Last Updated: December 21, 2024
In this article, we will be reviewing the SEO analysis tool SEMrush, including everything from its features, benefits, pricing, alternatives, and who exactly is the ideal user for this tool.
However, as always, we’ve included an article summary section at the top, to give the quick scoop to all of you folk that are in a rush.
We highly advise reading through the entire article, it won’t take too long, and you’ll really get to see the true potential of using an SEO tool like SEMrush.
Article Summary: SEMrush is the gold standard of SEO tools, and therefore if you’re running an agency, or require just one All-in-One SEO toolkit, we highly recommend SEMrush. Additionally, its PPC, PLA and Display Advertising analysis tools are more developed and provide some fantastic insights.
You can try SEMrush using their 7 Day Free Trial here.
Table of Contents
⭐What is SEMrush?
It’s an all-in-one tool for helping business’ and agencies improve their online visibility, providing accurate insight into core metrics such as traffic and competitive research.
The reports that it provides can help online marketers that work in the following sectors, SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Content Marketing, PR, Marketing Insights, Campaign Management, and more.
🥇Is SEMrush any good?
Since we want to give more of an unbiased answer to this question, the only way we can do this is to get external opinions from a selection of active customers.
All of these clients can be found here, outlining exactly why they chose SEMrush and what it’s done for their business.
Some of these active clients include: Amazon.com, Quora, Booking.com, Forbes, HP, BooHoo, Skyscanner and more
⭐Semrush Features
- Organic Research
- Keyword Research
- Site Audit Tool (Technical SEO)
- Advertising Research
- Display Advertising Tool
- Backlinks
- Product Listing Ads
- Traffic Analytics
- Market Explorer
Organic Research & Keyword Research
SEMrush’s domain overview report enables you to get an overall picture of the SEO health of a website, showing the domain’s overall authority, organic search traffic, paid search traffic, backlinks, top-ranking organic SEO keywords, main competitors, etc.
One of the nice features here is that alongside these metrics, it gives you an impression as to if this has increased or decreased upon the last measurement, with a red/green arrow or red/green percentage increase/decrease.
The organic research report goes further into depth on the specific keywords that the domain, URL, subdomain, or sub-folder is ranking for.
This includes some nice graph data showing the overall trend in organic SEO keywords that the domain is ranking for, alongside a list of top organic keywords, top position changes, SERP features (showing featured snippets, site links, image pack, local pack, etc), top pages, and a competitive positioning map.
All of this can be seen in the report example below:
Site Audit Tool (Technical SEO)
SEMrush provides a technical SEO audit which scans the inputted website and evaluates it based on 130+ different factors, these include the following broad spectrum areas:
- Loading
- Crawability
- Content Issues
- Meta Tags (Structured Data)
- HTTPS protocol
- Internal Linking
- JSS & CSS
- AMP Implementation
Advertising Research
SEMrush’s advertising research report enables users to analyze their competitor’s ad budgets and the keywords that they are bidding on. Not only this, but it also provides you with information regarding the exact ad copy and landing pages that your competition is using, so that you can analyze and replicate their PPC strategies.
As you can see, the advertising research report provides a full list of these keywords, alongside data such as the associated landing page, estimated traffic, PPC cost, PPC competition.
Additionally, it includes macro-data such as the overall amount of keywords being bidded for, the total ad cost, and the number of traffic being acquired by these ads.
This information makes it easy to analyze a competitor’s PPC strategy.
Display Advertising Tool
Semrush’s display advertising tool enables users to get an overview of your competitors GDN marketing strategies. GDN stands for Google Display Network.
As you can see the report allows you to do a deep dive analysis into your competitor’s display advertising targeting, specific ad copy/design, and the publishers that they’re advertising on.
This is invaluable information for those agencies, business’ and individuals who are looking for display advertising analysis data.
Backlinks
Link building/Backlinks are the fuel to help boost a website’s overall rankings, and because of this, they’re highly important to not only acquire, but to analyze… Especially if your competition is outranking you. This is where SEMrush’s backlink report comes in handy.
The backlink report contains plenty of data relating to the inputted domain/subdomain/URL.
This includes referring domains, referring IPs, backlink types, link attributes, TLD distribution and some useful graphical diagrams showing the increase or decrease in certain backlink data.
Users can then look further into these information topics, with the example below showing us delving further into the specific backlinks linking to SEMrush.com
This information can inform future link building strategies.
Product Listing Ads
Sem rush allows users to analyze competitor Product Listing Ads which are launched through Google Shopping.
The tool not only allows for you to see the competition’s best performing PLAs, but also what keywords are triggering each particular ad.
This is such a great feature for both e-commerce stores and agencies who help e-com store, to help analyze Google Shopping competitors.
Traffic Analysis
Semrush provides useful information on a website/URLs traffic volumes, which can be useful when analyzing both your own website and that of competitors.
This report includes visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, average view duration, bounce rate and much more information.
Semrush allows for you to do a side-by-side analysis of your site against competitors, in terms of traffic and the audience-base.
Additionally, you can look at the top geolocations where you competitors are active, and compare against your own site
Market Explorer
The market explorer report is a useful report for any marketer who wants to get a better understanding of a new market or existing niche.
As you can see, SEMrush’s market explorer report includes plenty of useful diagrams, showing where competitors are in regards to each other, and the industry itself.
An example of such a diagram is the growth quadrant, which shows market leaders, game changers, niche players, and established players.
This kind of report can then be delved into further, using more of a narrow focus, and a more limited timeframe.
🥇Semrush Benefits
- Developed tools – SEMrush is one of the most established & well-respected SEO tools on the market, and this is simply because it works incredibly well and satisfies every marketer’s needs.
- Easy to use Interface – The SEMrush interface is very easy to use, and we actually prefer it when comparing against Serpstat.
- Used by highly established companies – Amazon, eBay, Quora and Booking.com all use SEMrush, and that’s definitely a good sign when choosing a marketing tool.
- Zendesk Live Chat – It’s always good to get support instantly, and with the existing live chat functionality, you can.
⭐Semrush Pricing – How Much is SEMrush per month?
Semrush has a few pricing options, starting from $83.28 per month (when paid annually), leading up to $333.26 and upwards for larger business’.
You save 16% when paying annually, which is definitely useful to consider.
You can read all of the information regarding pricing, and what exactly is included within each package on their pricing page, which you can find here: SEMrush Pricing
🥇SEMrush Alternatives
There are some great SEMrush alternatives that exist, and we’ve included the best ones below:
- Serpstat – Take a read of our Serpstat Review article (Includes 10%+ Discount).
- SEOPowersuite – On-page and Off-page SEO analysis tools
- Keysearch – Take a read of our KeySearch Review article (Includes 20%+ KeySearch Discount)
- Ahrefs
- Majestic
⭐Who is Semrush for?
Simply put, SEMrush is for the business that not only wants a fantastic SEO toolkit, but also one that can provide Display, PPC, PLA, and general marketing analysis, in a form that provides a lot of information and is understandable (and exportable).
This information is designed to help inform a company’s marketing decisions and the overall business plan, hence it’s important to consider using such a tool.
Given the higher price-point, we imagine that it is designed for larger business and agencies, although we do know freelancers who have purchased the smaller plan.
Currently, large clients including Amazon, Forbes, and eBay are using SEMrush, which shows that it really can provide a brand with value.
🥇Which is better Ahrefs vs SEMrush?
SEMrush is ideal for those companies who are not only looking for a tool to provide SEO-related information, but also PPC, SSM, and other marketing activities. Ahrefs is more SEO-focused.
With that being said, one is not necessarily better than the other, but one may be more suitable for you and your business’ needs.
We also use Serpstat & SEOPowerSuite (SEO & PPC) and KeySearch (Keyword Research) within our agency, and these three tools really are awesome.
