Semrush Review 2023

You might have read a buzz about Brian Dean selling his famous blog Backlinko.com to SEMRush for an undisclosed amount adding 500k monthly traffic.

Now, the deal would have been in millions or more. I guess that’s enough to give you a hint about how big brand Semrush is.

But, Is Semrush worth the hype? That’s what I’m going to tell you in my detailed Semrush Review.

Here, I’ll evaluate Semrush on the basis of:

• Major Features
• Pricing
• Ease of Use
• What do users have to say about it? 
• Customer Support and 
• Pros & Cons. 

Lastly, I will share the best alternatives to Semrush and give my verdict about using this SEO tool. 

But first, let’s start with a brief history of Semrush and what is this tool about? 

What is Semrush?

Semrush is a complete digital marketing tool that has various tools in its arsenal to help you build an online fortress.

Started back in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov, the company has now built a strong customer base of over 7 million. Since then, they have evolved and added over 40 tools accustomed to various purposes.

What makes SEMRush a viable choice over others is that it offers everything right under one dashboard. With SEMRush, you get the tools for:

• Domain Analysis
• Competitor research
• Backlink analysis
• Website audit
• Keyword research
• Social media management
• Lead generation
• PPC & SEO management.

So, one moment you are using it to conduct market research, and another moment, you are using its writing assistant feature to create high-quality long-form content.

SEMRush is like an “Avenger” of your digital marketing universe.

SEMRush Review: Key Features

This was my reaction when I found out that SEMrush offers over 50 different marketing and SEO tools for digital marketing campaigns.

With such a massive arsenal of tools and features, you surely need not go anywhere else.

Using SEMRush, you will never run out of ideas, get in-depth insights, discover new opportunities, and improvise your existing content to bring it out from the dead.

Keyword Research

For a good reason, Semrush is popular as a keyword research tool among SEOs and marketers.

That’s because they have a database of over 160 million keywords.

The keyword research dashboard of SEMRush will give you a bird’s view of your chosen keywords.

When you enter a seed keyword, the tool will give you a detailed overview of the dashboard for the target keyword. SEMRush gives you data about the following:

• Monthly search volume in the chosen region
• Global search volume
• CPC (Cost-per-click)
• Keyword difficulty
• And the intent for your keyword. 

If you want to dig deeper into keyword insights, Semrush gives you three other tools for exploring further keyword opportunities.

Keyword Gap: It helps find the keyword gaps in your content by comparing it with your top competing pages. The best part; you can compare with up to 4 competing URLs at the same time.

Keyword Manager: You can create a list of up to 1,000 keywords and track them over time. If you have a large blog or tons of keywords to research, this is your go-to tool.

That said, Semrush is a perfect tool to conduct keyword research for your SEO and PPC campaigns.

Keyword Magic Tool

Want to generate hundreds of unique ideas for your seed keywords? Keyword Magic Tool is a perfect goldmine for you.

In the keyword overview dashboard, once you click on keyword variation, the keyword magic tool will open up with hundreds of suggestions related to your seed keywords.

It provides you with keyword ideas on various metrics, like search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and languages. You can also refine the keywords using advanced filters like SERP features, word count range, and competition density.

You can get keyword ideas relevant to seed keywords by using:

• Phrase match
• Broad match keywords and
• Exact match keywords.

Pro tip: You can use the ‘related’ tab to explore the long-tail keywords relevant to your main keyword.

Keyword Position Tracking

To make sure your efforts are paying off,  keyword rank tracking is an essential tool in your toolkit.

Setting up your position tracking is a breeze. Enter your domain and all the keywords that you want to track. You can also choose the country for which you want to track keywords.

You can track your keywords for the Google search engine results page or Baidu.

Additionally, you can also see how your keywords are performing on desktop as well as on mobile devices individually.

You can also add the competitors’ domain and the common keywords to compare your performance with them.

SEO Writing Assistant

Of all the writing tools that I have used, SEMRush writing assistant is my favorite.

If you want to fine-tune your content, the writing assistant will analyze the top 10 search engine results pages ranking for your main keyword. The tool rates your content on a scale of 1-10. (10 being excellent)

SEMrush writing assistant looks like an online text editor where you paste the content or enter a URL. The tool will then analyze the content based on:

• Readability level and word count.
• Originality of the content. (Percentage of text that is not similar to other pages on the web.)
• Tonality of your content (casual, formal or neutral.)
• SEO-friendliness

The best part is you can use it as an add-on for Google Docs or MS Word or add it as a plugin on WordPress.

Identify Organic Competitors

This feature will give you an in-depth insight into your direct organic competitors. By doing this, you can find what your competitors are doing and what you can even do better.

The tool gives a visual comparison between your domains and other competitors.

The competitive positioning map displays a comparison between your domain and competitors based on traffic and total ranking keywords.

As you scroll down, you will find all the competing URLs and sort them on the basis of traffic, ranking keywords, and other metrics.

Website Audit

The site audit in SEMRush is hands-down, one of the best site audit tools that I have discovered. And, it is fairly easy to use.

When you enter your domain, the tool will run a thorough site audit and prepare a detailed report covering:

• Your site health score
• Errors
• Warnings
• Total crawled pages

Errors are highlighted in red, and one of the most crucial issues that need fixing. You can further audit your site using the thematic reports on:

• Crawlability
• Internal linking
• HTTP
• Markup.

So, if you want to score 100 in Core Web Vitals, SEMRush site audit is the best choice.

Backlink Analysis Tool

Backlinks are an indispensable part of an SEO strategy. SEMRush backlink auditing tool has a massive database of over 43 trillion URLs.

You enter a domain and run a backlink analysis to check your or your competitor’s backlink profile.

You can find the linking pages, anchor text, new and lost backlinks for any URL. You can also get data on Link types (text, images or videos) and what percentage of links are ‘follow’ or ‘no-follow’.

On-Page SEO Checker

On-Page SEO checker is one of the most useful tools in their toolkit. This tool excels at pinpointing the exact strength and weaknesses of your On-Page and Off-Page SEO elements on the go.

The tool has an Ideas tab clicking, which you will get suggestions for:

• Improving content
• how to optimize content for featured snippets?
• User experience ideas
• Missed backlink opportunities

To get the maximum benefit of this tool, you can use it in tandem with the site audit tool and work on user experience along with the page SEO.

PPC Analysis

SEMRush’s PPC analysis tool is a powerhouse for conducting PPC keyword research. It can help you discover the best keywords that you can use in your PPC for maximum visibility and lower ad spending.

Using the keyword research tool, you can scrape off the duplicate keywords or cross-group negative keywords that might be draining your budget.

You can spy on your competitor’s most lucrative keywords, traffic percentage, and traffic value.

SEMRush also gives access to live ad copies you can use to optimize your CTAs, incorporate keywords, and more.

Social Media Toolkit

It took me by surprise and I’m sure it will do that to you, too.

SEMRush is a popular SEO software that offers content marketing functionalities, but they have also added the social media toolkit to their suite.

Using SEMRush’s social media functionalities, you can schedule social media posts across various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

It also offers a social media monitoring feature where you can check for brand mentions and hashtags that offer the most engagement.

SEMRush’s Facebook Ads optimization feature is still in beta mode. You can track and analyze Facebook ad campaigns.

Content Marketing toolkit

SEMRush does the best that it is known for. It helps with all aspects of content creation, planning, and distribution.

Just what you will get with Buzzsumo and other topic research tools, SEMRush suggests the most popular topics related to your main keyword. You get to explore the topics that are trending over the last 60 days.

You can even discover the most engaging headlines and most popular questions around your seed keywords. That’s tons of content ideas, isn’t it?

Digital PR Toolkit

SEMRush acquired Prowly is a digital PR toolkit that can help businesses in finding journalists and influencers in their industry.

Prowly has a centralized dashboard that provides a list of over 1 million journalists. Plus, you can easily customize and design the press release content and share them with the relevant journalists within the dashboard.

Prowly is a perfect solution for PR agencies, small businesses, and in-house PR teams that are looking to speed up their PR game.

Agency management & Lead Generation

If you’re an SEO or Digital Marketing agency, this tool will help you out in email list building. SEMRush has a widget that you can add to your website.

Let’s say you use this widget and place it as a pop-up for conducting a free site audit. Your clients will receive the audit report by email.

What do you get? You’ll get tons of leads and emails to add to your in the lead generation section of SEMRush.

SEMRush Pricing

With so many features and functionalities to offer, SEMRush is slightly on the expensive side. They have three pricing plans:

• Pro Plan ($119.95/month)
• Guru Plan ($229.95/month)
• Business Plan ($449.95/month)

However, the yearly pricing plans will save you 20% on any of the pricing plans.

We would suggest a Pro plan for bloggers, freelancers, or small businesses with a limited budget. Guru Plan is a good fit for medium-sized businesses and marketing agencies.

If you are a large business, eCommerce website, or an enterprise, the business plan offers higher limits along with access to features such as API access, sharing options, Google data studio integration, and share of voice metric. 

It’s worth noting that Semrush offers a 7-day free trial as compared to Ahrefs’ 7-day trial, which comes for $7.

It’s obvious that the free trial comes with limited functionalities and tools, but it is sufficient to see if the tool is worth investing in or not.

Ease of Use

SEMRush has a clean user interface with all the tools on the right side of the dashboard. You can jump right to any of the tools which are sorted by using different categories.

For example, the keyword research tab offers four different keyword tools. Similarly, the backlink analysis tool will have different tools like backlink auditing, backlink analytics and others.

If you are switching up from tools like Moz or SpyFu, you will find it a bit overwhelming. But worry not, there are a plethora of guides and tutorial videos in their knowledge base.

Customer Support

Customer support is one of the major criteria for choosing a SaaS tool. And, as a tool that offers so many tools, it is crucial to provide stellar customer support.

SEMRush provides three options to reach the customer support team; email, phone, and chat.

Furthermore, there is a ‘question mark’ icon on the left corner of every page. This will give you an ocean of resources like onboarding guides, help center, access to blog page and customer support contact form.

Once you fill out the form, the customer support team will respond to your queries within one business day.

Customer Feedback & Reviews 

SEMRush has gained various positive feedbacks and recommendations from marketing experts like Neil Patel, Lary Kim, and others. 

Plus, it is highly rated on popular review platforms like G2, Trustpilot, and Capterra. 

Here’s how SEMRush is rated on each of these sites: 

G2 – 4.6/5 (1,454 reviews)
Trustpilot – 4.4/5 (328 reviews)
Capterra – 4.7/5 (1,688 reviews)

SEMRush vs Other Tools:

SEMRush is an incredible tool, but there are other major players in the industry like Ahrefs, Moz, and SpyFu. Let’s see how they compete with SEMRush.

Semrush vs Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers various features that are the same as SEMRush. Both these tools compete for neck-to-neck when it comes to ease of use and features like backlink analysis. 

While the backlink analysis tool of Ahrefs takes the edge, I would prefer SEMRush when it comes to features like keyword research, competitor analysis, PPC research, or content research.

In a nutshell, Semrush may come a bit more pricey than Ahrefs, but it offers more bang for your ducks. You can read our detailed comparison guide for Ahrefs Vs Semrush

SEMRush vs Moz

Moz started back in 2004 and was one of the arch-rivals of SEMRush in the past. However, SEMRush has completely dominated the marketing in the last few years, whereas Moz feels a bit outdated now.

Be it the SEO keyword research or PPC analysis, SEMRush wins in every aspect. Their large database and competitive intelligence, along with a wide resource of knowledge base, make SEMRush a clear winner.

If you want to get the data on Bing and Yahoo search engines, then choose Moz over SEMRush.

SEMRush vs SpyFu

SpyFu has been in the market since 2005 and they’ve done a fairly good job as a competitor analysis tool.

SpyFu is more popular as a competitor analysis tool rather than a complete suite of SEO.

SpyFu comes at fairly low pricing as compared to SEMRush but lacks the most value-added features.

So, if you’ve just started and have a limited budget, SpyFu isn’t a bad choice.

The clear winner is SEMRush. Evidently, it has a massive keyword database and amazing keyword research capabilities. Even more, it also takes the edge in terms of competitor analysis with features like brand monitoring and social mentions.

SEMRush vs Serpstat

Just like SEMRush, Serpstat offers all the tools under one roof except a few. There is a difference in functionalities, accuracy, and, of course, the pricing.

SEMRush offers a social media toolkit that Serpstat lacks. Moreover, SEMRush houses an SEO writing assistant tool that is extremely useful for content marketers and bloggers.

Serpstat has various features for small businesses, such as text analytics, SEO checklists, competitor analysis, domain analysis plus the browser extensions.

Again, my vote goes to SEMRush because of its value for money and the vast database and functionalities.

Conversely, if you’re on a tight budget and need a feature-rich tool, Serpstat is a viable choice.

SEMRush Pros & Cons

Pros:

• SEMRush is fairly easy to use.
• SEMRush updates 7 million keywords in their database each day.
• Its SEO writing assistant and content template help with high-quality content.
• Besides SEO, it also provides accurate data on PPC keyword research. (Plus, you get to see live ads.)
• Besides English, SEMRush is available in over 10 languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
• SEMRush academy offers various certifications and courses created by some of the best SEO experts, like Brian Dean and Greg Gifford.
• SEMRush provides a social media toolkit that no other SEO tool does currently.
• You can try out its features using the 7-day free trial.
• It also offers add-ons for WordPress, Google Docs and MS word.

Cons:

• For the new users, the tool can be a bit overwhelming and confusing.

Should You Use Semrush?

Pretty evident, yes. There is surely a reason as why 4,71,000 people trust SEMRush.

SEMRush can be your best investment and I’m sure you will stick to this tool for long

It is like a massive ocean when it comes to SEO tools in the market. It has an experienced team of content marketers, SEOs, and professionals from all the other departments.

Switching from one feature to another is a cakewalk. In terms of accuracy, SEMRush wins it over all the other giants in the industry.

Be it competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink analysis, or social media monitoring, SEMRush has so much to offer that you need not go anywhere else.

Final Thoughts

My review on SEMRush would have given you clear evidence of why SEMRush is one of the most liked tools.

They are constantly growing with the addition of new features.

Surely, there must be various other features on the roadmap. These current features will help you drive quality traffic and choose the keywords with the right intent.

Even if you are running a PPC campaign, the accuracy of SEMRush is pretty impressive.

What I like even more is you get to learn from SEO gurus like Brian Dean and their helpful webinars. If you want to stay ahead in the digital sphere, SEMRush is your best bet.