There are now tools online that can help businesses get their visibility online, while also helping them discovering marketing insights. These tools have reports that are here to help every marketer that work in different services, including Campaign Management, Marketing Insights, Content Marketing, PR, Competitive Research, Keyword Research, SMM, PPC, and SEO. But one that is going around online is Semrush, but what is Semrush? Find out in our review below.

What is Semrush

Semrush is a product that can do all the information above. It will help you optimize your own website for search engine websites.

It was created in the year 2008 by Dmitry Melnikov and Oleg Shchegolev and now has a big user base. It has more than 7 million users and is currently one of the most popular SEO tools available today.

Interface and Ease of Use of Semrush

Semrush interface is similar to its competing products like Ahrefs and Moz, which comprises of a menu of options on the left side which you can use to access all the functionality on the right side.

All the menu options are grouped in useful categories, including reporting, on-page SEO, rank tracking, link building, keyword research, and competitive research.

There are still a lot of data to contend with, which can be overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it, you will be able to use the tool with ease.

On the other hand, it would be best if Semrush’s interface can work in Smartphone. The reason behind this is because once you login to Semrush, you will get a standard desktop interface, which means that you will get a small text. You will get a lot of zooming and pinching.

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How Does Semrush Works

Semrush works by providing you information, which you can use to do the following:

• Tweak technical aspects of the website content to help achieve a higher search ranking
• Identify all the opportunities for link building
• Create new website content that can attract traffic

For instance, Semrush will give you keyword suggestions which are all based on the phrases that you will enter. The keyword suggestions will be used as the based for the content that you’ll be writing and are likely the ones that will perform well during search results.

It can also help tell you on how hard it will be to rank for certain search phrases, while also suggesting the sites that may be worth approaching when it comes to backlinks.

Another good thing about Semrush is that it will let you perform SEO audit on your own website that will let you perform any technical improvements to help you achieve great search results.  

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Features of Semrush

Domain Analysis

Majority of SEO projects today start with domain analysis, which means that getting a simple overview of the domain’s quality from an SEO’s point of view.

You will usually perform a domain analysis either on your competitor’s website to see how hard it would be to outrank them, or on your own website if it needs any SEO improvements.

You may also perform a domain analysis on a website for you to be able to see if it’s worth it to approach the owner for a link from the owner’s site to yours. The reason behind this is because backlinks or external links from websites that are high quality can help boost the performance of your website in search.

Performing a domain analysis in Semrush is easy, wherein all you have to do is enter the URL domain in the domain overview section and get the result on how your website or any website is performing.

Metrics Provided

• Authority score
• Total number of guests to the website per month
• The total number of backlinks
• Total number of keywords the website ranks for
• Anchor text used in links to the site
• Top performing keywords
• Competing websites
• Display advertising stats

All of these metrics are calculated based on the backlink data, website traffic dat, and organic search data. The authority score is a little buried in the interface of Semrush but has now been moved from the front and center of the overview section. This will provide you an information on what Semrush thinks of that specific domain.

Keyword Research

When it comes to keyword research, it is usually about the following:

• Getting suggestions from the others
• Finding who is already using and ranking that specific keyword
• Establishing how hard it is to rank using that keyword
• Determining how many people are looking for a specific keyword
• Semrush will make it easier for you to find all of the information mentioned above.

All you have to do is enter the keyword that you need to research to Keyword Overview and you will immediately see the following:

• List of the websites that are ranking for it
• Keyword difficult score
• Number of searches per month for the keyword on Google
• When it comes to the domain analysis, you can easily do this per country, which is very helpful as well.

Rank Tracking

Rank tracking is the process of monitoring how the website performs in all the search engine website. Setting this up in Semrush is easy as all you have to do is position the tracker section and enter the domain name and keyword that you want to track. Once done, you will get a report showing how your website is ranking using those specific keywords.

You may also enter the website of your competitor, which will let you compare how yours is performing using your chosen keywords against those of your competitors. You’ll be able to monitor all the progress of your website as time goes on, which will then help you know how your website is performing. Regular updates will be sent to your email about your rank tracking progress.

Backlink Audits

Backlink audits’s purpose is to help establish the backlinks’ toxicity and helping you determine its overall health. During the audit, Semrush will comply a list of links that it thinks are spam, thus giving you the chance to review them. They will usually be uploaded as “disavow” file.

The audits will tell Google to ignore these links because poor quality links can get your site penalized by Google. Disavowing bad links can have a huge impact on your web search rankings.

Backlink Analysis

How your site performs in search result will depend on how many backlinks you have. There are two different different ways to looking on backlink, first is by backlink audit and second is the backlink analysis.

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics will help you enter a domain name and view all the backlinks that it can find. You can use this tool to view the following:

• IP addresses of the backlinks and its information
• Top level domain distributions, such as how many .gov, .org, .com there are
• Anchor textx used for every backlink

All the information is provided to you and will help you see when a domain has lost or gained backlinks, together with the link’s value. You can use all these information to enhance your SEO efforts and as well as gain insights to your competitor’s website.

Semrush Link Building

One of the features of Semrush that stands out is Link Building, which is the process of getting sites linking to your website. It is important to the success of every SEO project since search engines will usually reward websites with links pointing to them that has high positions in search results.

The link building will work by:

• Asking you for the keywords that you want to rank
• Examining all the content of your website
• Determining your competitors and what they are ranking for
• Once done, it will surface a list of prospect sites that it thinks are worth it to approach for guest post or backlink opportunity.
• Besides that, it will also help you connect your mailbox to Semrush and assist in sending outreach emails from within this tool.

Broken Link Building

Another important SEO tactic is broken link building. It involves searching for any broken link or links that leads to nowhere to be recreated and use it to point to your website instead.

This approach will let you build new backlinks to your content, and the more backlinks pointing to your website, the better your content will perform in search engines.

You can use this feature by running a backlink analysis report, navigate to indexed pages section, click on target errors, and export all the results to a CSV file or Excel. You can filter or sort the file to identify all 404 errors.

Site Auditing

Site auditing acts by looking out for issues that can cause negative effects on your website’s website ranking, including the following issues:

• Overuse of keywords
• Missing headers
• Crawl errors
• SSL problems
• Duplicate content

Slow-loading Content

This feature will provide you with a list of issues and will let you export tasks to the Trello or use another project management tool to send to another one.

I specifically like the on-page SEO checker, which will scan the entire site and provide you with tips for the improvement for each of the page. Some of the suggestions may include:

• Internal linking strategies
• Length of content
• Sites to approach for backlinks
• How you can improve the body copy and the meta description
• Steps to take to make your pahe appear as a featured snippet in Google
• Keywords to add

Pricing and Value for Money

Compared to other kinds of tools, Semrush can be very expensive. But this is very understandable because you are not only paying for its functionality, but also for accessing a huge quantity of data, including competitor intelligence.

Here are the three Semrush plans:

• Pro Plan: $199.95/month
• Guru Plan: $229.95/month
• Business Plan: $449.95/month

You can also get a custom version of Semrush, which lets corporate customers to make their own bespoke plans. Of course, before committing for a paid plan and for a long period of time, it would be best to try out the 7 days.

When it comes to the length of the trial offered by its competitors, it’s actually better than that of Ahrefs because what they are offering is a paid 7 day trial. But Moz’s is offering a 30 day FREE trial.

In order for you to avail of the trial, you will have to enter your credit card details. This may be a common practice but it can be annoying and concerning for some.

The fees of Semrush are comparable to Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz, though Majestic offers a lower monthly plan at $49/month but has less functional than the others.

Are There Semrush Trial Versions

If you want to try out Semrush first, they offer two types of trial to choose from. These trials will help you determine if you will find this tool useful for you and your business.

Here are the Semrush trials and the features that you’ll be able to enjoy:

Pro Trial

• Create 3 projects
• Technical optimization insights, audit and crawl 100,000 pages
• Get on page insights, content templates and SEO ideas for up to 10 keywords
• Conduct link building
• Track up to 500 keywords
• Research keywords
• Manage social campaigns
• Analyze a competitor’s strategy, including backlinks, ads, and keywords

Guru Trial

• Get a total of 15 projects
• Enjoy content marketing platform, including brand reputation monitoring, content optimization on-the-go, topic research, and content edit
• Higher limit of keywords that you can track – 1,500
• With higher limit of pages to audit and crawl – 300,000
• Ability to make branded PDF reports
• Get the Ability to track keyword cannibalization
• Ability to track keyword positions across different locations and devices, while also identifying keyword cannibalization
• Access to historical data

Conclusion

Semrush is a good tool if you want to monitor your website’s status and overall health. It has a good monthly subscription, so you don’t really have to worry about putting your money to waste because that fees are worth it especially if it’s for your website and your business.

Hit that free trial button now that you know what is Semrush and check out the wonders that your website has with Semrush.

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