SEMrush Review: Features, Pros & Cons

If you’re serious about growing your website traffic, understanding your competitors, or improving your SEO game, chances are you’ve heard of SEMrush. It’s one of the most popular all-in-one digital marketing tools out there, used by businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals around the world.

In this review, we’ll break down everything you need to know about SEMrush — what it does, the key features it offers, what it gets right, and where it might fall short.

Whether you’re a beginner looking for a reliable SEO tool or a pro searching for advanced features, this guide will help you decide if SEMrush is the right choice for you.

SEMrush Overview

SEMrush is a powerful digital marketing platform that helps you improve your online visibility. It started back in 2008, founded by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov, and has grown into one of the most trusted tools in the SEO industry. Today, it’s used by over 10 million marketers and has more than 117,000 paying customers worldwide.

SEMrush offers a full suite of tools that cover everything from SEO, content marketing, and PPC, to competitor research, social media management, and site audits. It’s known for its huge keyword and backlink databases, making it a go-to tool for businesses that want to boost their search rankings and stay ahead of the competition.

Whether you’re a freelancer, a blogger, a small business, or part of a big marketing team, SEMrush gives you the insights and tools to grow your traffic and make smarter marketing decisions.

SEMrush Features

Domain Analysis

No matter where you are in the SEMrush dashboard, you can do domain research by using the top search bar or by clicking on ‘Domain Overview’ in the left menu.

Keyword Research

Just writing about any topic won’t get you traffic or money. Many new creators think that picking topics with high search volume will bring a lot of visitors. But when their content doesn’t rank, they get frustrated.

The real key is proper keyword research. You need to look at things like keyword difficulty, search volume, trends, and competition to know if a keyword is worth targeting. This doesn’t apply much to news or trending topics, though, because most tools can’t show fresh data for those.

SEMrush helps you do detailed keyword research. It shows keyword volume (both global and by country), trends, difficulty, competition, CPC, related and similar keywords, search history, and more.

This data helps you pick the right topics, plan your content, and make smart updates. You can also research multiple keywords at once by entering them in different rows and clicking the “analyze” button. This helps you decide if a topic is good for your next blog post.

Keyword Magic Tool

The SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool helps you find the best keywords to use in your content. It has a huge database with over 17 billion keywords. When you type in a word or phrase, it shows you a list of related keywords along with useful details.

You can see how many people search for each keyword, how hard it is to rank for, how much advertisers pay for it, and how strong the competition is. It also tells you if the keyword shows things like videos, reviews, or FAQs in Google search.

For example, if you search for “iPhone price,” the tool will give you a bunch of similar keywords and important data to help you decide which one to use.

Competition Analysis

SEMrush gives you useful tools to study your competitors in detail. You can check their website traffic, see which keywords they rank for, compare your keywords with theirs, look at their backlinks, study their ads, and even track their brand mentions.

These tools help you understand what your competitors are doing and give you ideas to stay ahead. With competition research, you can:

• Get ahead of your competitors
• Avoid sudden drops in your rankings
• Find new content and SEO ideas
• Learn from their top strategies
• Understand what’s happening in the market
• Plan your next steps better

Rank Tracking

The ranking of your keywords shows how well your SEO is working. Every online business wants to show up at the top for certain important keywords. Just like other tools such as SERPwatch or Screpy, SEMrush also tracks the rankings of your chosen keywords. With the Position Tracking feature in the “SEO Toolkit,” you can see how your keyword rankings go up or down over time.

SEMrush also has a Position Tracking app where you can check how your main keywords are performing across different projects.

Rank tracking helps you:

• Monitor the main keywords for your website
• Keep track of all your keyword positions
• Quickly spot keywords that are dropping in rank so you can fix them

Backlink Tracking

If you know SEO, you already know how important good backlinks are to rank for tough keywords. Most SEO tools, including SEMrush, let you check both your backlinks and your competitors’ backlinks.

By looking at your own backlinks, you can find and remove bad or spammy links that might hurt your site. This helps improve your off-page SEO. And by checking your competitors’ backlinks, you can find link-building ideas for your own site.

SEMrush gives you full access to backlink data. You can see everything from a quick overview to detailed information about each link.

Site Audit

The Site Audit feature is a great tool for quickly checking your website’s health. It gives you important details about your site and shows them in a clear, easy-to-read report. The report is well-organized, so you can easily find what needs to be fixed or improved.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a very useful feature in SEMrush. It helps you rank your business or listing websites in local search results.

With the tools in SEMrush, you can get the right data to improve your local SEO and reach more people in your area. Many of SEMrush’s features support local SEO and help you get better results.

Content Marketing

SEMrush also helps with content marketing and content writing. It has a special content marketing dashboard that includes different tools made for planning and improving content. You can use it to find topics, plan your content, write articles, make them SEO-friendly, track mentions, see how well they are doing, and make changes to improve them.

SEMrush also has an SEO Writing Assistant that works with Google Docs. It’s kind of like Grammarly, but instead of checking grammar and tone, it helps with SEO. It checks things like readability, originality, and plagiarism to make sure your content is good for search engines.

Intuitive UI

For any online tool, the user interface (UI) is very important. We’re already used to using tools with great UI—like Facebook, which is easy to use and well-designed. That’s why it’s hard for us to like any tool that feels complicated or clunky.

The same thing applies to tools like SEMrush. We expect a smooth and easy experience. SEMrush has a clean and user-friendly design. It’s fast, responsive, and easy to navigate. For Linux users, it even feels familiar because it uses the Ubuntu font. You can easily view all your data, apply filters, and sort information without any hassle.

Ease of Use

SEMrush is one of the easiest SEO tools to use. Its features are simple to understand, and you don’t need to be a tech expert to use them. There are helpful guides and tutorials for almost every feature. Most things are clear on their own, especially if you already know a bit about SEO.

The design of the tool also makes it very easy to navigate and use.

SEMrush Resources

SEMrush doesn’t just offer a blog and help center to teach users about SEO and how to use the tool. It also has webinars, PDF ebooks, podcasts, and an Academy to help you learn more.

You can access different PDF courses for free to improve your SEO skills and make the most of SEMrush. The SEMrush Academy is made for people who want to learn SEO deeply and understand how to use the tool properly.

There’s also a “What’s New” section where you can check out the latest features added to SEMrush.

Data that can be Relied Upon

SEO tools are based on the data which they provide. It has to be very accurate and updated so as to make the decisions. SEMrush and Ahrefs are the tools that offer data that is updated, accurate, and can be relied upon for business decision-making.

Quick Disavow Links

As we try to grow our websites, we see many toxic, bad, or spam domains breaking the health of our off-page by giving us low-quality links for no reason. This as a result can increase Spam scores and bad rankings. As such, we have the option to tell google not to consider those links.

SEMrush here plays a part to help us identify those bad links which we can disavow and also helps to make a document for further submission. This way we can easily get rid of those bad domains and rank high on SERP.

Content Optimization

With the various tools offered by SEMrush, one can easily optimize the content existing on the website or new one. With the guidelines, it becomes really simple to optimize the content.

Reporting

Many people use SEMrush for reporting purposes as well. SEMrush gives an in-depth report related to backlinks, SEO, site health, domain overview report, growth report, or an overall audit report.

SEMrush Quick Guide: Starting Guide

Keyword Research

Consists of all the relevant tools to help you discover new keywords or simply research the keywords based on your requirements.

Keyword Overview

Shows an overall view of the specific keywords that you want. Keyword overview shows you the volume, CPC, search features, keyword variations, related keywords, and much more.

Keyword Magic Tool

It lets you filter down your keywords to reach the best keywords you can rank for or write for.

Keyword Manager

Here you can collect your favorite keywords from across SEMrush. This feature allows you to save your findings, get fresh metrics, and export your findings into an XLSX or CSV file or other SEMrush tools.

Competition Research

Competition Research is nothing but analyzing the various metrics of competitors’ websites.

Domain Overview

Shows insight about any domain with its authority score, organic search traffic, backlinks, country distribution, organic keywords, search features, organic competitors, and much more.

Traffic Analytics

Here you can analyze the traffic sources, traffic by country, traffic journey, and much more of your domain. You can compare the same with your competitor domain and get insights into where you can improve.

Organic Research

Organic Research shows detailed insights with respect to keywords, ranking, traffic cost, branded traffic, positions, competitors, and much more. Here you can also see top search features, top pages, top sub-domains, main organic competitors, and competitive positioning map.

Keyword Gap

This tool helps you do a full analysis of your keyword with the keywords of your competitors. You can enter your competitors, choose the keyword types and get the insights to stay ahead of your competitors.

Backlink Gap

Backlink gap allows you to compare your domain with one or more competitor domains to

Link Building

Link Building tools of SEMrush assist you in your link building efforts.

Backlink Analysis

Backlink analysis of backlink analytics assist you to discover

• Referring Domains
• Monthly Visits
• Keywords
• Backlinks
• New & Lost Referring Domains
• New & Lost Backlinks
• Categories of Referring Domains
• Top Anchors
• Referring Domains by Authority Score
• Backlink Types
• Link Attributes on Domains
• TLD Distribution
• Top Countries
• Link Profile Distribution
• Similar Profiles

All this data is very well summarised into easy-to-understand visuals & graphs.

Bulk Analysis

The bulk analysis allows you to analyze many competitors’ links at one go. As such you can find link-building opportunities from this and export the results to XLSX or CSV file.

Market Analysis

Domain Overview

Domain overview as we recently discussed is also helpful in the market analysis as you can unearth the insights of any given website with this feature. As such, it is a highly useful tool for market analysis.

Advertising Research

The advertising research feature of SEMrush helps you understand the traffic coming to the website through advertising efforts. It shows you the keywords on which the site has an advertisement and the traffic coming through the keyword. Apart from that, you can also see target URLs, traffic cost, competition density, trend, and results attributed to the advertising keywords. It also lets you see the ad copies, position changes, competitors, ad history, and much more.

Display Advertising

With Display Advertising, you can see the Image (visual) ads of any particular domain. Display Advertisement can be in the form of Text, Image, or HTML (inc. animated GDN) which you can also filter. It is very useful if you want to track the advertising strategy of your competitors.

PLA Research

With SEMrush’s PLA research feature you can analyze the performance of an advertiser’s Google Shopping Ad Campaigns. PLA stands for Product Listing Ads. It is basically helpful for e-commerce sites. PLAs are shown when someone searches for a product that is listed on Google Shopping.

Local SEO

Position Tracking

Position tracking lets you track the position of various keywords on your website. It works like a rank tracking tool. You can add your local keywords to the list and easily track them. Position tracking also lets you enable email notifications so that you can see the changes over time and take the necessary steps to avoid a major fall in ranking.

Site Audit

SEMrush is definitely a great tool for the site audit. It audits your website for multiple parameters and gives a condensed report that you can share with your clients or use as a reference for your future efforts.

On-Page SEO Checker

The On-page SEO checker tool of SEMrush helps you in identifying the points where you are lacking. It assists in working on your on Page strategy to have a better ranking than the competitors.

Adding your first project on SEMrush

You can add your web project in SEMrush very easily. Follow the below steps to add your first project on SEMrush:

• Navigate to Management Area
• Go to Projects
• Click on Create Project
• Enter your domain URL and Project Name and hit “Create Project” button

Once your project is added you can set up all the features that you want to use for your project. Set up process is different for all the different features.

How to Delete a Project in SEMrush

• In your projects overview tab, simple click on the settings icon
• Now click the delete button
• Enter your domain name to confirm the deletion and proceed to delete the project completely from SEMrush

Alternatives

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the top alternatives to SEMrush because of its Data accuracy and amazing features that no other alternative offers. With such a huge database, Ahrefs gives you the information of any given website with the help of which you can actually rank.

SEMrush vs Ahrefs

Both the tools are masters of the SEO game. It is hard to decide which one is better out of the two. So, we can simply segregate them based on the user requirements. As such, if you are more into SEO you might have surely used both of them. In terms of UI, SEMrush is my choice over Ahrefs. The app UI of Ahrefs is very basic. But if you are a link-building expert or want to create backlinks then you can prefer Ahrefs for its quality data and easy-to-understand filters. But again, there is no such difference in SEMrush & Ahrefs regarding that too. It is better to try the trial version of both of these software that will give you an understanding of which can work better for you.

Moz Pro

Moz is very popular SEO software. It is very trusted software in the industry. Most people consider the Domain Authority defined by Moz, and not the Authority score of SEMrush or Domain Rating of Ahrefs. This software is best for keyword research and link building. People generally complain about late data update, however, it is not too much. As such, it can also be a solution for most SEO experts.

SEMrush vs Moz Pro

If you are looking for an All-in-one SEO tool, then it is recommended to go with SEMrush instead of Moz because of many reasons. There is no big difference in the pricing of the SEMrush Premium plan and Moz Pro. Even most of the features are quite similar but when it comes to data that is easy to understand, SEMrush leaves Moz Pro silent.

Mangools

Mangools offers some amazing SEO tools. With the Mangools tools, you can do keyword research, competition research, backlink research, and a lot more. Mangools tools are bifurcated into five different tools:

• KWfinder
• SERP checker
• SERPwatcher
• LinkMiner
• SiteProfiler

There is also an extension offered by Mangools for browsers.

It gives cutting-edge competition to SEMrush as of today. Its UI is simply amazing. Its pricing is also very competitive.

SEMrush vs Mangools

Mangools is an SEO company that offers SEO tools. Its tools are very popular, easy to use, and help you to rank on the SERP. On the other hand, SEMrush is the leader of the game. When it comes to the number of features, SEMrush simply overtakes the battle. SEMrush is a professional SEO tool and its data is very robust and it can be relied upon for executing SEO tasks. You can go for any of these as the pricing of Mangools is way more affordable than SEMrush.

Serpstat

Serpstat is a popular All-in-one SEO tool just like SEMrush. It offers almost all the necessary tools and features to help you in your SEO endeavors. It is one of the best growth hacking tools to track and outrank competitors. Serpstat is trusted by many renowned brands. This tool can be used as a single solution to many of your questions.

SEMrush vs Serpstat

Serpstat is not as famous as SEMrush. However, this tool truly deserves applause. It is very easy to use. Its clean and easy-to-understand UI makes it very evident for anyone to make decisions out of the data. If you are making a choice between SEMrush & SERPstat, believe me you’re putting yourself in clouds of thoughts. Serpstat offers multiple plans. Its lite plan is very affordable when compared to the least affordable plan of SEMrush. You can also try the trial account to see if this tool stands to your expectations.

Spyfu

Spyfu is a dominating competitor keyword research tool. This tool lets you unveil the advertising strategy of your competitors and hack their link strategy to outrank them. Spyfu monthly plan is very affordable and it allows you to do enough data exploration. However, if you are an agency or entrepreneur having multiple projects, then there are some other plans to suffice your need. This tool is very easy to use and has many great features such as rank tracking, PPC keyword research, SERP checker, SEO report, and much more.

SEMrush vs Spyfu

Spyfu is a strong competitor of SEMrush. Both the tools have their own strengths but at the same time, they have their own battleground as well. This means Spyfu can’t replace the need for SEMrush. Spyfu tool doesn’t suffice various needs of an SEO expert. When it comes to a tool that has all the required SEO tool features, then SEMrush beats Spyfu and can be the best choice. But if you are more interested in Google PPC Research then you can simply go with Spyfu as it serves the purpose and is way more affordable.

Majestic

Majestic is an SEO tool that also allows you to see the insights of any competitor website to take action. With Majestic, you can do keyword research, do backlink research, access rank tracker, do campaign research, and much more. This tool is very affordable when compared to most of its competitors.

SEMrush vs Majestic

Majestic UI is very similar to that of the Ahrefs. Both Majestic and SEMrush are very popular SEO software. If you have used SEMrush, you can’t simply move to other software. However, if you are new there is nothing bad to test the software and choose which works best for you. When compared, SEMrush is a little costly in pricing, and at the same time, it is having more features and tools than Majestic.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is more like a content marketing tool and it is a very strong competitor to SEMrush. With Buzzsumo you can see what is trending, and you can frame your content around the trend. It works as a competitive research tool. Buzzsumo serves the end purpose of an SEO tool, which is to increase traffic. You can also try Buzzsumo’s 30-days free trial account to test this software.

SEMrush vs Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is the best tool in the market to find the topic and create viral content for increasing traffic. However, it doesn’t help much to rank already existing content. It is the point where SEMrush comes into play and gives you a tight solution for ranking the existing content. Both the tools have however their own point of wisdom. If you want to increase traffic with content marketing then there is hardly any better option than Buzzsumo.

SEMrush Pricing

There are currently three plans of SEMrush available to you, viz. Pro, Guru, and Business. You can opt for any plan based on your requirements.

Pro	Guru	Business
$119.95/mo	$229.95/mo	$449.95/mo
5 Projects	15 Projects	40 Projects
500 Keywords to Track	1500 Keywords to Track	5000 Keywords to Track
No API Access	No API Access	API Access Available
No Historical Data	Historical Data Available	Historical Data Available
10000 Results Per Report	30000 Results Per Report	50000 Results Per Report
3000 Reports Per Day	5000 Reports Per Day	10000 Reports Per Day
100000 Pages to Crawl Per Month	300000 Pages to Crawl Per Month	1000000 Pages to Crawl Per Month
50 Social Profiles for Monitoring	100 Social Profiles for Monitoring	300 Social Profiles for Monitoring
5 Scheduled PDF Reports	20 Scheduled PDF Reports	50 Scheduled PDF Reports
No Topic To Research	Unlimited Topics To Research	Unlimited Topics To Research
No Plagiarism Checks Per Month	5 Plagiarism Checks Per Month	10 Plagiarism Checks Per Month
1 Target Per Project	10 Targets Per Project	Unlimited Targets Per Project
Buy Now	Buy Now	Buy Now

You can also enable some other features for some additional pricing. You can add in your plan:

• ImpactHero for an addition of $200/mo
• Basic Location Features in Local SEO for an addition of $20/mo
• Premium Location Features in Local SEO for an addition of $40/mo
• Additional Users add-on for an addition of $45/mo per user for Pro, $80/mo per user for Guru, $100/mo per user for Business
• SEMrush .Trends for an addition of $200/mo
• Agency Growth Kit for an addition of $100/mo

FAQs

What is SEMrush Academy?

SEMrush academy is an online place where you can enrich yourself with SEO skills and sharpen your knowledge about Digital Marketing and LInkbuilding. There are many courses available at SEMrush academy that are 100% free and tend to educate you about the tool, abbreviations used in the tool, and some basic SEO & Digital Marketing skills. The courses are designed by experts. They impart some fundamental knowledge that may be required if you are a complete beginner.

How much does SEMrush cost?

SEMrush costs you as low as $119.95/mo. If you are a new user, you can try the trial account for free and upgrade later on.

Is SEMrush worth it?

If you win the game of SEO, then SEMrush really worths your pocket. It puts in front of all your possible competitors whom you can outrank with all the tools to help you outrank them. SEO is not a one-day game, it takes time, patience, and effort. But SEMrush surely makes you the master by unveiling the ranking strategy of your competitors.

Is SEMrush good for bloggers?

Yes, definitely! If you’re a blogger, then SEMrush can help you in ranking your blog for the possible keywords. It can give you major content insights that can make you confident in ranking high on SERP.

What can I do with a free SEMrush account?

With a free trial account of SEMrush, you can use almost all of its major features except a few. As such, you can decide whether you should upgrade your account.

Does SEMrush show accurate data?

This is in fact one of the positive reasons why many people use SEMrush. The data reflected in charts and tables is very much fair if not 100% accurate. After comparing data from many SEO tools, I’ve personally found that SEMrush data updates more frequently and gives you better results over time.

How Rank Tracking can help in SEO?

Rank tracking keeps you on track by showing you the valuable ups and downs which if neglected can harm the traffic distribution on your site. With proper rank tracking using SEMrush, you can keep an eagle eye on your best keywords and make adjustments whenever you see any major collapse in position.

Which is better in Moz and SEMrush?

Both are equally useful SEO software but when it comes to more usability SEMrush seems to be a much better solution.

Is SEMrush better than Ahrefs?

It would be inappropriate to say that SEMrush is better than Ahrefs because Ahrefs is also a powerful SEO tool. However, when it comes to UI/UX and easy-to-understand data then SEMrush clearly wins the race and seems to be a better solution than Ahrefs. One can always argue on it because for some users Ahrefs is their choice.

Why should I buy SEMrush?

If you want to do competitor research and outrank them by hacking their advertising, keyword, and link-building strategy then you should definitely buy SEMrush. If you want better SEO of your domain, then SEMrush can help you in your endeavor.

What are SEMrush Pricing plans?

SEMrushh has three pricing plans viz. Pro, Guru & Business.

Will I need to buy SEMrush for my different domains?

No, you can add your project in one SEMrush account. In Semrush Pro you can add up to 5 projects, in Guru Plan you can add up to 15 projects and in the business plan of Semrush you can add up to 40 projects.

How can I cancel on SEMrush subscription?

• Log in to your SEMrush account.
• Navigate to Subscription Info page.
• Click on Active next to Recurring above your subscription.
• Click on Contact Us.
• Fill in your personal details.
• Select the option “I want to cancel my SEMrush account“

Is SEMrush better for PPC Analysis?

Yes, for PPC Analysis, Semrush is an ideal tool. With Semrush you can do an in-depth PPC & Advertising analysis for any of your competitor websites.

Can I do competition research with a free SEMrush account?

Yes, it is possible to do competitive organic research even with a free account of SEMrush.

What is the SEMrush keyword magic tool?

SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool is an advanced keyword research tool that lets you find the most appropriate keywords for your content. It lets you filter down the keywords under broad match, exact match, and phrases which further help you narrow down the recommended keywords. It gives you full control over your keyword discovery.

How is the Keyword Magic Tool different from the basic keyword overview?

Keyword Overview tells you the information about the given keyword in terms of its volume, CPC, search features, variations, and all. However, Keyword Magic Tool gives you information about variations of keywords around the given keyword with their volume, trend, keyword difficulty, and more. In practice, both tools are highly beneficial.

Renown Brands that use SEMrush

There are many renowned brands that trust SEMrush such as SAMSUNG, Walmart, Tesla, and many more. Even some blogging celebs love SEMrush, not in the influence of its affiliate program, but for its features that are put on the table. For agencies, SEMrush is like a boon that can handle many SEO tasks with ease.

SEMrush is best for

SEMrush is a tool that has plenty of features for anyone whether you are an SEO expert, social media expert, or even a content marketer. So, let’s discuss for whom SEMrush is best for:

• SEO Specialists
• Digital Marketing Consultants and Executives
• Advertising Persons
• Social Media Experts
• Smart Bloggers and Entrepreneurs
• SEO & Digital Agencies
• Marketing Personnel

Conclusion

There is no doubt that SEMrush is a leading SEO software as of today. By using it, you are assured of getting the accurate and most reliable data which can tend to make your web projects powerful in less time. With this leading SEO software, you can easily increase the traffic of your websites by exploring and targeting the best keywords under your niche. There are many tips, tricks, and tutorials available on the internet, following which you can become the master of SEO. SEMrush makes you nothing but a master in search engine optimization.