SEMrush

Over the last decade SEMrush has been named as one of the best SEO toolkits countless number of times, it seems every roundup or top 10 list of SEO tools mentioned it. This attention is not ungrounded. SEMrush supplies a plethora of highly valuable insights on your own website and your competitors, and it makes it easy to set up a fruitful ad campaign, no wonder most marketing specialists recommend it.

A Bit of Stats and Metrics About SEMrush

Founded in 2008 by a few SEO and IT enthusiasts as a startup, SEMrush is now a well-established global business with over 5 million users worldwide.

Their database is quite impressive and offers 18.8 billion keywords, 500 TB of row data on 190 countries and regions in traffic analytics and over 5 million advertisers in Display Advertising reports. All of this and much more is available with a 7-day trial period, the subscription prices start at $99.95 per month.

Let’s see the most recommended and essential SEMrush tools a bit closer.

SEMrush Keyword Research Tools

Most online marketing experts recommend SEMrush first and foremost for its impressive keyword research capabilities. The keyword tools you’ll find here can and will make it easy to identify which keywords your pages are already ranking for, which keywords have the most potential for targeting and advertising and which key phrases to build your content around.

SEMrush keyword magic tool

This insanely impressive tool simply generates keyword ideas. A LOT of them. In this example a search for “paleo diet” returned over 494 000 keyword suggestions.

The keywords are arranged by difficulty, volume of people searching for a keyword monthly, CPC, competition on PPC, number of Google search results.

You can group the search terms by topic and save in the Keywords Manager, as much as 50 different keyword lists can be created.

SEMrush Keyword Difficulty Tool

This is a rather straightforward tool that lets you see if your keyword has a chance to rank better and beat the competitors. Type in the key phrase and get its difficulty estimation, monthly volume and amount of search results.

SEMrush Keyword Gap

Knowing which of your keywords you share with your competition and comparing the ranking is invaluable when it comes to building a strategy. Keyword gap tool will help with that. Up to 5 websites can be checked, including exact URLs, subdomains and subfolders for a more precise view. Both common and unique keywords, paid, organic and PLA keywords (these are the keywords used by Google Shopping ads) are delivered.

The tool offers an interactive visualization on how the keywords overlap. Extensive filters will help create a comprehensive report on yours and your competitor’s keyword portfolios, which then can be used to adjust your ad campaign for better results, or to create an SEO campaign to conquer the market, or both.

Position Tracking

The Position Tracking tool can monitor the ranking on local and national levels for any URL, subfolder, subdomain or domain on both desktop and mobile devices.

The tool can filter the gathered data by SERP features the key phrase triggers, you can check if you or your competitors are ranking there. The Competitors Discovery will find you the real competitors in the organic search. Exclude the omnipresent websites like Wikipedia and get a real picture of who your competition is. Another awesome feature is the notification — create a trigger and the Position Tracker will inform you if anything crucial changes.

Organic Research

The Organic Research tool is great for finding out how much organic traffic a keyword brings you or your competition. But not only for that. The tool will show how the keywords grow over time, their estimated monthly search volume, the average CPC, the competitive density of a given keyword, number of the indexed URLs which carry the search phrase, trends and much more.

SEMrush Website Review Tools

A huge part of online marketing is SEO. After all, no keyword would ever be able to bring you to the top 5 in SERP if your pages are poorly optimized. SEMrush is a true all-in-one tool and has it all covered, from complete website audit to backlink analytics.

Site Audit

This tool provides a full fledged SEO audit of a website. The comprehensive reports have everything accounted for: loading speed, crawlability, internal linking, JavaScript and CSS errors, meta tags, security protocols and content issues are all covered.

The reports you get as a result of the audit are well-organised and intuitive enough, you’ll get them divided by the issues addressed. SEMrush will point out which errors and issues should be fixed first, though you are given all the reigns and can prioritize yourself. You can track your progress and compare crawls along the way as well. The audit will run automatically and update itself.

Traffic Analytics

This tool provides an overview of all the incoming and outgoing traffic of almost any website. What this means is — you can get a detailed view of where your competitors get their traffic from, who gets traffic from them, where their customers come from and how they behave, which of their products or services are the most popular and much more.

Backlinks Analytics

SEMrush backlinks analytics is great for monitoring your own backlinks. It gathers info on your linkbuilding progress, finds new backlinks and notifies when a backlink is removed. All linking domains and incoming links are identified, the location and authority of those domains is specified and the backlink types are detected.

Another way to use this tool is to spy on the competitors. You can easily compare your link profiles and progress, see their most authoritative backlinks and track their efforts to get the most successful ideas for yourself.

Backlink Audit

Cleaning up your backlinks profile is very easy with SEMrush Backlink Audit. To check the backlinks' health you’ll have to connect SEMrush to your Google Search Console. After that the Audit tool will automatically crawl every link you’ve got and detect the toxic ones.

After the bad backlinks are identified cleaning up the link profile is fast and effortless. If you agree with the algorithm’s estimation you can add all the damaging links to the Disavow list and send it to Google. Right from the SEMrush dashboard. If you are sure some of the links the algorithm identified are in fact good, you can whitelist them.

You even don't have to leave the dashboard to send link removal requests to the site owners. SEMrush will automatically gather the contact details, help you write an email template and then you can send it to all the websites right from the dashboard.

Backlink Gap

If you need a quick backlink comparison and a list of missing domains to outreach simply add yours and the competitors domains to Backlink Gap. The tool will analyse the backlinks and deliver a list of domains for you to target.

Brand Monitoring

Another great way to find more backlink opportunities is monitoring your competition with the Brand Monitoring tool. Knowing who mentions them and evaluating these websites’ credibility, you can efficiently decide which resources are worth your outreach efforts.

A Couple of Other Useful SEMrush Features

SEMrush toolset is quite impressive and reviewing it all will take a lot of writing. Above we mentioned the most essential tools and features every marketing specialist recommends. Below are a couple more useful features that are worth mentioning.

Social media toolkit

This one-stop toolset allows to schedule all of your social posts, track their performance, get deep insights into your audience, monitor competitors and create ads for Facebook and Instagram.

Market Explorer

This tool provides a detailed overview of any industry. The reports include all the metrics you might be interested in, including market traffic size, trends, industry leaders, audience demographics and acquisition channels.

SEO Content Template

This feature generates an analysis of the content of top 10 Google results of the keywords you choose and creates a list of recommendations on writing your own SEO-friendly content to beat those top 10 websites.

SEMrush Review: Bottom line

Overall, SEMrush is an awesome toolkit for online marketing professionals who need a lot of data and research. From technical analysis of your own website to indepth competitor analysis, and even an SEO writing assistant, it has everything covered for you. The reports are extensive and detailed. The provided data is quite accurate, according to the customer reviews and our own experience. Wouldn’t recommend it for a complete newb though.

SEMrush Pros and Cons

Pros:

• One-stop solution
• Expansive keyword research capability
• Comprehensive SEO audit and on-page SEO analysis
• All backlink cleanup stuff in one place
• Huge database

Cons:

• A bit too expensive
• Not very user-friendly

Too much information, which can be overwhelming for a beginner