Every digital marketing team needs a reliable tool to gain qualitative insight before planning and applying strategies.
In 2019, SEMrush ranked as the most used SEO tool in Italy, and it’s one of the most well-known digital marketing tools in the world. According to a survey of 210 SEO professionals, about 75% of them said that they have been using SEMrush for the past 12 months for link building.
There’s probably a good reason for this, although we just need to keep in mind that one shoe won’t fit everyone. Based on what you’ll learn of SEMrush’s features–the pros and cons, you’ll be able to determine if this all-in-one tool is for you.
SEMRush Review 2023
Whether you’re a novice digital marketer looking for the right tool or an expert that’s considering SEMrush, you’ll find everything you need to know below. Let’s start with the in-depth SEMrush review.
Overview of SEMrush
Let’s go to the basics first. SEMrush is an all-in-one toolkit that has more than 40 features. It can give actual SEO information on keywords, your site, your competitors, and a whole lot more that digital marketers will surely find useful.
You can subscribe to three different plans: Pro, Guru, and Business. Each plan has a different price point so you can buy the plan that will fit your budget. You can choose between monthly and annual subscriptions. SEMrush also has a customized plan called Enterprise for which you would need to contact them directly.
Individual freelancers can go for the Pro plan while large companies such as those offering link-building services can subscribe to the Business plan. With over 500 million keywords and 700 million domains listed in their database, users can find all the information they’ll need. SEMrush uses an algorithm that updates its databases regularly.
You can also use it for free by registering on their site, but it has limitations. Still, it’s a good way of testing it out first before buying.
Notable SEMrush Features
Now, let’s get to the features. Since the SEMrush toolkit has too many features to cover here, let’s get to those most useful and widely-used:
1. Keyword Magic Tool
The Keyword Magic Tool makes keyword research easier. You can get these data for the keywords you enter:
- Volume
- Trend
- Keyword Difficulty
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Competitive Density
- SERP Features
- URLs displayed in organic search for the keyword
The great thing about this tool is that you can get long-tail keyword suggestions that can help you with your PPC and SEO campaigns.
When I searched for web hosting, I found other keywords such as free web hosting and cheap web hosting. These other keywords can be included, let’s say, in a blog post as secondary keywords.
The Keyword Magic tool helps to optimize your website’s content with ease. Knowing the frequency and CPC of the keywords, you’ll know what keywords to put in and what to avoid.
2. Organic Research
Using SEMrush’s Organic Research feature, you can run an analysis on any domain that’s in their database. You can analyze your site as well as your competitors’ websites. You can find these data on this feature:
- Overview
- Organic Search Positions
- Position Changes Trend
- Competitors
- Organic Pages
- Subdomains
Using this tool, you’ll understand where your competitors get their traffic. You can build an SEO campaign for your site to surpass your competitors and gain even more traffic.
3. Keyword Gap
If you’re ready to hit your competitors head-on, you can use the Keyword Gap feature. This provides keyword profile comparisons between 2 to 5 websites. You can get specific details of shared, weak, strong, and missing keywords between you and your competitors’ sites. This will be useful in content creation where you can fill in gaps on your site.
For example, let’s say you have an education-focused site. You noticed your competitors are using the keyword homeschool ideas to rank higher. You can find the pages that are ranking for this keyword and create better content with it.
4. Site Audit
Site Audit is a feature that will identify technical SEO problems on your site. You’ll find broken links and duplicate content as well as your site’s indexability and visibility for search engine crawlers. You can also find data on your site’s load speed. This can help you determine the next step if you need to hire WordPress website design professionals to improve it.
You’ll discover any technical issues on your site that affect your rankings and your visitors’ experience. Through this feature, everything that your site needs to improve and maintain can be monitored. You’ll have a sense of security that your site is running smoothly and optimally.
5. SEO Content Template
The SEO Content Template feature is a part of SEMrush’s Content Marketing Toolkit. This gives writers a guide on how to create SEO-friendly content.
You need to enter your target keyword/s. Then you’ll find the related words, backlinks, readability, and text length of the top content that also targets the keywords you entered. From this, you can plan your content to compete with the top-ranking pages.
6. Traffic Analytics
An analysis of website traffic of adidas.com using Traffic Analytics
This is one of the most useful tools that SEMrush offers. You can keep track of your website’s traffic through Traffic Analytics.
There is a clear difference between traffic analytics and domain analytics. Domain analytics gives you an estimated analysis of online traffic through your website’s search volume.
On the other hand, traffic analytics gives you more accurate data because this tool analyzes all of your domain’s traffic sources. This includes traffic from backlinks, paid advertisements, referrals, and social media presence.
This can also be a useful tool to keep track of your competitor’s traffic and from where they get their traffic. For example, they may have an effective social media strategy that makes their traffic skyrocket. As a response to this information, you can step up your game on social media marketing to be at par with your competitors.
Advantages of SEMrush
SEMrush has a lot of advantages which makes it one of the popular choices for digital marketers and SEO professionals.
Massive Advantage for Your Website
The stockpile of features SEMrush offers gives your website a stepping stone for progress. Anything and everything SEO-related can be optimized and tracked using its tools. Believe me when I say that SEMrush gives you leverage over your competition.
Intensive SEMrush Academy
Since SEMrush can be too technical for beginners (you’ll see this as one of the disadvantages), they offer 3 hours of lessons on how to use the toolkit.
These lessons make this toolkit much more user-friendly and accessible for beginners.
Massive and Updated Database
You can squeeze out all the data you need from SEMrush alone. Because of its massive database, you can get all the information you need. SEMrush also makes sure that its database is always updated.
Affordable Price
You may think that using this powerful, all-in-one toolkit will cost you a huge amount of money, even though they do offer three (3) independent plans that will surely fit your budget.
The price range for their plan is from $99.95 to $399.95. With the amount of data, information, and tips that you’ll gain in order to optimize your website, this is reasonable. If you’re a freelancer or a starter, $100 might hurt at first, but you’ll reap the rewards down the road.
All-in-one Toolkit
Everything you will ever need for your SEO campaign, from site auditing to competitor analysis, can be provided by SEMrush. You won’t need to subscribe or pay for various other tools.
Actionable Improvement Suggestions
Its Site Audit feature gives suggestions that are easy to understand and actionable for both on-page and technical SEO improvements.
Reachable Customer Service
Users can get support through email, chat, and phone which makes its customer service a standout among other competitors.
SEMrush Disadvantages
All good things have a downside as well and SEMrush isn’t an exception. Here are a few features of SEMrush that could cause some bumps in the road:
Learning-curve
Compared to other SEO tools, understanding SEMrush may take a while. With all the information in this toolkit, there is a lot to learn for each feature. Its complexity can be difficult to deal with but SEMrush offers lessons for its all-in-one tool. In this way, beginners and even experts will have a comprehensive guide on how to maneuver through SEMrush.
Information Overload
Though the huge database is certainly a plus, it can also be a disadvantage for beginners. Luckily, first-time users can enroll in SEMrush’s academy to learn everything needed in order to use the toolkit. Still, being comfortable using the tools may take a while for some users.
Limited Users
User access is quite limited to two (Pro), three (Guru), and ten (Business). For large digital marketing teams, you’ll need to pay an additional fee on top of your subscription to add more users.
Only Offers a 7-Day Free Trial
SEMrush offers a one-week free trial for the Pro and Guru plans, but you can’t try the Business plan for free. This is included as a disadvantage since Moz offers a month-long free trial. It would be helpful if SEMrush could stretch the free trial a bit longer.
Is SEMRush Worth It?
The big question is, “Is SEMrush worth your money?” As its price isn’t much different from other competitors, trying SEMrush is worth a shot. For people running websites, running content, and being involved with digital marketing, getting a reliable SEO tool is an important decision to make.
Each user’s preferences and needs will be unique. It’s all about choosing the tool that you’ll be most comfortable using and that would give you the best results on your website.
If you still have any issues that are pressing you then feel free to ask us by commenting at the end of this article. We will be happy to assist you.
Also Read,
- How to Start Your Own WordPress Blog
- How to Install & Create Conversational Forms with WPForms
- How to Use Email Marketing to Skyrocket Your Sales
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