Semrush Review (2024) – Powerful Benchmark Marketing Tool

Our Verdict

90%

90%

Excellent

Semrush is a comprehensive SEO suite with a powerful feature set, making it a popular choice for marketing professionals. It excels in keyword research, competitor analysis, and site auditing. However, the free plan is limited, and paid plans can be expensive for smaller businesses.

The Good

1. An all-in-one marketing tool
2. Access premium tools within a single price
3. Effectively improve website presence

The Bad

1. Free version has limited tools
2. The software is a bit complex
3. Requires very high level of expertise

• Features

  9.5
• Ease Of Use

  9
• Accuracy

  9
• Customer Support

  9.5
• Pricing

  8

Semrush is a complete marketing toolkit and one of the leaders in the SEO software market. Whether you're a professional, individual, or business owner, it has a lot to offer for people of all levels of experience.

Created in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov, the company with headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It relies on an ultra-complete all-in-one tool to meet marketing needs.

With 7 offices and 1,000+ employees, it has established itself as the benchmark and largest flagship SaaS for SEO. 

The company is regularly featured on many of the biggest news publishing companies around the world. Such as Bloomberg, Business Insider, Reuters, The Washington Post, and many more.

The platform provides users with powerful tools to optimize their website's ranking on the web, as well as specialized tools for advertising campaigns.

You can access different types of data with complete analysis reports. Such as Traffic data, Search data, Brand mentions, Advertising data, Social Media data, Content data, and the list goes on.

It is a real one-tool army in web marketing which means that your entire strategy is centralized on a sole platform along with a single investment.

Ultimately, if you want to grow your large or small business, then it can help you accelerate and achieve your goals.

The Growth Of Semrush

Back in 2008, when Semrush was started it consisted of only 2 tools that allowed users to understand the areas for improvement for their website.

But in 14 years, it has grown from a small startup to a large international company and become a strong pillar of marketing.

Today it consists of over 50+ tools with a multitude of features. They are used by a large number of advertisers and web agencies to analyze their websites and online marketing.

Why Semrush Is The Best SEO Tool?

The company always strives to deliver awesomely, and their numbers speak for themself.

According to the statistics, they have 10 million marketing specialists worldwide and serve 25.6 billion keywords, 142 geo-databases, and 808 million domains.

These numbers are the main reason, that makes Semrush stand out from its competitors.

Take a look:

Semrush – Tools And Developments

As previously mentioned, like in the past years, Semrush always focuses on its developments.

Improving with impressive software design and upgraded algorithms, they always emphasize fulfilling the user needs for online marketing.

The software has an impressive range of tools to strengthen your marketing approach. But it’s important that first, you are familiar with what’s inside, so you can easily use all the features.

Now, let’s jump to the different tools in detail as well as the updates and improvements.

1. New Branding (Logo & Typeface)

One of the major updates by Semrush is their REBRANDING.

The transition and changes represent the growth of the company from a single SEO tool to a solid, robust framework, that helps marketers worldwide to increase and manage their online presence.

The new brand identity has two key parts:

A. The Fireball Symbol – Core Element
B. The Typeface – Represents The Platform’s Dynamics

A. The Fireball Symbol

The time since Semrush started the FIREBALL SYMBOL is an integral part of the logo. What it really indicates is “the explosion of the marketing mechanisms and then flows with a robust power.”

The previous logo was a little wider and long whereas the newly designed logo is firm and gives a contemporary look.

B. The Typeface

The Typeface in the new branding represents the platform’s determination, enthusiasm, and bright and unconventional approach toward their tasks to introduce something exceptional that helps marketers around the globe.

Take a glance at the new look in the video below:

You can read and know more about the NEW LOOK & BRANDING here.

2. Competitive Research Tools

A. Domain Overview

Domain Overview is an excellent tool to find the strengths and weaknesses of a certain domain whether it’s your own or of your competitors. Basically, it gives you complete analytics for the particular domain.

You can see search traffic, the paid search traffic, the top organic keywords that are actually ranking for, the main competitors, the competitive positioning map, and the backlinks that are pointing to the specific site. Even you can also get insights into display advertising.

With the latest improvements and updated features, now you have all the site key metrics in a single dashboard. A new “Comparison Mode”, is introduced to get better and more well-organized analytics side by side.

B. Traffic Analytics

Sometimes you don’t have access to traffic data of third-party domains, this is where the Semrush Traffic Analytics tool comes in handy.

It shows you the complete traffic analytics of a particular domain with more in-depth audience insights and algorithm improvements.

It represents the data in a graphical format so that you can easily understand how the particular marketing campaign is performing over time under different traffic sources.

Using this tool, you can see the different insights for a domain including pages per visit, average visit duration, the bounce rate, and also compare the insights with the data of the previous month. You can also analyze other traffic sources including referral traffic, search traffic, social traffic, and paid traffic.

Under the Audience Insights Reports tab, you can compare your domain with your competitor and measure metrics like audience overlap, traffic sources, top pages, sub-domain performance, etc.

You can also get a clear picture and insights into the user behavior by page on a particular domain by using the Traffic Journey Report. These key metrics are helpful to entice the audience towards your targeted offers.

C. Organic Research

Semrush Organic Research is a favorite tool for bloggers and SEO professionals because it gives lots of data for top-ranking keywords, organic traffic, traffic trends, etc, and its correlation with Google updates.

You can find top organic keywords, their positions, monthly search volume, and traffic percentage.

This tool helps you to compare the top position changes and take necessary measures to achieve or keep top positions.

You can perform organic research for your competitor and steal their top keywords to target your website so that you can increase your blog rankings.

D. Keyword Gap

The Keyword Gap tool helps you to compare your domain with your competitor’s domain and find the potential keyword opportunities that you are currently missing.

It also shows you the keyword overlap which means the common keywords both domains are ranking for.

Within a few seconds Semrush will offer opportunities for you with the huge search volume.

This tool helps you to visualize an in-depth analysis of the keyword gap by organic keyword position along with other SEO metrics including average monthly search volume.

You can then target those search terms on your website and get additional search traffic.

Keyword Gap tool finds profitable keyword opportunities and targeting those would be a great decision to beat your competitor and for higher rankings.

E. Backlink Gap

The next tool on the list is the Backlink Gap which works on a similar mechanism as Keyword Gap.

When you enter a primary domain and a competitor’s domain SEMRUSH shows the total number of backlinks for each domain.

This tool is really helpful in monitoring how your link-building efforts are going according to the certain timeframe that you can set in the dashboard.

Easily analyze the backlink profile of a particular domain whether it is weak, strong, etc. Use this tool to find prospective domains to create powerful backlinks.

F. Market Explorer

Market Explorer helps you to get actionable insights for any industry and benchmark your business.

Using this tool will show you all the players in this particular market.

One of the great improvements that SEMRUSH made was introducing the amazing feature Growth Quadrant that helps you to find your position in any market.

This new feature shows you niche players, game-changers, established players and market leaders, audience size and growth rate, etc.

It allows you to choose the time frame and see how your business is performing against your competitors.

Get comprehensive insights into the traffic flow, trends, percentage, and distribution for all the competitors which is useful in creating traffic generation strategies.

With the help of the new Benchmarking Report, you can see how the traffic is flowing to the particular market, and audience interest shows the topics that attracted most of the traffic in the market.

3. Keyword Research Tools

A. Keyword Overview

Keyword research is a critical step in search engine optimization that’s why Semrush offers an excellent competitive research suite for a complete analysis of a keyword so that you can decide whether you should enter the competition or not.

Nowadays topical optimization is essential for search engine optimization that’s why the platform provides keyword variations, relevant questions, and related keywords to target on your website.

It offers in-depth SERP analysis that includes top pages for a particular keyword along with other metrics such as page authority score, referring domains, backlinks, organic search traffic, and keywords.

Use this tool to get the AD copies for the related search query with the keyword AD history.

Although it is a great tool for finding profitable keywords you should consider researching keywords manually to decide whether you should get those keys in your SEO campaign or not.

B. Keyword Magic Tool

The Keyword Magic tool is very useful and allows you to find profitable keywords for your campaigns and articles.

It will give you complete insights such as keyword data, database volume, average keyword difficulty, etc.

The detailed report allows you to look into any or more specific longtail keywords and see which ones are easier to rank for.

The Advanced Filters in the tool, allow you to narrow down your search to eliminate the competitive keywords.

You can then target those keywords on your website but remember to keep an eye on keyword trends that shouldn’t be declining because it only means the average volume for the past twelve months and using those keywords doesn’t make sense.

C. Keyword Manager

Keyword Manager collects and manages your favorite keywords.

You can either import your keywords from SEMRUSH Keyword Magic Tool or an organic research tool or import them manually by uploading a CSV file for typing keywords one by one.

The keyword manager tool shows the list that includes the keywords, average search volume for these keywords, search trends, CPC, PPC competition, SEO keyword difficulty, etc. It also provides you a comprehensive data on potential and top competitors.

D. Organic Traffic Insights

Organic Traffic Insights is an SEO tool that combines data from Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, to show you a clear picture of search volume, organic click-through rate, and sessions.

However, it requires an active Google Analytics integration to display organic traffic insights.

4. Link Building Tools

A. Backlink Analytics

When talking about OFF-PAGE SEO it is impossible to ignore backlinks and the Backlinks Analytics tool helps you to find data for any domain that you are analyzing.

After the recent update, Semrush has now one of the largest backlink databases.

With this tool, you can find the categories of referring domains, top anchors, the referring domains by authority score, backlink types, and link attributes. It also visualizes a graphical representation for referring domains and backlinks.

When analyzing the competitor’s domain, these key metrics are very important and helpful.

Many people have a habit of ignoring No-Follow Links however Google has recently announced that No-Follow Links will be taken into account as a ranking signal. So, you can use the No-Follow Links report which can be useful for your website.

For e-commerce sites, the source pages report is an advantage, which shows whether the competitor has an affiliate partnership with a particular website, so you can also join the affiliate program, and get referral traffic, high-quality leads, and sales.

B. Backlink Audit

Semrush's Backlinks Audit tool helps to find potentially harmful backlinks that may lead to search penalties.

The tool provides you with a list of all toxic backlinks and the reason why it’s marked as toxic. It allows you to decide whether to keep those backlinks or delete them.

After the backlinks audit, if you decide to delete the toxic backlinks then you can request the particular domain owner to remove them or export all toxic backlinks to a text file and upload them to the Google DISALLOW tool.

Then there is a Target Pages Report that shows the list of web pages that are affected.

By integrating Google Search Console, you can get more realistic reports and the behavior of your backlinks.

C. Link Building Tool

After analyzing the competitor’s backlink profile and performing a backlink audit for your domain name the next step is building links for your domain or a web page using the Link Building Tool.

The Link Building Tool will show the backlink opportunities and also filter these results by URL type keyword and top-level domain.

It will also show you the potential that will help you to get the backlinks from the domains which have a rating of 5/5.

The Outreach feature allows you to create an email and send it to the site owner. The built-in templates are beneficial, but it is also better to customize them to match your prospects.

If the message or pitch isn’t worth promotional and sharing value to the site then most probably you will get a reply but in the best case, you can also get a link pointing to your site.

Once you receive the backlink, check the BOX under the Actions sections, so that SEMRUSH will move this link to the “Monitor Section” which helps to find the relevant metrics for backlinks.

By monitoring the backlinks, it is easy to find which domains no longer hold the link to your site or require a content upgrade.

D. Bulk Analysis

In the Bulk Analysis tool, you can analyze up to 200 URLs.

It is a helpful tool to analyze the mass number of domains simultaneously. One domain per line is allowed to check relevant metrics.

5. Rank Tracking Tools

A. Position Tracking

The Position Tracking Tool is a great way to measure your SEO efforts accurately and effectively.

The tool allows you to enter domain names and start tracking the organic positions.

An intuitive dashboard that visualizes the data with estimated traffic, average position, and rank with the distribution.

It shows you the complete insights for top keywords, the positive or negative impact of competitors, the top pages it is ranking for, etc.

B. Sensor

The SEMRUSH Sensor tracks the organic position changes and tries to find whether there is any update by using its secret algorithm.

It also enclosed the WINNERS & LOSERS module, which quickly determines which domains are ranking for top organic keywords and their search traffic.

C. Rank

Semrush has a special ranking system that is based on organic traffic coming from top search results.

It is also helpful to find metrics for paid advertising.

6. On-Page & Tech SEO Tools

A. Site Audit

The Site Audit tool is now more powerful than before.

This tool crawls your website and finds top issues including critical error warnings and suggests some improvements so that you can achieve a better SEO score.

The new “MARKUP REPORTS” gives all the statistics and lists for different issues to make the important changes to improve performance by eliminating errors.

There are “THEMATIC REPORTS” which give you great insights and important data for all kinds of big or small websites.

B. On-Page SEO Checker

Semrush On-Page SEO Checker tool is used to pull the on-page optimization ideas for a website.

It will suggest the top pages and optimization ideas for those pages. It gives better optimization ideas that help to rank higher in the search engine and get more traffic.

The On-Page SEO checker has a very cool feature called TF-IDF. It stands for “TERM FREQUENCY-INVERSE DOCUMENT FREQUENCY”. It determines how the particular term appears on the top pages and the quality of content based on the established expectations of the audience.

The “Top 10 Benchmarking” is an excellent feature to analyze your competitors and compare your content against these competitors. It helps to analyze the content length, referring domains, keyword usage, whether videos are used in their article, and improve your content if it lacks the top positions in SERP.

C. Log File Analyzer

Log File Analyzer will help you find how Googlebot is crawling your site.

D. Listing Management

The Listing Management Tool is a great option to manage the online presence of your business.

The tool helps you to track your rankings locally and ensure the correct distribution of your business details across dozens of authoritative directories.

Simply enter your business information check for listing and distribute the correct information with a few clicks.

7. Content Marketing Tools

A. Content Marketplace

The Content Marketplace by SEMRUSH can be your one-stop for all your content needs. 

Due to a lot of happy users and customers who already engaged with Content Marketplace, they have now expanded their services.

Whether you need a highly relevant, well-researched, and professionally written article, or if you are in search of Email Newsletters, Product Descriptions, E-Books, Press Releases, or Media Stock, they will deliver you highly engaging content for your blog or website at an affordable cost.

E.g. If content writing isn’t your expertise then you can order content writing services from Marketplace.

They have also the SHARED WORKSPACES feature, which helps people to team up under the same roof and produce some masterpieces together.

Alternatively, you can also try out ContentShake AI, the content writing AI tool by Semrush.

B. Content Marketing Toolkit

Content Marketing Toolkit is used to find relevant topics, create a content plan, write and optimize your articles, etc.

I. Topic Research

Use the Topic Research Tool to discover content ideas and trending sub-topics with their viral discovery.

It allows adding any content idea to your favorite ideas for future usage.

II. SEO Content Template

The SEO Content Template tool is designed to create high-quality content for your website or blog.

By entering just your target keyword, SEMRUSH will give you an idea of how to write winning content.

It also shows you the complete analysis like the top rivals that are ranking for the particular term, semantically related words that should be included in the content/article as well as resists acquiring backlinks from the mentioned domains.

The content template tool suggests keyword placements for the top 10 results and recommendations for Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, HI Tags, etc.

The real-time content check will give the ideas on where to paste your content and see how it’s performing against the current articles.

III. SEO Writing Assistant

The SEO Writing Assistant is a great way to optimize your content for both users as well as search engines.

It will analyze your content on 4 parameters such as readability, search engine optimization, tone, and originality. It also gives some suggestions/recommendations to improve your overall SEO score.

If you are a newbie and don’t know how to write search engine-friendly content then you should be using this tool.

IV. Brand Monitoring

The Brand Monitoring Tool helps you to track analyze and benchmark your brand’s performance in the online world.

It helps you to track the estimated reach, as well as the SEMRUSH Authority score and traffic potential for the particular site.

This tool is super helpful for online reputation management and the cool part is the platform is offering this tool as a part of its content marketing toolkit, so you don’t need to buy a separate tool for brand monitoring.

V. Post Tracking

The Post Tracking tool is used to analyze and measure the performance of any article. It allows you to track key metrics like backlinks, keyword rankings, and social shares.

You can connect your Google Analytics account to fetch the live data of your posts or articles.

VI. Content Audit

The Content Audit tool allows evaluating the content performance on your website.

This tool allows you to define how well your piece of content actually engages readers and interacts with other sites and search engines.

It gives you internal metrics or also enables you to import metrics from your Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Use this tool, to track and identify what content should be updated, optimized, or removed.

8. Social Media Tools

The Social Media Toolkit helps you to post on different social media channels and track your social media performance without leaving the Semrush dashboard.

A. Social Media Poster

The Social Media Poster allows you to post, schedule your social posts, and also track your competitors.

This tool lets you create the post, save it as a draft to post it later, and publish it on your social media platform.

It also supports the use of emojis, GIFs, custom images, and UTM parameters for tracking purposes.

B. Social Media Tracker (Internal Analytics)

The Social Media Tracker allows you to track insights such as new follows, post reach, post engagements, and the engagement rate directly from SEMRUSH’s internal analytics dashboard.

This analytic section doesn’t offer insights into other social media platforms yet. It’s only available for Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn profiles/pages.

C. Social Media Ads (Ads Management)

One of the updates by SEMRUSH was integrating the SOCIAL MEDIA ADS feature into the toolkit.

It allows users to create, manage, and monitor their social media campaigns for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and other networks.

The main punch of this feature is to save the user’s time and pain from digging into the complexities of the ad campaigns as well as to make it easier to monitor the performance of the ads.

Other Semrush Updates

Let’s take a look at some of the other updates, that might interest you.

1. Agency Growth Kit

Agency Growth Kit is an all-in-one solution that can help agencies land new customers, customize and brand the reports, and manage unlimited clients.

The kit consists of the following features:

A. Extended Customization

Impress the clients with reports that fully reflect your company style. 

It allows you to create advanced reports with customized options. With extended customization, edit some fields, and drag and drop sections to improve your report.

There are several premade templates in the SEMRUSH gallery, but you can create your custom report using the blank template.

With just a click of a button, it will quickly create a beautiful-looking report.

B. Branding

Impress the clients with reports that fully reflect your company style. 

C. White Label

You can improve your client’s reports with white-labeling options.

2. Collaboration Of Prowly With Semrush

In 2020, Semrush acquired a fast-growing SaaS PR-focused startup called Prowly.

It is basically a tool used for an improvement in the DIGITAL PR functionalities.

From finding the journalists to creating/publishing press releases and managing contacts, Prowly is your all-in-one go-to tool for all your PR activities. 

3. Semrush Integration With Yoast SEO

Another major update was SEMRUSH and Yoast SEO, shaking hands and announcing a partnership for the integration of their services.

Yoast SEO will now feature integration with extensive SEO products and keyword databases.

This integration offers Yoast users smart, SEO-focused keyword data and suggestions within the WordPress post editor.

It allows content creators to improve their site indexability and also track site traffic.

To benefit from the new features the Yoast SEO plugin users will need to have a SEMRUSH account, either free or premium.

The full suite of features available in Yoast SEO will help clients:

• Get useful metrics for each keyword
• Discover new keyword ideas for content

Semrush – Plans & Pricing

Let's have a look at Semrush Plans & Pricing.

After going through the in-depth review above, it is proved that it is software packed with awesome tools and features. It is the most complete optimization platform in the market. But on the other hand, it is also one of the most expensive tools, which is after all, quite logical.

The prices vary depending on how you plan to use the software.

It has currently 3 plans, and all the 3 plans provide access to 40+ different tools. It’s up to you to choose which one best suits your needs. 

1. PRO PLAN
2. GURU PLAN
3. BUSINESS PLAN

There is a full list of all the features for each plan on the official website, but here is a brief overview of all these plans:

1. Pro Plan

The PRO PLAN is for freelancers, independent marketers, and start-ups.

Indeed, here the use of tools is restricted, although largely sufficient for a small project to start.

With PRO PLAN, you will be able to:

• Work on the optimization of 5 projects – Follow and analyze 500 keywords, crawl 100,000 pages per month, follow 50 profiles on social networks, etc.
• Analyze the competition – Reports of 3000 domains per day that will contain 10,000 data and results.

The price of PRO PLAN is $129.95 per month on monthly basis and $108.33 per month if you are billed annually.

If you are an individual or do not have employees for your business the PRO PLAN is recommended.

2. Guru Plan

The GURU Plan is great for SMBs and marketing agencies where the access to the various tools is a little wider.

With PRO PLAN, you will be able to:

• Work on the optimization of 15 projects – Monitor and analyze 1500 keywords, crawl 300,000 pages per month, and follow 100 profiles on social networks.
• Analyze the competition – Reports of 5,000 domains per day that will contain 30,000 data and results.

In addition to wider limits for the use of the tools, you will have access to additional features such as:

• Content Marketing Platform – Allows you to find high-potential content and maximize their SEO optimization.
• Historical data of all your competitors –To measure the evolution, analyze market behavior, and surmise your strategy.
• Personalized reports

The price of GURU PLAN is $249.95 per month on monthly basis and $208.33 per month if you are billed annually.

If you find that you want more features that are on the GURU plan you can always update it later if you are already driving a lot of revenue to your business.

3. Business Plan

If you are looking for a tool, adapted to the needs of a company, an e-commerce project, or a marketing agency, you should go with the BUSINESS PLAN.

With BUSINESS PLAN, You will be able to benefit from less limited access to the various optimization tools, such as:

• Work on the optimization of 40 projects – Track and analyze 5,000 keywords, crawl 1 million pages per month, and follow up to 300 profiles on social networks.
• Analyze the competition – Reports of 10,000 domains per day that will contain 50,000 data and results.

In addition to the options of the GURU PLAN, you will have access to other exclusive tools like:

The price of a BUSINESS PLAN is $499.95 per month on monthly basis and $416.66 per month if you are billed annually. 

• White Label Reports – This allows you to perform simulations, which is very useful because you know exactly where you are going before you start.
• Access to the SEMRUSH API – Able to customize the interface of your dashboard to display only the data that interests you, integrate the SEMRUSH tools into your platform and software, etc.

If you have a few employees, consider getting the BUSINESS PLAN. It has a lot of advanced features that you would not get with PRO or GURU plans.

Semrush Annual Billing – Best For Long-Term Projects

If you think your business will not be stopping anytime in the next year, you should definitely go with the annual prices, because you can save a considerable amount of money.

So, if you want to subscribe to a subscription for a period of one year, you will benefit from a 17% discount.

Important Notes

Semrush is for the people who really take their business seriously. So, if this is simply your hobby and you don’t put much time or effort, then you should not even consider one of these plans.

However, if you put your heart and soul into your business and have the desire to nurture it, then it is the perfect tool to help you achieve growth and success.

So, It is highly recommended that you should go with the 7-day free trial before committing to any paid plan.

There are other less complex and cheaper marketing softwares that may be perfect for you.

You can try it first, and if you think that this software is not for you, then you can cancel it without any risk.

Semrush Review – Conclusion

Semrush is a powerful tool that offers many possibilities for analysis and optimizations of your SEO strategy.

It is a benchmark in the market and the tool deserves this title. It is packed with features and will accompany you throughout your project. With software like this, you’re ready to gain your online visibility.

You will probably have to skim a few tutorials, so you can achieve the full potential of this great tool.

But, if you are not comfortable with the related concepts, then it might not be a suitable tool for you.

Either way, the best way to find out is to simply try it out.

➔ Also Read: Semrush VS SimilarWeb – Comparison