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Semrush is one of the most popular all-in-one SEO solutions on the market, because it includes a lot of functionality that you have to pay for separately in other tools, all in one package. It is updated very frequently and new features are added all the time. And while it’s not the least expensive tool on the market, it stacks up well vs the competition and is consistently innovating. How well exactly? Our experts dive in to find out in our comprehensive Semrush review.
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Semrush
Pros
- Site Audit tool shows overall website health and what issues need to be addressed.
- Position Tracking tool provides historical data and can target different devices and locations.
- SEO Ideas tool looks at your content and compares it to your competitors’ to give you ideas.
- Brand Monitoring tool allows you to easily monitor your brand reputation online.
- Great for competitor evaluation – track keyword position changes, traffic values, and more.
- Speedy! The data loads quickly, unlike some competing services.
- Keyword Magic Tool gives access to 20 billion keywords and allows you to drill down into specific subtopics to build your campaign
- Keyword Overview tool allows you to easily research new keywords from various locations within Semrush and add them all to one convenient location
Cons
- While we appreciate SEMrush’s Keyword Difficulty tool, we’ve found it places too much emphasis on total Google results instead of exact results, perhaps making some keywords less difficult than their rating indicates.
Semrush Key Features
You can get overwhelmed with Semrush at first because it’s so feature rich. Here’s a fairly brief (we could go on and on) overview of this tool’s main features.
Site Audit
The general Audit feature gives you stats on your current organic and paid searches, backlink performance, etc.
Organic vs Paid Search
Confused by some of the lingo we’re throwing out? Make sure you visit our SEO 101 guide (we recommend referencing it side-by-side) which will explain the basics so you’ll understand the terminologies and concepts we use in this comparison.
Semrush also has an excellent SEO Ideas tool that offers you specific insights and suggestions on areas that could use improvement. And their Brand Monitoring tool lets you track, measure and adjust how people are viewing your brand.
Competitor Analysis
Competitive analysis is where Semrush stands out from the pack. Semrush gives you powerful information on who your competing websites are and how they’re performing.
You can see data about their top keywords, display advertising, link building, paid and organic searches and how they’re doing in rankings. You can manually enter your competitors, but Semrush also analyzes your keywords and finds competitors you didn’t know existed.
Keyword Research
Semrush takes keyword research to a deeper level and lets you play with the big boys — websites that rank in Google’s and Bing’s top results. Along with the basic data, like CPC and volume, you’ll also get information on keyword difficulty, trends, the number of results, SERP features, and more for every queried keyword, including long tail keywords.
In the cons above we distinguish between “total” and “exact” Google search results — this simply means if you type a keyword phrase into Google using quotes (“we rock your web”), it will provide the exact number of results for that phrase.
We’ve found this value is more useful in calculating how competitive a phrase is than the large number of results that’s returned when you don’t use quotes (ie. you type in ‘we rock your web’ without quotes).
Link Building
You can do some serious backlink research with Semrush to help you boost your website’s reputation on the Internet. Semrush gives you insights into how authoritative a referring domain is and where it’s located. You’ll also be able to see if each backlink is a follow or no follow link.
Semrush also allows you to see how your competitors’ backlinks are performing. Semrush recently launched a backlink audit tool that helps you find toxic links so you can easily disavow with Google’s Search Console.
Social Media Poster & Tracker
Semrush’s Social Media reporting and posting tool allows you to manage and track all of your social media under the same roof as your SEO. You can link your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram accounts (and more) and schedule posts to publish at the most ideal time (when your fans and followers are online).
You can see all your scheduled content in one calendar and create custom, detailed reports about your social audience, their activity, user engagement and more. All of this data is also available to analyze your competitors’ social media efforts. We made the switch to SEMRush for our social media management and rank them as one of the best in our social media management tools review.
Semrush’s Newest Features
Semrush is constantly adding new features. Some of its latest additions include:
- Traffic Jet — an AI-powered tool that fully automates traffic acquisition and gives you instant access to hundreds of premium traffic sources including Google Search & Display, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Quora, Reddit and hundreds of other advertising platforms
- Social Media Ads Tool — allows you to create, launch, manage and optimize ads on Facebook and Instagram
- Improved level of accuracy in Traffic Analytics
- In-depth Custom Market Analysis reports
Pricing
Semrush offers a 7-day money back guarantee on all plans. The following prices are monthly. You get discounts if you pay annually.
| Pro | Guru | Business | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price Per Month | $129.95 | $249.95 | $499.95 | Must Contact |
| Reports Per Day | 3,000 | 5,000 | 10,000 | Must Contact |
| Projects | 5 | 15 | 40 | Must Contact |
| Keywords | 250 | 1,000 | 5,000 | Must Contact |
| Scheduled PDF Reports | 5 | 20 | 50 | Must Contact |
There are also custom Semrush plans if there isn’t a stock product that works perfectly for you. For example, if you just want to add another session (simultaneous login) or user, you can pay for this a la carte.
How Do Users Weigh In On Semrush?
Here’s a sampling of user feedback we’ve found on Semrush. A vast majority of customer reviews around the web are overwhelmingly positive about Semrush.
Positive Reviews
Awesome SEO tool. I use it on a daily basis and most other SEO colleagues also use it. You can benshmark [sic] your domain with that of competitors – on different levels (PLA/Display Ads/backlinks/rankings). Very usefull and very detailed information. You can further use it to expand on the keywords and find new related ones with the keyword analysis function. Also good if you want to expand into new markets. – Andrea S., G2 Crowd 4/30/2018
Not only is the service they provide fantastic but their customer service was rapid to reply when I had a problem and they resolved it immediately. They are a bit pricier than some others but worth every penny. – D. Hazan, Trustpilot 4/27/2018
Complaints
Some SEMRush data has a delay, which we’ve caught only by comparing data available in Google Search Console. For situations in which we are monitoring specific keywords, SEMRush is not the most reliable. – User, G2 Crowd 5/2/2018
Decent features but poor money garbing practice by making it a hard to cancel subscription resulting in me being charged another month unnecessarily. – Mark, Trustpilot 8/26/2017
Want To See Semrush In Action?
Check out the video below for an overview of Semrush’s easy interface and visually engaging platform.
Semrush vs The Competition
How does Semrush stack up to popular competitors in a side-by-side showdown? Our experts find out. Here’s the head-to-head bouts we have on deck at the moment.
Semrush vs Moz
We often get asked how Semrush compares to Moz, a known leader in the SEO world that has been around since the beginning. Moz was here first, but Semrush has been evolving at a rapid clip. Who has the best offering to help you rank higher today? Our experts find out in our exclusive Moz vs Semrush showdown!
Semrush vs SpyFu
These two duke it out to be your all-in-one SEO resource. They both have very comprehensive offerings, but differ in a few key areas. While Semrush is developing and adding features at a more rapid clip, SpyFu offers more aggressive pricing. Find out what else separates them as our experts compare Semrush vs SpyFu.
Is Semrush Right For You?
Semrush has evolved into such a full-fledged SEO powerhouse that it may take a little while for you to get used to everything that’s available to you in their portal. Semrush is a great all-in-one SEO tool, in fact, that’s our SEO solution of choice that we pay for here at We Rock Your Web. It’s a bit pricier than the competition, but we’ve already seen our ROI increase to cover those costs.
But don’t take our word for it, see how Semrush fares in our experts’ independent annual comparison of the best SEO solutions, and read our interview with Semrush CEO Oleg Shchegolev for an inside look into how the company got started and where it’s going.
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