Semrush Review (Pros, Cons, Pricing, And Ratings)

Now more than ever, SEO, or search engine optimization, is the name of the game for all online retailers, workers, and businesses.

SEO refers to the process of increasing the quantity and quality of website traffic to your page through organic search engine results.

SEO targets unpaid traffic versus paid and can be generated through the use of different kinds of searches.

It is arguably the most popular internet marketing strategy on the market today.

Luckily, if you have no idea where to start but want to integrate SEO into your business, there are dozens of tools out there to choose from.

These tools will help generate new content ideas likely to generate traffic or identify other opportunities to raise brand awareness.

One such tool is Semrush.

Quick Summary Of SEM Rush

How I Like To Test These Platforms

SEM Rush Rating Breakdown

Try Out SEMRUSH

What is Semrush?

Launched in 2008, SEM Rush is marketed as an all-in-one tool suite for improving market visibility through advanced SEO and offering quality data reporting to help you understand what traffic you’re getting.

SEM Rush also offers Campaign Management and PR services, as well as PPC tools and keyword research.

All of this is important for businesses hoping to scale digitally and looking to target new audiences.

This guide will do a deep dive into Semrush’s offerings, as well as discuss the pros, cons, and pricing of the platform.

To get started with Semrush, you can choose to try out the 14-day free trial before buying a premium plan.

Be aware, however, you will need to input your credit card information before beginning.

You’ll then start a “project” on a domain you want to analyze for current online visibility.

Try Out SEMRUSH

Ease of Use

Before getting into the specifics of how Semrush works and what you can do, this guide will cover how easy it is to use for the beginning SEO content builder.

The overall Semrush interface is similar to other competitors and website builders, including a menu of options on the left which will then pull up related functionality on the right.

The menu options are robust and categorized cohesively.

For example, you’ll find link building and backlink analysis within the same categories, as these two are related concepts.

Semrush does provide its users with a lot of data.

It may be hard to make sense of it all at first, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

But SEM Rush offers helpful guides and suggestions, as well as the option to pull reports that they generate.

If you need to report data back to your team, this is especially helpful so that all data appears in one place.

In addition, Semrush will automatically create helpful graphs and data visualizations to make the data look cleaner and more visually appealing.

Unfortunately, Semrush’s interface is not the most responsive, meaning that the interface you see on your desktop is the same one you’ll see on your mobile phone.

This can require a lot of pinching, zooming, and turning to get the best angle.

Luckily, Semrush does offer a mobile app for mobile-friendly position tracking data but use your desktop for the best experience with Semrush.

Domain Analysis

A domain analysis simply refers to an automated inspection of your domain from an SEO vantage point and is where SEM Rush starts its process.

This refers to seeing where SEO integrations could be added or improved.

You can perform a domain analysis on your own website or even do one on a competitor’s site to see how you compare in search results.

If nothing else, you’ll be sure to want to run a domain analysis for the most comprehensive overview of your domain.

To get started,

you’ll enter a domain URL in Semrush’s “domain overview” section.

After calculating metrics based on a variety of algorithms, Semrush will give you analytics on how the domain is currently performing in search.

Some of these metrics include an authority score, arguably the most indicative number of the quality of your site.

This outlines the total number of visitors to the website per month and the total number of keywords the website ranks for.

A metric called backlink analysis is also a key data point to look for.

Backlinks are created when one website links to another, essentially representing a “vote of confidence” for a website.

SEM Rush can track any domain’s backlinks, spot new backlinks, and also inform you when backlinks are deleted.

This will also help you track your competitors’ link-building efforts and see what you could be doing differently.

It’s important to note that while Semrush gives solid domain overview statistics, they are estimates, giving you an indication of site popularity but not 100% accurate traffic reports.

Semrush does offer a cool feature called a ‘competitive positioning map’ which allows you to see where your site stands against its competitors in different positions and markets.

You can also break down your domain analysis by country, which is crucial for understanding new markets to break into.

Try Out SEMRUSH

Keyword Research (This Has Helped Me A Ton)

Keyword Research refers to the practice of optimizing your site’s keywords to get the largest amount of people searching for a particular keyword as possible.

With Semrush, you can understand what sites are already ranking for a specific keyword and who is searching for it.

Semrush offers a great “keyword overview tool” that gives you a “keyword difficulty” score, allowing you to understand how difficult it is to rank for a particular keyword and which keywords to avoid using.

You can also see how many people search for the keyword per month and year, and boil it down to a country level.

You can create a keyword difficulty score by using Semrush’s “keyword magic” option, which will automatically pull a percentage based on hard it will be for a certain keyword to rank highly in search.

In addition, Semrush will provide keyword suggestions based on competitor analysis and metrics, and even provide you with cost-per-click data if you were to use Google Ads.

This guide will go over PPC and CPC data in a later section.

One thing to note, however, is that all keyword data provided is for Google searches only, which isn’t beneficial if you use a search engine like Bing.

SEMRUSH Rank tracking

SEMRUSH is a tool for tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your rankings in search engines. With SEMRUSH you can track the performance of all your keywords, get reports on which pages did well and where you need improvement, monitor competitor activity, and much more.

With Rank Tracking, you will always know how well your website ranks for any keyword or phrase that matters to your business!

SEMRUSH is a tool for tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your rankings in search engines.

It provides you with real-time data on the keywords that matter most to your business so that you can identify opportunities to improve performance and increase revenue.

With SEMrush’s Rank Tracking feature, you’ll be able to see how many visitors come from each keyword search term (including the number of impressions received), as well as the average position at which they appeared on page one of Google’s results pages (SERPs).

With SEMRUSH you can track the performance of all your keywords, get reports on which pages did well and where you need improvement, monitor competitor activity, and much more.

Tracking your rankings and performance is important because it allows you to see exactly how your SEO efforts are working. With this data, you can determine where the most success lies and where there is room for improvement.

• Tracking your rankings: Tracking your rankings allows you to see how well a keyword or phrase ranks on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Search. This information will help determine which keywords should be focused on moving forward with content creation or link-building campaigns.*

Takeaway:

SEMRUSH is a tool for tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your rankings in search engines. With SEMRUSH you can track the performance of all your keywords, get reports on which pages did well and where you need improvement, monitor competitor activity, and much more.

SEMrush is one of the best platforms to use if you want to improve your organic traffic and optimize your site’s performance on Google.

Backlink Audit & Analysis

As mentioned before, how well your site performs in search results often depends on how many backlinks — external sites linking to it — exist for your site.

With Semrush, you can perform a backlink analysis and a backlink audit, which made sound similar but offer different metrics.

With backlink analysis, you can enter a domain name and simply view a list of all the backlinks Semush can find.

You can also see the anchor text for each backlink and the IP addresses of backlinks, allowing you to improve your own SEO or change anchor text to be more visible.

The data provided is a fairly comprehensive set of results that perhaps outperforms similar analyses from other SEO platform competitors.

With SEM Rush,

you can also perform a backlink audit to determine how “toxic” the backlinks are pointing to your site.

This will help determine your site’s overall health and SEO strategy.

To identify toxic backlinks, Semrush will collate a list of links during a backlink audit that appears spam-like or have privacy concerns.

You can review the list link-by-link and then upload a link to Google as a “disavow” file, meaning Google will ignore these poor-quality links in a search result.

This will benefit the overall quality of links pointing to your site.

The process to “disavow” a file can be arduous though, so read Google’s policy on this before choosing this route.

Luckily, you can also whitelist links if Semrush points to a link incorrectly as toxic.

After you do this, Semrush will not flag the link again.

In addition, everything is provided in an easy-to-understand CRM tab style to easily track and click away from and back to.

Semrush link building

A great feature of Semrush that some other competitors don’t have is the link-building tool.

Link building is crucial for SEO, as search engines often reward sites with more links pointing back to them with higher rankings in search results.

Semrush’s link-building tool will first start the process by determining who your competitors are and what they’re ranking for, as well as doing an overall examination of your site’s content and the keywords you’d like to rank for.

Semrush will also offer you a list of potential sites to reach out to feature a backlink to your site.

You can connect your email inbox to SEM Rush and reach out to sites directly through the platform, and Semrush may even provide an email address connected to the site you’d like to be featured on.

Broken link building is worth mentioning here as well.

If you find a broken link or a link that no longer has any content or leads anywhere, through Semrush’s link-building analysis, you have the option to recreate the content that once appeared on the page.

To perform this, you can run a backlink analysis report and first navigate to an ‘indexed’ pages section.

From there, turn on the ‘target errors’ option.

Depending on your preference, you can export your results to an Excel or CSV file, where you can then sort and filter your results to determine the broken link.

Then, you can reimport your broken links file and reach out directly to users or sites with the link directly within Semrush.

Reporting Pulls & Competitive Intelligence

Luckily, Semrush allows you to put in a large number of reporting requests per day, giving you real-time analytics ready to be shared within minutes.

You could theoretically pull up to 3,000 domain analyses per day, a high number that far outpaces Semrush’s competitors.

If you’re really interested in analyzing what your competitors are doing differently, you can purchase Semrush’s “competitive intelligence” add-on for an extra $200 a month.

Unfortunately, these features do not come as a part of Semrush’s entry plan, which can be a bit frustrating.

Still, with competitive intelligence, you can use Semrush’s main tool, Market Explorer.

This is where you can really get advanced demographic information, like the age of your audience compared to your competitors, gender, behavior and buying habits, and who is leading the market right now.

It’s also great for understanding how your competitors are doing where and when.

You can see how their traffic changes throughout the year and in which countries are they performing the best.

You’ll also get extended traffic analytics with the competitive intelligence feature, going beyond what is available through the basic site auditing feature.

Here, you can see how your visitors engage with your site. How long do they stay and where are they clicking to first?

What are your most popular sources of content?

You can also see if your visitors are coming in from a desktop or mobile device.

If you find more visitors accessing your page from a mobile device, you’ll want to make sure your site is optimized for smartphone usage.

If you’d like to analyze several of your competitors at once, you can cross-compare up to 5 sites and get great benchmarking analytics in one single place.

Sometimes, businesses want to understand both SEO and PPC, or pay-per-click data, as mentioned before.

PPC data, unlike the organic content generated from SEO, is paid search.

PPC does allow you to finely focus your page positioning and create target opportunities for brand visibility.

If you have both SEO and PPC projects that you’d like to run, Semrush offers PPC tools as well.

SEM Rush allows you to create PPC campaigns and even design live ads directly on the platform based on individual keywords.

Try Out SEMRUSH

Overall Site auditing

For overall site auditing and really getting an accurate picture of issues that may negatively impact your search ranking, Semrush has great functionality.

You can use the dashboard feature to look for several key metrics, including slow-loading, overused or duplicate content that could confuse your viewers, as well as any missing headers or meta descriptions that may be getting lost in the search.

During a site audit, you can use Semrush’s on-page SEO checker.

This will scan your website in its entirety and give you technical solutions for overall improvement, starting with the most actionable ones first.

For example, Semrush will give you keywords to add, content suggestions for length and rankings, as well as how to make a site page appear on Google as a “featured snippet,” perfect if you have a launch or promotion coming up.

Semrush also provides internal linking opportunities to take your site to next level.

A great feature of Semrush is that they provide not only the know-how but also the explanation as to why you should take action on an item.

This comes in the form of a “why should I do this?” link under each suggestion.

When you explore the link, you’ll understand why you should implement these changes while also learning about SEO in the process.

Overall, the site auditing feature provides a standardized checklist of ways that you can improve your technical and on-page SEO.

Pricing For SEMRUSH – Discount For Annual Plans

SEM Rush, and other SEO tools in general, are usually fairly expensive because you do get a wide variety of analytics options.

If you’re a small business that doesn’t experience a ton of web traffic a day or is only hoping to get a marginal increase in visibility, buying a premium plan with Semrush may not be your best bet.

But if you want to understand why your site is ranking where it does and how you can move past your competitors, using Semrush is like joining the ranks of big businesses.

Here is an overview of the SEMrush pricing plans and costs:

Pro Plan:

The Pro Plan is the entry-level subscription tier of SEMrush, ideal for freelancers, startups, and in-house marketers with a limited budget. This plan gives you access to the core features of SEMrush.

• • Monthly Subscription: $129.95 per month
  • Annual Subscription: $108.33 per month (billed annually)

Guru Plan:

The Guru Plan is a mid-tier offering that provides additional features including content marketing platforms, historical data, and Google Data Studio Integration. It is well-suited for SMB and growing marketing agencies.

• • Monthly Subscription: $249.95 per month
  • Annual Subscription: $208.33 per month (billed annually)

Business Plan:

The Business Plan is designed for agencies, E-commerce projects, and businesses with an extensive web presence. This plan includes more advanced features like API access, extended limits, and share of voice metric.

• • Monthly Subscription: $499.95 per month
  • Annual Subscription: $416.66 per month (billed annually)

Enterprise Solution:

SEMrush also offers custom solutions tailored to an organization’s needs. For pricing and features of the Enterprise plan, SEMrush recommends reaching out directly to their sales team.

Keep in mind that opting for an annual subscription provides a discount compared to the monthly subscription rates.

SEMrush also offers a free trial, allowing you to test out the platform before committing to subscription plans.

Try Out SEMRUSH

Overall Pros and Cons of Semrush

Pros

1. Easy to get started and use

Domain analysis is often a key facet of SEO and it is especially easy to complete with Semrush.

Their overview section gives you all the metrics you’d want to know, displayed in a clear and concise place that even those with no SEO experience can understand.

2. Provides a lot of data

With Semrush, you truly do get what you pay for, which is access to detailed graphs and data visualizations with large quantities of data.

You can sort based on year, month and day and pinpoint data based on country.

You can also pull multiple reports within a day.

3. Great link-building and site-auditing functionality

Semrush doesn’t just want you to audit your site.

They want you to make solid SEO improvements that will take your site to the next level and technically improve your visibility, which is why their SEO and link-building features are so robust.

Cons

1. Only provides data from Google

Unlike some of its competitors, Semrush only provides data sourced from Google’s search engine.

Unfortunately, while Google is by far the most popular search engine, you could be missing out on a huge chunk of data.

2. Plan limitations and costs

As mentioned before, only one person can have an official “account” with each Semrush plan.

While you can add more, this can add up quickly.

In addition, some advanced reporting is only available for official project analysis, and SEM Rush only allows you to run a few projects at the same time.

3. Not responsive

While the platform is continuing to make improvements to its responsiveness, Semrush still doesn’t look great on a mobile phone, which isn’t great for the on-the-go SEO content lead.

Customer Support

SEO sites like SEM Rush can be quite complex if you’re unsure of what you’re doing.

Semrush offers three channels of support – phone, chat, and email, which run from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, Monday-Friday.

The 14-day free trial is also great for deciding if you’d like to buy a premium plan.

The chatbot is available on the corner of every page, so whatever section you’re on, you can ask for support.

FAQ Section for SEMrush Review

Semrush Review Conclusion

Overall, Semrush is one of the best SEO tools on the market today.

For all of the link-building, site auditing, and competitive analysis tools that it offers, Semrush is regarded by many customers to be well worth the cost.

If you decide to go with Semrush as your go-to SEO platform, make sure to read all the guidelines, understand each plan and think about your goals for your site.

It also does help to have a solid understanding of SEO and SEO terminology to really get the most of the analytics.