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If you were looking for a comprehensive Semrush review, you have come to the right place.
With this review, we plan to help you make the right choice.
This article uncovers all the key areas of this truly all-in-one digital marketing platform. From features and functionality to some cons and price, this Semrush review gives all the ins and outs of the rest, helping you understand its final value assessment.
The digital marketing landscape
It makes no sense to talk about the power (or lack thereof) of any digital marketing suite without assessing the overall online landscape and how it has changed over the years.
It all started with SEO: Semrush was designed as an SEO suite, and digital marketing as a whole mostly boiled down to Google algos which were pretty straightforward at the time. Just a few strategically placed keywords, then you add links, and boom – you’re in good shape and well positioned to win the digital game!
Then as the web and the competition grew, everyone started to get on the SEO bandwagon. And Google has started improving its intelligence with each algorithm update.
Today, while the myth behind Google 200 ranking factors has been debunked, most of the weight goes to brand strength and factors related to content quality. And traffic doesn’t just come from search or referrals, you have to factor social media, reviews, and more into the equation.
Sounds complicated, right?
This is why a large part of your online success almost directly depends on which platform you use to solve all of these digital marketing tasks. That’s why we’ve embarked on a “Impossible mission” – highlighting all of the platform’s key features in one Semrush review.
Semrush Review: An Overview of the Platform
As digital marketing became more and more sophisticated, Semrush was also changing and evolving. From a purely SEO-based suite rolled out in 2008, in 2021, it has evolved into an ecosystem of interconnected tools spanning the entire online visibility and content marketing management workflow.
Now, what exactly does this imply?
While Semrush has always been prominent for its SEO capabilities – from keywords to competitive intelligence tools – it has now grown into a solution that encompasses almost every angle imaginable related to online presence.
These days when you invest in Semrush, you get an all-in-one suite of marketing tools to audit and review your site. You can do everything from backlink analysis to competitive analysis in one place. Plus, you can create useful benchmarking reports to track your progress over time.
Essentially, the platform is split into several big toolkits which have over 50 tools available to Semrush users:
- SEO: from keyword management and technical site audit to link building and SERP position monitoring;
- Local SEO: from automatic distribution of business information to the most trusted and popular directories and removal of duplicates to management of reviews and ideas for improving local visibility;
- Content Marketing: from auditing existing content and topic ideas to performance monitoring and suggestions for improvement;
- Competitive intelligence: from market trends and overview of the competitive landscape to the detection of keyword / backlink discrepancies and advertising information;
- Online advertising: from paid search and display ad search to PLA information and advertising content;
- Social Media: From competitive research and post planning to launching social ads and monitoring performance.
Before we delve into the nitty-gritty of each toolkit, however, we need to mention a few overall Semrush benefits, applicable to every tool and feature.
- Mobile data access for all Semrush users
With the entire web now covered by mobile-first, access to mobile databases is a must for any digital marketer. After all, sometimes desktop and mobile data can vary dramatically, and it’s mobile that is shaping the future of digital marketing.
Since it’s quite expensive, you don’t get a lot of platforms that offer this kind of data. And if they do, it comes at an additional cost. So in terms of mobility and price, the simple fact that Semrush includes mobile databases in every package is a huge plus – not only business, but also financial.
- Exceptional reporting features + Google Data Studio connector
Whether you’re in an in-house or agency marketing team, reporting is a big part of the hassle – whether it’s updates for a client or for senior management.
Semrush turns this generally bleak reporting job into a snap with its custom My Reports solution. All the information you have stored on the platform – including your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google My Business data – can be reflected in a beautiful report that is automatically generated with just a few clicks.
You can choose out-of-the-box customizable PDF templates or create your own, or choose branded or white-labeled options. It doesn’t matter – once you’ve created your reports, you can just set up a frequency and schedule, and Semrush will automatically deliver them to anyone’s inbox.
Thanks to a specially designed connector, all Guru and Business users can also integrate their Semrush data into Google Data Studio reports without having to spend valuable API units along the way.
Semrush review: main features
Now that you have a helicopter view of Semrush‘s capabilities, we’re going to dig deeper into each toolkit. Since it is impossible to discuss everything in one article, we will highlight only the most useful and cool features in the following.
Semrush is designed to be as feature-rich as possible, so you don’t have to do a lot of competitor analysis before deciding to use the service. If you want to make your landing pages and online websites stand out, Semrush might be the product for you.
To keep this Semrush tale as close as possible to real life, let’s pretend we’re about to or recently launched a fanny pack rental. We’ll take an existing leading American brand, Borrow or Steal a Bag, or BBS as we’ll call it, as an example.
Let’s go!
Competitive research with Semrush
If you want to start a new business or if you just need to gain the upper hand in your industry, researching the market and the competition is your place to start.
At this point, Semrush covers just about all the essentials – from high-level competitive insights to granular insights:
- The Market Explorer tool instantly collects detailed information about the landscape of any market.
Since Banggood.com operates in global market, we simply entered our target location like United States and website to understand the overall market space online:
It turns out that we only compete with around 15 retailer brands and, of course, indirectly with large high-end clothing aggregators and the luxury bag brands that we want to hire. It may mean that the bag rental niche in the US is not very busy yet, so we might run into something with our idea.
In addition to simply showing the major market players, the tool reveals their market share, traffic growth / decline trend, as well as identifying commonalities in their audience acquisition strategies and key features. demographic (age, sex and geographic distribution):
Note: you can always Create a custom market for this type of analysis. Take a look at the top competitors suggested by the tool and choose which ones you want to benchmark against – it is very unlikely that you can realistically compare your strategies to Amazon or eBay while developing a local eCommerce brand.
If you want to get more information about a certain market player, use TRAFFIC ANALYSIS for a more granular view of any website.
In essence, this tool is like getting Google Analytics data, only for your rivals. From estimates on user behavior statistics (unique visits, average visit duration, bounce rate) to viewing major pages and subdomains (reading, offers), Traffic Analytics reveals traffic channels and products on which your competitors place their bets.
- Tips: You can even try to estimate the conversion rates of your competition. Check the total traffic for their main pages and compare the numbers to their checkout / thank you pages.
Since we have chosen Fashionphile as the main rival, with the help of the tool, we can see that the Hermès and LV bags are getting the most attention.
Now, let’s try to take a look at their conversion (we looked at their main pages first, then used the filter to see the stats of the “checkout” pages):
Apparently, Fashionphile’s approximate conversion rate is around 2.3%.
- From higher level information, we can move on to keyword and backlink optimization ideas using the Keyword Space and Backlink Gap tools.
There is no way to win over rivals in search if you don’t know anything about their keyword or referral link strategy.
The Keyword and Backlink Gap tools have been specially designed to uncover untapped SEO opportunities for you.
They follow a similar logic:
By stacking your site (or subdomain / subfolder / URL) against four key rivals, the two tools instantly analyze the keyword and backlink portfolios of those sites or pages to offer keyword ideas and additional backlinks that you might have missed.
The Keyword Gap tool‘s filtering options can help you laser focus on missing, untapped, unique, or other keywords. You can also choose whether you want to uncover hidden opportunities for organic, paid, or PLA keywords.
The tool found over 120,200 untapped keywords for BBS- we can further refine the list using advanced filtering options and choosing only high volume search terms. In this case, we have a few more new high-value keywords to focus on.
A similar idea is behind the Backlink Gap tool. Only with this tool the most interesting unique feature is that it uses a proprietary algorithm that calculates the authority score for each site that connects you to you and your rivals. So, when discovering new leads, pay attention to this metric so that you only focus your link building efforts on the sites that potentially bring you the most value.
- There is more!
Advertising Research Reports uncover your closest paid search competitors and provide insight into the headlines and posts your competitors are using in their ads. This will help you understand what products they are promoting at the moment.
In addition to this information, with Semrush, you can also spot your competitors’ display and PLA ads, social media accounts (from audience growth trend to planning), as well as content strategies.
SEO tool of Semrushkit
We’ve already covered SEO a bit in the competitive research part. Still, Semrush pretty much covers the entire workflow of perfecting your site to get those rankings.
With around 20 tools dedicated to improving your SEO performance, here we’ll only focus on those that can really be the deciding factor for ecommerce success.
- With a whopping 20B keywords in its largest database in the market, Semrush has some really powerful keyword research tools.
Keyword Insight provides in-depth analysis of your target keywords, reflecting their search volumes and CPC. Semrush also uses a custom formula to calculate keyword difficulty (for organic keywords) and competition (for paid keywords) based on the number of rivals targeting the given search query.
And you don’t have to be location specific. The Worldwide View feature presents global search volumes so you can understand global “demand” trends if you target all audiences and ship internationally.
You’ll also see the top questions asked around each keyword (useful for collecting content ideas) and the SERP features triggered.
You can then hover over the Keyword Magic Tool to better manage your keyword research process – to get data-driven insights for semantically related keywords, discover broad / exact / phrase matches, and even deal with queries based on questions.
- A powerful Site Audit tool.
Any site, but especially e-commerce, must ensure 100% health. Even the smallest error seemingly – say, heavy visuals – can take a toll on site performance. And that can lead to a slower page load time, which in our case is unacceptable as a one second delay can cost around 7% of conversions.
With over 140 crawl possibilities, performance, internal bindings, HTTPS and hreflang implementation checks, and unique structured data and AMP problem detection capabilities, Semrush‘s site audit is arguably the place to be. the most powerful and reliable tool on the market.
The tool even shows that the top 10 sites in our niche achieved a health score of 92%. BBS, however, is only 75%, with site performance – the key issue for eCommerce brands – being the lowest.
If you connect your Google Analytics account, the tool will help you prioritize your error correction efforts to initially invest in fancy things that will potentially improve performance.
- Once you’ve run into bigger site issues, you can start improving your page-by-page performance with On-Page SEO Checker.
This tool offers page-specific improvement ideas.
To maximize page performance, simply run your site through the tool to get an instant assessment of your current efforts – from technical SEO, user experience, and semantics to content, SERP functionality, and backlinks. All recommendations are aimed at triggering growth in the ranking.
To speed up your results, you can use the tool’s prioritization feature, which guides you in the most effective direction.
- In order to track the progress of your efforts, you need actionable benchmarks. This is where Position Tracking – a tool designed to help monitor market positions – comes into play.
Another Semrush tool that we can put a quality checkmark on is position tracking.
All you need to do is enter your site, choose target keywords, and specify your target location – from global to hyper-local to zip code. The tool will reflect your online visibility (a Semrush-specific metric that takes into account your Google positions and your CTR estimates) and will keep a daily track of any ranking change.
In the Competitors Discovery report, you can uncover which rivals are affecting your SERP positions to really understand who you’re optimizing against. The latest cannibalization report, however, shows whether you are causing auto-competition and thereby hampering your page performance with cannibalizing pages.
A cutting edge feature added only in 2020 is Share of Voice (SoV) Measurement. If visibility indicates your website’s positions relative to target keywords, SoV also takes their search volumes and traffic estimates into the equation.
To help you keep your finger on the pulse and take timely action, the tool sends weekly reports straight to your inbox.
From detecting toxic backlinks to maximizing your link building efforts, Semrush has an impressive set of backlink profiling features.
With a consistently growing backlink database updated consistently, Semrush knows that with SEO, it’s not all about quantity. The quality of the referring domain also has an impact on the health and performance of your site.
The Backlink Audit suite has a unique metric – Toxic Score. This metric uses a proprietary algorithm where each reference domain is scanned through more than 50 markers to assess its level of toxicity. It helps you focus on the data to remove harmful backlinks and invest your link building efforts in sites that don’t seem untrustworthy to Google.
Once you are done with existing links potentially hampering your site’s performance, you can discover new high quality leads and increase your referral traffic with the Link Building Tool.
Here you can take advantage of other Semrush-specific metrics – authority score (measures prospect reliability and potential SEO impact) and rating (compares link value with difficulty in raising awareness) – to create a targeted high impact link building strategy.
Additionally, you can manage all of your efforts right from within the tool – from requesting link removal and making disallow lists, to actual outreach and follow-up to prospects.
Semrush covers the entire content marketing cycle
With an understanding of the value and importance of content, the suite has developed a comprehensive ecosystem of content tools that help you:
Refine existing parts and monitor content performance with Content Auditing.
If you already have a set of content items, maximize their performance before you start creating new items. Some studies show that editing old content can 111% organic growth.
This is what content auditing was designed for.
The tool examines the performance of your site’s existing (and new) content (date published / last updated, metadata, word count, social shares, number of backlinks, bounce rate, and sessions) and provides suggestions for actionable improvement.
All your content items will be automatically broken down into categories defined by criteria specified by Semrush (you can always create a custom category and define your own indicators):
- Rewrite or delete (very old content with few views);
- Need to update (old content with fewer views than average);
- Quick review (recent content with a relatively high number of views); and
- Poor content (any piece under 200 words).
- Discover resonant new topics with Thematic Research.
The topic search tool basically covers the ideation part of your content creation process.
Simply enter a general topic and your target location down to a very local level (state, city), and the tool will instantly collect specific ideas around potential topic angles, headlines, and even the hottest questions around the topic. .
A cool angle BBS might have discovered here’s a trending question: How do fashion bloggers afford all these clothes?
But before you jump into writing, make sure you see the data behind each topic / question / title. With this tool, you can take a more data-driven approach to your topic selection. A Semrush-specific metric, Topic Efficiency, reflects the angle that might hit a keyword with higher search volume but lower competition rate.
- Write targeted content with SEO Writing Assistant.
Once you’ve made a final decision on your sub-topic and title, you can finally start writing without thinking about optimization.
As soon as your copy is complete, you can use the SEO Copywriting Assistant (can be used as an add-on for Google Docs and WordPress) to check if your copy meets reader needs and SEO requirements.
Based on the content characteristics of the best performing elements for your target keyword, the tool measures readability, originality, tone of voice, links, keyword optimization and others. criteria of your content.
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Using Semrush to manage paid campaigns
Now, the things we discussed had to do with organic results. And for good reason – they drive 70-80% of search traffic.
But there are still 20-30% of search engine users to worry about, on top of the fact that 65% of the few who are willing to buy end up clicking on paid ads.
To effectively capitalize on these ready buyers, you need a certain level of finesse. And Semrush offers a set of advertising features to help you succeed with your paid campaigns.
We’ve covered the keyword side of the sequel already – across all of the keyword tools (from Overview report to Keyword Gap) you’ll find a number of actionable ideas for your efforts. advertising.
Still, there are a few ad-specific tools that we haven’t mentioned yet.
- Just like site auditing detects your SEO issues, Semrush‘s PPC Keyword Tool does the same for your ads.
If you’ve already created a keyword list from your previous SEO-focused steps, work with them. Otherwise, the tool will give you some instant suggestions.
In addition to cross-matching poor keywords to minimize marketing costs, the tool establishes and eliminates all matching keywords. And for that extra boost, it also provides invaluable recommendations for fine-tuning your keyword choices.
Using advanced filters, you can set acceptable CPC cost, number of search volumes, difficulty level, etc. In addition, the tool will provide suggestions for cleaning and grouping your keywords so that your list becomes neater. Then, to avoid self-competition or CPC growth, use PPC Keyword’s “exclude between groups” feature to remove any conflicting keywords.
Once you have a tidy keyword list, just export it to a Google Ads compatible .csv and .xls file.
- It’s not just about PPC ads. The PLA Research and Display Advertising Tools can improve your offerings and your media buying strategy.
PLA research allows you to gain insight into what products your competition is trying to sell online and how. From target PLA keywords and your competitor’s “shopping ad” positions to pricing and actual advertising content, the tool can provide you with the information you need to identify the exact source of your PLA campaign’s underperformance.
We can see that BBS’s main competitor, Rebag, is investing more and more in PLA ads for a Celine belt bag and an LV tote. With price references and actual advertising content, this can help BBS create a PLA campaign that can potentially beat Rebag.
Display Advertising Reports reveal everything from the characteristics of your competitors’ target audience (age, gender, geography, interests and devices) and potential trends in ad seasonality to image, text and HTML ads and to key editors.
With this information, BBS can see which display ads are running and for how long: if the ad is running for a while, it may indicate its success, so our bag rental brand should take note. In addition, by checking which publishers competing brands often refer to, BBS can improve its media buying strategy by discovering new platforms with high added value.
Be social with Semrush
By now you’ve probably realized that Semrush is pretty research heavy in every marketing channel imaginable. And social media is no different.
The key tool here is Social Media Tracking, which helps you refine your social media marketing strategies based on competitive information. It analyzes your competitor’s social media accounts to help you identify what they’re doing, what kind of content they’re using to target prospects, their posting frequencies, and corresponding best practices.
You will also be able to identify the posts of your rivals with the best engagement statistics.
Now add hashtag tracking on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you are on your way to a knowledgeable social media marketing strategy.
When everything is ready, you can take advantage of Social Media Poster to spread your posts.
The tool unifies all social media channels, allowing you to post simultaneously from a single platform. And since it would be tedious to do it over and over, Semrush provides a scheduling feature to organize upcoming posts. You can also schedule posts directly to Google My Business.
Once the “ organic ” part of your social media efforts is covered, Semrush also recently launched a tool for paid social pros – Social Media Ads.
If you are already serving ads on Facebook, Instagram, FB Messenger, and FB Audience Network, you can use this tool to:
- Create and launch advertising campaigns directly from Semrush;
- Monitor their performance and receive alerts in the event of a fall; and
- Find out the strengths and weaknesses of each campaign and get ideas for optimization.
By avoiding the complex setup process, sending instant notifications, and automatically tracking campaign performance, you can save time and money by managing your paid social campaigns from one user-friendly interface.
To keep track of your aggregate social media performance data in one place, you can turn to Social Media Analytics. With this tool, you can gauge your performance on all key metrics – followings, mentions, post reach, post engagement, and engagement rates – for Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram over time.
Semrush review: Are there any disadvantages?
Before we wrap up, as promised, we’ll also go over some major downsides of the sequel.
While Semrush – if you look at it tool by tool – is quite intuitive and user-friendly, when you are new to the platform it can feel really overwhelming.
Combining all the functions we have mentioned throughout the article and many more in one package might make you dizzy at first. And, indeed, it takes time to learn all the tricks of the sequel.
Still, we have to admit that the Semrush team is doing their best to ensure that their users are surrounded by an extensive learning environment – from dedicated Semrush Academy courses and a comprehensive knowledge base to excellent customer support. and highly responsive.
Another thing that can potentially make you slow to roll up your sleeves to begin with is the price. It’s pretty obvious that Semrush can’t be free or even cheap, especially for small-scale users. However, if we think about the value per dollar spent, the power and volume of the solutions, complemented by mobile data, makes us believe that Semrush is more than reasonably priced.
Now that we’ve mentioned it, let’s take a look at the different Semrush packages.
Semrush Review: Price
Semrush‘s overall pricing strategy covers different types of users – from small-scale users like freelancers and startups to large corporations and multinationals.
Semrush offers a 7-day free trial, which should be enough for a standard business to test out a wide range of platform features. There is also a 16% discount if you sign up for an annual plan.
Semrush offers three main subscriptions: Pro, Guru, and Business. Again, we will mention that all users have access to mobile data and can also benefit from read-only sharing access and PDF template sharing.
- Subscribers Pro can set up 5 projects, track 500 keywords (with daily updates), and crawl 100,000 pages per month. This makes this package an ideal choice for freelancers, small digital agencies and internal teams, as well as startups.
- Guru Users can set up 15 projects, track 1,500,300,000 keywords, and crawl XNUMX XNUMX pages per month. They can also leverage the power of the content marketing platform and integration with Google Data Studio, making this plan ideal for large marketing agencies.
- Business users can create 40 projects, track 5,000,000,000 keywords, and crawl pages per month. They will also have access to Share of Voice (SoV) estimates and the Semrush API to amplify their dashboards, products and tools with Semrush data. So if you own a large digital agency, e-commerce business, or have a growing internal marketing team, this is the perfect plan.
All additional seats are offered at a lower cost: $ 45 for Pro users, $ 80 for Guru subscribers, and $ 100 for Business account holders.
Who should consider using Semrush?
To conclude this Semrush review, we have to say that it is a truly comprehensive and powerful platform that covers just about every aspect – the obvious and less – of digital marketing.
While this might seem to imply that in order to use Semrush you need to be a seasoned marketer working in a large team, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Anyone can use Semrush for things like long tail keyword research, checking competitor performance, etc.
Semrush has built an entire learning ecosystem around its toolkits – from the best blog in the industry to expert webinars – so you can learn and hone your professional skills with the sequel. And the availability of a lower Pro plan only proves it.
Whether you’re struggling to make an impact on your organic search strategy or need help with new keywords to drive that crucial organic traffic, Semrush is an ever-evolving solution for marketing success. This product can help you get the most out of your own site when trying to make a fortune online.
With Semrush, you can perform an SEO audit and determine which specific keywords are driving the most traffic. You can do some organic research on strategies that could help you excel at Adwords, and even check out a tutorial or two on how to improve your marketing as you go.
As a comprehensive analytics tool for any business, large or small, Semrush ticks many boxes. If you’re tired of using a basic SEO plugin and are up for something new, this could be it.