Semrush Review (2022) — The Unbiased TRUTH Shared!

Still, figuring out whether to go with Semrush or not? 

As per my experience with Semrush over the years, I found the tool helpful. Here’s the catch – it’s not for everyone!

Listen, I have been using Semrush for years, and using the Sermush toolkit on a daily basis. Here’s the snap of my active subscription to the Semrush Guru plan worth ($229.95)

Yes, if you’re figuring out whether to go with Semrush for SEO or digital marketing analysis – this is the only Semrush review you need.

In This Detailed Semrush Review, I’ll Cover:

Without further ado, let’s get straight into the review. 

Semrush Review: In a Nutshell & What’s New

Semrush is an all-in-one marketing platform, aka the one-stop digital marketing toolkit. Semrush platform founded by Dmitri Melnikov and Oleg Schegolev back in 2008.

However, Semrush is widely used as an SEO tool that seven million leading marketers use. With Semrush, you will find useful tools for SEO, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, competitor research, social media, content marketing, and so on.

Wait, you made this far — I have something exciting for you.

As mentioned earlier, Semrush is used by SEOs all over the work for carrying out keyword research, competitor analysis, site auditing, rank tracking, link building, and so on. It is a game changer tool for beginners, intermediates, and experts alike.

Later in this review, we’ll go through all the tools and features of Semrush in detail. 

What is Semrush Used For?

Semrush comes with around 50 tools, making it a complete digital marketing toolkit. From SEO tools to paid ads, it provides everything in one place, from social media to content marketing. 

To be precise, Semrush is mainly used for SEO purposes such as carrying out competitor research, doing keyword research, link building, rank tracking website auditing, and so on. 

In the next section, we’re going to review each tool in detail and help you with a better understanding of Semrush. 

Semrush SEO Toolkit Review 

The Semrush SEO toolkit comes with four modules that consist of various tools which help with all the SEO aspects. The SEO tools have everything from competitor research to keyword research and link building to on-page and technical SEO. 

Competitive Research

No doubt, competitor research is the inception of a solid SEO strategy. Yes, with the help of Semrush, you can easily carry out competitor research and get to know what your competitor’s SEO strategy looks like. 

With the competitive research module, you can dig deep into your competitor’s website. What’s more, the competitor module helps you get detailed insights into these metrics listed below:

These are just basic metrics; however, with Semrush, you can do a lot, such as with the competitor research module. In fact, for DemandSage, I use it to check our competitors and upto — to organic keywords, backlinks, traffic analysis, etc. 

These are some of the tools which come with the competitive research module. 

Domain Overview

As the name suggests, the domain overview tool of Semrush helps you check the performance of a domain in the search engine. With the domain overview module, you will get insights into the strengths weakness of your competitor’s website.

To start the domain analysis with the tool, you need to enter a domain, subdomain, or URL. Also, you can narrow down the domain performance by selecting geolocations such as worldwide or any country-specific. You can easily do a domain analysis of your competitor’s domains.

For instance, we’re adding HubSpots’ domain and see their traffic breakdown.

Voila, I have lots of insights and data to use and stay ahead of the game. You can now see various metrics here, such as authority score, organic search traffic, paid search traffic, and backlinks. 

What’s more, you have different options that you can use, such as overview, compare domains, growth reports, or even compare by country. If I want, I can compare DemandSage with HubSpot directly and see where we’re lagging. 

Traffic Analytics

The traffic analytics tool lets you check the traffic metrics of a domain you enter. It checks the traffic of a domain against the three competitors you enter. 

What’s more, all of this data is broken down at a device and subdomain level. All you need to do is enter the domain of your competitor. The data and reports you’re going to get are visits, unique visitors monthly, page visits, average visit duration, and the bounce rate.

With the traffic analytics tools, you can also make the most out of it by checking these reports — Audience Insights, traffic journey, top pages, subfolders, subdomains, geo distributions, bulk analysis, etc. 

What’s more, you also have the option to choose from different regions and even choose device types. Overall, it’s a robust tool that helps you get detailed insights into your competitors’ traffic. 

Organic Search

The Organic Search tool of Semrush is our all-time favorite. Yes, it helps us understand the organic traffic our competitors are getting. Instead of just showing your organic keywords, it also helps you get an extensive list of organic keyword suggestions; it also provides insights into:

To get started, you just need to enter your competitor domain, and yes, you will get a county-wise organic traffic breakdown. You will get metrics like — keywords it ranks for, estimated traffic, traffic cost, branded traffic, non-branded traffic.  

Keywords Gap

Yes, the keyword gap module of Semrush helps you compare organic and paid keywords with upto five domains, subdomains, or even URLs. This feature comes in handy when you’re looking to compare your website rankings and keywords with your competitors.  By far the best keyword research tool.

To get started, you need to enter your domain and then your competitor’s domain; you can add upto five domains. After that, you can choose from the type of keywords which you compare — organic or paid. At last, you also have the option to choose the country-wise keyword comparison as well. Once you hit the enter button, it will show various keywords data such as — share, missing, weak, strong, unique, untapped, and so on. 

What’s more, you can also click on the “Top Opportunities for” tab to find some of the keywords for your website that you can work on. 

Backlinks Gap

As the name suggests, the backlinks gap tool helps you compare your websites’ backlinks against your competitors. The useful metrics that you can use here is the — best backlinks strategy category. These metrics help you uncover all those websites linking to your competitor but not to your website. 

What’s more, there is a “Weak” section which will also display the domains that main point to your website less frequently than your competitors. Well, if you’re looking to break into the link-building thing, you can make use of this backlinks gaps tool. 

Semrush Keyword Research

We at DemandSage, religiously use the keyword research module of Semrush — we can’t stop praising it. 

In fact — Semrush has the highest database of keywords; as of February 2022, it has 20 Billion keywords in its database. You can check the latest Semrush stats here.

Yes, the keyword research module of Semrush helps you get detailed insights into profitable keywords.  

For the keyword research module — Semrush comes with two tools — Keyword Overview and Keyword Magic Tool. 

Keyword Overview Tool

Yes, the keyword magic tool of Semrush is a good place to start keyword research for beginners. 

With the keyword overview tool, you will get keyword insights like:

The Semrush keyword tool is similar to the Ahrefs keyword research tool. I would say Semrush UI is a bit nested when compared to Ahrefs interface and user experience.  

In comparison to Ahrefs, Semrush also shows you other useful information such as — search trends graphs, paid ads metrics, etc. What’s more, Semrush also shows the data for Google Ads and other useful keyword metrics. 

Pro Tip: If you’re working on paid keyword and PPC campaigns, Semrush is a better choice for keyword research. However, Ahrefs and Semrush are reliable for keyword research, but Semrush is better for paid ads keywords and data. On the other hand, Ahrefs have a better user experience compared to Semrush. 

Keyword Magic Tool

For DemandSage topic ideas, I often do use the keyword magic tool module to get niche relevant keyword suggestions for our domain. To get started, you just need to enter a target keyword or even a phrase to begin the search result. Semrush will then display the keywords on the basis of different parameters:

Coming to the data, you get insights such as — keyword volume, search trend, CPC, difficulty, SERP features, and so on. What’s more, there’s also a percent score which shows the similarity of a keyword to your base keyword. 

The best part about the keyword magic tool is that — it gives different filter options. You can also set search volume requirements or even use the advanced filters such as — competition score, SERP results, competition score, SERP features (reviews, knowledge panel, instant answers, etc.)

DemandSage Pro Tip: I have used the Semrush keyword magic tool to easily find reliable and low competition keywords for DemandSage. In fact, I have published this keyword — Google Sheets vs. Excel, and we’re acing the search result. You can easily find low competition and long-tail keywords simply by playing around with the features and filter options available.

Semrush Link Building Toolkit

Link Building is another important SEO aspect that plays an important role in your website rankings and relevancy. 

We’re amazed to see the performance of the Link Building tool of Semrush. Yes, you can easily do backlink analysis of any domain with a snap. Yes, Semrush offers two tools under the Link Building Module — Backlinks Analytics, Backlink Audit Tool. 

Backlinks Analytics

To get started, you need to just enter a domain, and it will provide different breakdowns of the backlinks profile. 

The best feature that I liked of the backlinks analytics module is — the links comparison feature. Yes, you can make use of this feature and compare your domain backlinks against your competitors. What’s more, Semrush also tracks the new and lost backlinks, which you can monitor easily. 

Backlinks Audit Tool

The Backlinks audit tool helps you get detailed insights for a domain you enter. It will audit the backlinks profile of a domain, and it will show up — broken backlinks, new backlinks, lost backlinks, etc. 

Well, when I compare the Semrush link building tool to the Ahrefs, I would say Ahrefs has an easy interface. If you’re looking for guest posting opportunities, I would suggest getting started with the “Site Explorer” toolkit. 

Other than that, Semrush also provides useful metrics and backlinks profiles for a website. 

Semrush Rank Tracking Review

SEO is a constant battle, and you have to keep your ranking strategy updated every day. Me at DemandSage, keep an eye over all our keywords and their performance on a daily basis. If I see any ranking drops, our SEO team gets backs to the URLs and sees what’s the possible cause, then updates the content and fetches it again. 

This is all I can do with the help of the Semrush rank tracker only. 

Similarly, if you have a website ranking for many keywords, you can make use of the rank tracking module to track the keyword rankings and performance. 

The position tracking tool of Semrush provides you with detailed analysis and data, which let you monitor:

DemandSage Pro Tip: Yes, there is an awesome reports section called the Cannibalization report. Basically, it shows if your website has covered the same keyword and content and checks the content duplication issue. It could happen that some keywords might compete against each other to rank for. Keep one thing in mind; this feature is only available with the Business Plan and The Gurr plan of Semrush. 

Semrush On-Page & Technical SEO

No matter how low, the competitive keyword you’re covering, how well your backlinks profiles are. The on-page and technical SEO plays an important role. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO isn’t everyone’s cup of tea; in fact, we have hired two full-time technical SEO geeks for DemandSage. 

Coming to technical SEO aspects, the Technical SEO tool isn’t that effective. The tool only crawls; different things are listed below:

To be honest, we don’t reply much on Semrush for the technical SEO. Yes, we have two full-time technical SEO geeks who take care of these aspects using other tools. 

I would say the Technical SEO Audit tool isn’t that effective. 

On-Page SEO Checker

To be honest and straightforward, I didn’t like the on-page optimization module of Semrush. 

For the on-page aspects, I mostly rely on two superb tools called — Surfer SEO and Page Optimizer Pro. 

The working of the on-page checker of Semrush is simple; you need to enter a domain. After that, it will provide different keyword ideas for the top pages, which you can optimize. 

What’s more, it also checks the content on pages against the top 10 ranking competitors. It checks the posts and pages against different metrics such as — content length, readability score, referring domains, and some other metrics as well. 

DemandSage Pro Tip: For the on-page aspects, I suggest making use of other tools such as Surfer SEO. Here, I have shared a detailed review of Surfer SEO to help you get detailed insights. 

Semrush Advertising Toolkit Review 

Yes, Semrush comes with a robust Advertising toolkit, which I don’t use for DemandSage at the moment. As of now, we’re looking to expand DemandSage organically.

Related Read: Learn how DemandSage raised three million in the first round of funding. 

Coming to the topic, the advertising toolkit of Semrush comes with some robust features which help you take your PAID Ads game to the next level. 

There’s one advertising dashboard that helps you see the glance of your projects and your competitors. With the advertising dashboard, you can quickly see the changes in the organic and paid traffic metrics as well. 

Market Analysis

The market analysis module helps you get proper glimpses of your competitors and advertising research. This module comes with various useful tools which you can use, such as — Domain overview, advertising research, display advertising, PLA research. 

The domain overview modules help you get the current performance of your competitor’s websites performance such as their organic and paid ads keyword, traffic, and other useful metrics. 

There is one advertising research module that helps you get an insider’s view into your competitor’s ads strategies. Yes, this tool is useful, and it allows you to identify their strength and weakness to easily improve your paid ads campaigns. 

Our team at DemandSage often uses this particular feature to see what our competitors are upto and the kind of strategy they are having. To get started with the tool, you need to enter the domain or URL. 

For instance, I’m taking the example of the HubSpot domain here, they are bidding for around 1K keywords, and they have the traffic of 38.4k from those campaigns. On the dashboard, you will see useful metrics such as — Position, keywords, traffic cost, position changes, competitors, ad copies, ads history, pages, subdomains, etc. 

DemandSage Pro Tip: Forgetting the ads copies ideas, you can just check the Ads Copies, where you will find all the ads copies that your competitors are targetting. For each ads copies, you find all the keywords they are targetting and other useful details. 

Apart from this, Semrush also comes with Keyword Research modules which are exactly the same as I explained earlier in this review. Using the keyword research module, you can easily find easy keywords for your paid ads campaigns. 

There is one useful tool that is new in this section is the — Ads History. Once you open the search section of ads History, you will see the domains, ads traffic, ads keyword, and the timeline. 

This ads history report will show you the keyword research report, which has all the domains that bid on a queried keyword. And it also tracks whether they have the PPC ads in any of Googles’ top 8 positions. 

Semrush Social Media Review (Not Live in Beta Mode)

To be honest, we don’t use much of the Semrush social media tools. For managing the social media handles of DemandSage, I make use of different tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, etc. 

Well, I asked my team to try the Social Media tool just for this through Semrush review. Yes, our team found it pretty useful for individuals who want to excel with social media marketing thing. 

Yes, the social media toolkit enables you — to create, analyze and spread engaging content. You can easily schedule your posts, get insights, track your competitors, boost your posts. 

And the best part is that you can also create ads that are in beta mode for now. 

As of now, Semrush only supports these social media channels — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google My Business. 

Semrush Content Marketing Review

Every now and then, we have heard — Content is The King!

Yes, still content is the king, but here’s the catch. We have to intend to solve users’ problems in a precise and structured way. This is where the Semrush content marketing toolkit comes into play. 

As per our experience, the Semrush Content Marketing toolkit is effective — but it’s not something that I praise. They have a structured platform, basically, which helps you to get started. 

For example, with the content marketing toolkit, you can start with topic research, create a proper plan, write the article, optimize it properly, check & analyze the mentions, and then mention the impacts. 

Everything is fine but not that great, but there is one thing I liked about Semrush content, which is — Topic Research. To get started, you need to enter a seed keyword it will show up topics, headlines, and questions. What’s more, with questions, you will get a whole content map which is typically the copy of SEO tools like AnswerThePublic. 

Even the best part, you can find topics ideas for specific geolocations such as — US, UK, etc. 

Some Other Notable Features Of Semrush

Yes, Semrush also comes with other notable features which I haven’t reviewed in this review of Semrush. So we’re just listing some other notable features of Semrush here. 

Semrush Pricing Review: How Much Does Semrush Cost?

As mentioned in the introduction section, I said — Semrush isn’t for everyone!

Yes, pricing is the factor that decides Semrush suitability — because it’s expensive. Why wouldn’t it be — Semrush is the Pioneer SEO tool. 

Yes, Semrush comes with three pricing plans — Pro, Guru, and Business. 

What’s more, there is Semrush free trial available; yes, you can signup for seven days of a free trial. 

Features	Pro	Guru	Business
Projects	5	15	40
Keyword Tracking	500	1500	5000
Results & Keyword Domains	10,000	30,000	50,000
Historical Data	N/A	Available	Available
Content Marketing Tools	N/A	Available	Available
Price	$119.95/mo	$229.95/mo	$449.95/mo
Free Trial	Seven Day Trial	Seven Day Trial	N/A

So these are the pricing plans that Semrush offers as of now. What’s more, Semrush offers more than 45 tools that differ on the plan you choose.  If you choose to pay yearly you can easily save up to 17% on yearly plans.

Note: We have partnered with Semrush to help you claim Exclusive 30 Days free trial of Semrush. Use this exclusive link to claim the 30-day free Semrush trial.

Which Semrush Plan Suitable For You? 

The Pro plan of Semrush is suitable for freelancers and bloggers out there as it has all the essential and advanced features you need to excel in your SEO & marketing game. 

On the other hand, the Guru plan is suitable for small marketing agencies and affiliate marketers looking to leverage SEO and Organic Traffic for a couple of websites. Also, this plan is suitable for you if you’re looking up to level up your paid search game. 

And the Business Plan is best suited to agencies looking to ace SEO and marketing for their clients. 

Note: Semrush also comes with a seven days money-back guarantee. Somehow if you don’t like the services of Semrush, you can request for money back. 

What Is Better Than Semrush: Semrush Alternatives

Here’s the complete list of Semrush alternatives.

I would say there are only a few alternatives to Semrush. The reason is that — Semrush is a complete suite of Digital Marketing tools, from SEO to Content marketing and from Social media to paid advertising — it has everything to offer.

However, there are a few alternatives to Semrush that you should try once. 

Later on, we’ll be making a detailed comparison of these tools, which Semrush. Stay tuned. 

Conclusion: Semrush Review (2022)

Now it’s verdict time — Is Semrush worth the hype? 

The answer to this question is — BIG TIME! 

As per our experience with Semrush, I say it’s worth the hype. If you’re someone looking for robust SEO tools which come with all the features — competitor analysis, keyword research, backlinks analysis, site audits — Semrush has it all. 

Even it comes with a good set of Paid Ads and PPC modules. Literally, you can take your organic and paid search game to the NEXT level with Semrush. 

In a nutshell, I would say — Semrush has everything for small and medium-sized businesses. For example, bloggers, freelancers, affiliate marketers, content strategists, content marketers, SEOs, and Agencies can easily make use of this tool. 

If I would have to say one con of Semrush — they’re trying to be the JACK or All TRADES! To put it simply, they are trying to bring everything together — SEO, Social Media, SEM, PPC, Content Marketing, etc. I wouldn’t recommend Semrush doing that. Instead, they should just stick to the core — which is SEO tools. 

With all that being said, I would like to finish the Semrush review! Now over to you, what do you think of Semrush? Have you claimed the Semrush Free Trial yet? Do let us know in the comments section below.

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