Semrush Review: Assessing the Platform’s Capabilities

The task of increasing website traffic can be solved with the help of different SEO tools. Yet, the effectiveness of your efforts and the quality of your work depend on which one you choose. My number one choice in this matter is Semrush. In this article, I will tell you why I came to the conclusion that it is the best one for digital marketing, SEO, and PPC. If you want to beat your competitors, use the most advanced SEO software. It provides many features and discovers those nuances that more primitive versions of SEO tools cannot detect. Also, if you want your marketing or SEO agency to prosper, offer clients a deeper analysis that is possible only with advanced tools such as Semrush.

Still, my high rating of this SEO tool does not mean that I do not see its weak points or the advantages of competitors. In this article, I will objectively reveal both the best sides of Semrush and the functions that still require some improvements. 

Tasks That Can Be Solved with Semrush

If you are involved in online marketing or in-depth technical audits of websites, Semrush is the platform that will take your strategy to a fundamentally different level. It offers the broadest range of SEO tools that users can combine in their work:

• Competitor SEO Analysis;
• Rank Tracking;
• Local SEO;
• Keyword Research;
• Content Marketing;
• PPC Keyword Research and much more.

Overall, the platform offers seventeen different modules with over 55 tools. The developers facilitate the selection of suitable solutions from various possible ones with the help of a convenient classification. It is based on the tasks that subscribers solve:

• SEO
• Content
• Advertising
• Social Media
• Competitive Research
• Agency Growth Kit

Of course, the most extensive set of tools is presented in the SEO section. Still, other tasks are also provided with advanced solutions. Semrush pays significant attention to such areas as Advertising and Social Media, which are less supported by other SEO SaaS services, such as Ahrefs. Let’s take a look at the main SEO and marketing tasks that can be effectively solved with the help of Semrush software.

Domain Overview

If you want to evaluate your PPC marketing efforts and diagnose overall SEO, use the Domain Overview feature. The detailed report will clearly show how effective your advertising costs are. Also, you will be able to evaluate many other key SEO metrics:

• Backlink profile;
• Organic Traffic that the website receives from SEO efforts;
• Keywords that will promote the website in SERP;
• Competitors who use the same keywords to increase organic traffic to their websites.

You can get the same information about your competitors’ websites. Check out how well your paid advertising efforts are doing compared to theirs. You may need to pay more attention to good SEO so that the increase in organic traffic can help reduce your advertising costs.

Domain Overview gives users general information about any website. To get a more detailed picture, you need to use the more specialized tools of the platform.

Competitive Research Tools: Traffic Analytics

By delving into the details of your website traffic, you will receive a huge amount of useful information. It will help you adjust your marketing and SEO strategy, taking into account the current state of affairs:

• Main sources of website traffic;
• Regions with the best online performance of your website;
• Which pages of the website give more traffic due to the consumer interest ;
• What percentage of visitors make a purchase;
• Mobile vs. desktop traffic ratio;
• Top products on competitors’ websites.

The advantage of Semrush is that it shows traffic not only from the Google search engine. That is why the numbers you get will be significantly higher than when using Google Analytics. Users can get to your website through social media, YouTube, blogs, and other platforms. Semrush will highlight all these traffic sources and help evaluate the effectiveness of your website promotion through different channels.

By analyzing your competitors’ websites, you’ll see which marketing channels they prioritize. If their traffic numbers are higher, you might want to pay more attention to these channels in your marketing strategies.

It is also useful to evaluate the traffic of your potential partners’ websites for guest posts or other forms of your site’s online promotion. If their website traffic is low, consider whether it is worth posting materials about your brand there.

Organic Research

To study Google search traffic in detail, use Organic Research tools. In addition to comparative traffic dynamics in the form of graphs, you will receive valuable insights on keyword performance. Semrush will tell which keywords from your site are essential for ranking by Google search engines. 

Still, this information alone will not be enough to optimize the content of your website. Find out the same data about your competitors’ websites. And if their positions in SERP are higher, determine what keywords your content is missing to move up in search results. This can be done with such a Semrush tool as a Keyword Gap. It points out the keywords that make a significant contribution to your competitors’ Google rankings but are missing from your website. By opening the potential to rank higher on Google, you can adjust the content of your website.

Keyword Magic Tool

Semrush’s keyword discovery and analysis tools are the most powerful in the SEO software market due to two main factors:

• A huge database of over 26 billion keywords;
• Use of AI-powered metrics.

When working with keywords, users can take two main paths:

1. Enter the keyword you are interested in and get thousands of related search terms. Filter them based on difficulty, search intent, search volume, and other parameters for more effective analysis.
2. Add your website domain to take advantage of AI-powered search. It will offer only relevant data to your business and save a lot of time due to personalized search results.

Backlink Analytics

A massive link index provided by Semrush makes the backlink checker reliable and useful. That’s why I trust it more than alternative SEO services, except for Ahrefs. The high speed of backlink search and dozens of filters also add significant advantages to this platform feature. Users can filter results by a number of criteria, including:

• Type: image, text, form, etc. 
• Attribute: follow and nofollow

The Semrush backlink management tool provides a list of websites with similar link profiles. You can use this information for reverse engineering.

Subscribers can also find out the Authority Score of the domains that link to their websites. It affects the SEO of the recipient website, so it is worth taking care to remove backlinks from sites with a dubious reputation.

Advertising Research

The ability to evaluate the performance of your PPC campaigns is one of the strongest features of Semrush that other services lack. From the beginning of the platform launch, the developers paid much attention to this capacity. That is why it has become one of the best among the most advanced SEO software on the market. This feature makes an essential contribution to marketing intelligence. If you want, you can study all the advertising posts of competing websites and the sites on which they are placed. You can also estimate the share of their traffic from this advertising. And you can even see the monthly costs of competitors on Google Ads.

Pay attention to your competitors’ long-running ads on the Internet. This is usually done only when the advertising brings significant traffic due to a high click-through rate (CTR). This information will help you plan a more effective PPC campaign based on your website’s current performance and your competitors’ experience.

Market Explorer

When entering the market with a new project, a business can collect complete analytics about the landscape of its niche. This does not require any serious costs since all the information can be obtained in the Market Explorer section. Enter your website URL to find out critical information:

• Leaders who set trends in a given niche and gain significant market share;
• Established Players, who differ from Leaders by lower traffic growth rates;
• Game Changers that are growing rapidly and can provoke others to change their strategies;
• Niche Players who don’t have the resources to increase their traffic yet.

This section is useful for any business, especially for those companies that provide marketing and SEO services. They significantly save working time on collecting such information about their clients’ competitors.

By studying the market landscape, you will be able to assess your chances of getting a sufficient share of it. You will also estimate the costs of launching your project in this niche. This will help you avoid entering a highly competitive market with little chance of success.

Topic Research

To get additional traffic from your website content, fill it with materials that resonate with your target audience. You do not need to conduct expensive marketing research to identify popular topics among users. The Topic Research tool copes with this task brilliantly. It helps identify trending content ideas and user queries in search engines. By adding articles on similar topics to your website’s blog, you will be able to attract an additional audience. Also, the suggested topics can become the subject of your guest posts, where you will integrate links to your website.

Position Tracking

Evaluate your website’s overall search engine visibility using the Position Tracking tool. The data will be presented in monthly dynamics for the selected period. Thanks to this, you will understand what factors influenced the increase or decrease of its visibility. This feature allows monitoring the effectiveness of PPC campaigns and SEO optimization of web pages. Make sure that your company’s budget is not wasted. Identify ads that do not bring you significant traffic and exclude them from further advertising campaigns.

Semrush’s advantage is that it offers daily updated data for this feature. While its closest competitor, Ahrefs, updates information for this query weekly. And to get daily updates, Ahrefs’ users must pay for optional add-ons.

Site Audit

Similar to backlink analysis tools, Semrush’s Site Audit is unrivaled in the SEO software market, except for Ahrefs, which is not inferior in this regard. Semrush comprehensively evaluates overall technical SEO health and provides useful recommendations for its improvement. Even if your site consists of thousands of web pages, each will be thoroughly scanned and analyzed. After that, you will receive a detailed report containing tips for fixing more than 140 possible SEO and technical issues. Site Audit tools classify all potential problems with the website into 3 types depending on their severity:

• Notices
• Warnings
• Errors

Pay special attention to the primary issues, fix them, and monitor the improvement of the “Site Health” percentage score. Users can set up an automatic Site Audit, which will check the progress of their optimization weekly. Also, use the Position Tracking tool to see how fixing all the errors affects your website’s position in search results. Use both these tools to achieve better results and increase your website’s online visibility.

Link Building Tool

Conducting competent outreach campaigns is an important component of effective website promotion. However, without automation of routine tasks, the full cycle of such campaigns takes too much time and effort. Company employees must find the best donor websites, negotiate on content placement, and then monitor the published backlinks. Semrush allows you to simplify this procedure since many of the tasks will be performed automatically. Moreover, you will work from one window, which also allows you to avoid confusion and unnecessary actions.

Semrush Pricing Policy 

SaaS platforms solve the issue of tariff plans in different ways to attract more subscribers. Some of them offer many plans so that a user with any volume of working tasks can find a good deal. Semrush has taken a different approach in this regard. It offers 3 main tariff plans and unlimited options for a custom plan. Thus, a user can negotiate a custom plan if none suits their needs. For example, you can contact support to develop a personalized pricing plan if you want higher limits for certain features. As for the regular plans, the platform offers the following options:

• The Pro plan for managing up to 5 projects for $139.95/month.
• The Guru plan raises this bar to 15 projects with a subscription of $249.95/month.
• The Business plan for SEO and marketing agencies, who can manage up to 40 projects for $499.95/month.

You can check out the possibilities of each tariff plan for free. For 7 days, you will have access to all the features of the Pro or Guru plans. If you want to check out the Business plan, you can request a custom plan from the support service.

The second option for using Semrush tools for free is to create a Simple Sign-up Account. In this case, you will not be limited in access to the platform. However, free plan users must adhere to monthly limits on using free tools.

Semrush’s pricing policy is generally similar to that of other top marketing and SEO platforms. However, you can save a lot if you sign up for an annual subscription. I have been using Semrush for over 10 years and do not plan to cancel my subscription, so I pay for a year in advance and save 17% on the annual fee.

Benefits of Semrush SEO Tools

• Rich and reliable data: Semrush offers impressive SEO databases that ensure high quality of all tasks. Users can use databases of 26.4 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks, 390 million referring domains, etc.
• A comprehensive set of tools. Semrush offers a full set of software tools that may be needed by SEO specialists, marketers, content marketers, webmasters, website owners, etc. This means you will not have to subscribe to other SEO platforms in parallel to compensate for the missing tools.
• Well-developed PPC tools: Semrush stands out from any other SEO SaaS service with its advanced PPC features. Here, you can study the effectiveness of your paid advertising campaigns and compare them with similar marketing moves of competitors. No other service will give you such in-depth data on this issue.
• A large number of SEO tools. In this review, I have covered the main SEO tools on the platform, but you will have many more at your disposal. You can read about them in more detail in my complete analysis of Semrush or take a look at the platform yourself.
• Constant progress: Semrush never stops to evolve, although it has more than 10 million users. It constantly improves existing features and adds new ones. Therefore, by staying on the platform, users can enjoy all the latest technological developments.
• Bulk traffic analysis. Users save time and effort by analyzing many websites at once. Thus, you can specify up to 200 competitor or outreach partner websites for instant analysis.
• Advanced filters for Keyword Analysis. Semrush offers convenient filters for faster and more effective analysis of a large number of keywords. Users can sort them by traffic, intent, SERP features, CPC, etc.
• Great customer support. Working with Semrush, users can get advice in a live chat anytime. Unlike many other services, where they will have to wait a long time for an answer, the chat works in real time. Therefore, you will not have to postpone your tasks to wait for a response from the support service.

Platform Weaknesses That Need Improvement

• Organic traffic estimates are not always accurate. The SEO software development team has not been able to overcome the difficulties of absolutely accurate organic traffic estimates. That is why you will have to put up with some inaccuracy. But you should not change the platform because of this, because competitors also cannot provide 100% accurate organic traffic estimates.
• Lack of click data for keywords. Semrush offers a variety of metrics for evaluating keywords, including monthly search volume. However, it does not provide data on how many people click on these words. This makes it more difficult for users to assess their value. Other platforms, such as Ahrefs, offer such data, so there is hope that Semrush will add this metric soon.
• The user interface needs some improvement. A large number of features and tools is an undoubted advantage of Semrush. However, they create some difficulties in using the platform. To get to the desired feature, you will have to click on different menus several times.

Conclusions

It is no coincidence that Semrush has been one of the most popular digital marketing tools for many years. It is ideal for deep SEO analytics, website optimization, digital marketing, content marketing, and many other tasks. Most of its tools are in no way inferior to other SEO SaaS services. Some of them are much more effective, such as Backlink Analytics, Site Audit, Position Tracking, PPC Keyword Tool, and many others. 

Semrush offers so many features that you will hardly use them all. In my experience, only about 15% of all the platform’s capabilities are needed for my daily work. However, the options that I use give a much better result than other services. That’s why I continue to use Semrush even though many alternative SEO software options have appeared in recent years. After testing each of them, I came to two main conclusions. Firstly, the Semrush development team is pretty cool and quickly responds to all new technological opportunities. Secondly, the quality of SEO largely depends on the size of the databases. And since Semrush databases are among the largest ones, it is challenging for competitors to reach this level. That’s why those SEO specialists and marketers who want to be the best in their field choose Semrush.