Semrush Review 2021 (+14 Days GURU Plan)

In this article, I would review the Semrush Digital Marketing suite from top to bottom. Also, I’ll show you six quick wins to do right away with Semrush. You will be able to hit the ground running and get the most from this SEO tools suite.

Let’s get started!

#1. What is Semrush, and what can it do for me?

Semrush started in 2008 as a set of SEO tools with only a couple of users, but now it’s even more than that. Twelve years later, it evolved into a robust platform that helps marketers worldwide grow their online visibility.

Today, Semrush has over 50 tools for SEO, content marketing, advertising, social media, digital PR, and competitor research. Just to name several of the tools available at your disposal:

Let’s get into more details about Semrush tools. Shall we?

#1.1 Semrush Domain Analytics

I consider domain analytics the primary tool of Semrush as it can give you a complete overview of a domain name. In a nutshell, you can see how much traffic it gets, how many keywords it ranks for, and the country’s distribution, if it’s doing any PPC ads, the number of the backlinks, competitors, the pages it ranks organically, and keyword ranking evolutions.

As you can see from the picture above, Monetize.info was hit by the Google Jun 7 update. Using the traffic graph is easy to identify what was causing a traffic drop and take recovering measures.

It’s also useful to spot top organic keywords and position changes, as I’ve outlined in the picture below. Keep in mind that you can do this for any site. It’s handy to analyze both your site and your competitors.

#1.2 Traffic analytics

Traffic analytics is a new feature of Semrush that no other tool is offering. It is a part of a separate Competitive Insights add-on, priced at $200, that you can purchase with every plan.

Traffic Analytics works by giving you an almost Google-Analytics-level sneak peek into your competitors’ websites. You can get to Traffic Analytics by going from the dashboard to Competitive Research –> Traffic Analytics.

Below is a traffic comparison between the major players in the SEO tools industry. You can do this in the regular traffic overview to see who’s getting more pageviews, a better bounce rate, etc. I think this tool helps allow you to figure out what page designs are working/not working.

In the audience overlap, you can see how much traffic you are sharing with your competitors. For instance, from the picture below, you would see that Semrush is sharing a ±14% audience with Ahrefs and 16% with Moz.com

Check this blog post from Semrush to understand all the capabilities of this tool. As I’ve previously said, it is just like you would take a peek into your competitor’s Google Analytics and see all their sources of traffic and volumes.

#1.3 Backlinks audit

This is an important tool to help you maintain upkeep on the sites linked back to yours. To maintain a healthy SEO status, you want to make sure that the backlinks you’re receiving come from reputable sources.

Also, to protect your site from being penalized by Google for being affiliated with non-reputable sites, use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to check where your backlinks are coming from.

Last year, Monetize.info was attacked through negative SEO by placing hundreds of thousands of low-quality links with porn anchor texts. I’ve used the Backlinks audit tool to identify these links, create a disavow file, and upload it to Google.

With the Semrush Backlink Audit tool, you’ll be able to find all your backlinks via the Search Console integration, discover and remove any bad backlinks, report backlinks to Google’s Disavow tool and keep your backlink record clean and full of only the sites you want to be affiliated with.

#1.4 Link building tool

With the Semrush Link building tool, You can find thousands of backlink opportunities literally all targeted to your business and your keywords.

It’s an outreach tool combined with a backlinks monitoring tool. All you have to do is set up an email account and a pitch and Semrush Link Building tool to contact the website owners with your pitch.

#1.5 Site Audit

On-page SEO is these days more important than ever. Titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, h1 headings, website speed, duplicate content, broken links are settings you need to get right if you want to increase your website’s exposure in search.

Once you register your website with the Site Audit, you will get a report with the errors and warnings you have to fix. This is how the audit screen looks like:

As you can see from the picture above, there is room for improvement. The errors should be addressed immediately next to the warnings, and you should look at notices too. As always said, if your on-site SEO isn’t close to good, it makes your life difficult on off-site SEO.

#1.6 Keyword Magic Tool

Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool enables you to find over 2 million keywords to choose from after entering one “seed” keyword. You can then sort the results by search volume, ranking difficulty, competitiveness, CPC data, and more in one easy to read table.

These results are related to the seed keyword you entered, and you’re able to narrow down the results by search topic further so you can hone in on the keywords that are most relevant to you.

This tool helps you find long-tail keywords that apply to your business to create more opportunities to target those keywords in your content.

#1.7 Position Tracker

Your keywords position in search engines is essential, primarily if you work hard at optimizing your content, product pages, and website for SEO. So make use of Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to monitor your national, regional, and local search engine positions for any keyword.

This data is updated daily, so you’ll always have accurate information regarding where you’re ranking for your target keywords at all times.

Semrush also has a mobile app that will let you view your keyword position when you’re on the go. Currently, the app is available for Android phones but soon maybe an iOS version. I don’t know about you, but I already have Google Analytics and Facebook Pages apps on mobile, so the Semrush app is a nice addition.

#1.8 Brand Monitoring

When your brand gets mentioned by other brands or customers on social media, blogs, or just on the web in general, it can have a hugely positive effect on your brand’s image as well as your SEO in some cases.

The Brand Monitoring tool allows you to easily track your website’s mentions and your competitors’ brand, product, or service on the web and social media. All mentions are assigned a sentiment based on text analysis to see the users’ general opinion on your brand or competitors’ brands: positive, neutral, or negative.

Speaking about competitors, Semrush Brand Monitoring allows you to get insights into how your competitors create opportunities – and seize them! With its help, you can research their past and current promotional activities and adopt their best tactics.

#1.9 Content Analyzer

With Semrush Content Analyzer, you may dive deep into your content analytics. You can better understand how it’s performing and how your audience is engaging with it. For each particular piece of content, you will view essential metrics such as visitor sessions, durations, bounce rate, and social shares and backlinks. You can also compare posts against one another and even get suggestions on how to optimize your content for search engines better.

Semrush Post Tracking offers you all the metrics you need to evaluate your content’s results on other websites, which was always a struggle.

#1.10 Organic Traffic Insights

Organic Traffic Insights combines your Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush data into a single dashboard. This includes click-through rate, sessions, and volume with organic keywords and rankings found by Semrush and Google Search Console.

With this integration, you can uncover those “not-provided” keywords from Google Analytics and quickly cross-reference data sources to get the most accurate overall look at your website’s organic search performance.

Organic Traffic Insights helps you better understand what is happening on your website, so you will be able to improve your SEO strategies based on traffic statistics and the keywords you already have in your ‘portfolio.’

#1.11 PPC Keyword Tool

This tool is specifically designed to help you create successful PPC campaigns. Obtain your keywords from various sources, narrow down your keyword list, and remove duplicates with one click. Further, get rid of keywords that cause your ads to compete against each other so that you will have a  list of keywords to the best and most relevant words.

With the Semrush PPC Keyword tool, you can create different campaigns and ad groups with just one click.

#1.12 Social Media Tracker

Social Media Tracker will let you track the social audience, activity, and engagement of you and your competitors on Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

You can compare your engagement trend to that of your competitors, see the total number of likes, shares, and comments. Also, this tool will pull all your results into a customizable, easy-to-read PDF report. Use it to showcase your results and impress the audience!

#1.13 Social Media Poster

Semrush Social Media Poster helps you schedule your posts on all major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Check the results to find out the best time for your post, create posts while you’re surfing your website or another one, edit images. You can even import posts from CSV files. Also, add your competitor’s social profiles and learn from them what works and what doesn’t. You will get weekly updates by email and can create PDF reports.

#1.14 Advertising research

The advertising research tool is powerful. Later on, in the SEMrush tutorial part, I will explain how you can use it properly to make money as a blogger.

With this tool, you will be able to analyze in detail all the ads of your competitors. You will see the keywords they are bidding on, other competitors that bid on the same keyword, ad copies, all ads used to date, and all the landing pages they are advertising.

Now you can inspect all your competitors’ ads or even yours (both active and past) using the Semrush Advertising tool. which is included in the Semrush Guru plan:

#2. Semrush Plans and Pricing

Semrush offers multiple plans for different use cases. You should pick the one that fits your budget and needs better.

On top of that, if you need Traffic Analytics (the tool I described at point 1.2 of this review), you should add $200 as this is now a part of a separate Competitive Insights add-on purchased separately.

If you subscribe for one year in advance you will get a 16% discount on your Semrush subscription.

Check here a full feature comparison done by Semrush. I suggest you look closely at the features and decide what you need and what you don’t. Also, keep in mind that you can upgrade or downgrade anytime you want.

Their GURU plan is the most popular one. According to Semrush, it is used by 64% of their paid users. I go with the GURU plan, but If I would be on a tight budget or just started, I would go with the PRO plan.

Let’s continue our Semrush review with the PROs and CONs of this digital marketing suite.

#3. Semrush PROs and CONs

I’m using SEMrush for over seven years already, and I have to tell you it’s one of my favorite tools.

Considering all these, Semrush is a powerful SEO suite worth the money you pay for if you’re using it regularly.

Keep in mind that Semrush is not really set up and forget tool. It still has plenty of automation tools like SEO audit, backlink audit, advertising research. Still, if you want to use it to its maximum capacity, you should dedicate at least several hours weekly to set up everything and analyze the data gathered.

#4. Semrush Support

The Semrush Academy and Semrush Community are great places to learn more about Semrush and its features. Besides English, there are tutorials available in French and Spanish.

Semrush worked a lot to make the suite available to a large audience. The website and tools are available in the following languages: English, Spanish, Deutch, French, Italian, Portugues, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.

Phone support is available through local numbers for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, and Australia. If you live in these countries, you shouldn’t have any long call charges.

If you prefer to use email, you could use this email address: mail@semrush.com. A LiveChat is also available.

Ok, now that you’ve read the Semrush review, it’s time to activate the Semrush deal and put into practice what exactly can Semrush do for you.

#6. Wrapping Everything Up

SEO isn’t the easiest thing in the world, far from it. BUT it’s not as hard as it seems. Using Semrush, you can start laying the groundwork for a successful SEO strategy. Monitor it and update it for your small business right now.

So what do you think?

Are you already using Semrush?

I’d love to hear your comments in the section below!

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