SEMrush is an all in one marketing tool created for the digital marketing professional to focus on competitor based keyword research. It generates a ton of analytics that provides crucial information for your SEO strategies. This business tool really aids in finding the best keywords that can bring better ranking for your site. Even your competitor’s domain and keywords position can be tracked in all major search engines based on the geographic location. SEMrush servers diverse group of users based on subscription program and hence it not needed to be downloaded.
“Should I use SEMRush for my SEO needs?”
If you’re reading this post right now, chances are you’ve been wondering if SEMRush is the path to take to rank your website(s) high in the search engines.
Having used this SEO platform for the last 2 years and 5 months, I have been on a learning spree about it- from its features, functionality, and its ugly and good sides.
In the following full SEMRush review, I’ll share with you my 2plus years’ experience with this SEO tool and help you decide if it’ll do the trick for you.
Let’s do this:
What is SEMRush?
I know you might have come across varying definitions of SEMRush but allow me to tell what it truly is:
SEMRush is, in the simplest terms possible, a well-balanced, all-in-one SEO platform that helps you increase your site visibility, traffic, and rankings on the search engines.
To do this, the platform presents you with a wide array of features which include in-depth keyword research, competitor analysis, site auditing, domain monitoring, backlink analysis, to name but a few.
Designed by expert SEO and SEM minds, the platform has a total of 30 databases to give you the most accurate results.
Currently, over 1 million users are using SEMRush for their SEO/online marketing campaigns. Among these users include large sites:- like PayPal, Forbes, Phillips, Hyatt, etc.
However, SEMRush is a premium tool.
But don’t let that scare you. As you’ll see in my SEMRush pricing plans section, the tool comes with flexible pricing plans to make it affordable to everyone even the small-sized business struggling to create a presence online.
From my experience, the BEST way to understand what exactly SEMRush is actually getting to know what it does or what its features are. Let’s discuss this next…
SEMRush Features:
The bread and butter of SEMRush lie in the list of great features it presents you with.
In this section, I’ll highlight the platform’s top-best features and show you how to use them to get the best results…
- Keyword Research and Analysis:
As you already know, your online marketing journey starts with doing a keyword research. This helps you find the most profitable keywords to dominate the SERPs easily.
You also know that finding a list of potential keywords isn’t an easy journey.
BUT…the moment you start using SEMRush for your keyword research and analysis needs, believe you me, things will get easier and better!
Why do I tell you this?
Well, you just need to go to the tool’s first page and key in your keyword on the topmost search bar. After only a few seconds, the tool gets back to you with accurate monthly search volume for your keyword.
Not only that;
It’ll go the extra mile and provide you with additional data- like the most valuable keywords (or related keywords, if you like) that you can use in your SEO campaign.
TIP: I strongly advise you to pass every keyword you wish to target through this platform for a detailed analysis!
- Competitor Research and Analysis:
Time and again, it has been proved that spying on your competitors is a huge plus for your website. You’ll get to know which keywords they’re ranking, amount of traffic they’re receiving, and so on.
Allow me to make a confession:
With the help of SEMRush competitor research and analysis feature, I’ve always laid out great strategies that help me completely crush most of my competitors.
Wanna gain an edge over your competitors too?
Let me explain to you how you can do that too in 3 easy methods…
a). Assuming you already know your competitors, take their domain name (be sure to remove the “”http://” and www parts) and post it on SEMRush search bar. Within a few seconds, the tool will provide you with a list of:
- The top organic keywords driving traffic to your competitor’s site
- Their backlinking profile
- The paid advertising campaign (if any)
- And yes, you’ll also get a list of other competitors for the input domain.
Isn’t this an outstanding way of finding keyword competitiveness?
b). Another great way to spy on your competitor involves conducting an in-depth keyword research.
To do this, enter your competitor domain and click on the “Organic Research” button on the sidebar. This takes you straight to the Positions Analysis (by default, you’ll get US-specific data; but you can adjust to your country).
Finally, do the Organic Traffic Estimates- this will provide you with an idea of your competitor’s organic traffic volume as well as the traffic trend with time.
If you go ahead and click the Traffic Analysis tab, you’ll get more insights on your competitor’s traffic statistics.
c). How about determining your competitor’s SERPs competition strength?
Clicking on the Position Changes tab on the sidebar gives you easy access to changes in organic ranking for your competitors. You can then check up to 100 search results for New, Lost, Improved, and Declined keywords.
Filter out your results based on the four categories above.
When doing this kind of competitor analysis, I mostly focus on top-performing keywords on SERPs, so I rely on the New and Improved results only.
This way, I get hordes of long-tail keywords that my competitors are ranking for, including keywords that are ranking higher on Google and other search engines.
- Domain Monitoring:
As a SEMRush user, you don’t have to limit your research to keywords only. You can go ahead and gather tons of information regarding your own website to help track your reputation on the web.
This fantastic SEMRush SEO sub-tool automatically alerts you when you or your site/service/product/brand gets a mention on the web as well as on the social channels.
In my opinion, this is a quite helpful feature for your website, for two main reasons:
- First, getting mentioned by other site owners in your niche or your regular customers on the social media will have a better impact on your site than the conventional advertising.
- Second, you’ll get backlinks with the mentions, and these will further enhance your SEO rankings.
- Full Site Auditing:
When was the last time you did an audit for your site?
Yesterday? Last week? Or Never?
You might be updating your site with regular, quality content, and doing everything else the right way but still not getting results.
And that should prompt you to do one thing- to perform a site audit to discover where the root of the problem.
If you’re like me, you might have been hit by the Google updates- such as the Panda and Penguin- and understood the importance of site auditing.
Thanks to SEMRush Site Auditing feature, you can quickly discover the underlying issues affecting your site performance and rectify them on time. It presents you with a full list of issues affecting your site, including those on specific pages of your blogs and websites.
Perform a quick audit of your site with SEMRush now to identify any issues that need fixing, rectify them on time, and boost your site traffic!
- Backlink Analysis:
Part of your keyword research and competitor analysis involves having this crucial data: backlink analysis.
It will help you easily discover the number of links pointing to your site to help you come up with an effective SEO strategy to increase your site traffic and rankings.
That said, I’d suggest that you rely on SEMRush for all your backlink analysis needs.
The tool provides you with a pie chart option showing all the no-follow and do-follow links. Besides, it’ll show you the total number of backlinks of a given site, inclusive of the referring domains.
Without a single doubt, this is the highly valuable data you need in your backlink analysis job to help boost your site organic traffic.
With this backlink analysis, I’ve also been able to build quality backlinks for my site through a process I’ll share with you below:
– After running the backlink analysis test, I click on the Referring Domains option under the Backlinks column (this section has a list of the total number of the domains pointing to my competitors’ sites).
– Next, I do an email outreach to up to 10 of these domains per day (for weeks or months), promising to provide them with value or requesting for a guest post.
Most of the time, 3 out of 10 bloggers always get back to me. And that’s how easy it becomes to build backlinks for my sites.
If you’re having a hard time building links to your site (which is one of the top ways to rank your site higher on the search engines), I suggest that you start using SEMRush backlink analysis tool and you’ll love the results.
- For Indian Website Owners and Bloggers:
SEMRush has been thinking about you too, and this is evident from the changes they recently made to their tool…
They launched their own database that lets you- all the Indian site owns and bloggers- easily do keyword research targeting Indian readers.
So, if you’re an Indian site owner- this is a golden opportunity and a huge plus for your brand!
What’s more, you can also spy on your competitor by keying in their domain name or URL and changing the settings to Indian database.
SEMrush Discount Coupon & Promo Code
SEMRush Pricing Plans:
The last thing I’d want to share with you before calling off my review for SEMRush is the price you’ll need to meet to enjoy its unique features and functions.
As I did mention earlier, the platform comes with flexible pricing plans (they’re 3, to be exact) to make it affordable to everyone.
These plans include:
- Pro Account for $99.95 per month
- 5 projects.
- 500 keywords tracking.
- 100,000 pages crawling.
- 10,000 results per report.
- 3000 reports per day.
- 5 scheduled PDF reports.
- Guru Account for $199.95 per month
- 50 projects.
- 1,500 keywords tracking.
- 300,000 pages crawling.
- 30,000 results per report.
- 5,000 reports per day.
- 20 scheduled PDF reports.
- Branded PDF reports.
- Historical data access.
- Business Account for $399.95 per month
- Unlimited projects.
- 6,000 keywords tracking (1,500 per user).
- 1,200,000 pages crawling (300k per user).
- 50,000 results per report (for each of the 4 users).
- 10,000 results per day (for each of the 4 users).
- 50 scheduled PDF reports (for each user).
- branded PDF reports.
- Historical data access.
- Product listing ads.
- Multi-user management.
NOTE:
Before you can actually select the right plan for you, I’d recommend you to start by signing up for their 14-day FREE trial (with access to all the features I’ve outlined for you earlier).
This will give you a feel of what the platform looks like, works like, and so on.
Also, if you opt for an annual subscription for each of the above plans, you’re sure to save a lot of cash as opposed to paying monthly.
Pros:
- 14-day free trial with access to ALL features.
- All-in-one SEO platform.
- Comprehensive keyword research and analysis.
- Incredible competitor research.
- Desktop/mobile search breakdowns.
- Backlink tracking.
- Keyword suggestions plus proactive SEO recommendations.
- Quite useful project-based SEO campaign reports.
Cons:
- Keyword list management lacking.
- The backlinks data isn’t 100% accurate.
- You’ll need enough time to get used to this tool.
Final Verdict:
“Should I use SEMRush for my SEO needs?”
Yes! You should- all the time!
Having taken you through an in-depth review of this top-rated SEO tool, it’s easy for you to see that this is an all-in-one SEO tool that provides you with a wide range of tools (features) that you’d have spent additional money to buy for your online marketing needs.
Also, you have seen that this tool provides you with a comprehensive keyword research and analysis. Their data is accurate and will truly give you a list of high potential keywords to help increases your organic search traffic.
Above all, this is the team that makes crushing your competitors look so easy with the detailed competitor research and analysis.
In conclusion, I’d recommend you to grab the SEMRush 7-day FREE trial right now, and if you get excellent results (which I guarantee you’ll), you can go ahead and grab the ideal plan for you.
Have you signed up your 7-day trial already?