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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the bread and butter of online businesses today. How else would you attract your target audience to your website?
Using the right keywords and proper content is the key to improving your organic search rankings. But how would you know if your content is SEO-friendly or not?
This is where SEO tools like SEMrush come in. Since it is such a popular industry staple, most business owners use it as their default SEO tool. It offers a range of functionality and is used by most small to midsize businesses. But just because everyone is using it, does it mean it’s the best for you too? Talk about herd mentality.
Let’s get into an in-depth review of SEMrush so that you know if it is the best keyword research tool for you. Before we get into the individual features, here is a short pros and cons list for a quick review.
Overall Pros
- Easy domain overview and competitor analysis
- Impressive site audit features
- 7-day free trial
- Link building and backlink tracking
- Relevant keyword recommendations
- Unique PPC features
- Data is presented through easy-to-understand visual means
- Customer support available through phone, email, and chat
Overall Cons
- Can only use SEMrush with one user account (additional users can get expensive)
- No keywords list management
- Only provides data for one search engine: Google
- Competitive analysis can be expensive
- Organic traffic analytics can be inaccurate
Now that we’re done with that let’s get into how (or how not) SEMrush can be beneficial for your digital marketing needs.
Domain Overview
A domain overview or analysis is basically a test of how good your domain is from the point of view of SEO. You can do it on your website – to check which parts need improvement- and you can perform it on a competitor’s website- to find out how to outrank them in search ranking.
All you need to do is enter the domain name into the ‘domain overview’ section of SEMrush, and you will immediately get results on how that domain is performing on Google.
You can also use this feature to find out which websites are worth approaching for creating backlinks, which is also a good way to improve ranking.
Some of the various metrics provided by SEMrush under this feature are the authority score, total number of backlinks, total number of monthly visitors, and competing websites. Out of all of these, the ‘authority score’ will give you the quickest sense of the quality of a site.
You can also break down all the provided data according to year and country. But in our experience, we have found the traffic estimates not to be 100% accurate, not that SEMrush claims them to be. Just be sure to use them as an indicative guide rather than as gospel truth.
One thing lacking in SEMrush’s domain overview is the traffic cost figure, meaning how much it would cost for ads to get the same amount of traffic on your website. Although you can find this feature on the ‘Organic Research’ page of SEMrush.
Rank Tracking
Rank tracking, also known as position tracking, is tracking the performance of your website in Google for specific keywords over time. All you have to do is go to the position tracker section of SEMrush, enter the domain name along with the keywords you want to track, and you’ll get a report on your website’s performance with regard to those keywords.
You can also check the performance of your competitor’s website for those same keywords to see if they’re faring better or not. You can actually subscribe to email notifications to get regular reports on rank tracking.
Additionally, you can also set certain triggers so that SEMrush notifies you if a certain event occurs.
Backlink Analysis
Using SEMrush, you can check out backlinks using two different features: backlink analysis and backline audit.
Backlink Analysis
Using backlink analysis, you just have to enter the domain name in the analysis section, and you will get a list of all the websites backlinking to the domain. You even get to see the value of each of the backlinks. Since SEMrush has up to 43 trillion URLs in its database, it has one of the largest databases compared to its competitors, leading to more comprehensive results.
Backlink Audit
The backlink audit feature tells you about the quality of the websites linking to your domain. SEMrush describes that as the ‘toxicity’ of the website. SEMrush will list out all the links that it thinks are dodgy and toxic. You can individually review all of them and decide if you want to send a ‘disavow’ file to Google.
You might have differing opinions on disavowing links and their efficacy in improving search rankings, but with SEMrush’s toxicity report, you have the option to do whatever you want with the links.
Keyword Analysis
SEMrush keyword analysis will help you figure out a keyword’s search volume, keyword difficulty, and keyword suggestions. All you need to do to get these basic keyword metrics is enter a particular keyword in the ‘keyword overview’ section. The keyword analysis done by SEMrush can also be divided into certain sections.
Keyword Difficulty Score
SEMrush gives you a keyword difficulty score, which is a percentage showing how hard it is going to be to rank for a specific keyword. It also tells you the number of backlinks it will take to improve your ranking.
However, sometimes SEMrush will give a vague suggestion on how to improve ranking, saying that it will take a lot of work and link building to improve ranking. In these cases, it would be better if SEMrush could give more quantitative comments on improving ranking.
Keyword Suggestions
You can use SEMrush’s ‘keyword magic tool,’ which will give you a list of keywords related to the specific keyword you entered. Along with suggestions, you also get data about the keyword difficulty, the number of monthly searches, and the cost per click for Google ads.
You can also use this tool to filter out keywords that would be really easy to rank for. Another unique feature provided by SEMrush is the ‘search intent.’ Beside each keyword is one of these letters- I, N, C, or T, which tell you if the suggested keyword is informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. This way, you will know which keywords are worth targeting.
However, all these metrics are only provided for Google and not any other search engines. Even though 93.4% of all Internet searches are made on Google, it would be better if some other search engines were included in the database.
Link Building
In our opinion, SEMrush is a great SEO tool for link building. Many SEO tools provide you with a ton of data but don’t execute anything. SEMrush examines the content on your and your competitors’ site and comes up with a list of prospective websites that would be a good backlinking opportunity.
You can actually connect your mailbox to this tool and use the tool itself to send out outreach emails. SEMrush will provide you with email addresses for websites wherever possible. Additionally, you can use an individual email as a reusable template as well.
Need we say more to explain how link building is the strongest feature of SEMrush?
Site Auditing
Site auditing is another strong feature of SEMrush. The tool examines issues that might be slowing down your website or having a negative impact on your ranking. The ‘site health’ percentage score will give you an insight into your site’s SEO-friendliness.
Additionally, it will also give you a bunch of ways you can improve your site health. If SEMrush identifies any of the problems or solutions as tasks, you can easily export them to Trello, which is a popular project management application.
Pricing
As expected, any SEO tool as comprehensive and efficient as SEMrush is bound to be expensive. The three main plans offered by SEMrush are:
- Pro: $199.95 per month
- Guru: $229.95 per month
- Business: $449.95 per month
You do get a 7-day free trial if you don’t want to commit to a paid plan straightaway, but you’ll have to enter your credit card details, which can be annoying.
Compared to the competitor’s top plans, like Moz Pro or Ahrefs, SEMrush has the lowest-priced business plan. Additionally, SEMrush provides an extremely large number of daily reports when compared to its competitors for the same plan.
So, if you’re someone who has a decent budget cut out for an SEO tool, then SEMrush is a great option to improve your search results.
To Conclude
As you must’ve surmised from above, we definitely like SEMrush. Its important features of link building and site auditing will help you in your content marketing goals. If you’re still confused about whether SEMrush is the right choice for your business,
Choose SEMrush if:
- You have a small to midsize business with a decent budget cut out for an SEO tool
- You really need a comprehensive tool to improve content marketing
- You have an online store that you want to grow
Don’t Choose SEMrush if:
- You are stretched out for cash
- You can make do with a simple keyword research tool
- You don’t like the user interface
Hopefully, this review helped you come to a decision. We’d say if you have the money, and the goal of digital marketing, go for SEMrush. You definitely won’t be disappointed with the results!
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