SEMRush is a deep, robust tool used by many of the top-tier marketers online right now. You, too, can use it, and I’m going to tell you why you probably should.

Tools and Features

SEMRush starts out as a simple web search, but there’s a lot more to it than just a web app. You can plug in a domain name, a keyword, or a specific URL and you’ll get a huge pile of data from it. You can focus that data within a handful of different markets, including US Google, Google in other countries like Brazil, Canada, and France, Europe as a whole, or even Bing.

When you submit a phrase or link, you are taken to an analytics dashboard. This dashboard shows different data for different types of search. For a keyphrase, for example, you get an overview that you can toggle between desktop and mobile. You see organic search volume and the number of existing results. You see paid search CPC and a competition ranking. You see a CPC distribution by geographic location, and you see trending info.

In boxes below that, you get related keywords and their metrics, phrase match keywords and their metrics, and a box with organic search results. If there are results for AdWords or for product listings, those will be listed as well. All of that, my friends, is just the first page, and I’m skimming it for the sake of simplicity.

Domain analytics are similar. They show organic and paid search metrics, backlink rankings, and a chart showing locations and types of traffic. There’s a box with organic keyword information, including positions in SERPs, search volume, CPC, and a traffic ranking. There’s a list of primary

What features does SEMRush promote on their site?

• Organic keyword research analytics. This includes the ability to see the best keywords in use on a competitor’s site, the ability to discover new competitors you might have missed, and the chance to monitor changes in ranking.
• Advertising research and analytics. This gives you the ability to see what the ad campaigns of your competitors look like, including the keywords they’re targeting and an estimated budget. This also includes analysis of ad keywords and ad copy, so you can adopt successful strategies or improve beyond them. It even tells you how long an ad has been running, which indicates a successful ad. Ad research also helps you discover people paying to compete with you, who might not have an organic presence but are willing to pay for an ad presence. All of this also includes geolocation tracking so you can see regional opportunities as well.
• Display advertising analytics. This analytics shows the top publishers and advertisers in Google’s display network for your keywords in a top 30 report. There’s an ad analysis engine to help you take those ads apart to figure out what they’re doing right and wrong. You can spot new publishers that can be relevant to your advertising through this system, as well. On top of that you have the ability to change the device you’re viewing to see statistics per device.
• Detailed backlink analytics. While not one of the top-tier backlink analyzers on the web – that honor goes to something like Majestic – it’s still very good. You can conduct a deep link analysis to show you what links coming in are helpful versus harmful, while recording the domain authority of the links involved. You can also check whether or not the links are followed, and interestingly, whether they show up in a frame, form, or image rather than just standard text. There’s also an element of geolocation, so you can see where in the world your links are coming from.
• Video advertising analytics. This is a relatively unique tool; video marketing is still a newcomer to the web comparatively, and thus the marketing tools we’ve had for text are only now adapting to work for video. This tool collects data about YouTube channels and videos in your niche, including ads embedded in them or overlaid across them, and ad placements. It’s a lot of the same information you get about the ad analytics above, just focused on video ads rather than search ads. If you’re breaking into video marketing, you can also use it to locate advertisers who might be interested in your content.
• Specialized keyword research features. I already mentioned above that each keyword you look up has detailed statistics; each also shows you related keywords and phrase match variations, ranked by search volume and cost per click. This data helps you identify high volume keywords with lower costs you may be able to target with future content and ads. On top of all of this, you have long tail keyword analytics, and multinational/multilingual keywords. This is insanely useful for some companies, because almost every other keyword research tool on the market works solely in an English America-centric viewpoint.
• Detailed analytics about Google Shopping product listing and product ads. If you’re using ecommerce and want to be listed in Google Shopping, this is invaluable information.
• Keyword difficulty measurements, based on search volume, cost, and competition.
• Domain comparison tools, which allow you to plug in two domains and see all of the above metrics for each, side by side. Use this to scope out how two competitors stack up against each other, or how you compare to them.
• Charts and other visual representations of data; you’re not going to go all glassy-eyed staring at table after table of meaningless data.
• Position tracking, to monitor your place and the places of your competitors in search at both the national, regional, and local levels. Track keywords and domains this way.
• A complete site audit for SEO health. This analysis checks both internal and external links, tagging opportunities, meta data, image functionality and alt text, error pages, duplicate pages, and other SEO issues.
• Social media analytics. This all in one dashboard showcases social media ad campaigns and organic traffic, both for yourself and your competitors. It tracks across a number of different sites.

All of that is a pretty good overview of what SEMRush has to offer, and it all boils down to one thing; detailed analytics of ads and keywords that is independent of logging into any site-specific analytics suite. It really is the next best thing to having Google Analytics access to your competition.

Pricing

You had to know it was coming. You can get a lot of data from SEMRush for free, but it’s strictly through the web app, and it’s not all of what’s available. A lot of the drill-down data, as well as things like API access, are gated behind the paywall. As well they should be; SEMRush is a good business and deserves to make money for what they do.

Warning: SEMRush is a professional-grade tool. That means it is not cheap. Don’t be shocked by the pricing.

The lowest tier plan is $70 monthly. It allows you to generate up to 3,000 reports per day, with up to 10,000 results per report. You can have 5 total projects saved, can track 500 keywords, and can crawl up to 100,000 pages. You can also schedule reports, but only up to five of them per month.

The middle tier is $150 monthly, and adds on to the lower tier. The results per report is bumped to 30,000, while the number of reports jumps to 5,000. You can run 10x as many projects and can track 1,500 keywords. The crawl limit jumps to 300,000, and you can generate 20 scheduled reports. As an addition, those reports can come in branded PDF form, and you gain access to historical data in addition to current data.

The top tier is quite a jump. You go up to $550 per month, which is very much into enterprise-level software pricing. For that, you get 10,000 reports per day PER USER, of which you can have up to four. Each report can have up to 50,000 results. You have unlimited projects, 1,500 tracked keywords per user, and 300,000 crawled pages per user. You can schedule 50 reports per user and get the historical data. In addition, this is where you get product listing ads and, of course, the multiple-user management system.

If you find you need something in the middle, or something higher than the enterprise-grade plans, you can customize a plan with them on a scaling pay scale. You can also try any tier subscription with a 7-day money-back guarantee. There are also annual plans where you can pay once a year and get an overall discount, if you have the budget to swing one large lump sum payment.

In case you’re skeptical about the data, SEMRush publishes some statistics. Their historical data comes from 11 databases stretching back to 2012, with 15 additional regional databases starting in 2013. Their service has over 786,000 users, tracks 120 million keywords, 74 million domains, and more. This isn’t some fly-by-night company promising the moon; this is a legitimate company with a lot of power for you.

Inaccuracies

SEMRush is not a perfect tool. As I said, it’s the next best thing to having access to Google Analytics. It is not, itself, Google Analytics. That means it is, necessarily, flawed in terms of data. There’s only so much one company can harvest, even with an immense set of databases and tools on hand. This means the data for some things, like traffic and CPC, are not going to be 100% accurate to your own data. Your actual CPC will vary, as will your actual traffic.

There’s no way to avoid this. Without actually hacking into Google and pulling data on sites directly, no competitive analysis app will ever be able to have completely accurate data. Even Google Analytics is plagued with inaccuracies on occasion.

Just remember one thing: SEMRush is inaccurate in the same ways for all sites. It doesn’t take and make individual predictions about each site, which would lead to differences in viability of data for different sites. It uses the same data to make predictions with the same algorithms for every keyword and domain.

You can figure that if you check your site against Google Analytics and SEMRush, the difference will be similar to the difference between SEMRush and Google Analytics for your competitors. The scale might be different, but a 3% difference is a 3% difference one way or another. This is why SEMRush is such a good competitive analysis tool; the comparisons are accurate. If SEMRush says your competition is above you in traffic, they’re going to be above you in traffic, even if the specific numbers aren’t strictly accurate.

SEMRush also does not have a complete database of all possible keywords. The only way to actually get such a database would be to use Google’s index itself, the Sum of All Knowledge. Unfortunately, that’s not something anyone but Google can do. Maybe with sufficient billions of dollars, time, and a huge staff of engineers you could replicate it, but why would you want to?

As a result, SEMRush has a huge database of keywords, but they tend to be generic and long-tail keywords. Other keywords – generally geo-located or non-metropolitan keywords – will be left out. This makes SEMRush a better tool for global analytics than it is for small, local competition. Of course, the pricing does that too; very few small businesses have enough to spend to get SEMRush in the first place.

At the end of the day, traffic you actually get is going to be higher than the traffic recorded in SEMRush, because SEMRush only calculates traffic from the keywords it tracks. You, meanwhile, get traffic from sources that SEMRush doesn’t monitor, which makes their number smaller.

I have one gripe with the site audit, and that’s how it tends to individually list every single issue rather than lump things together and scale them. You can run it and find a shocking thousand or more errors, but if you look, it could be as simple as 500 images on your site missing alt text, or something equally simple. Those are errors, sure, but it’d be better to lump them together and say “X images have no alt text; moderate priority” or something of the sort. It’s a minor gripe, but then, SEMRush’s SEO auditing is only decent, not outstanding. It’s only as good as an automated tool can be; a real SEO professional with a close look can spot some errors that don’t show up elsewhere.

Really, there are only two real problems with SEMRush, and one of them is the price. It’s not a cheap tool, but if you can put it to good use, it will pay for itself within a few months. The other problem is how it’s not entirely easy to use. It takes a bit of getting used to, and it tends to throw a lot of information at you very quickly. It’s easy to get lost in the crush of the charts, tables, and graphs, without actually pulling out the detail you want. Once you get used to it, though, it becomes much easier.

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