SEMrush Review 2021
If you’re creating content for your company website, you probably already understand how important search engine optimization (SEO) is. Most of the time, it’s not about how catchy your ads are, but how relevant they are to your audience’s needs and if the content is backed up by other websites. To measure how effective your site is, you need SEO tools.
Not only do SEO tools provide data and alerts about the overall health and success of your website, but they also help find opportunities and identify issues that may prevent you from ranking higher in search results. In a nutshell, SEO tools help you turn data into actionable insights and eventually help you grow revenue.
In this review, we’re going to walk you through the popular SEO tool SEMrush and talk about its functions, key features, pros and cons, pricing, and some product details.
What’s on This Page
SEMrush
4.75/5
- Offers more than 50 tools and products
- Optimizes your advertising spend
- Has seen over 41 trillion backlinks and 20 billion keywords
What is SEMrush?
As you can probably tell from its name, SEMrush is a top-notch tool for companies hoping to boost their search engine performance. It’s a leading software-as-a-service platform that has over 50 products, tools, and add-ons for enhancing online visibility. These tools can help you with search, content, social media, data, and market research and have helped 7 million marketers from more than 140 countries advertise smarter. Want more numbers? SEMrush has seen over 41 trillion backlinks and 20 billion keywords… If you’re looking for a trustworthy online presence booster, look no further.
Why use SEMrush?
SEMrush is the marketing analytics tool you need to track keywords that are bringing traffic to both you and your competitors. The wide range of products SEMrush offers helps you do better in search engine optimization, content, social media, and market research. Not only does it show you a bunch of keywords you can use for your ad campaigns, but it also finds blog topics that might resonate with your audience. To make sure you’re making the most of your marketing dollars, SEMrush optimizes your advertising spend and tells you which content is bringing in revenue and which is costing you money. You can also see holistically how your competitors’ social media accounts are doing compared to yours.
SEMrush Pros and Cons
Pros
- Comprehensive keyword research tool and domain analytics.
- Sophisticated backlink tracking
- Extremely helpful project-based SEO campaign
- Accurate keyword and SEO recommendations
- Clear desktop/mobile search breakdowns
Cons
- Lacks keyword list management.
- Potential steep prices
- Lots of features come only in additional packages
- Avast popups in the free version pushing you to purchase
How to use SEMrush?
There’s a lot of things you can do with SEMrush. Once you create an account with SEMrush, you can start exploring the different keywords that are trending. Then, if you want to identify where you can improve your website, create a project, and run a Site Audit. SEMrush will show you all the errors, warnings, and notices on the technical side of your website that are hurting your SEO game. Once you know what’s not working well, set up On Page SEO Checker to gather ideas for improvement and Position Tracking to monitor your SEO growth over time.
Being in a business means you must be better than your competitors. You can use SEMrush’s Competitors report to find websites that are competing with you for organic traffic. Once you’ve identified who your top competitors are, use SEMrush’s Organic Research and Advertising Research reports to see the exact keywords that their search traffic comes from. By doing this, you then know what keywords to include on your site to gain some of that traffic!
Finally, use Backlinks Analytics to understand where your competitors get referral traffic so that you can build similar backlinks for your own website.
Our Rating Process
We assessed SEMrush using the four criteria below and scored them each out of five points to help you in your decision-making process:
Return on investment (ROI): You can calculate your return on investment (ROI) percentage by dividing your net profit by the cost of your marketing campaign and then multiplying that number by 100. This percentage is important because it tells you if the money, you’re spending on marketing efforts is worth it. On top of that, the SEO tool you’re using should be worth your money too.
Data collection: How many customers saw your ads? How many clicked on them? How many ended up buying something? Did they tell their friends about the product?
Reports and dashboards: Marketing analytics software that compiles reports and dashboards can help you visualize results over time. With these insights, you can make more accurate predictions and hit marketing goals more easily in future campaigns.
Multichannel tracking: Nowadays, marketing efforts span across various channels: email, social media, SMS, landing pages, out-of-home (e.g. billboards, subways ads), and search engines. You need a marketing analytics tool that can tell you about this information in order to better spend your marketing dollars.
Now, let’s take a look at how SEMrush does in terms of the criteria above.
Return on investment (ROI) – 4 out of 5
We can use many different angles to judge how effective SEMrush is in driving ROI. The first one is on pay-per-click (PPC) data. SEMrush provides a good value when it comes to PPC data as it gives you detailed cost-per-click (CPC) competition and distribution data, live ads, and PPC campaign planning tools. This feature is there to make sure the money you’re spending gets a good result.
When it comes to reporting, you can pull 3,000 domain analysis reports per day on the entry-level plan. That’s 2,825 more reports than what Ahref — a SEMrush competitor — offers. Of course, more expensive plans come with more reporting limits… it can go up to 10,000 reports on SEMrush’s most top-tiered plan.
Last but not least, you can add multiple projects to your plan and run site audits, backlink audits, on-page SEO checking, and position tracking on them. All these features are going to make your website more profitable, thus boosting your ROI!
Data collection – 5 out of 5
SEMrush’s keyword overview gives you a good amount of data to learn from. It shows you a variety of tables, charts, and interactive data visualizations. For example, it’ll give you a breakdown of organic versus paid search with average monthly search volume and a CPC breakdown of how much a paid result would cost in different countries. You can toggle between desktop and mobile search traffic to see if there are any differences between devices.
On your dashboard, you’ll also see your website’s current “health score,” which is based on SEMrush’s data and position tracking information for ranking on particular keywords.
Of course, you’d want to study your site traffic as well. SEMrush’s traffic analytics reports estimate which channels your competitors are using and gaining traffic from. Then, the pages report identifies competitors’ top-performing pages and analyzes full subdomain keywords.
Reports and dashboards – 5 out of 5
As we briefly mentioned above, SEMrush’s reports and dashboards are very visual and useful. Since SEMrush provides you with a lot of data, it’s important to present them in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you. The software knows that, and so you’ll mostly see graphs that make information easily understandable.
Multichannel tracking – 5 out of 5
As a top tool in boosting online presence, SEMrush has got you covered when it comes to multichannel tracking. It’s there to help you schedule and post content on all your social platforms, analyze the performance of your posts, track competitor accounts, and create social ads.
Package Comparison
Product Details
Pro
Guru
Business
Price per month if paid annually
$99.95
$191.62
$374.95
Keyword, domain, and backlink analytics
Yes
Yes
Yes
Content marketing platform
No
Yes
Yes
Reporting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Share of voice metrics
No
No
Yes
Historical data
No
Yes
Yes
Technical / Product Details
Product Details
Specs
Supported Languages
English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korearn
Compatibility
App is available on both iOS and Android devices
Restricted Countries
Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea region of Ukraine, or any other country subject to U.S. trade sanctions
Customer Support
Available via website form and on phone at +1 (800) 815-9959 Monday – Friday 10 am – 6 pm EDT
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. SEMrush has helped over 7 million marketers rank better on search engines. It’s a solid tool that gives you all the key data you need for a successful SEO project. Many users have compared SEMrush with other SEO tools and think that SEMrush is still one of the best, well-suited for organizations of all sizes.
That really depends on how you’re comparing the two! Many users favor SEMrush over Moz because the former is easier to use, has more features, and gives way more generous reporting limits than the latter. With SEMrush, you can easily create great link building campaigns without ever leaving the app; with Moz, you need to use spreadsheets and email programs alongside the software.
We also found that SEMrush provides a lot more data that are both SEO and PPC-related, whereas Moz provides less on PPC. And of course, SEMrush’s interface has won many users’ hearts. Its data visualization features are especially user-friendly; but these aren’t present in Moz. Lastly, SEMrush provides better user experience through phone and live chat support; Moz only provides help via email, which is a bit slower.
It’s important to understand that it’s nearly impossible for third-party tools to give 100% accuracy on search engine results. However, in late 2020, SEMrush did make a major improvement to the accuracy of the data they provide to users. They leveraged innovative machine learning algorithms to provide more accurate estimation of website audience, detailed analytics for subdomains, top pages, traffic journey, and increased accuracy for small and medium domains.