Luckily, there are several great SEO tools on the market that digital marketers can use to handle online marketing. One of such tools is SEMrush. SEMrush makes SEO and other related digital marketing strategies easier to handle and manage, especially by those with little or no SEO knowledge. Read on to understand what SEMrush is and whether the tool is safe, accurate, and useful as claimed. 

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is an all-in-one tool that helps digital marketers to easily run and apply digital marketing strategies, such as SEO, SEM, SMO, and SMM campaigns. This tool is specially designed for those who need help with digital marketing. If you have little or no experience/knowledge in digital marketing, SEMrush makes the entire SEO process easy for you to understand and apply. 

Business owners can use SEMrush to identify trends within their industry niche. This useful tool audits on-page SEO practices and helps website owners to improve their web pages. SEMrush enables website owners to understand their web pages better and optimize them for SEO, leading to better lead generation.

More so, you can use SEMrush to identify valuable keywords for your marketing campaign. This tool will help you learn about the specific keywords your competitions are using and how they rank in the search engines. SEMrush gives an abundance of insight on how business owners can match up to the competition.

SEMrush has a huge database containing more than 120 million keywords and 45 million domains. It’ll track anything from the competitor analysis, the organic position of a landing URL or domain on search engine result pages, CPC ads, to AdWords ads and their positions, etc.

In a nutshell, SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that digital marketers can use for keyword research, tracking the competitive keywords used competitions, running an SEO audit of websites, and looking for back-linking opportunities, etc.

Although SEMrush helps to run SEO, content marketing, SEM, SMO, pay-per-click (PPC), and SMM campaigns, this post will focus mainly on using SEMrush for SEO campaigns.

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SEMrush Features

As stated above, SEMrush is an all-in-one digital marketing tool that enables business owners to research and track many important elements of their online business, such as SEO, SMO, paid ads, etc. SEMrush is used primarily by many as their one-stop source for all SEO practices.

SEMrush has five different toolkits, which are:

∎     SEO Toolkit: This tool helps specifically with on-page web optimization, link building, keyword research, and competitive analysis.

∎     Advertising Toolkit: This tool focuses specifically on paid ads (SEM). It helps you to find valuable keywords that will drive traffic and generate results (without stretching your budget).

∎     Social Media Toolkit: This tool handles all social media advertising strategies. You can use it to schedule, plan, and track all social media marketing efforts.

∎     Content Marketing Toolkit: Currently, content is king and is essential in all digital marketing strategies. This tool helps you to ensure that you’re not only creating the right content, but you’re also optimizing it and giving it the best shot at SERP ranking.

∎     Competitive Research Toolkit: This is a very important tool that enables you to track and monitor your competitors’ positions like their organic research, traffic analysis, domain overviews, backlink analysis, etc. so you can improve upon your marketing performance.

As indicated earlier, this post will focus mainly on the SEO toolkit. Based on the chosen toolkit, here is a further breakdown of what SEMrush can help you do:

Keyword Research: This is the primary step to SEO. It would be best if you researched the relevant and valuable keywords to use in your content. SEMrush enables you to easily research and identify relevant keywords that you have a better chance of ranking for. These keywords will have a great impact on your business.

Competitive Analysis: You’re not running your business in isolation. You have competitors over which you need to gain an edge. SEMrush allows you to see exactly what your competitors are ranking for as well as the current metrics of their website/webpage. This will help you to figure out your position with your competitors and if you’ll be able to outrank them or not.

On-Site Analysis: Since your website is an online representation of your business, you must take your website’s on-site analysis seriously. SEMrush will analyze every one of your webpages and inform you if anything is wrong or not with it from both the technical and optimization viewpoint. If anything is wrong, SEMrush will also tell you exactly how to fix it. More so, this tool will make useful and practical suggestions on how to improve your webpages for an improved Google ranking. 

Position Tracking: To know if your SEO campaign is yielding the desired results, you need to always track and measure your performance to see how things are improving. SEMrush features an in-depth position-tracking ability that enables you to see your current position and evaluate whether there’s an improvement or decline from the last time you checked. It will also help you to see if your listings have image or video results, featured snippets, ads, etc.

Opportunities: Aside from tracking and measuring your KPIs, SEMrush will help you to identify opportunities that relate to any of your webpages. It’ll also suggest valuable keywords that may work well. More so, SEMrush will give ideas on link-building and suggest relevant websites in your industry from which you can obtain a link.

Being able to rely on SEMrush for all of these features makes the tool a total game-changer. Hence, SEMrush is a very useful and necessary tool in digital marketing. Adopt SEMrush today to dominate SERPs in your niche and find out what your competitions are up to.

SEMrush Pricing

SEMrush has three pricing plans – Pro, Guru, Business. All pricing plans are recurring and renewed monthly. Even with the increase in pricing plans in January 2017, SEMrush remains competitively priced (at least not costlier than what Raven Tools, Moz, and Ahrefs offer). 

∎ Pro – $99.95 per month. This is the basic plan and is perfect for bloggers, beginners, or those managing 1 to 3 websites.

∎ Guru – $199.95 per month. This plan is best for solopreneurs and small business owners. It enables users to run more data, track more keywords or search terms, and build branded reports. This plan is the ideal solution if you have multiple projects and clients.

∎ Business – $399.95 per month. This plan is suitable for marketing teams of large firms and marketing agencies.

The table below contains the features and restrictions of each pricing plan:

 *When you visit SEMrush’s official website, you can click here to  get 7 day free access to SEMrush Pro.

Aside from the pricing plans listed above, SEMrush offers a custom plan and a plan for enterprise customers.

Is SEMrush Worth it?

Considering the pricing plans above, is SEMrush worth it?

Well, considering the many features and benefits of SEMrush, the tool is worth the price. The $99.95 monthly charges may look expensive for a starter, but if you run a monetized website, you would realize that using SEMrush can help you make over $1200 from your website in a year.

Is the SEMrush Keyword Tool Accurate?

 The SEMrush keyword tool is accurate. When compared with other similar tools, SEMrush does the same function. When used for keyword research, you would get similar or very close figures with what you would achieve from other Google keyword research tools. So, if you choose SEMrush, you’ve made a very good choice.

Which is better: SEMrush vs. Ahrefs

Both SEMRush and Ahrefs are two popular tools that help digital marketers or business owners to optimize their website/webpage for search engines. Both tools offer useful information that website owners can use for:

∎ Creating new web content that may attract organic traffic.

∎ Identifying opportunities for link-building from other websites to your website.

∎ Changing technical aspects of your website so enhance ranking in SERPs – SEO audit.

When used for domain analysis, SEMRush does better than Ahrefs. While Ahrefs tends to give a more accurate result, SEMrush contextualizes its results into high, medium, or low, giving users an indication of how accurate the analysis is.

In terms of keyword research features, SEMrush wins only if you major in performing keyword research for Google searches. Ahrefs, on the other hand, allows users to perform keyword research for nine other search engines, which include Yahoo, YouTube, and Amazon.

More so, Ahrefs focuses mainly on organic search and a bit of PPC, while SEMrush covers both organic search and PPC (including live ads, distribution data, CPC). So, if you’re interested in information from organic search and want to perform keyword research for several search engines, embrace Ahrefs. However, SEMrush is the best for you if organic, PPC, and CPC data is important to you using Google search engine alone.

In terms of backlink analysis, SEMrush presents the analysis and key stats better in simple and attractive graphs that help users to digest them easily. More so, SEMrush provides better link intersect tools than Ahrefs because SEMrush allows users to compare their website’s backlinks against four other websites while Ahrefs is limited to just three websites. Nevertheless, Ahrefs features an “anchor context,” which is missing in SEMrush. 

In terms of broken link analysis, both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer users with a means to identify broken outbound links. However, Ahrefs is more straightforward when spotting broken inbound links. For instance, all you need to do in Ahrefs is to key in a domain into the “Site Explorer,” navigate to the “outgoing links” section, and hit the “broken links” option to view results. Whereas, with SEMrush, users have to carry out a full website audit before broken outbound links can be spotted.

In terms of site auditing, both tools provide lots of useful suggestions, but SEMrush provides better auditing. When compared to Ahrefs, SEMrush is an easier site auditing tool. SEMrush automatically presents users with an easy-to-follow to-do list.

In terms of ease of use, Ahrefs is very easy to use and enables users to dive straight into results and get easy-to-digest data fast. SEMrush, on the other hand, is the best for project-based work and outreach.

In terms of pricing, SEMrush offers three pricing plans, as stated above:

∎ Pro Plan – $99.95/month

∎ Guru Plan – $199.95/month

∎ Business Plan – $399.95/month

SEMrush offers a 7 day trial and a 16 percent discount if a user pays upfront for a year. Ahrefs, on the other hand, offers four plan:

∎ Lite Plan – $99/month

∎ Standard Plan – $179/month

∎ Advanced Plan – $399/month

∎ Agency Plan – $999/month

Effectively Ahrefs offers a two-month free if a user pays upfront for a year. Considering both plans with their feature carefully, SEMrush offers a better pricing plan than Ahrefs.

7 Practical Applications of SEMrush

For the purpose of this review, here are ten practical applications of SEMrush that users should start using right away.

1. For Analyzing Website

You need to see and know your website’s current state and how your website is performing before you start your competition analysis. This is called website analysis, and it is very important. There are three important things that every web owner must know about their website. These are:

∎ Your website’s top organic keywords or search terms.

∎ Your website’s organic search positions – SEO ranking.

∎ The total number of backlinks on your blog or website.

Luckily, SEMrush is a very good and affordable tool to analyze your website. This tool gathers and presents this necessary information within a few minutes. For instance, using Domain Analytics on SEMrush enables you to see how your website, as well as websites of your competitors, is performing. 

With SEMrush, you’ll see how your website is performing on parameters, which include the number of paid keywords, organic keywords, backlinks, and traffic from paid and organic search.

Simply key in your domain name (website address) in the SEMrush search bar, choose “Domain Analytics” from the drop-down menu, and click on “Search.” Click on “Organic Search” on the results page to get data on your website’s organic keywords, total traffic, and SEO ranking. If you’re running PPC ads, then you can click on “Paid Search” and “Display Advertising” to obtain some useful information on your ads.

You can also click on “Backlinks” to obtain data about the backlinks your website has presently, which include the types of backlinks, the number of referring domains, and a percentage split of nofollow vs. follow links. SEMrush enables you to export these results into a CSV or Excel file for further decision making.

2. For Identify Your Organic Competitors

An important step involved in improving your SEO ranking and dominating search engine result pages is to identify your organic competitors. The aim of identifying your organic competitors is to understand what your competitors are doing, how they are performing, and how you can perform better than them.

You can use SEMrush to identify your organic competitors. To do so, type your domain name (website address) in the SEMrush search bar and choose Domain Analytics, and then navigate to the Competitors tab. You would see several bubbles representing each competitor.

When you allow your mouse to hover over each one of the bubbles, you should see your competitor’s organic keywords and traffic.

When you scroll down the page, you would see a list of all your organic competitors.

You may be quite surprised when you notice how long the list is and the number of competitors you have, but you don’t have to be intimidated. Instead, closely observe the following “very” important metrics: Competition Level, Common Keywords, and SE Keywords. These metrics rank your competitors and help you to identify your closest competitors – these are the websites you should outrank in SERPs.

3. For Site Auditing and Fixing Errors

Site auditing on SEMrush enables you to carry out a diagnostic check of your site to identify any error, fix on-page SEO, and fix other technical SEO problems with your website.

Conducting a site audit with SEMrush on your website is very easy and straightforward, though it can take some time, depending on how many webpages you choose to audit.

To perform a site audit, click on “Add New Project,” input all the necessary details, and click on “Setup Site Audit.” Choose the number of webpages you want SEMrush to check per audit, skip every other step, and select “Start Site Audit.”

Once the site audit procedure is completed, SEMrush will display a report showing the overall SEO status of your website in percentage. It’ll also highlight warnings and errors that may hurt your SEO.

The errors highlighted in red are very critical issues your website is currently facing. They are the SEO problems you must fix ASAP.

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4. For On-Page SEO Checking

This is formerly known as “SEO Ideas.” On-Page SEO checking is one of the latest and favorite features added to SEMrush. This On-Page SEO Checking tool enables users to quickly check if their web content complies with on-page and off-page SEO elements alike, such as meta description, H tags (H1, H2, etc.), page title, backlinks’ reputation and trustworthiness, and content’s quality and relevancy.

This feature analyses each webpage and gives instant actionable SEO tips to optimize these webpages. 

5. For PPC Analysis

SEMrush is a powerful PPC tool. That one of the edge SEMrush has over many other SEO tools like Ahrefs. Keeping an eye on your competitors’ PPC ads is an important step in matching with and staying ahead of your competitors.

SEMrush enables you to monitor the keywords your competitors are targeting, their current rankings in search engine result pages, and even have a peek at copies of their ads. All these will enable you to polish your PPC ads and optimize them and your landing pages for a great impact.

6. For Finding Better Advertising Opportunities

If you run a blog, one way you can make money from your blog is by displaying ads. Hence, you have to look for better advertising opportunities – businesses to display ads on your blog. This is known as affiliate marketing and is better than Google AdWords.

However, for you to become a successful affiliate marketer, you need to create great content. Creating web content that is helpful, interesting, and informative to your audience is the first step to making money via affiliate marketing.

With SEMrush, you’ll be able to analyze the keywords you’re trying to rank for and identify various online businesses and companies that are paying for PPC ads that are based on these keywords. SEMrush displays these keywords in a user-friendly way and connects them to the businesses/companies using them. This will help you to easily know which business/company to reach out to for better advertising opportunities.

Here are some of the information that SEMrush enables you to know about the companies or businesses that you want to advertise for on your blog or website.

∎ Domains that are paying for the traffic

∎ Common keywords these companies are bidding for and which your blog is ranking for

∎ Keywords that their PPC ads are targeting

∎ Traffic that their ads generated

∎ Cost of driving the traffic through these PPC ads

With this information, you’re in a better position to convince these companies and businesses that your blog or website is ranking high for the keyword that they’re trying to target. So, advertising on your blog or website is more profitable than spending it all on Google Ads.

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7: For Creating an Effective Guest Blogging Strategy

One way to improve your site’s outbound links and authority is guest blogging, and there are some websites that accept guest posts. These websites are so many that identifying the best website to place your guest posts is difficult.

However, SEMrush enables you to carry out deep research on any blog or website where you’re considering placing your guest posts. You can easily find out the weaknesses and strengths of websites you’re considering for guest blogging. In a nutshell, SEMrush will help you to know if placing guest blogs on these websites would be beneficial or not.

Conclusion

With the content above, including the seven practical applications of SEMrush, you can see that SEMrush is a safe, accurate, and very good SEO tool to use for your website.

Click this affiliate link to learn more about Search Engine Marketing and driving traffic to your company’s website.

Whether you’re a business owner, runs an ecommerce business, a blogger, an internet marketer, or a member of a marketing team, you’ll find SEMrush very critical and useful to your plans because it will help you to identify the keywords and search terms used by your competitors to drive traffic and also identify better advertising opportunities.

 So click to get your free 7 day Semrush Trial.