Skip links
SEMrush Review 2020 Better Than Ahrefs

SEMrush Review 2022: Better Than Ahrefs

SEMrush has been one of the topmost competitor SEO research tools in the current market.

If you have your foot in SEO space long back, then you have surely heard SEMrush.

In this post on SEMrush, we will have a glance at review on the features of the SEMrush and expand how they worth the value you pay for.

SEMrush has raised $40m on 24th April 2018. Now, it has been aggressively rolling up with new beneficial features thereby expanding its databases. Added, the backlinks, keyword databases have become larger compared to the other tools in the realm.

They have also added a lot of features recently. This would be the best time to have a review of those features that may uplift you with good wows.

Coming next is in-depth information about the features of SEMrush that has been widely experienced.

Overview of SEMrush

SEMrush, an all-in-one marketing toolkit, for your online business, has been uplifted its head in late 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev with the vision of increasing online visibility and content marketing platform.

Wandering with multiple benefits, SEMrush offers various apps like SEO toolkit, advertising toolkit, content marketing toolkit, social media toolkit, competitive research toolkit. We will have deep facts in this post. Every app contains tons of useful features that have been developed and refined for years.

Pros

  • Largest SEO keyword database fetched from dozens of geographical locations
  • Groundbreaking traffic analysis to enable in displaying the visits, dwell time, bounce rate as well
  • The content marketing toolkit includes topic research, SEO template creation, writing assistant, and content audit
  • The brand monitoring feature right next to SEMrush
  • Social media tool kit with social media poster and tracker
  • Advertising toolkit with keyword ad history, advertising, ad building, and PLA research
  • SEMrush with backlink expansion with a really large database
  • It has the largest keyword database in the world

Cons

  • Excludes inbuild SERP analysis feature
  • Whitelabel reports available only for highest plans
  • Keyword difficulty scores can be a bit unreliable (Manual keyword difficulty analysis is always better)

SEMrush has been the most feature-rich tool that one can accept without any argument in the marketing space. Still, there are few downsides you need to look at.

It is a really easy-going tool. But the learning curve is a little low and the features have been arranged intuitively and perfectly as well. Glancing at the toolkits will help you know that they are useful and are neatly accessible with a dropdown sidebar.

Now, it is time to know the exact functionalities, my opinion, and critics associated with my review.

SEMRush Dashboard

SEMrush VS Ahrefs

SEMrush is a quite more popular tool than Ahrefs when compared with the wide range of audiences who wish to cater more tools.

Still, many people have a little war in confirming which is the best to choose upon.

There is no clear winner here. Believe me, it is true!!

Ahrefs is good at the link building side. With more popular blogs and an active YouTube channel, they have been functioning effectively, and are better to market the features. You will get benefited in the form of link building tutorials as well.

There are also features in Ahrefs that include a content explorer, keyword tracker, and site audit tools resembling SEMrush.  On the contrary, SEMrush updated its backlink database days before. It has been bigger than Ahrefs and thus reports a huge number of backlinks.

SEMrush updated its backlink database

Keeping the keyword database lining with 7.7 billion keywords, SEMrush has become the largest SEO keyword database. Many keywords provide accurate metrics including traffic and others.

Added to the features of Ahrefs, SEMrush comes up with loads of features as pinpointed in the post.

When it comes to pricing, both go hand in hand with a similar price. But, when you peep into the features, then SEMrush offers you a better value for every single penny.

Ahrefs comes up with a 7-day trial for $7.

But SEMrush typically offers a free 7-day trial on their pro membership. Nevertheless, you can try SEMrush Pro for a complete 30-days with our SEMrush free trial.

SEO Toolkit – SEMrush Review

SEMrush has always been known for its SEO-related features. Let us keep our foot in the sections that elaborate us the features of the SEMrush SEO toolkit.

You will get,

  • Competitive Research
  • Keyword Research
  • Link Building
  • Rank Tracking
  • On-page and Tech SEO

Now, let us indulge in knowing in-depth about the above-mentioned points.

Competitive Research

Here, you can get an analysis of different domains, do organic research, display traffic analytics, do keyword gaps, and also indulge in doing a backlink gap analysis.

With the Domain overview section, you can enter into the domain name and display all the essential information you are in need of. On one screen, you can inculcate different benefits.

Typically, it remains the starting point for your competitor analysis. You will also get to know more about the site’s traffic, paid traffic, backlinks, organic traffic graph, top organic keywords, and many.

At this point, you can get to know more about the metrics.

If you wish to display the mobile analytics for your site, then you can select Mobile under the Device dropdown option. It will help in displaying the mobile rankings and traffic data as well.

SEMrush has introduced a new feature lately known as Traffic analytics. Using that, you can able to see various metrics like page views, unique visitors, average page visit duration, bounce rate, etc. of any competitor site you would like to know.

Essentially, it is more or less equal to the process of getting access to the Google Analytics account of your competitors. A comparison between the different competitors and analyzing them would become easier with this feature. You can also peep your eyes in knowing how they are getting traffic to their site and you can identify the source too.

This is one of the features of SEMrush that add uniqueness when compared to the other tools like Ahrefs or Serpstat.

During the organic research section, you can come up with the process of researching all the keywords within the domain or for the particular website. You can also determine the position changes, competitors, trends data, and many.

The number of branded searches and unbranded searches has been listed out for your site. It will help you to know more about your visitors and the audience as well. For navigational purposes, you can use the keywords in Google in order to make people land on your site. You can also determine the improve/decline strategies of the keyword rankings of your competitors.

The next one here is the Keyword Gap Analysis.

It is a great tool that helps you to identify the common keywords between you and your competitors.

There are keywords that can be targeted using blogs like your competitors. It also helps you to determine the content marketing ideas or angles through which you might have been missing out for the past hours.  It helps you to unveil some quick wins which you might never experience before.

Resembling the keyword gap tool, the tool named Backlink Gap tool will help you to determine the backlinks of the competitors that are common and help you to get to know more about it.

Keyword Research

SEMrush offers you various features including keyword magic tool, keyword difficulty store, keyword overview, etc.

It will display you with various metrics including keyword volume, CPC, competition, and various results. The display ratio is also high that matches up with the phrases and related keyword suggestions along with the metrics.

The trend graph is also displayed for the keyword and thus lets us know if the keyword is worth ranking for in the near future. It also helps you in setting the right expectations when in the year to expect traffic from the particular keyword.

It also displays the SERP results for the specific keyword.

SEMrush gives you access to the keyword magic tool. This tool will also help you to find a broad match, phrase match, exact match, and other related keywords. It helps you to ping up with your seed keyword. There is a separate section called questions that helps you to find keywords that are essential to question in the form of long-tail keywords.

It helps you to have a featured section with a lot of formulated FAQ sections on your blog. It helps you to come up with Google Knowledge Graph and also rank for many related keywords. For all the keywords, the essential metrics like volume, difficulty, CPC, and others will be displayed.

SEMrush gives you access to the keyword magic tool

You can also find the various filters in order to refine the keywords that SEMrush returns to you.

For example, when you search for the product reviews to find keywords, then you can include the word “review” in your keyword section and click the Apply Filters button. You can also use particular keyword research for your blog posts as well.

If you wish to measure the keyword difficulty score of the keywords, then you can enter them in the bulk under the Keyword Difficulty feature.

keyword difficulty score

It also displays what SERP features are present for the keyword and also represents the trend graph.

Keyword Difficulty feature.

Nevertheless, we also recommend you to do manual keyword difficulty analysis before deciding to create content around the keyword scores that have been returned to be quite contextual and have discrepancies.

You have the Organic Traffic Insights feature in SEMrush. Using that, you can display the keywords that have been driving the traffic to your site.

Organic Traffic Insights feature in SEMrush

In order to make the feature work efficiently, it is necessary to connect your Google Analytics and Search Console with SEMrush. It is the pull-in of data that combines it with the data intelligence of SEMrush. It also gives you a more enriched view of your search data.

Link Building

With Link Building, you have the first tool – Backlink Analytics.

You can enter in dealing with any domain name or URL, and SEMrush will display you with all the backlinks, anchor texts, referring domains, referring IPs, indexed pages, competitors, and various link-related metrics.

The tool will be useful for you to use whenever you are coming out with blogger outreach prospection, guest post, or any other link building campaigns. Added, you will also have access to scores like PS and TS along with advanced filters. It helps you to identify the top 20% powerful backlinks of a website that actually move the needle.

With the free version of SEMrush, you can import up to 100 domains to the campaign. If you wish to go along with the paid plans, you can import up to 10,000 domains into the tool.

For outreach, you will be using Gmail that gives you a limit of 500 emails per day. However, if you consider using GSuite, then the limit will be raised.

If you wish to do the backlink audit of your own website, SEMrush will really become a good Backlink Audit tool.

Firstly, you need to set up your domain for the audit. It will analyze the nature and toxicity of the backlinks that a site has. It also gives you an integration with Google Search Console in order to make sure that none of your backlinks will be missed in the audit.

If you are indulging in the audit for the first time, then it takes 2 minutes depending on your site to analyze the backlinks, toxic, scores, and also potential link networks.

You can also individually go through each of the backlinks that the SEMrush tool has analyzed and examined the toxic scores for your site.

Either you can decide to keep or delete the backlinks by adding them to the disavow list.

Conducting Backlink Audit regularly is a daunting task especially when you are engaged in building active backlinks and protecting yourself from negative SEO.

The spammy toxic backlinks really help you to have a negative effect on your search visibility.

The Link Building Tool from SEMrush will really become a game-changer. It always asks you to provide the domain name, keywords to rank for, and also the list of your competitors.

Now, it will also put up all your prospects that you can consider outreaching for link building.

You can also select the prospect from the source with the backlink and then outreach them right from SEMrush.

Bulk Backlink Analysis Tool

SEMrush will track if the emails have been opened and more. Once you earn a backlink, then you can add it to the monitor list in order to make sure that backlink has not lost over time.

Bulk Backlink Analysis Tool helps you to analyze the backlinks of a list of URLs in one go. It must also help you to come up with a handy feature while doing competitor articles and analyzing the guest post prospects too.

Position Tracking

SEMrush will enable you to track the rankings of your pages for different keywords that you ought to target.

First, you need to track your site with the setting available.

Position Tracking

You can also get the option to import the backlink from SEMrush website data, Google Analytics, and also you can import the file.

Once you get the report, you can glance at the ranking of your keywords and also analyze whether your site has been featured in Google Snippets.

On-page and Tech SEO

With the help of these features, you can perform an on-page SEO audit and thus analyze the technical SEO of your suite.

It helps you to analyze the various aspects of your site including site structure, internal linking, broken links, crawl depth, and other factors too.

You can set the site audit to run periodically and thus SEMrush sends you to the audit reports available right back in your inbox.

Manually, the research will be time-intensive if you have an SEO agency in hand. You may need to use other tools like Screaming Frog and other such tools.

Especially, there is a spotlight in their crawl depth analysis and internal links. It really helps you to make the optimization for your site crawls and lets Google frequently crawl the entire website without any crawl budget. You have to consider adding more internal links to the pages with a crawl depth of more than 2 clicks.

The features of the SEMrush when it comes to SEO audit are really commendable. Some of the often-overlooked features are robots.txt analysis, HTTPS health, sitemaps, orphaned pages, crawl depth, page speed, htaccess analysis, and many others have also been included.

You do not need to have your SEO audit checklist and SEMrush will help you to analyze all these things for you.

Along with the Website Audit tool, you have tools that include SEO content template, on-page SEO checker, log file analyzer, listing management, features.

The On-page SEO checker will help you to import and analyze the webpages of your website for SEO.

It also analyzes your content, keywords, backlinks against your competitors. It also offers you actionable strategies in order to implement them in your content. One of my favorite features is the top 10 benchmarking.

It always enables you to reach the content metrics to the competitors. It lets you analyze your word count, readability, video usage, and other factors to the top 10 ranking web pages for the keyword. It helps you to easily determine the commonalities between all the top-ranking web pages.

I also liked their Optimization ideas. They also prefer to offer you SEO optimization ideas for specific topics on your blog.

You can also check out whether you have indulged in proper keyword usage at critical places of your blog posts and it checks any technical issues, semantics, and many more.

And, also suggests you get more backlinks to the page considering the backlinks of other top-ranking pages.

Advertising Toolkit – SEMrush Review

With the help of this tool, you can have all the essential PPC research features under one roof. It is a must-use tool if you are going around running PPC or paid campaigns on Google.

Advertising Research

Similar to the SEO competitor research, you can also enter any URLs and get the outlook of the entire PPC reports that the SEMrush generates for you. It will also display you the PPC traffic and also the keywords that the site has been ranking for.

SEMRush Advertising Research

You can also display positions, changes, competitors, ad copies, and ad histories.

You can also head over to the ad copies section that will help you to get an outline and determination of various ads that have been used in any site or particularly in your competitors’ sites. The Ad history is like an archive for the PPC ads.

ad copies, and ad histories

With the help of it, you can tweak the location, time device into dynamically displayed ads that match your condition as well. If you are getting rid of VPNs and other difficulties, you can involve in competitive ad analysis.

CPC Map

You will always have a tool named CPC map that will help you to determine the Google ads and CPC prices globally.

You can also compare the CPC features with the multiple countries and categories using the compare feature available.

SEMRush CPC Map

When you have been determining the target of the countries in your ad campaigns, then it becomes really effective to benchmark the numbers and plan the marketing campaigns, and estimate the ROI.

Ad History

The tool helps you to get a display of the ads that have been displayed for a specific keyword in Google.

Ad History SEmRuSh

Here you can glance at the term “SEO Course” which helps you to get into multiple brands that have been running for several months. When you click further, then it will display all the running ads. It also lets you display your competitor’s ad too that has been running on Google Display Networks. The ads will always be displayed on various AdSense-enabled websites and also come across various Google properties too.

Ad Builder

SEMrush has been getting into a good Ad builder feature that will assist the user in greatly building profitable ads by grabbing inspiration from the competitors.

Ad Builder

You can also use your competitor ads as a template in one click and thus the entire ad settings will be configured as per your convenience. If you are running an ad for your iPhone, then you can search for ads that have already been streaming for iPhone while creating your ad.

SEMrush’s PPC features will really take the guessing work involved in ad creation out of the equation.

PLA research

The feature will turn out to be a really effective and helpful one if you are running PPC shopping ads for your eCommerce store or drop shipping business.

You can also enter into any domain name and SEMrush will help in displaying the PLA keywords and positions. It also helps you to visualize the PLA trend for the domain to formulate your own strategies accordingly.

For example, you can see that many companies have been spending good money on their pre-festival and Black Friday deals.

Social Media Toolkit – SEMrush Review

SEMrush will come up as a complete social media toolkit that allows you to publish and schedule your social media posts.

You need to connect with your favorite social networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Twitter, Linked In, and others.

You can also schedule your content on the social media networks mentioned and can view your entire schedule in the “SEMrush Posting Calendar”. You can also make use of the SEMrush social media poster extension. It helps you to add content for your social media poster while browsing the web and importing the social media posts in CSV format. You can also have a display to the analytics of the social media campaigns right inside the Analytics section.

Alongside this, there are many features of Buffer or Hootsuite. SEMrush will also come up with the ability to track your competitors’ social media strategies.

SEMrush Posting Calendar

You also have the option of “Publish regularly” where you can publish the specific posts regularly thereby driving the traffic to old posts. You can also spy on your competitors’ social media posts through the social media tracker. You can see what else are they posting and thereby you can also get weekly reports in the PDF format too.

Content Marketing Toolkit – SEMrush Review

In this toolkit, you will be getting all the features that you ever need to create highly SEO optimized content for your website.

SEO Topic Research

With the tool, you can enter the topic that you are interested in writing an article about.

The topic research feature of SEMrush will be very useful for people to easily analyze the subtopics of a topic, characteristics of most of the backlinked articles, etc.

You can also find the “cards” view as a useful one to outline what content is needed to present in the article.

If you are a part of a content marketing agency, then the topic research tool by SEMrush will be a handy solution for you to get content outlines at scale.

SEO Content Template

SEO Content Template will help you to be prepared for your blog post outline and also to write content effectively. Using the suggestions, you can get the competitor’s content, semantic keywords, and the list of keywords you need to include in your blog posts to rank them higher.

SEMrush comes up with an SEO writing assistant for Google Docs that will check the content in real-time for SEO friendliness.

Brand Monitoring

It is similar to the tools like BrandMentions and Mentions do.

It helps in alerting your inbox whenever your brand has been mentioned anywhere on the Internet. It also lets you know the brand’s sentiment. It also helps greatly if you are into a reputation management agency or offering resembling services.

Brand Monitoring

You can also indulge in figuring out the mentions that have not linked to you. You can also reclaim the links by reaching them out. You can reach them with the phrase, “Hey, you have mentioned my brand, I appreciate it. But I hope you forgot to link me!!”

You can also glance at the brand mentions of your competitors and frequently unveil greater opportunities for you. You can also get alerted whenever they do guest blogging or featured one.

You just need to set all the terms that you need to monitor and SEMrush will do the hard-lifting thing for you. Until then, you can wait for the emails as SEMrush checks the mentions. It is more or less likely to set it and forget it type.

Similar to the other features of SEMrush, you can export the results of the brand mentions in the PDF and various other formats.

Content Analyzer

With the help of the Content Analyzer feature, you can enter the URL and SEMrush will help you to display the metrics of the URL including the backlinks and social shares.

It helps you to discover the number of backlinks and social shares for the content that has grown a period of time.

You can also consider adding the top 20% of your blog posts that help in driving most of the traffic for your site to “Post Tracker” to be updated regarding the recent performance.

Market Explorer

The feature of SEMrush’s competitive research toolkit is Market Explorer.

Whenever you are entering into a new niche or market, then you need to give this tool a spin to set proper benchmarks in your business. It also helps further in identifying the influencers in the niche, discover competitors, analyze new trends, etc.

Market

You just need to enter any URL. for instance, let us say Asos – a fashion company.

You can see SEMrush displaying crucial data like market-relevant sites, and the domain’s traffic sources, traffic metrics, and much more.

With this, you will get a clear idea about the expectations to keep when you indulge in a particular niche.

Other Features (Especially for Agencies)

SEMrush offers other features like the Lead Generation tool, Marketing Calendar, Projects, Notes, Reports, and other dashboards that have been geared towards agencies.

Let me explain to you some features that I have found noteworthy for you.

Lead Generation contains a site audit widget tool. The tool allows you to generate a SEMrush powered widget that allows your website’s visitors to request a free audit report.

They just need to fill up the form, and SEMrush will always email them a free website with the site audit report for them. The report will be white-labeled and you can also add your own details.

At the same time, you can get the email details of the prospect so that you can convert them to pay the clients. You can also have your own marketing calendar in order to collaborate with your team members. If you are using tools like Notion, Trello, Asana, and others, you may not get many benefits. Indeed, it is a nice addition to you due to its integration with SEMrush.

Now for all agency folks out there, you can talk a bit about reporting features.

When you hear about the “My Reports” section, you can click the “Create New Report”.

Here you can select any template as per your wish and start customizing it.

For instance, let me prepare from scratch.

There are various widgets that can be used while dragging and dropping your report. You can also use various generic widgets like headings, text, images, 2 columns, 3 columns, and page breaks. You can see it in the above screencast.

Upon generating the report, it reminds you whether to email this report, schedule the generation of the report, and also whether to include a table of contents in the report.

The report will be generated in PDF format and thus will also have SEMrush branding in it.

Other than the “My Reports” section, you can also export the reports on any page of SEMrush.

For example, when you do competitor keyword analysis by entering in any domain name in SEMrush, then you can just click on the Export button or the PDF button to download reports.

If you wish to have white label reports, then you need to go with the business plans. Or maybe you can use some PDF editors and it is worth the hassle for you.

SEMrush Pricing

SEMrush is not a cheap tool as you expect. Instead, the price starts from $99.95/month.

If you are a freelancer or a blogger, then you can avail of the pro plan that would be a great fit for you.

SEMrush Pricing

On the other hand, the Guru and Business plans are more suitable for agencies.

FAQs

Which is better: SEMrush or Ahrefs?

In my vision, SEMrush is quite better for your money when compared with Ahrefs. There are tons of features that SEMrush offers you and now also has a larger backlink database than Ahrefs. However, Ahrefs also comes up with features like SERP analysis and better data for data link analysis.

How to get a SEMrush free account? 

SEMrush has a limited free plan to use. But, planning for a pro will offer you a free trial of 30-days.

How to use SEMrush to find keywords? 

You need to make use of the competitor keyword analysis tool or the Keyword Magic tool that has been offered by SEMrush to find the keywords.

How much is SEMrush per month?

SEMrush has 3 plans namely a Pro, Guru, and Business. Each costing $99.95/month, $199.95/month, and $399.95/month respectively.

Is SEMrush right for me?

SEMrush has been a great tool for you when you are looking up all-in-one visibility online and content marketing platforms with a great money value.

What are some of the SEMrush alternatives?

The closest competitors to SEMrush are Ahrefs and Serpstat. Moz has been considered as an alternative, but today it lacks a lot of features.

How often does SEMrush update data?

Depending upon the popularity of the keywords, the data has been updated daily, weekly, and monthly. When it comes to position tracking, then the keyword positions have been updated every 24 hours.

What does the SEMrush sensor score refer to?

SEMrush sensor has Google’s rankings and algorithms tracking tool. Based on how frequently Google updates its algorithms, the sensor score changes. The higher it is, the more volatile are the rankings across the Google SERPs.

How to use SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool?

You need to head over to Keyword Magic Tool and enter your seed keyword. It will return you the broad match, exact match, and related keywords. The question-related keywords can also be filtered.

What is a good SEMrush rank? 

SEMrush assigns rankings based on the organic traffic that a website receives.

Verdict 

It is a great all-in-one SEO and marketing tool that I have come across. It is likely to be a marketing method that increases your online visibility or content marketing platform.

There are lots of marketing tools in the market, but SEMrush is like an all-in-one.

In early 2019, they expanded their backlink index and now have one of the largest backlink databases in the world. It is really great info for all the SEO folks around here.

It replaces and fits in well beating the other tools that you may be using. Such tools may include

  1. Social media poster – Buffer and Hootsuite
  2. Keyword rank tracker – Accuranker or others
  3. Brand Monitoring – BrandMentions or Mentions
  4. OnPage SEO audit – Screaming Frog
  5. Backlink tracker – LINKCheetah or other trackers
  6. Topic Research – BuzzSumo
  7. SEO Link Building Tool – BuzzStream
  8. PPC spying tools – Like iSpionage or SpyFu
  9. Evergreen social media posting – MeetEdgar or SocialBee

In a few aspects, SEMrush may not completely replace the tools but indeed does its job well.

If you want to get lots of features for the price, then SEMrush will not be your disappointing factor.

It combines all essential features for your content marketing needs from SEO, backlinks, all the way to brand monitoring, and editorial calendar.

It also comes with various features like PPC competitive research and also PLA research for eCommerce business owners.

Leave a comment

90 Days Club - Be An Effective Digital Marketer

X
Home
Account
Cart
Search