Semrush Review – SEO and SEA software

Users rating

Read further to learn more about Semrush, one of the best SEO software, we will detail its features, pros and cons with our rating, and a conclusion about why you should use it.

Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article:

Semrush is a platform that allows you to do many different things. To give you an idea of the architecture, it is necessary to know that Semrush allows long-term reference campaigns through what it calls “projects”. In parallel with these projects, it is possible to achieve live analytics on SEO of certain domains, on social interactions or even on paid Google campaigns (SEA).

The Semrush tool can be used to monitor your daily positions but also that of its competitors. This is the great strength of the service, with millions of sites being analyzed daily, Semrush offers a very good overall description of the competitive ecosystem around a domain. Whether for SEO, social interactions or paid traffic campaigns, it is always possible to compare the positioning of one with the competition.

Make sure to understand that Semrush doesn’t do everything. It is a toolbox that can accompany a website owner in its SEO strategy, its social strategy, or its strategy on paid traffic. It involves all sources of traffic acquisition on-site, and it is actually a complete tool to control and understand the development of its traffic. It is a very global offer that, in our opinion, makes the strength of Semrush.

Semrush specifications

Semrush by default offers three subscription models on their platform: the Pro version of $120 per month, the Guru version of $230 per month and the Business version of $450 per month. An even more complete business version is also available, but must be made on the estimate. For this purpose, a dedicated form on the Semrush website is available. As you can imagine, the Pro version offers fewer functions than the Guru version and business version. However, according to the applications, it is not necessarily justified to go for the most expensive model. If independent users are largely satisfied with the Pro version, agencies and SMEs should go to the Guru version. The business version concerns only large groups with a strong presence on the web. Below we will quickly detail what the big differences are in terms of limits for each plan.

Semrush pricing plans

Different pricing limits for the Domain & Keyword Analytics feature

Let’s quickly talk about the differences between the 3 plans. What you can quickly see is that there are differences in the “Domain & Keyword Analytics” section:

• The pro plan offers 10 000 results per report, 3 000 reports per day and 250 keyword metrics updates per month.
• The guru plan offers 30 000 results per report with 5 000 reports per day and 1 000 keyword metrics updates per month. Plus, you will get access to historical data that will allow you to travel back in time and understand how you or your competitors’ websites were performing since 2012.
• The Business plan offers 50 000 results per report with 10 000 reports per day and 5 000 keyword metrics updates per month. You will obviously get access to historical data too and will get access to the Semrush PLA data for optimizing your Google shopping campaigns.

Different pricing limits for the Projects feature

If you go around the middle of the pricing feature comparison image, you will see that there are differences in the “Projects” section:

• The Pro plan offers 5 projects maximum (5 websites to track), 500 keywords IN TOTAL to track, 1 target per project, 100 000 pages to crawl per month, 20 000 pages to crawl per projects, 500 SEO idea units, 50 social profiles for monitoring, 10 social profiles for posting.
• The Guru plan offers 15 projects maximum (15 websites to track), 1 500 keywords IN TOTAL to track, 10 targets per project, 300 000 pages to crawl per month, 20 000 pages to crawl per projects, 800 SEO idea units, 100 social profiles for monitoring, 30 social profiles for posting.
• The Business plan offers 40 projects maximum (40 websites to track), 5 000 keywords IN TOTAL to track, unlimited targets per project, 1 000 000 pages to crawl per month, 100 000 pages to crawl per projects, 2 000 SEO idea units, 300 social profiles for monitoring, 50 social profiles for posting.

Different pricing limits for the Content Marketing Platform feature

If you are interested in improving your content for the search engines, then we would recommend you to get the content marketing platform feature. Unfortunately, it’s not available for the cheapest plan and for the other plans, there are some limitations:

• The Guru plan offers 800 SEO content templates, 20 000 pages to audit, 5 countries to track, 50 posts to track, 1 calendar and 5 plagiarism checks per month (don’t worry you can buy additional checks).
• The Business plan offers 2 000 SEO content templates, 20 000 pages to audit, 10 countries to track, 50 posts to track, unlimited calendars and 10 plagiarism checks per month (don’t worry you can buy additional checks).

In this Semrush review, we will focus on the following features:

• Management Features
• SEO Features
• Advertising Features
• Content Marketing Features
• Competitive Research Features

This part of Semrush is more intended for agencies or contractors who have employees and various projects. We will of course detail all the features below but in summary you will get:

• A lead generation widget
• Calendar and notes to manage your projects and team
• Reports for your customers
• A client management system with their projects

Client Manager: Manage your clients in one dashboard

If you need to add clients to your Semrush dashboard, it is now possible thanks to the Client manager feature. Now you can organize all your customer data in one interface and you can manage and control everything easily. You will be able to do the following things:

• Add customer contact info and notes
• Set up a project for each client
• Track a wide variety of SEO, SMM and other metrics
• Get notifications about important changes
• See all your clients’ performances in one place
• Create, schedule and send reports to your clients.

Create your custom PDF Reports or use ready-made templates

For your customers or yourself, it can be interesting to gather data from your sites on PDF reports to facilitate reading and comprehension. Semrush offers the possibility to create your own reports thanks to their 200 widgets and 50 marketing metrics. You also have 12 ready-to-use reports that you can directly use and customize as well.

The creation of a personalized report is done by dragging and dropping, the making of it is very easy. Once the template is ready, just schedule the sending and everything will be done automatically. In addition, you can add your brand and company name on the reports, so they are white-label reports.

Here are the different report templates offered by Semrush:

• Monthly SEO: Traffic, Keywords, Backlinks and Site Audit
• Organic Search Positions: Top 100 keywords sorted by traffic
• Site Audit: General info, issues, pages with issues
• Backlinks: Track your Backlink profile Health and measure your Link Building efforts
• Full Organic Research: Positions, position changes, top keywords, etc.
• Full Advertising Research: Positions, position changes, competitors, etc.
• Monthly Competitor Analysis: Website Traffic, Ads, SEO, Content, PR, Social Media
• Google Ads: Build reports for your Google Ads campaigns with all the metrics you need: Impressions, Clicks, Cost, Conversions, and more.
• Domain Comparison: Organic research data, paid traffic, top keywords
• Google My Business Insights: Customer Actions, Search vs Map Views, Direct vs Discovery Searches

Manage your projects in your Semrush dashboard

A large part of our review about Semrush is based on the “Projects” tool, which is Semrush’s great strength if you want to keep it in the long run. In addition to the SEO tracking features of a given website at any time, Semrush has also developed a “project” system that allows you to effectively track your website in the long run. This tool is especially interesting for those who want to measure the development over time of their SEO strategy (and that of their rivals) while benefiting from relevant recommendations from Semrush.

As you can see from the video above, the first phase has to define the domain name, which is followed by Semrush. As already mentioned, this project allows you to track the evolution of the positions of the site on the search engines, the possible technical problems, the activity on social networks, and Semrush can even suggest additional recommendations.

Once you’ve built your project, as in our Semrush review, you’ll have a dashboard that allows you to configure and track various strategic points for referencing a website. Among the features available on the platform are all highlighted in the image above. We’ll go into a few of these in more detail, but we strongly recommend trying Semrush for free to test the capabilities of all of these features.

Generate leads automatically with the Semrush Lead Generation Tool

Specially designed for a digital marketing or SEO agency, this lead generation tool allows to generate a widget to be inserted on a page (usually home page) so that future customers can get an audit of their website for free. This will allow you to collect their email addresses and to be able to offer them your services afterwards.

What’s even more awesome is that it’s possible to fully customize the widget, from the content to the appearance and even the language.

Marketing Calendar and notes

As a marketing or SEO agency manager, you will surely need a calendar system to plan your tasks and those of your employees. Semrush provides you with this functionality, which will allow you to delegate tasks at the SEO and SEA level, as well as track their achievements.

When you make a change to the SEO of your site, whether it is by adding content to an article, publishing a new article, acquiring backlinks or improving the internal mesh of your site, it can be hard to remember the exact date of the changes made. With the notes system, you will be able to understand the changes you have made as a result of your modifications.

Here is finally the long awaited part, because yes, Semrush is especially popular for its SEO part. So we will show you in the rest of this article, all the potential that Semrush offers you!

Below is a screenshot of the SEO dashboard concerning the site Ciroapp.com. This provides an overview of the following statistics:

• Domain Analytics
• Position Tracking
• Site Audit
• On page SEO checker
• Backlink audit
• Traffic analytics
• Keywords
• Backlinks

Complete competitive research

The domain analysis functionality is available in a limited version and is free for everyone. Just go to the Semrush homepage and enter a domain name to get some results. This tool is really relevant because it gives an excellent overview of the SEO power of a domain, its traffic, the keywords in which it is positioned, and its competitive environment.

You can directly see an estimate of traffic from organic traffic and paid traffic (see the picture above in our Semrush review). To have tested several websites, this number is not always very precise, but it gives a good indicator.

The Organic traffic graph gives the traffic over a period of time. Semrush is able to measure fairly efficiently when a site tends to gain or lose traffic months after the month. By clicking on the graphic you can have a detail of the biological research. It uses the search quantities and analyzes the position of the location that the Semrush can estimate the traffic at a given time.

Complete Keyword research

Another very interesting feature in Semrush has a keyword analyzing system. This section is as relevant as everyone else, as it gives you ideas for producing content based on popular keywords. As you can see in the screenshot below, you must first specify the keyword you want to get an overview of, the volume research, the keyword difficulty, the trend and all the lexical fields around it.

With Semrush, you can find keywords so you can build content around them and drive traffic. The Keyword Magic tool helps you get many keywords (with their traffic and trends) around the Lexical field.

The principle is simple: you enter the keyword you want to evaluate, and Semrush then displays a certain amount of related information. For example, you can see the number of searches, the number of results, or information about SERP services (images, videos, and other carousels on the first page of a search engine).

The last interesting tool in this section on Semrush keywords is “Keyword Difficulty. ” As the name suggests, you can see the estimated difficulty in reaching the top position for a particular keyword on Google.

If you only need software to do keyword research, we advise you to consider Mangools, which is much easier to use and more affordable.

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Complete Backlink tool

SEMrush wants to compete with service platforms specialized in the analysis of backlinks like Ahrefs or Majestic. The service has developed a dedicated section that allows pushing the analysis really far and determines the backlink profile of a site. If you are used to Majestic or Ahrefs, it may seem difficult to take in hand, but you will find almost the same information there.

It is also possible to visualize all reference domains and their authority scores – an indicator created by Semrush that shows how powerful a domain is. This is quite similar to the trust flow you can have on Majestic, or Moz ranking that you can find on Moz. It lets you see what are the most powerful sites pointing to your domain (or a competitor).

On-page and tech SEO

As part of the project, there is another very powerful tool called “On-Page SEO Checker”. By default, it chooses the approximately fifty pages to be analyzed in-depth (it is also possible to define them) and provides a complete summary of the improvements to be made.

Unlike “site audit” focusing on the technical part, the SEO page of the page further analyzes the selected pages to deliver a complete SEO analysis. This refers to the net linking strategy, the semantics, and technique of these pages. Once you have started the analysis of the tool, wait several long minutes on an interesting result.

Rank Tracking

Obviously, rank tracking is an essential part of an SEO website because it is a clear indication of whether the effort has been focused.

In this case, as part of a Semrush project, a section dedicated to it will allow you to track the performance of the website, such and such geography, on such a search engine (Google or Baidu), as well as in such a device (mobile or desktop) and compared to the competition (up to 20 competitors can be selected).

You can define up to 1,500 keywords to track and you can enter them manually, import them through a TXT file, or download them from Google Analytics or Semrush data.

One of the interesting tools in this position tracking analysis is that it is possible to detect all the competitors who position themselves on the keywords we defined and who therefore have these keywords in common with our website.

Thus, we can find other competitors that we would not think of, and we can analyze the keywords they are placed on to generate even more traffic and better target keywords.

We are now at the advertising part of Semrush. Indeed, Semrush is mainly known for its SEO features but it also offers SEA (Search Engine Advertisement). We will detail below the different features you will get to track and optimize your advertising campaigns and spy on your competitors.

Market Analysis

The Market Analysis feature works in the same way as the competitive research part you can find in the SEO features. With the domain overview, you will get the following benefits:

• Reveal your main paid search competitors
• See the keywords they are bidding on
• Discover examples of their live ads

Organic research and advertising research work in the same way, it allows you to track the positions of your advertising campaigns as well as those of your competitors. You will be able to optimize your campaigns according to the different tests you will carry out and according to the keywords you will choose.

• Gain insights into the audience targeted by your rivals in GDN
• Monitor your competitors’ GDN campaigns on desktop and mobile
• Analyze the texts and banners your competitors are using
• Discover the biggest publishers in your niche

The Product Listing Ads (PLA) research feature will show you everything about your competitor. You will be able to discover their advertisements which are positioned on different keywords and you will thus be able to improve your advertising campaigns or consider positioning yourself on their keywords. You will also be able to see the bidding strategy of your competitors.

Keyword research

Keyword Gap will help you to find keywords that are actually targeted by your competitors so you will be able to track their results and find new keywords for you. You will directly get new opportunities and therefore improve your ROI! It is possible to search for keywords in organic, paid and Google shopping campaigns results.

Keyword magic tool whose operation is identical to the one presented in the SEO part will allow you to obtain the cost per click of a keyword, its search volume and the estimated level of competition. In addition, you will be able to find new long-tail keywords.

Optimize your Google ads campaigns with the PPC Keyword tool by setting negative keywords, relevant keywords and removing duplicates.

Go back in time by getting google ad history based on specific keywords. This way you can get key figures in terms of traffic acquisition and spending. This will allow you to estimate your advertising expenditure and estimate your ROI. Watch an example about the keyword “movies” in the United States:

Ad Tracking

Track the position of your advertising campaigns on specific keywords and compare your positioning with your competitors. Also, get insights about Snippets and shopping ads SERP results.

Social Media Ads

Create and manage your Google advertising campaigns directly from your Semrush dashboard. Save time with automatic features such as automatic UTM creation, streamlined creation and low-performance ads monitoring.

We prefer to make it clear right away, the features of the Content Marketing platform are not available to users of the Semrush Pro plan, which costs approximately $120 per month. It is only available with the higher plan called Guru which is about $230 per month.

Topic Research

Finding an article topic and knowing the interest of your users can sometimes be complex. Thanks to Semrush’s topic research tool, by inserting the topic, you will get multiple ideas of topics to cover. For example, you will get ideas of popular subtopics with the indicated search volume. Then several hundred headline ideas will be proposed. And finally, you will get an overview of all the questions users have in this particular area.

This will give you many ideas for writing your article in a relevant and SEO-optimized way.

SEO Content Template

Get recommandations on how to create and optimize your article. Just insert the keywords you are targeting and you will get some tips about the semantically related words, the backlinks you can acquire, the average readability score of top 10 competitors ranking on your targeted keywords and the recommended text length for your article.

You will also get some basic recommendations for the title and meta description of your article, the H1 and the content.

If you noticed it, you have an “order content writing” button. Semrush offers you some content writing offers as on the screenshot below. Currently you have the possibility to buy content writing for:

• Article
• Product description
• Website copy
• Email newsletter
• Press release
• Ebook

SEO Writing Assistant

Used by most large companies or by professional content writers, Semrush’s SEO writing assistant tool allows you to optimize an article according to target keywords so that it is best suited to what Google wants to get in the top 10 results. Below you can see an example concerning the writing of this article.

Semrush recommends inserting several different keywords to improve the semantics of the article. It is also possible to check if the content is unique and not duplicate content.

Brand Monitoring

If you are the owner of a brand or simply want to track down when a website talks about you by citing the name of your site, you can use the brand monitoring tool. This way you will get a summary of all the articles that mention you. And that’s not all! You can also track what’s going on with your competitors to spy on their communication strategies.

Post Tracking

Guest posting is a powerful tactic that can help build authority, get high quality backlinks and get new audiences to your site. If content creation and distribution are resource intensive, it is very important to monitor and evaluate the results of your external articles.

By analyzing key metrics such as social media engagement, reach, backlinks and referral traffic that comes to your site, you will be able to identify relevant guest posting platforms to focus your efforts on them. It can also help you identify opportunities, highlight failures and understand the type of articles that work best for your goals.

If you write and advertise external articles (such as guest posts), this analysis will be valuable in reporting the impact of your work. In addition, seeing how well each article has proven to give you an understanding of what works to shape future campaigns for success.

Content Audit

Content analytics tools can tell you how your digital content performs both on and off your website. The tool measures social sharing, backlinks, keyword ranking and even Google Analytics data such as batches and bounce rates. The tool has two main functions: to review the engagement of your website and to measure the distribution of your external content.

Running a content review is a great first step because you can find pages on your site that are old and potentially obsolete or pages with very low social engagement – those that you have a priority to improve.

Everything we have seen above can be used to spy or search for competitors, in the “Competitive Research” section you can analyze the traffic of your competitors, analyze the market, analyze the keyword gap, analyze the SEO results of your competitors and their backlinks but also discover their advertising campaigns, their keywords on which they are bidding and study their copywriting.

Competitive Intelligence add-on

The CI (Competitive Intelligence) add-on package can be added to any paid Semrush subscription. It contains the following tools:

• Traffic analytics
• Market explorer
• Bulk Traffic Analysis
• Top pages
• Competitor Benchmarking

This feature is part of the Semrush Competitive Research Suite, a package that includes the main Semrush suite and these additional tools for one price. These tools are not available with a standard Semrush subscription and can only be purchased in addition to a regular subscription or as part of a custom Semrush plan.

SEOquake is a free plugin for your browser that gives you organic search data with just one click. SEOquake is currently compatible with Google Chrome, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox. It can also provide parameters for entries in search engines. In addition to organic research data, SEOquake offers other useful tools such as SEO review, keyword density report, internal/external link analysis and even social metrics.

In summary, you will get the following features thanks to the SEO Quake plugin:

• SEObar: Get an instant SEO summary for which web page you are browsing with the interactive SEO line that can be customized to your needs or disabled completely.
• SEO Dashboard: It opens a compact lightbox with a brief SEO overview, including page information, domain and backlinks.
• SERP Overlay: Get a comprehensive analysis of the SERPs and export the results in CSV format.
• Big data: SEMrush, Alexa, Google ranking, Yahoo index, whatever! Switch between a wide variety of trusted data types and sources, including social media like Tweets and Facebook Likes.
• Keyword Analysis: Get a detailed and structured report on all the keywords found on the page. Visualize data in the keyword cloud and refine your search using powerful filters.
• Print and export: With SEOquake, it is easy to store data from all your reports into one CSV file.

Today, Semrush is the only tool so powerful as it is today to follow the evolution of the visibility of a website (and a brand) on the internet. From a purely SEO point of view, it is a tool that includes all strategic points to improve its referencing:

• Website structure analysis
• Content optimization
• Position monitoring
• Competition analysis

In the “Social Media” strategy and in the traffic campaigns, Semrush is also very complete, it allows you to control everything from a single interface.

Our opinion on Semrush is very positive at all levels, although (necessarily) expensive. The investment is depreciated very quickly, especially for the time you save and the advice you can give. In fact, every position improved in Google can generate a large sum of money, so there are not a hundred euros a month which should deter SEO specialists.

Of course, everyone has their preferences, but we must see the tool as a way to follow the development and trend of positions over time (especially through “projects”). It is not a tool that we will necessarily hear every day (the position report is not daily), but a tool that we open every week to see their positions and discover their competitors’ SEO strategy.

Beware, there is so much information that we can quickly waste time on the platform and forget the most important thing: Put your hands on the mud to change position. Once again, in our opinion, Semrush is a good companion, but he will not do the job for you.

The length of this Semrush review also says a lot about the number of features in the platform: You may get lost in it at first, but soon you will get up again. It’s just a matter of habit, and it’s worth examining. However, some features added over time by Semrush (and for some who are still in beta) are not the most relevant, and this may saturate the screen.

Between the main menu on the left and the submenus of the tabs, there can sometimes be redundancies that do not facilitate navigation either. As you can see in our Semrush test and review, the interface remains very intuitive.

Passing now at prices, we must admit that the service is not cheap. For an independent SEO, the cheapest is $119 per month. These are certainly a little more expensive than the competition terms, but they are not so complete. I have to add the price of at least 3 competition services to get all the features found in Semrush. So in the end, the price of Semrush in our opinion is pretty much justified.

Before subscribing to Semrush, it’s always a good idea to check out the competition and find the best SEO software for your needs. You can find the Semrush alternatives here.

Here are some versus to compare Semrush with its competitors:

SEOmatic vs Semrush

AccuRanker vs Semrush

Mango SEO vs Semrush

Ahrefs vs Semrush

Moz vs Semrush

SpyFu vs Semrush

SurgeGraph vs Semrush

Ubersuggest vs Semrush

Show next

Semrush Review – SEO and SEA software

• 1Quick Overview
• 2Pricing
• 3Features
• 4Management Features
• 5SEO Features
• 6Advertising Features
• 7Content Marketing Features
• 8Competitive Research Features
• 9Browser extension
• 10Conclusion
• 11Alternatives

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