What is Semrush?
Semrush is the most popular and comprehensive SEO content management tool on the market today. It’s famous for its keyword research, ranking, and gap analysis features, but it also offers tons of other impressive functionalities.
It’s difficult to know where to start with so many excellent tools, but let’s focus on some of our favorites below.
Best Features
Domain Overview Analytics
This fantastic feature allows you to check your website’s authority score, organic search traffic, number of backlinks, and much more. With some paid plans, you can even get historical data, compare domains, and set up a detailed growth report for your website.
Traffic Analytics
This handy tool is based on real users’ browsing data and is perfect for competitor analysis. You’ll get information about up to five of your competitors’ traffic sources (including locations and devices), their engagement metrics, and even obvious gaps in their promotional tactics.
For example, check whether their social media traffic is stronger than their referral or search traffic, so you can focus on areas in which your competition is weaker.
Keyword Magic Tool
While Semrush is brilliant for basic keyword research, its Magic Tool offers much more: just enter your desired term and receive a list of recommended—and most effective—keywords for your domain. Plus, it’s great for checking out related topics and finding common question search terms.
Keyword Gap Analysis
Compare your own keyword profile with that of your top competitors, filtered by your desired target country. You’ll receive a comprehensive list of keywords they rank for. Even better, you can select different keyword types (organic, paid, PLA/Google Shopping). These invaluable insights help you focus on useful search terms your competitors lack in their content.
Backlink Gap and Backlink Analytics
With Backlink Gap, you’ll find valuable backlinks that refer to up to five of your competitors, but not to your website (yet!). With the additional help of Backlink Analytics, you’ll be well on your way to building high-quality backlinks to your site.
Site Audit
Simply set up your website as a “project” and track up to 100 web pages for free. Site Audit gives you, for example:
- a quick overview of your site’s overall health (expressed as a percentage),
- error and warning messages you need to be aware of,
- reports on crawlability, performance, internal linking, site speed, markup, and
- actionable “top issues”.
Advertising Research
With Advertising Research, you can check for your competitors’ paid keywords, filter these by CPC (cost-per-click), and even analyze live ad examples. This will help you build your own marketing strategy and campaigns. With paid plans, you’ll also be able to view historical advertising data back to 2012.
Pricing
Get started for free
You can try Semrush for free, which I think is pretty generous, because it already offers a lot great functionalities!
Just register with your email address/Google Account, and start your Semrush journey. No credit card needed. Generally, you’re allowed to use up to a total of 10 credits/searches per day when using a free account.
Our Rating: 4.5 / 5 stars
Semrush is a brilliant, all-in-one SEO tool suite that gives you hugely valuable information—even in the free version.
It’s perfect for users who already have some knowledge of SEO, though beginners will benefit from Semrush’s vast help resources and its outstanding free Academy courses. Don’t worry if you feel a bit overwhelmed at first by everything on offer—it’s well worth persevering!
The paid plans may be a little pricier than some SEO tools on the market, but it’s a fantastic, comprehensive solution that’s still excellent value for money.
Interested? Sign up to Semrush here.
