DIGITAL MARKETING
SEMRush Review: How Do SEO Tools Bring Success To Your Business In 2021?
SEMRush Review: How Do SEO Tools Bring Success To Your Business In 2021?
Table of Contents
Visibility in search engines is a crucial step in building awareness of your brand in the mind of your consumer but also requires having clear navigation on how you will rank in search engines’ indexes. It is worth investing in an SEO tool that knows precisely the process of gaining more relevant traffic to visit your site.
Today, SEMRush caters to over 7 million marketers using their digital marketing SaaS. We’ll take you through an in-depth SEMRush review and how this platform can bring success to anyone that wants to rank in today’s very competitive digital market.
How Does SEO Grow Your Business?
SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, is a method that business owners use to improve the visibility of their website in search engine results pages (SERPS). For start-ups and new projects, having a clear picture of your target market can be challenging, especially if your business offers more than one service or tool. With SEO-focused content, your website will be catering to those who truly need your service.
What Are The Features Of SEMrush?
If you’re planning to use SEMRush to scale your business, manage your competitor’s statistics, or discover other SEO strategies and opportunities you can rank for, SEMRush offers a wide range of tools and services. We have reviewed and detailed all the features that SEMrush offers. These tools and services are useful to upgrade your domain authority, create high-quality SEO content, and promote organic search traffic to your business.
For SEO:
Domain Overview And Site Audit
SEMRush starts providing statistics for your current website by carrying out a Domain Overview And Site Audit. SEMRush allows users to focus on which organic keywords their website is ranking for on Google and how to improve these rankings. The site audit report also shows which pages have errors and how your landing pages are gaining traffic for you. You can schedule your website crawling to keep track of your website’s performance daily, weekly, or monthly.
Their domain overview and site audit include visual representation of your domain’s authority, SERP features, backlinks, traffic to your website, and outline the exact steps needed o fix errors on your domain.
Link Building Tools
Link building opportunities are constantly changing depending on the content you add to your site. The better your content, the easier it will be to link with high-authority websites that will help your website rank in search engines. Tips on link-building require a full thread in itself, but the most important step in building links will still come back to the quality of the articles you are writing.
SEMRush helps your website become a referral site for other blogs to link back to your content. You can set up an email marketing campaign with suitable domains that rank for your target organic keywords. There is also a tracking feature for your backlinks to see which are active, broken, lost, or rejected.
SEO Keyword Research
This tool provides excellent help for start-ups and solopreneurs who don’t have a list of keywords to rank for their blogs. If you already have an industry to focus on, you can input a few target keywords, and SEMrush provides competitive analysis on which other keyword opportunities you can rank for. With their Keyword Magic Tool, you can visualise the keywords’ competitive density, keyword difficulty, search volume, and SERP features. It has a simple UI design where you can filter your keyword suggestions, organise them via groups, and even integrate them into your apps.
Keywords Position Tracking (Target and Organic Keywords)
The key to ranking content is having a clear understanding of the keyword landscape of your business. After establishing the list of keywords from the Keyword Magic Tool, SEMRush provides a detailed report on how well your tracked keywords are ranking. The keywords position tracking element also features tagging, sorting, filtering and exporting custom reports to better present your SEO or PPC marketing strategy.
Create Better Content For Websites And Social Media
The purpose of researching target keywords and competitor keywords is to create content that conveys your business’s strengths, opportunities, and benefits. SEMrush offers SEO content templates where you can create SEO-friendly content for both your website and your social media account. They also list Google’s top 10-ranking pages for your target keywords, handy to see at a glance what competitors are ranking.
Content Audit
If you have existing landing pages, blogs, and other resources, SEMRush can also check your content’s relevancy and make it search engine optimised. SEMRush uses the Wow-Score tool to determine how engaging your blog post is. The internal metrics are based on the user’s active reading time, how fast they scroll, and your article’s word count.
For Advertising:
Advertising Campaigns and Research
SEMRush helps businesses build PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns from scratch. If you have an ongoing Google Ads keyword list, you can compare the CPC (Cost-Per-Click) across different categories to get an idea of benchmarked costs for a new campaign. SEMRush also allows you to evaluate your competitor’s search ads and check their search strategies too.
Social Media Tools
With the current SEO content you have created using the Keyword Magic Tool, you can draft and schedule your posts on social media accounts in their all-in-one dashboard. You can also create, manage, and optimise ads on Facebook with performance results and recommendations on how to improve them. SEMrush also allows its users to track their competitor’s social media strategies using their public accounts.
They have two social media tools to work with: Social Media Poster and Social Media Ads. These tools offer to schedule posts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google My Business. You can also monitor your competitor’s follower count, posts, and social media presence. At a campaign level, you can track engagement metrics with your target audience and redirect your brand’s purpose.
For Competitive Research:
Competitive Intelligence
Businesses last longer because they know how to adapt to ever-changing business demands. Getting ahead of the competition is a smart strategy to know if your content and services are worth the attention. With SEMRush, you’ll have an overview of your competitor’s keywords, their regional presence, audiences, lead generation sources, as well as their website’s traffic. Additionally, you can use these keyword opportunities for your Google Ads and PLA campaigns. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to pay an additional $200/month for their Competitive Intelligence add-on.
Resources For You and Your Business
They have a wide range of Ebooks, blogs, and news on their upcoming features and new tools that you can test. They also have podcasts and webinars for better audio and visual training. Users can even join their community by taking Academy courses and earning a professional certificate. Hence, you and your staff can take advantage of these training materials to better understand what SEO and PPC are and how to use SEMRush efficiently.
SEMRush Ease Of Use And Support
A broad spectrum of tools and services available means that there a reasonably steep learning curve in mastering SEMRush. That said, there is also a substantial and well laid-out library and knowledge base to support you in your learning phase and beyond. Customer support is 24/7, meaning any questions you may have can be answered on the spot.
How Much Does SEMRush Cost?
Prices for all-in-one SEO and digital marketing research/analysis tools are never cheap and this is no exception. However, as is the case with any tool of this calibre, if you use it to its full potential then it is exceptional value for money. Their starting price is at $99.95/month (billed annually) for the Pro plan. It also features tools and services such as competitor’s keywords, ads, backlinks, and keyword research. Additionally, you can also manage your link building, do social campaigns management, and on-page & technical optimisation insights.
Their Guru plan ($191.62/month ) is perfect for SMBs and growing marketing agencies. It features all that is in the Pro plan and includes Content Marketing Platform, Historical Data, Extended limits and Google Data Studio Integration. Lastly, their Business plan, which starts at $374.95/month, has more features and has the best offers for larger E-commerce projects and agencies. We recommend that you purchase their pricing plans annually as you can save up to 16% on all their available plans.
They also have an Enterprise plan that caters to large, rapidly scaling businesses and allows custom pricing for your preferred features. However, there are available add-ons for an additional fee that helps your agency’s growth, user management, competitive research, and more. If you want to find out more about these add-ons that aren’t discussed in this SEMRush review, visit their plans & pricing page here.
SEMRush Integrations
SEMRush integrates with tons of apps that you are already using to run your SEO and PPC campaigns, including analytics apps, reporting dashboards, and managing your social campaigns.
For this SEMRush review, here are some recommendations of the integrations that you can connect with:
Integrations with Google Products
Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google Ads
Google My Business
Google Disavow Tool
Gmail
Google Docs
Google Data Studio
Google Sheets
Google Calendar
Google Tag Manager
Integrations with Social Media Networks
Youtube
There are also other apps you can integrate with like WordPress, Trello, Majestic, and more. If you want to explore all app and tool integrations for SEMRush, check their full list here.
The Top 3 SEMRush Alternatives
Ahrefs
Ahrefs has been a super popular tool for search geeks since its inception. They have a good reputation for accurate keyword research results and site audit recommendations. Compared to SEMrush, Ahrefs doesn’t need higher tiers to unlock competitor organic keyword traffic, opportunities, and SERP data. Furthermore, Ahrefs reputedly has the best backlink index, which is excellent for growing your domain authority. Their tools and services also include support, integrations, and resources which make it well worth the sticker price, starting at $99 per month.
Pros
Wide variety of features, tools, and services
Has a 7-day free trial for all subscription tiers
Great support system
Cons
Expensive than most of its competitors
User limitations
Requires a forced update for tracking and positioning
Moz
Business owners like reporting, data, and accuracy can rely on Moz’s tools and services. Moz excels in a ton of features that help any marketers for creating digital marketing content. Their keyword research tool allows you to discover lucrative or hidden keywords. You may need to subscribe to Moz Pro to get all the better features and analytics to make your content rank better. We recommend getting this paid plan to use Moz Pro’s Keyword Explorer and their SERP features which start at $99/month for their standard subscription.
Pros
Provides accurate data for reporting and analytics
Detailed Search Volume Metrics
Deep-dive keyword research
Cons
Moz Pro is expensive for basic SEO features
Lacks automation for some processes
Third-party cookies may be turned off by default
Serpstat
SERPstat starts at $69 per month with features that would suit SMBs, nonprofits, and freelancers with a tight budget. They also have useful keyword and competitive research tools to check your website for SEO errors. You can visualise these issues with their infographics and visual analysis. Even beginners of SEO could comfortably understand the metrics. SERPstat also features one-on-one training for those without experience in ranking their SEO content. If you don’t have the budget for more advanced SEO tools, SERPstat is the best alternative providing keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and site auditing.
Pros
Affordable price with excellent SERP and SEO features
Has distinct features like Missing Keywords and Keyword Clustering
Cons
Site audit and crawl is slower than other competitors
Keyword difficulty after the research is sometimes inaccurate
Final Thoughts
SEO tools are essential to not only monitor how you are performing in the search engine results page but also to keep an eye on your competitors and uncover opportunities from a keyword research and content generation perspective. We believe that after writing this SEMRush review, it is one of the best SEO tools available to support you whether you are a startup, an SMB or an enterprise B2B client.