Semrush is excellent, and most SEO companies and freelances know this. but here is the catch the tool is only as good as the person that uses it.
I know it’s a cliche but in this case, is true.
And since this tool is a medium to the high-level user, well let’s say that some beginners don’t fully leverage its power and might be missing out on it.
However, only a few people know about all the features it has.
In this SEMrush Tool analysis, I will review all the most common but highly overlooked SEO functions of this tool. and I’m quite sure that if you are a beginner you will get a kick out of it.
Specifically, I would address the following details:
- Domain analysis
- Rank tracking
- Keyword analysis
- Backlink analysis
- Site auditing
- Link building features
- Pricing and value for money
- Ease of use
And I’ll start this off with a fundamental question….
WHAT IS A SEMRUSH?
In a few words, SEMrush is a tool that will help you boost the site’s ranking in search engines.
Established by Oleg Shchegolev & Dmitry Melnikov in 2008, the website currently has an extensive user base. According to the firm, it has more than 6 million users and is one of the top SEO tools available.
SEMrush supplies many resources that can be used to:
- Create new content on the internet that would draw traffic
- Recognize link-building chances.
- Audit the website’s quality technical details so you know how it can rank better on the search engine.
SEMrush will also send you tips for keywords (based on words you enter) that you can use as the foundation for blog content that is likely to do well in search engine results.
It will even inform you how challenging it would be for particular search phrases to rank. Websites that may be worth reaching for backlinks are also listed.
MAIN FEATURES & BENEFITS
The tool helps you carry out an “SEO check” on your website and figure out whether you can make any technical changes to it that can help you improve search performance.
However, that’s only the beginning. There are several other features offered by SEMrush that are intended to help you boost your website’s rank in the search results.
Below, I’m going to go over these in-depth, highlighting all of their pros and cons and more.
DOMAIN ANALYSIS
We’re going to start by review their domain analysis feature. It is a place that you can use to analyze some domain metrics. You see how valuable a domain is.
The opportunity to filter it down by country is also valuable, allowing you to see where the website you enter is doing exceptionally well in the world.
SEMrush lets you access domain research statistics per country or worldwide basis. It also helps you to access statistics for domain research on a national or global stage.
All in all, SEMrush’s domain analysis feature is immensely beneficial. This part of the product provides you with significant insight into how a website performs from an SEO point of view.
KEYWORD ANALYSIS
The study on keywords is usually about:
- Looking at how many users are looking for a specific keyword,
- Figuring out how tough it is to rank the keyword,
- To find out who is already ranked for that keyword,
- And see the keyword rank per country.
SEMrush allows it really easy for you to sneak peek at all information above. In its ‘Keyword Analysis’ tool, you only insert a keyword, and you can instantly see:
- The number of searches per month,
- Keyword difficulties,
- A list of the websites chosen for it.
- Like the domain analysis feature, this may also be filtered at each country’s level, which is beneficial.
The keyword complexity score is one of the most relevant indicators returned here.
To show this, SEMrush uses a higher percentage ratio with red color. It means that it would be more challenging for a given keyword to rank.
Anyway, you should tap into SEMrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ feature to get keyword recommendations based on the keyword you have entered.
From a usability point of view, if this was named ‘Keyword Tips’ ‘Keyword Magic’ sounds a little ambiguous, it will be easier. Still, you can find it very simple to navigate after you have reached this section of SEMrush.
This offers you a set of keywords relevant to the term that you have entered, along with filters that you can use to organize them, including:
- The competition of the keywords
- The number of monthly queries for each keyword per month
- If you wanted to use Google Advertising to view results with a keyword displayed, the cost per click estimation is also available.
All in all, as part of an SEO project, the keyword complexity tool from SEMrush provides you with all the crucial details you need to make decisions about which keywords to aim for.
Nevertheless, there are a few things to keep in mind:
First, the statistics given are for Google searches only; if metrics were accessible for any other search engines, the keyword would be easier to rank.
According to Statcounter, the vast majority of search engine market share is taken by Google, which is 91%. However, even in the United States, there are places where other search engines enjoy more shares (in the US, for example, 7.2 percent of searches are currently made on Bing). You are granted access to this knowledge through rival products such as Moz and Ahrefs.
Second, it will be great to indicate the number of backlinks for a given keyword by SEMrush would have more statistics. Ahrefs shows you more metrics, and I hope it will be nice to see SEMrush soon follow.
THE CONTENT MARKETING TOOLKIT FROM SEMRUSH
Besides offering keyword analysis resources, SEMrush also provides you with a collection of content promotion tools (as long as you are on a ‘Guru’ plan or higher).
These make it easier for you to:
- Identify a new topic about what to publish.
- From a Seo perspective, audit the current content.
- Identify keywords used by the rivals in their blogs.
- Track references to your brand.
- The ‘SEO writing assistant’ (It is my favorite feature of the SEMrush content marketing toolkit, which helps you copy and paste the content into SEMrush for analysis.)
When you have done that, you can get feedback on how you can boost your search results output. These include advice to increase or decrease the number of words, advice to apply specific keywords to the text, and alerts if other bloggers have published the material.
RANK TRACKING
Rank tracking is the practice of monitoring over time how your website does with a specific term in search engines. You go to the rank tracking feature, insert a domain name or the keyword(s).
You will see a report and a chart telling you how your site is ranked for such keywords. This is simple to set up in SEMrush. As time goes by inside the SEMrush platform, you will track your website’s success more efficiently.
You can also insert competitor website details into the rank tracking, which helps you measure (again) how your website does against your rivals for selected keywords. And eventually, you can get daily email notifications on your achievement in rank monitoring.
All in all, the functionality of rank tracking in SEMrush is well done. No problems here!
BACKLINK ANALYSIS
How well a site does in the search results often relies on how many backlinks are directed to the website. In SEMrush, there are two methods to look at backlinks: the first is to use its option for ‘backlink review .’ The second is to do a ‘backlink audit.’
Let’s look at each of them in turn.
BACKLINK REVIEW
In SEMrush, the ‘Backlink Analytics’ section helps you enter a domain name and open a list of all the backlinks identified.
- It is also necessary to use this segment to view:
- The anchor text used.
- The top-level distribution of domains (how many .com, .org., .gov links, etc. your site has)
- Details regarding the backlinks’ IP addresses
All the details are quite merely set out and lets you see where backlinks have been acquired or lost by a domain. To boost your SEO activities or gain insights into a rival niche site, you may use this data.
How reliable is the backlink analysis of semrush? SEMrush reports to have 125 trillion backlinks in its servers when I write this review, which is more significant than Majestic, which says 9.2 trillion, and Ahrefs, which claims 25 trillion. (For Moz, I could not find comparable data).
It means that the SEMrush backlink database is more significant than its rivals, ensuring that you can potentially receive more detailed backlink data from the tool.
However, I was interested to see how this worked in some real-world experiments. Therefore, I performed backlink audits on six very distinct sites to see how some of this field’s main instruments did against each other.
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I noticed that the number of backlinks found by each instrument was very close in my studies. However, SEMrush is doing more substantial on finding more domains that link to the website you analyze compared to Ahrefs or Moz.
I wouldn’t draw strong conclusions from it because this was only a tiny examination. But yes, it certainly presents you with very detailed data compared with outcomes to its major rivals.
Audits from backlinks
The other approach to peek at backlinks in Seo tools is by a ‘backlink audit’ done. The key aim of doing this is to decide the ‘toxicity’ of backlinks leading to your website and to determine the ‘health of your domain.’
BACKLINK AUDIT
SEMrush compiles a collection of links that it suspects are spam after a backlink check, which you may then evaluate and post as a ‘disavow’ file to Google. This advises Google to disregard these toxic connections — because, since Google penalizes pages with loads of poor-quality links leading to them, disavowing negative links will have a very positive effect on the search rankings.
(Note that when it gets down to disavowing links, it is necessary to tread very cautiously to read Google’s guidance on the subject before doing so!).
Ultimately, a compelling aspect of the product is the SEMrush backlink audit function. It’s very effective at detecting backlinks with low quality and making it very quick for you to disavow it.
LINK BUILDING IN SEMRUSH
One of SEMrush’s standout features is its tool for link building. As described above, link building is essential for every SEO initiative’s progress since search engines usually reward sites with more connections, leading to higher search results.
Link building is the method of getting other sites that link to yours. SEMrush’s platform for link building operates this way:
- Determining who the prospects are and how they rank.
- Review of the material on your website
- Asking you for the keywords for which you want to rank
- A collection of ‘prospect’ websites that it feels is worth contacting would then emerge for a backlink or guest post chance.
Not just that, but it also offers you some precious resources to do that. You can link your mailbox to SEMrush, and from inside the tool, you can submit outreach emails.
You will then the CRM-style email outreach platform. If that is not enough, SEMrush often provides you with email accounts for each website where necessary and the possibility of storing an outreach message as a reusable prototype.
All this goes way beyond anything provided in the link-building feature by the major competitors of SEMrush, and it is arguably the best reason for choosing semrush over them.
BROKEN LINK BUILDING
Broken link building is an SEO tactic to link dead URLs with high authority to your website. It includes discovering a damaged link (i.e., one which no longer leads anywhere), reconstructing the ‘missing’ content it used to connect to, and telling someone who owns the link to link to yours instead of dead content.
This strategy enables you to generate new backlinks to your page, and the more backlinks that lead to your website, the further your content succeeds in search, as described previously. However, the broken connection-building mechanism of SEMrush is more challenging than I would predict.
You have to run a backlink review report to use it, navigate to the ‘indexed’ portion of the pages, press the ‘target errors’ button, and then export the data to an Excel or CSV format. To find the 404 errors, you can then sort or filter this file (i.e., the broken links).
This is a bit of a fiddly operation. Still, on the positive side, using a linked mailbox. However, with the CRM’ pipeline ‘approach I said earlier, you can reimport the broken links document to SEMrush (together with related email addresses) while doing your outreach directly inside the network.
SEMRUSH PRICING
SEO tools such as SEMrush are costly in contrast to other forms of ‘SaaS’ apps. But that’s reasonable since you’re not only paying for features.
You’re paying a subscription to very significant volumes of knowledge, like intelligence spy from your competitors.
semrush provides three pricing plans:
- Pro: $199.95 every month
- Guru: $229.95 every month
- Business: $449.95 every month
There is also a ‘Custom’ edition of the app to remember, which helps company-sized clients build their personalized plans with plenty of limits on reports and queries, more user accounts, etc.
It is necessary to remember that a free trial is accessible if you want to try semrush out before agreeing to a paid-for contract. The regular one lasts seven days, but you can get access to its
It is better than the Ahrefs deal (a seven-day funded trial) and less generous than Moz’s in terms of how this trial duration occurs (a 30-day free trial).
To take advantage of the trial, you have to input your credit card information, which is a little irritating, but standard enough procedure where SEO instruments are concerned.
semrush’s fees are roughly similar to those paid by main rivals Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic (that said, Majestic provides a lower monthly option for $49 per month, but it is significantly less valuable than the entry-level plans offered by its competitors).
The gaps between the pricing plan for SEMrush include:
- The number of reports that you will perform every day.
- The number of keywords that you will track per month.
- Access to instruments for content marketing.
- Providing links to historical records.
- The higher you spend, the more you can enjoy.
Let’s focus on a few facets of the price structure to illustrate where semrush provides positive or poor value for money.
User profile
Perhaps the worse part regarding SEMrush’s price system is that all contracts — except the $449.95 ‘Company’ package — only provide one user profile. If you’d like more than one person in your company to have access to semrush, you would have to pay an additional $45 to $100 per account (depending on plan type).
This contrasts adversely with all the main rivals of semrush, which usually raises the number of accounts when you raise the price ladder (or charge less for extra accounts).
If this is a challenge with your company, as the name implies, you may need to explore a ‘Unique’ package with SEMrush, which helps you make deals for a solution that requires a custom list of advantages and users.
Furthermore, It is essential to know that quite a few semrush features may only be used for a higher price. Site inspections, backlink evaluations, on-page SEO scanning, and role management are the main features that fall under this group. And if you are looking to expand your digital marketing toolkit, you may have to consider investing in the higher-priced plans. However, for those just starting out, the basic features available on the lower-tier plans should be sufficient to get you started. Many successful digital marketers, including gamegrumps, tobuscus, and dashie animation software, have used semrush to grow their online presence and improve their SEO strategies.
These limitations may not be a showstopper for any organization. Still, it is certainly something to know if you have multiple sites to handle SEO simultaneously or do a lot more competitor research.
FINAL THOUGHTS
semrush is a good SEO app. But you have to test it out yourself to make sure it is what you need.
The semrush regular free trial lasts seven days, and you should check them out. Click on this link
