SEMrush Review + Example

Keyword research plays an important role in online marketing and the use of the internet as a whole. SEMrush is a powerful target marketing tool that uses keyword research on the internet to reach out to your audience. Poor use or choice of keywords will generate low traffic and lead to loss of sales.

Marketers need to understand people's needs to be able to generate enough traffic. Keyword research plays an important role in digital marketing and the internet as a whole, and it's important to use tools like SEMrush for your online marketing campaigns. Tools like SEMrush are necessary to get the right content and products to the right people.

I am a big fan of SEMrush, and I have extensively used it for a lot of my SEO and content activities. In this guide, I will cover SEMrush features, pricing, as well as actionable tips that will help you optimize your organic ranking, increase your web traffic, and improve your ROI like it has for me.

What is SEMrush: A Quick Backstory

Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitriy Melnikov launched SEMrush in 2008 after their first SEO tool, SEOquake, became a success. Their friends and some acquaintances in the IT industry were among its first users.

Currently, it is used by millions of people from all over the world. SEMrush has grown from a keyword research tool to become an all-round SEO and PPC tool. You can use it to manage your content and social media marketing needs.

Tracking and auditing a sites' performance for issues is now a lot easier with SEMrush. Moreover, SEMrush helps me observe my competitor's performance to gather crucial insights into their marketing strategies. You can use this insight to employ better strategies for your website and stay ahead of the competition.

SEMrush Features

SEMrush has grown into an ultimate digital marketing tool thanks to its numerous features. You may not need to use all of its features at once (unless you run a big agency). However, it's important that you understand what these features are and what they do.

I work with small and medium businesses to help them optimize their online visibility and analyze competitor's strategies. So far, SEMrush has made my job a whole lot easier thanks to its features.

Organic Research

This feature is one of the top features within SEMrush. To use it, I simply need to type my competitor's website in the search field. Organic Research feature provides you with a ton of useful data on three metrics: keywords, traffic, and traffic costs.

• The Keyword Metric. The keywords metric shows the overall number of keywords that my or competitors' site ranks for.
• The Traffic Metric. The traffic metric shows how much traffic a site receives from search engines. This data is not always accurate, but it's a good place to start.
• The Traffic Cost Metric. This metric measures organic traffic and how much it's worth. The meter provides a rough estimate of how much my competitors spend on PPC.

Traffic Analytics

Site traffic determines your site performance. SEMrush traffic analytics show you how much traffic your site gets every month. Moreover, traffic analytics shows the source of my site traffic and what visitors do when they visit.

Your source of traffic could be social media shares or organic searches. The data is available in several metrics such as bounce rate, page views, and more. I also rely on visuals like charts that indicate site performance and how my visitors' actions change over time.

Paid Search

SEMrush is good for SEO, but it also makes a decent PPC (Pay-Per-Click) tool. I use paid advertising with the help of target keywords to get more traffic. Paid search on SEMrush also lets you find out which keywords your competitors include in their ads.

You will know if they use branded terms or non-branded ones. If these ads are successful, I can import these terms to mimic my competitors' success.

Keyword Gap

The keyword gap provides a comprehensive list of keywords that my competitors rank for. You get to search for multiple keywords that your competitors use. I can find keywords that are in the top hundreds of Google search engine ranking pages by default. Thus I will know how many competitors rank for my desired keyword.

I also use the advanced filter to get keywords that only rank in the top 10 for a particular search. This tool also provides interesting keywords I can use to outrank my competitor.

Keyword Overview

Most of the keyword features on SEMrush use a reverse engineering mechanism. However, the keyword overview is a conventional tool. You get to feed a keyword idea in a search box, and it provides a list of suggested keywords based on that term. It also provides keyword difficulty score alongside other metrics like search volume, cost per click amount, and more.

I like the suggested terms option that helps me widen my search. The suggested terms will include short and long SEO versions of your original keyword.

Keyword Magic Tool

I only use the Keyword Magic tool for one particular task. This is to help me discover thousands of new keyword ideas. I simply need to type your keyword term in the search field to get a comprehensive list of related keywords.

I can sort the keywords according to different parameters, such as difficulty, cost-per-click, search volume, and more.

Keyword Difficulty Tool

The keyword difficulty tool, like all the tools I have covered so far, helps to make your digital marketing efforts easier. I use this tool when I want to analyze my competitor's keywords. It takes into account their page authority, domain authority, on-page SEO, content quality, and user intent.

I find it easy to use this keyword tool. You simply type in the keywords that you want to rank for and to get a percentage difficulty of the keyword. This way, I can compare different keywords to know which ones I should target first.

Charts Tool

SEMrush charts make it easier to read the data I get from the tool. The charts will help you visualize all this data and position them in bar and pie charts so that even an SEO newbie easily understands them.

Thanks to these charts, I have been able to do a domain versus domain analysis on SEMrush. I easily compare my competitor's traffic source against my own, advertisement expenses, top keywords they rank for, and current positions that these keywords hold.

Reports

Reports help to communicate your work with clients and team members. SEMrush report allows me to download all my data to a single PDF file to create clean reports for my clients. It has a lot of intuitive custom templates with a drag-and-drop feature, which usually makes my work easier.

These reports are usually very easy to understand, and they contain a lot of visuals. I can automate the report to send them out to my team or clients at specific times.

CPC Map

If there was ever a part of digital marketing I'd want to outsource, it will be ad planning as it can get complicated. However, I find it less of a challenge thanks to the SEMrush CPC map.

The CPC map gives you an estimate of the cost per click based on several niches and geographical locations. It uses the search volume to use the cost per click to find the most rewarding keywords.

A/B testing feature lets you run as many trials as you want to improve your ads. The tool also helps me know if my competitors have invested in PPC or SEO.

The higher the competition, the higher the CPC. In such cases, I always opt to invest more in SEO. However, if the CPC is low, then I go all out on PPC.

Position Tracking

SEMrush has its own built ranking tool, which shows me where I rank. I simply Input my domain in the appropriate feeds to get my comprehensive position report.

This feature is highly flexible and very accurate. You can compare your results from SEMrush with any other rank tracker, and they will be sure to match.

My only issue is that the 'visibility trend,' only shows me changes that have occurred on Google page's top 100. This means ranking on the second or third pages of Google is just as good as ranking on the 11th page.

Site Audits

This is another of my best features within the app. It reveals the errors that are harmful to my technical SEO. I also get warnings for the things that need fixing because they could cause problems later in the future.

Another fantastic thing about this feature is that it allows me to compare Google crawls. With this, I will be updated on the technical SEO health changes of my site. My best part about this feature is that audits are automated. Once I set it running, it will display a comprehensive report on my dashboard whenever I log in.

Seo Content Template

SEO content template helps you write content with adequate latent semantic indexing keywords (LSIs). LSIs are terms that help Google to understand what your content is talking about.

If I want to rank for a term, SEMrush will first provide the top ten results for the exact term. I will then get semantically related terms to improve my content. Moreover, you can easily paste your content in its editor to see how it stacks up.