SEMrush’s Pro plan has a starting price of $119.95 per Month. It is an increase over $20, but you could save some cash by purchasing an annual plan. SEMrush offers the Pro plan which gives 10,000 results across keyword and domain analytics, along with up to 3,000 searches and reports each day. SEMrush also prices in terms of “projects,” or every piece of SEO research associated with a particular domain. The Pro plan allots five projects, 500 keywords to track, a 100,000 crawled page limit, and up to 50 associated social media profiles along with 5 scheduled PDF reports. SEMrush claims that this plan is affordable for most SMBs.

The Guru plan, which costs $229.95 per month is the next up. This tier gives you 30,000 search results per report, and 5,000 searches/reports per day. There is a big boost to 50 total projects that the SEO team can use for expanding their research or targeting. In addition to 20 PDF reports and custom branding, the Guru plan includes historical data access as well 1,500 keywords, 300,000 pages crawled and 100 social profiles. Fourth, there is the $449.95/month business plan. This tier allows you to access unlimited products, product listing ads, white-labeled PDF reports, multiuser management, and API access.

SEMrush can also provide custom solutions for companies with specific marketing requirements. This includes custom keyword databases, limits and on-site trainings.

SEMrush Dashboard is simple. The first thing you see is a snapshot of Domain Analytics, showing a quick breakdown of current keywords and traffic coming from organic and paid sources. There are widgets that will help you with each part of your recent SEO project. The boxes I received for my PCMag tester project included tools to track position, perform site audits, audit backlinks, and monitor brand. Moz, Ahrefs, and Moz integrate with social media and allow for brand monitoring, mention tracking and brand monitoring. However, SEMrush was the only SEO tool that I tried. The left-hand navigation bar of SEMrush has five tabs: Domain Analytics Keyword Analytics Project, Keyword Analytics and Project. It also includes its Lead Generation Tool and My Reports. Since business users tend to be using these tabs most frequently when searching the search engine results pages (SERP), it makes sense that this section of reviews will focus primarily upon ad-hoc keywords research. As such, I focused my testing largely on SEMrush’s Keyword Analytics tooling.

During testing, I used five identical keywords to examine how the results of SEO and other keyword recommendations varied. The five keywords I used were: “pcmag,” “digital marketing,” “online shopping,” “IT consultant,” and “small business accounting.” The reason I chose this combination was to simulate real-life business search terms then find related search results and competitive spots ripe for targeting.

SEMrush offers a variety of search options. For example, you can set your search bar to display any number of metrics. After selecting Keyword Overview, a number of charts and interactive visualizations were displayed. SEMrush, for example, provided me with information about organic and paid searches, as well as a breakdown on the average monthly search volume, along with an estimated cost per-click of what a paid results would cost in various countries. SEMrush can’t filter search results by city, like KWFinder. However, it offers the possibility to filter by countries. One unique filter SEMrush provides is an option to toggle between desktop and mobile search traffic. SEMrush was the only tool I tried that allowed me to toggle between mobile and desktop search traffic. It has now expanded its mobile-specific databases from the US-only version in its initial review to include 16 more international databases. These are mostly for European businesses.

SEMrush is now more popular and has improved its search engine results page (SERP) breakdowns. SEMrush uses the Positions report to show you what keywords your competitors have lost. With this report you can track the changes and find new opportunities for your domain. The company also created the Domain vs. Domain tool to help you compare keywords.

The platform’s renovated Position Tracking tool includes smart filters that allow you to check which of your target keywords trigger different SERP features, which of those SERP features you’ve managed to earn, and which of them your rivals occupy. With the added benefit of hyper-local targeting, you can also set up multiple-targeting campaigns to track different locations, devices, and cities within one project. You can also create tasks in Trello and assign work to other members of your team using the tool’s integration with Trello.

Below the traffic breakdown is where I found the meat of SEMrush’s ad-hoc keyword search. SEMrush provides both phrase-match and related keywords. This is Google Ad. The Words parameter allows for very close variations of keywords. Both of these breakdowns are also available from the left-hand nav. The boxes do not include CPC and search volume. I only found these difficulty scores when I clicked on “view complete report”. This allowed me to find the keywords that were most relevant for optimization.

Referring to the above, a difficulty score (all-in-one number of 1-100) factors Page Authority (PA), Domain Authority (DA), SEO metrics, as well data like keyword volume, paid search ads influence on search results and how competitive each position is. Experts indicate that a good score on which to target here is 50, while anything above 60 is significantly more difficult to topple.

That said, SEMrush does offer quite a bit of built-in reporting and organization functionality, particularly through its Projects feature. You can click on the Projects tab on the left-hand menu to access a dashboard which centralizes domain data. It includes current health scores based upon SEMrush crawling data and position tracking information. The most important feature in SEMrush is SEO Ideas.

The importance of an SEO tool’s ability to offer proactive suggestions and optimization recommendations can’t be overstated. SEO Ideas let me enter my test keywords to be associated with landing pages I wish to optimize for specific search terms. SEMrush completed a lengthy analysis and gave me many ideas. They were broken down into three categories: Strategy Ideas (suggested pages high in search engine rankings with room for growth), Semantic Ideas or Content Ideas (onpage content and keyword suggestion), Backlink Ideas and Technical SEO Ideas. SEMrush is also compatible with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This allows you to retrieve specific landing pages directly from either of those sites.

SEMrush has also released a new tool in this vein called Keyword Magic, which generates up to three million ideas for keywords based off a seed keyword you’re targeting. Keywords automatically get divided into groups (based upon the presence of related words within them) and subgroups. Keyword Analyzer will accept keywords. They can not be separated into campaign lists or customized lists. Keyword Magic can be used to search for keywords that are likely to trigger SERP features. It also allows you find keywords that answer questions.

For example, some of my Content Ideas were to use targeted keywords in the body, h1 tags, and enrich the pages with related keywords. Each idea has a small bar to show how challenging it is, along with a “Why should this be done?” explanation. Explanation.

SEMrush provides more SEO Ideas than we reviewed in our first review. SEMrush is already compatible with Google Search Console. However, you can now use SEO Ideas filters to determine the most valuable pages that need optimization. These are determined based on impressions and click-through rate (CTR). After you choose which pages you want to work on, SEMrush will prioritize them for you based on how easy it would be for you to implement all the necessary changes and how much traffic you could possibly gain as a result. The latest tool is more comprehensive than the one we reviewed in our first review. Instead of providing suggestions without context, it applies those recommendations to your pages and then compares them to other pages. This is a great feature for SMBs without any previous SEO experience. The SEO Ideas feature in SEMrush was by far the most helpful recommendation tool I tested.

SEMrush offers a drag and drop custom PDF report maker. It was easy to modify the formatting of a report and create templates. I could add headings or columns to any page break or column, as well as pull in keyword or domain data. SEMrush reports have also been the most improved area of SEMrush since its initial review. A number of new reports were released and more capabilities added.

Traffic Analytics reports calculate which channels (search, referral, and social traffic) competitors use to get traffic. This is based on data from clickstreams and third-party providers. Pages Report shows the top performing pages of your competitors and performs a detailed subdomain keyword analysis. Rankings for particular keywords are also provided.

SEMrush, an integrated SEO platform is an excellent choice. A beta tag has been removed by the company for some of its most revolutionary features. SEMrush offers all that is required to manage a business’ SEO strategy, as well as keyword management. SEMrush’s Keyword Magic and SEO Ideas features could come in handy. These will help SEMrush more effectively connect SEO to marketing.

Editors’ Choice Moz Pro might sport a better overall SEO optimization tool set, and Spyfu the better user experience and bottom-line business metrics, but SEMrush is a powerful SEO platform in its own right. The price has increased since our original review and there are some issues with keyword management, but the platform still remains a strong choice. SEMrush’s unique SEO Ideas recommendations are a highlight. There is much to enjoy about it. This SEO optimization tool can accomplish almost all of your needs.

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This Semrush Review will test one of the most popular SEO tools.

How does it compare to:

Domain analysis

Keyword research features

Tracking your rank

Backlink analysis

Semrush does not just provide keyword research tools. It also gives you a collection of tools for content marketing (so long you’re on a Guru) plan.

These will allow you to:

Find interesting topics for writing

SEO audit of your current content

Search for keywords used by your visitors in their posts

You can monitor brand mentions.

My favourite feature in Semrush’s content marketing toolkit is the ‘SEO writing assistant’ which allows you to copy and paste content into Semrush for review (you can also write copy within Semrush and get real-time advice on it).

Semrush can be a very solid SEO tool. It provides you with all the essential data needed to create a profitable SEO project. I find its most outstanding features to be its link building tool and its site auditing tool. The first gives you the ability to use a CRM-style approach for building backlinks, and the second gives you a quick checklist of possible ways you could improve both your technical and on page SEO.

But what are its main disadvantages? Well, the only search engine it provides data for is Google; all accounts only come with one user account (‘seat’); and several key features can only be used as part of a ‘project’ (with limits applying to the number of projects you can run concurrently).

It’s also a bit disappointing that some of the competitive intelligence features can only be unlocked via a rather pricey $200 per month add-on.

Semrush offers all you need for improving your search engine ranking. It is recommended that you use the Semrush tool before buying. You can get a free extended trial here.

Our overall rating: 4.3/5