SEMrush Review 2020: Why You Should Use It or Not

Is SEMrush really worth the money? In this full review, I will show you the pros and cons of SEMrush and how it can help you with SEO.

I have heard of SEMrush 3 years ago, but I never knew it could do this many stuff all in one place until I really tried it.

In 4 months’ usage, I recommend everyone who is in the SEO world. No matter what level you are at, SEMrush is the right tool for you.

Overview of SEMrush

SEMrush is an internet marketing suite that including many tools to help you do SEO, PPC, social media marketing, etc. It provides a few detailed reports to show you the performance of your own site and your competitors’, including traffic, ranked keywords, backlinks.

It helps find profitable keywords, monitor your competitors, analyze your content and site health, and find link building opportunities. You can dig deeper by adding websites as projects.

What can SEMrush do?

SEMrush is famous for keywords research, but it can also do more than that. Let’s take a quick look at all the features that SEMrush offers.

Domain Overview

In the main dashboard, can put in a domain, a link, or a keyword to get started. First let’s try a domain whether your own or your competitor’s. SEMrush will give you a breakdown of keywords the website already rank for, paid search keywords, backlinks, top anchors, advertisers, etc.

If you run it for your own website, you can see what keywords are performing well, so you can produce more content around these topics. Some keywords are not performing that well, so you can put more efforts to optimize and promote them. SEMrush will give you ideas about how to do that. I will talk about that later.

If you put in your competitor’s domain, you can understand what they are doing. Competitor analysis is a key feature of SEO. In this helpful report, you can see what keywords your competitors already rank for and it also gives you the search volume and ranking position. I always use this report to new content ideas.

Keywords Research

Speaking of finding new keywords ideas, SEMrush is the best tool in the market. Since Google Keyword Planer does not show exact keyword volume, many users have to consider another tool for keywords research.

In SEMrush, you can input any keywords to get started. In the Keyword Overview tab, you can see the organic search results for this keyword. You can click it to run to analyze this result link or see this page. I think they also display the page title for each result.

If you want to rank a keyword, you should check the keyword difficulty metric. If you have very high domain authority, you should target the high volume keywords. Otherwise, go for the low difficult ones. Metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, competition, trends, number of results, etc are in Phrase Match and Related Keywords tabs.

If you have decided to write for a keyword, you should try to include more keywords in the Phrase Match report, and include some related keywords. If you also do paid advertisement, you can also check the Ads History tab.

The Keyword Magic Tool works like the Keyword Overview with advanced filters. You can view all keywords or only questions. Besides, you filter keywords by word count, volume, keyword difficulty, etc.

You can also connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get more organic traffic insights.

Another way to do keywords research is by using Keyword Gap. This is a great tool to find keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t. SEMrush has a detailed post that introduces this feature very well. However, in my usage, it is not as accurate as I expected.

On-Page & Tech SEO

Some of the more advanced features start to come to life when you add projects into the Dashboard. The Pro plan can have 5 projects. It should be enough for your own websites. You can use this to better understand what opportunities are available to you and how your sites are currently performing.

Firstly, there’s basic information on the basic health of the site, it basically does an SEO audit on a regular basis. It also gives things that can help to improve this score, and this includes any types of issues you might have with a site. Anything from crawl errors to missing H1 tags, to under-optimized images, to dead pages and 404 errors.

Rank Tracking

You can do the keywords position (rank) tracking. This helps you to understand where your website is currently ranking for the keywords that you’ve identified, so that’s an excellent tool.

There is also On-Page SEO Checker to give you on-page SEO ideas. You can see how your site performing on social media.

Brand Mentions

You can monitor your brand and mentions of your business. This is particularly helpful with reputation management where and why you’re getting mentions for your brand. You can also build links with unlinked brand mentions. You can also use it to monitor your competitors’ mentions.

Link Building

The backlink audit tool is really important. Unhealthy backlinks can actually hurt your SEO. This tells you what backlinks are pointing to your website and it will also give you an indication if there are any toxic backlinks.

If you integrate it with Google Search Console, you will get a more accurate link profile.

You can run a backlinks analysis for your competitors. If you just add your keywords into the tool it will give you a list of keywords you can actually go out there and build. Based on what your competitors have ranked for but not limited to, it also tells you how easy those links are to achieve and it will categorize them as well.

It tells you if the link is a blog comment, or a forum post, or a guest blogging opportunity; it breaks down all these possible link building opportunities and makes it as easy as possible. All you need to do is follow the list and go out there and get as many of the links on that list as you possibly can reach for.

There is also a Backlink Gap tool, which works like the Keyword Gap. After using this method to continue building quality links to your site, your site will perform incredibly well in the long term.

From the test I ran, I find out that SEMrush’s competitor Ahrefs can discover a little bit more backlinks than SEMrush or any other tools out there. Even though, SEMrush still does a great job in helping you build more links.

PCC Tools

If you’re doing paid advertising, you can go to the Advertising Dashboard.  It is excellent for helping you run the best possible for campaigns. There’s an Ad builder that actually helps you build text ads. There’s traffic insights, which connect to Google analytics. There’s a content analyzer tool that helps you identify useful content, especially things like guest blogging opportunities and things like that.

SEMrush Pricing Plan

SEMrush offers a free plan that only allows you to do the basic stuff with limitations. Besides that, you will have Pro, Guru, Business, and Enterprise plan.

Pro plan is the starter pricing plan of SEMrush. If you are a beginner with a limited budget, this plan is suitable for you. It costs you $99.95/month and you can do everything from competitor’s analysis to keyword research to site audit.

Pro plan is the one that I use, and I recommend you try the Pro plan 7 days for free. If you find it not able to meet your regular usage, you can upgrade to a higher plan.

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s a lot of tools here that you can use. With SEMrush, you don’t have to use other individual tools, such as on-page audit tool (Screaming Frog), rank tracking tools, link building tools, link audit tools, keywords research tool, and  PPC tools.

With SEMrush, you can pretty much do everything from one dashboard from keyword research right through finding link opportunities and building those links. It is quite obvious why I regard this as one of the best SEO tools on the market in 2018.

Whether you’re working on a small budget and you want one tool that can do everything, or you’re an agency and you want to start putting all of your clients into this dashboard, SEMrush is a good choice. I recommend everyone who is in the SEO or SEM world use this tool. Do you think SEMrush is suitable for you after reading this SEMrush review? Share your thoughts in the comment section.