and some extra metrics. You also get API access.
There is also an enterprise solution for those who need it, but you will need to contact the Semrush team to find out more about the pricing of this solution.
If you’re not satisfied with the paid plans, you can also opt for the free Semrush plan . This gives you a limited trial of many of their tools before you buy. Or you can use this link to get a 14-day trial of the Pro subscription .
Semrush: Things I Like
Now let me introduce some of my favorite parts of the Semrush platform.
Reliable Data: Data is the backbone of SEO tools like Semrush. Semrush’s SEO and PPC data is world-class and always up-to-date.
Unified Platform: One of the strengths of Semrush is that everything is connected. This can make some of their features faster and easier to use.
For example, when you analyze a site’s organic rankings, you can quickly view that site’s backlinks, traffic stats, and more. Clicking on a specific metric, like backlinks, lets you view detailed reports in other tools, like Backlink Analysis.
Unique SEO and PPC Feature Set: This SEO toolkit has so many features that I didn’t get a chance to cover all of them in this review.
Yes, there are a lot of features in Semrush. The Semrush team is always innovating and adding new features to the platform.
Semrush: What I don’t like
Here are some things I don’t like about Semrush.
Organic traffic estimates can be biased: Like any SEO tool, Semrush’s organic traffic estimates aren’t always very accurate. This isn’t a flaw in Semrush, as all SEO tools have this problem.
Lack of click data: If you want to really drill down into individual keywords, Semrush can do the job, but Ahrefs is a little better here.
Why? Ahrefs gives you more data. This data can help you decide if a keyword is right for you.
For example, in Ahrefs, you don’t just get the monthly search volume. They also show you how many people clicked on it .
This is useful data that Semrush doesn’t have yet.
Click-Heavy UI: As you may have gathered from this review, this platform has a lot of features. This means that it often takes 3-5 clicks to get to the specific report you need. This is a testament to the power of the tool, but for beginners, it can be a bit overwhelming.
Bottom Line: My Semrush Review
Semrush has a host of industry-leading features backed by extensive keyword, backlink, and ad data. That’s why Semrush is one of the most popular and trusted marketing tools.
I work on SEO all day long. So I find myself always logging into Semrush to check my own site’s SEO health and rankings. I also use it a lot to research my competitors.
Even though I only use 10-15% of what Semrush has to offer, the value I get from it is still enough to justify the monthly fees I pay.
If SEO, PPC, and digital marketing in general are important parts of your business strategy, I recommend Semrush .
If you know of other tools or software for SEO, please let me know via the comments section below.
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