Semrush Review: Unveiling SEO, Content, & Social Media Tools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for any business. Since many businesses operate online, good SEO is a must. Today, we’ll give an honest review of Semrush, often considered the top choice for SEO.

Semrush is a comprehensive tool for SEO and digital marketing. It promises a lot and delivers even more. Thousands of users use it to boost search rankings, enhance market research, and stay ahead of competitors. Semrush offers a wide range of features, likely more than you’ll need right away. However, these features can be very useful as your business grows.

In our 2024 review of Semrush, we’ll cover every aspect of this product. We’ll discuss its features, pricing, ease of use, customer support, and other important details. If you’re wondering whether to invest in it, this Semrush review will help you decide.

What Is Semrush?

Semrush is not just one thing; it’s many things. However, if we had to describe it in one sentence, we’d call it an SEO tool. While SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it encompasses much more.

Semrush specializes in several areas:

• SEO
• Content
• Market Research
• Advertising
• Social Media

This tool provides everything you need to lead your business to success. With its advanced keyword research and competition analysis, you can improve your rankings and reach more people.

Semrush isn’t a new tool; it was founded in 2008 by Dmitry Melnikov and Oleg Shchegolev. Despite the founders’ names, Semrush is not a Russian company. It is headquartered in the USA and has around 100,000 subscribers. These users benefit from its link-building capabilities, which help optimize websites for more Google traffic.

Additionally, Semrush offers keyword suggestions and improves backlinks. This review will cover these and many other features to show just how powerful this tool is.

Pros And Cons Of Semrush

Semrush Review of Features

Now that we’ve highlighted some features, it’s time to dive deeper. After all, you’re here for a detailed Semrush review, and that’s exactly what you’ll get.

1. Domain Analysis

When you open Semrush’s interface, you’ll see a vast array of domain analysis features. Semrush allows you to analyze any domain online and obtain the necessary data about its quality, particularly in terms of SEO.

Domain Overview

Users often begin by analyzing their own site. By using the Domain Overview option, simply type in your site’s domain and click on Search. Semrush will then quickly provide all the information it can gather about the site.

For example, you can see the authority score, organic search traffic, backlinks, and even country distribution. It’s great that the tool shows both organic and paid traffic to help you understand these key metrics.

In this Semrush review, we also appreciate the option to view SERP features and organic keywords. This is crucial for understanding how your site or a competitor’s site operates.

Even better, this information helps you decide if getting a backlink from a competitor’s site is worthwhile. A backlink from a high-quality site can boost your rankings. Most of this data is based on actual figures, so its accuracy is high.

Most importantly, the tool lets you filter search results by country. This helps you see how the website performs in specific regions. Additionally, you can view historical data for a better overview of the site’s performance.

Traffic Analysis

However, traffic figures are estimated and can’t be 100% accurate. For larger, more popular sites, the estimates are better. For smaller sites, it’s harder to estimate exact traffic numbers. Still, we found Semrush to be quite accurate.

While the company acknowledges its estimates aren’t perfect, scrolling to the end of Traffic Analytics reveals satisfying results. We also appreciate its transparency; the tool indicates its accuracy level—Low, Medium, or High—depending on the site you search for.

In Traffic Analysis, Semrush displays essential metrics, such as visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration, unique visitors, and bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who leave the site after viewing only one page.

Another feature we liked is the display of competitors’ top pages. You can see each page’s unique visitors and their sources. Semrush clearly shows paid, direct, and social media visitors, providing detailed data.

In our Semrush review, we’re very pleased with how Traffic Analysis works. However, it’s more useful for analyzing larger competitors with over 50,000 monthly visits. For sites with fewer than 5,000 monthly visits, the data won’t be as accurate.

Other Domain Analysis Features

In addition to Traffic Analysis and Domain Overview, Semrush provides a useful array of tools for competitor analysis. For instance, Organic Research allows you to delve deeper into understanding search intent and gather more information about your competitors.

It’s used to determine the intent behind a search query, whether a user seeks information or intends to make a purchase. The tool provides insights into both aspects and allows keyword searches by intent.

This helps you understand why people click on specific sites, including your own. Compared to tools like Ahrefs, Semrush excels in search intent analysis, which is more intuitive and detailed.

Additionally, Semrush offers two more domain analysis features: Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap. Keyword Gap compares your keyword profile with competitors’, helping you identify strengths and weaknesses. Similarly, Backlink Gap uncovers new backlink opportunities to enhance your SEO efforts.

Throughout our Semrush review, we easily found numerous websites to include in our link-building strategy. Overall, we’re impressed with the quality and depth of Semrush’s domain analysis tools.

2. Keyword Analysis

The features we’ve mentioned so far are just the beginning. Beneath the surface lies a vast array of small and large features to explore. Beyond its thorough domain analysis, Semrush also excels in keyword analysis.

Keyword Overview

The first option you’ll notice is Keyword Overview. Simply enter the keyword, choose the location, and click Search. The tool will then reveal comprehensive information about the keyword, covering every detail.

Remember the keyword intent we mentioned earlier? Semrush provides that along with other crucial details such as keyword volume, global volume, and the trend of a specific keyword. Moreover, you can view the keyword’s volume in your target country, whether it’s India, the USA, or elsewhere.

Another valuable metric is keyword difficulty, indicating how challenging it is to rank on the first page for a given keyword. During our tests, we found the keyword ideas section particularly useful. Semrush suggests additional keyword variations and questions that have strong potential to rank well.

Regarding keyword difficulty, Semrush sometimes provides general advice like “a lot of on-page SEO” rather than a precise number of backlinks required, which could be seen as a minor drawback. However, this doesn’t significantly affect the overall quality of the tool.

Lastly, in this Semrush Keyword Overview review, the tool displays the number of searches for each keyword, a critical metric for assessing its popularity and relevance.

Keyword Magic Tool

The powerful algorithm of Semrush allows you to discover special keyword suggestions. Simply use the Keyword Magic Tool, enter your phrase, and within seconds, you’ll see dozens of new keywords generated based on your input.

This feature is particularly useful because Semrush suggests more refined phrases that are easier to rank for compared to your original input. You can also sort these keywords by CPC (Cost Per Click), volume, and Keyword Difficulty (KD), which is very convenient.

Furthermore, you can use the drop-down menu to filter keywords by their difficulty percentage range, and there’s a language filter for finding keyword ideas in specific languages, labeled as Beta within Semrush.

Each keyword in the results is accompanied by a colored icon indicating its intent: N for Navigational, I for Informational, and C and T for Commercial and Transactional purposes, respectively. This helps in understanding user intent and choosing appropriate keywords for your goals.

If you’re looking for keyword ideas aimed at selling a product, you can use the Intent menu and select “Transactional”. Semrush will then generate keywords geared towards improving your product sales.

It’s important to note that these metrics are primarily shown for Google, which dominates over 95% of all searches. Therefore, this focus on Google isn’t seen as a drawback, considering its vast user base compared to other search engines.

Keyword Manager

If you’re accustomed to manually creating keyword clusters and groups, Semrush’s Keyword Manager feature will streamline this process for you. It automatically organizes keywords into clusters, making organization effortless. This is one of the standout features we appreciate in our Semrush testing and review.

A function like Semrush’s Keyword Manager is invaluable for various SEO campaigns aimed at boosting your rankings. It automatically organizes keywords into clusters, simplifying the process of managing and optimizing content.

Moreover, users can enable Topic Clustering, which shows all the necessary keywords and phrases for a specific topic. This approach enhances your authority on that topic in the eyes of Google. For instance, when users search for a car review, authoritative sites like TopGear or WhatCar often appear first because Google recognizes them as knowledgeable on the subject.

Using relevant phrases suggested by Semrush is crucial for establishing authority in your niche. Each recommended phrase in the Keyword Manager is accompanied by metrics such as volume, intent, click potential, and keyword difficulty, making it a comprehensive tool for SEO optimization.

Position Tracking and Other Keyword Analytics Features

Semrush offers a comprehensive feature set that includes tracking your keyword rankings, which is both intuitive and powerful. Simply enter your domain, type in the keyword, and click “Set Up Tracking.”

The tool then displays how well your site ranks for the specified keyword globally or in the selected countries. This tracking accumulates data over time, providing more accurate results as time progresses.

You can also compare your competitors’ domain and keyword rankings using Semrush. Email alerts can be enabled to notify you of significant ranking changes, adding to the tool’s utility.

However, the number of keywords you can track depends on the plan you choose, a detail we’ll cover later in our Semrush pricing and plans review. Additionally, Semrush includes Organic Traffic Insights, integrating data from Search Console, Google Analytics, and its own database to address “not provided” keywords.

This feature helps you understand your website’s organic search performance and refine your SEO strategy by uncovering hidden insights from Google Analytics and combining them with Semrush and Search Console data.

3. Link Building

When discussing an effective SEO strategy, backlinks play a crucial role in improving website rankings and metrics. In our Semrush review for 2024, we’ve explored the wide array of link-building tools the platform offers, which we’ve extensively tested.

Backlink Analytics

The first feature you’ll want to explore is Backlink Analytics. True to its name, this tool analyzes a domain and provides a comprehensive view of all its backlinks. Whether you’re analyzing your own domain or a competitor’s, Semrush goes beyond just counting backlinks to provide detailed insights.

We often use the Backlink Analytics feature to examine the anchors associated with specific backlinks. Additionally, Semrush provides valuable information on the IP addresses and top-level domain distribution of these backlinks, including domains like “.gov”, “.com”, and “.org”.

Despite its initially intimidating interface, Semrush organizes all data effectively. On the left side, you’ll find metrics such as total backlinks, referring IPs, and referring domains. On the right side, details are provided about backlink types and attributes, including links attached to forms and images. You can even see when each link was first and last clicked, indicating its relevance over time.

In our tests, Semrush demonstrated excellent accuracy. Its database boasts trillions of URLs, surpassing many competitors like Moz and Ahrefs in terms of comprehensiveness and accuracy. Semrush’s extensive URL database ensures you receive the most detailed insights into your backlinks.

Backlink Audit

In our Semrush review for 2024, we extensively tested the Backlink Audit feature, which is crucial for assessing the health of your backlinks—or those of your competitors. This feature evaluates backlinks using a Toxicity Score: a high score indicates suspicious or spammy links, while a low score signifies healthy links with proper anchor distribution and a good Authority Score.

The Backlink Audit provides actionable insights by suggesting ways to reduce the Toxicity Score and improve your site’s ranking. It’s important to note that Google disregards toxic or spammy links, which can negatively impact your SEO efforts.

While this feature offers a comprehensive overview of backlinks and their Toxicity Scores, it may not be frequently used by experienced SEO professionals who can identify toxic links quickly.

How to Perform Link Building in Semrush?

Semrush’s Link Building Tool proved highly effective in our review. To begin, you enter your domain and select “Start Link Building.” The tool analyzes your competitors to identify what they’re ranking for, comparing these results with your own website. You can then specify keywords you aim to rank for.

Next, Semrush suggests websites it considers good sources for backlinks. An advantageous feature allows you to contact site owners directly via email to propose guest posts or other collaborations. Establishing connections with high-ranking sites through backlinks significantly enhances your SEO strategy.

Addressing broken links is crucial for maintaining site relevance. Semrush assists by identifying and repairing broken links through the Backlink Analysis tab. You receive a CSV or Excel file listing all broken links, making it easy to replace them with functional backlinks. This upkeep contributes to improving your site’s ranking.

Lastly, Bulk Analysis enables you to assess multiple competitors simultaneously by entering up to 200 URLs per line. This feature is invaluable for competitive niches, providing insights to help you stay ahead of rivals in your industry.

4. On-Page SEO

During our comprehensive review of Semrush, we thoroughly tested its On-Page SEO features, which are crucial for maintaining a healthy website. Semrush offers numerous tools in this regard, each designed to optimize various aspects of your site’s on-page SEO.

Rest assured, Semrush’s On-Page SEO features exceed what many competitors offer, providing robust capabilities to enhance your site’s performance and visibility in search engines.

Site Audit

Backlink auditing is just one of the many ways Semrush improves your website’s ranking. Another critical tool for this purpose is the Site Audit feature. It analyzes every significant aspect that can negatively impact your website’s ranking.

After performing the site audit, Semrush provides a Site Health score ranging from 0 to 100%. It also details all errors, notices, and warnings discovered during the audit, with the ability to view crawled pages for deeper insights. The tool is highly accurate and generates easy-to-read reports.

For instance, Semrush evaluates internal linking management and overall site performance, presenting these metrics as percentages. Each identified error includes specific advice from Semrush on how to resolve it, streamlining the optimization process.

You can export these audit findings to XLSX or CSV formats, facilitating collaboration by sharing them with team members who can address the issues. Additionally, the built-in API and Zapier integrations enhance flexibility and connectivity for seamless workflow integration.

On-Page SEO Checker

The On-Page SEO Checker option in Semrush complements the Site Audit features effectively. It thoroughly examines all your pages and provides actionable insights on how to enhance them. Based on our Semrush review, this process is systematic, prioritizing recommendations to optimize your on-page SEO efforts.

Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker prioritizes pages that require the most attention, guiding you on actions to improve their ranking. Recommendations may include adding new keywords, optimizing meta descriptions, or adjusting word counts.

Beyond providing detailed tips, Semrush explains the rationale behind each recommended fix. These explanations are clear and comprehensive, making Semrush a top choice for enhancing your website’s overall performance.

Log File Analyzer

It’s great to hear that Semrush continues to evolve with new features like the Log File Analyzer. This tool is designed to help you understand how search engines interact with your website.

To use the Log File Analyzer, you’ll need to download a log file from your website, upload it to Semrush, and generate reports. This process allows you to visualize how Google crawls your site, identifying the most crawled pages, pages that Google hasn’t crawled, and any errors encountered during the crawling process.

Other Notable Tools of Semrush

In our comprehensive Semrush review and testing, it’s evident that Semrush is far more than just a typical SEO tool. Its capabilities extend across various aspects of business, social media, SEO, and marketing, making it a versatile platform with numerous functionalities.

Let’s delve into some of our favorite features in this in-depth Semrush review.

1. Topic Research

Under Content Marketing in Semrush, one standout feature is Topic Research. This tool is remarkably intuitive and functions exactly as you would expect. Simply open it and enter the topic you intend to write about on your website.

Once you enter your desired topic and click “Get Content Ideas” in Semrush’s Topic Research feature, you’ll witness its impressive capabilities firsthand. It promptly provides suggested topics along with their respective volumes, a crucial metric for content planning.

Exploring further, users can refine their results by specifying a particular country or region. Semrush also accommodates different languages and evaluates topic efficiency based on factors like keyword difficulty and search volume.

From our tests, Topic Research generally performs exceptionally well, albeit with occasional instances where irrelevant topics may surface. However, these occurrences are rare and do not significantly detract from the tool’s overall effectiveness.

To enhance your research efforts, Semrush offers two additional features: the SEO Content Template and Writing Assistant. The SEO Content Template generates content briefs tailored for SEO, requiring you to input your keywords. Meanwhile, the Writing Assistant proves highly effective, aiding in text analysis and optimization to meet SEO standards.

Moreover, the Writing Assistant suggests alternative keywords to improve your content’s search engine rankings. It functions akin to an enhanced version of Grammarly, enhancing readability, SEO performance, and overall engagement with your content.

2. Market Explorer

In our Semrush review, we highlighted how the company continually introduces new features to enhance its already impactful nature. One such valuable feature we explored is Market Explorer, which may not be essential for all users but offers significant utility.

Market Explorer delves into the market landscape, providing insights based on your search queries. For instance, you can analyze a company like Amazon to understand its position in the marketplace. Semrush generates a graph categorizing companies into four types:

• Game Changers
• Niche Players
• Leaders
• Established Players

For example, Amazon would likely fall under Established Players or Leaders. Additionally, Semrush allows you to view which sites receive the most traffic, aiding in competitor analysis and providing valuable insights before entering a specific niche.

3. Social Media Features

In our Semrush review for 2024, we emphasize the importance of its Social Media features, often overshadowed by tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Semrush offers robust functionalities aimed at enhancing your social media presence.

One standout feature is the Social Poster, which facilitates scheduling posts in advance across platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more. This helps streamline content management and maintain a consistent posting schedule.

Another useful tool is the Social Tracker, which monitors key social media metrics such as activity, engagement, audience insights, and competitive analysis. You can compare your performance metrics directly with competitors to gauge your standing in the market. Semrush’s analytics are highly accurate, providing detailed insights into metrics like shares, clicks, comments, and reactions.

For those interested in influencer marketing, Semrush offers Influencer Analytics as a paid feature. While it comes at a cost of $169.99 per month, it boasts a database of over 27 million entries, making it a valuable resource for identifying brand ambassadors and influencers.

Overall, Semrush’s Social Media tools are comprehensive and effective, catering to both basic scheduling needs and advanced analytics for strategic social media management.

ContentShake AI

In your comprehensive Semrush review, you’ve highlighted the introduction of ContentShake AI as a notable addition. This AI-driven tool helps generate new content ideas and offers rewriting capabilities, albeit with some AI nuances. It’s priced at $60 per month, offering unlimited article rewriting, creation, and even publication features.

Ease of Use: Semrush Interface

Semrush can seem complex at first glance, but breaking down its interface into manageable sections makes it easier to navigate. Tools are neatly organized on the left side, while the right side displays detailed insights based on the selected tool.

Drop-down menus and filters further enhance usability, allowing users to customize their analytics experience effectively. Overall, Semrush’s use of visuals like colorful graphs aids in understanding and accessing critical data effortlessly.

Semrush Review on Mobile Devices

It’s understandable that Semrush’s web app may feel a bit cumbersome on mobile devices, especially compared to desktop experiences. While the interface remains consistent across platforms, the smaller screen size and potential usability issues on mobile phones can detract from the overall experience.

The mobile application for iOS and Android, while providing access to some features, doesn’t replicate the full functionality of the desktop version, which can be a limitation for users who rely heavily on Semrush’s comprehensive tools and analytics.

For users who require detailed metrics, insights, and extensive control over SEO and marketing campaigns, Semrush indeed shines best on computers with larger screens. This setup allows for easier navigation, clearer visualizations, and more efficient utilization of its powerful features.

Semrush Pricing: How Much Is Semrush?

It sounds like you’ve thoroughly explored Semrush’s capabilities and understand its value proposition well. Indeed, Semrush offers a robust set of features that make it a comprehensive SEO tool, but as you mentioned, it does come at a cost. Pricing is an important factor to consider, especially for businesses and professionals evaluating their budget for digital marketing tools.

If you’d like, I can summarize some key points about Semrush’s pricing and plans based on your review so far. Would you like me to do that?

It sounds like you’ve thoroughly explored Semrush and its capabilities! From domain analysis to content creation and social media management, you’ve covered a lot. If there’s anything specific you’d like to delve into further or if you have more questions about Semrush or any other topic, feel free to ask!

It seems like you’ve covered a lot about Semrush! From its features to pricing and user experience, you’ve provided a comprehensive review. Is there anything specific you’d like to focus on next or any other aspects of Semrush you’re interested in exploring further?

That’s great but now, the question is what do you get from all these plans?

Pro Plan

It sounds like you’ve really explored Semrush thoroughly! From domain analysis to keyword research, backlink auditing, and even social media management, you’ve covered a lot. The breakdown of the Pro plan and its limitations in certain marketing features is also insightful. If there’s anything specific you’d like to explore further or any other tools you’re interested in, feel free to let me know!

Guru Plan

The Guru plan offers more than the Pro plan but comes at a higher cost, starting at under $209 per month for the annual subscription. With the Guru plan, you get:

• 15 projects
• 1,500 trackable keywords
• 30,000 results per report
• Multi-location and device tracking
• Up to 1,000 keyword metric updates monthly (compared to 250 in the Pro plan)

In addition, the Guru plan includes advanced marketing features:

• Unlimited topics research
• Up to 800 SEO content templates
• 5 plagiarism checks per month for JavaScript rendering

Unlike the Pro plan, the Guru plan also allows additional users at $80 per user per month. Additionally, there’s a Start version of the Agency Growth Kit, previously a paid addition to the Pro plan. For more details, visit Semrush’s website.

Business Plan

The Business plan is designed for those with substantial budgets, costing under $417 per month on an annual subscription. This comprehensive plan includes:

• 40 projects
• 5,000 trackable keywords
• 50,000 results per report

The plan encompasses all features mentioned in this Semrush review, excluding paid-additional software like Local and Social. Each additional user costs $100 per month. Moreover, the Business plan includes Scale, an advanced version of the Agency Growth Kit.

One notable advantage of the Business plan is its flexibility to be customized further if you require more than what Semrush offers, with additional costs.

Semrush Free Trial

All Semrush plans, except for the Business plan, offer a free trial option. To sign up, you’ll need to provide your email and password, and you can also sign up through Google.

The trial lasts for 14 days when signed up through our site, but you must provide credit card information. If you don’t cancel within 14 days, Semrush will charge you. If you choose not to provide credit card info, you can continue using the tool, but with limitations (just 10 requests per day).

The Final Verdict

The Semrush review concludes with a highly positive assessment. It’s an all-encompassing SEO tool packed with exceptional features. Beyond advanced domain and keyword analysis, Semrush excels in marketing, social media management, and link-building capabilities.

Noteworthy are its smaller yet crucial features, such as the Search Intent option, which enhances keyword selection for better conversions. Its interface is also remarkably user-friendly. While initially daunting, it quickly proves ingenious.

One drawback is its price, undeniably high compared to competitors like Moz or Ahrefs. However, the extensive features justify the cost, including additional tools available via the App Center.

A silver lining is Semrush’s offer of a free trial, allowing users to test its capabilities at no cost. Considering its comprehensive site auditing, robust support, and detailed reports, Semrush stands out as the top choice for enhancing website rankings in today’s competitive online landscape.