SEMRUSH REVIEW IN 2021: WHY IT IS A BETTER CHOICE

Hariharan G
12 min readSep 23, 2021

It is by far the Best SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) tool inthe market which is widely used by Many bloggers.

More than 7 Million users have already tried semrush. It helps small and large businesses in every corner of the world to become visible to their target audience.

What is Semrush?

Semrush is a Digital Product which helps you to optimize the Search Engine. Semrush was created in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov. It has Millions of users.

Let see Semrush in Numbers. Over a decade later, the team achieved precisely that with Semrush and the company now has over 1,000 employees with 8 offices around the world.

  • Over 200 million unique domains monitored for 142 geo databases
  • Over 41 trillion backlinks
  • More than 20 billion keywords
  • Over 7 million users who have tried Semrush

There are many other SEO tools but still Semrush is potentially a big one. Why?

Because Semrush provides more actionable insights and data than any other SEO tool on the market.

How can Semrush help you?

For Instance,

Semrush can give you keyword suggestions (based on phrases you enter) that can be used as the basis for writing blog posts that are likely to perform well in search results.

It is also the preferred SEO tool of marketing experts around the world and once you start using the tool, it’s easy to see why.

First I signed up for a 30 Days Free Trial , then I loved it very much and bought one. It is a bang for buck. As Time goes, Semrush is like a lighthouse as I surf through the Ocean of Websites.

In this Blog, I break down the entire Semrush Bookinto tiny parts and explain it in detail.

What we will in this article are :-

  • Domain analysis
  • Keyword research features ( Magic Keyword Tools )
  • Rank tracking
  • Backlink analysis
  • Link building tools
  • Site auditing
  • Pricing and value for money

Semrush Review 2021: Domain Analysis

The Domain Overview is the Place we can get the ‘Domain Analytics’ which is offered by many SEO tools. It refers to the Quality Of the Domain from the SEO point of view.

From a Domain Overview, you can click on any of the data modules to jump into more specific reports on Semrush and continue your analysis further.

You might also perform domain analysis on a website in order to see if it’s worth approaching its owner for a link from his/her site to yours — this is because external links from high-quality websites to your content can really boost its performance in search.

There are also Metrics which are important when it comes to the Domain Overview.

Top Metrics:-

  1. Authority Score :-

This Metrics is estimates how authoritative a site is, how much Google trusts them and how much SEO impact their links have when they send hyperlinks to another site.

  1. Organic Searches :-

This blue number shows the amount of estimated traffic the domain receives, per month, from organic search.

Click on the number to open a more detailed Organic Positions report, As it shows 21 Million Searches are done on this website per month.

2. Paid Searches :-

This blue number shows the amount of estimated traffic the domain receives per month from PPC ads. Click on the number to open a more detailed Advertising Positions report.

3. Backlinks :-

This blue number shows the total number of backlinks Semrush found going to the domain.

Click on the number to open up more detailed Backlinks reports.

4. Display Advertising :-

This blue number shows the number of display ads that the domain has run through Google AdSense.

5. Display Advertising :-

Last but not least, These are global (not specific to one country) traffic behavior estimates from our Traffic Analytics database.

If you don’t see this widget it could be because the website does not have enough monthly traffic to register in our Traffic Analytics database.

Semrush Review 2021: Keyword Research

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding all of the possible search engine queries which may be relevant to your business and your customers or viewers.

Keyword research includes not only finding these keywords but also sorting and prioritizing them into logical, related groups, which can then inform how you might change existing pages on your site or create new content.

Why is Keyword Research more important?

When coming to SEO standpoint the Keyword Research is the soul of a content, It will give a clear picture of which keyword you are ranking the content or if your content is correctly aligned or matched with the correct keyword.

Or else, whatever hardwork you put in making your content which is not matching a correct keyword, which it should, the whole work of yours is a merry chase.

Keyword Research also has some metrics as the Domain Overview, In this we call it ‘Keyword tools’ are:-

  • Keyword Overview
  • Keyword Magic Tool
  • Organic Traffic Insights
  • Keyword Manager

With these keywords we can get a variety of benefits.

  1. Keyword Overview

Keyword Overview tool. Simply enter a keyword. You’ll be able to see the number of searches per month, the websites that rank for it, and the keyword difficulty score. You can also see these rankings for different countries.

Keyword difficulty is expressed by a percentage.

This percentage ranges from 0–100%. Semrush breaks down these percentages into three categories:

  • Below 60%: low difficulty
  • 60%-80%: medium difficulty
  • Over 80%: high difficulty
  1. Keyword Magic tool

The Keyword Magic Tool (KMT) is the most powerful keyword research solution we offer.

It provides access to an extended database with over 17 Billion Keywords and a streamlined interface for organizing research on the go.

  • CPC and volume ( Cost per Click )
  • Keyword difficulty ( as seen )
  • Competition level
  • SERP features ( Search Engine Result Page )

Organic traffic Insights and manager are compiled in itself.

Semrush Review 2021: Rank Tracking

Rank Tracking or you can also refer to it as Position Tracking .

Over time, you’ll want to measure your SEO results.

Semrush offers a simple solution to tracking the website traffic you receive from your keywords.

The Rank Tracking tool provides this assistance.

It’s easy to set this up in Semrush — you go to its position tracker section, enter a domain name and the keyword(s) you’d like to track, and you get a report showing you how your site is currently ranking for those keywords.

The tool comes with tons of features like tagging, sorting, filtering and exporting reports that make it easy for marketers to find exactly what they’re looking for in their website’s SEO or PPC performance.

Semrush claims the rank tracking has many features in Rank tracking I listed a few:-

  • Ability to track any keyword and domain — even those not in main Semrush database
  • Track and compare multiple geographic locations or device types in a single project
  • Featured Snippet report to look for featured snippet opportunities
  • Easy local SEO tracking and local competitor discovery
  • Simple PDF reporting to share results with colleagues and clients

It not only helps to track your website, you can spy on your competitor websites too. You can also enter competitor website data into Semrush’s position tracker tool.

Which allows you to compare (again, over the time) how your site is performing for chosen keywords against those of your competitors.

Semrush Review 2021: Backlink Analysis

Before diving into the section you should know, What the heck is a Backlink?

Also referred to within SEO as Inbound ( Internal ) links or External links, backlinks are links that point from a page on one website to a page on another.

They are the links from third party sources that point to your website, in comparison to internal links that exist between two pages within your website.

Types of Backlinks

There are many types like Sponsored, UGC, Toxic, etc. But, mainly these two types of Backlinks are important, i.e.:-

  • Nofollow Links
  • Dofollow Links

Why Are Backlinks Important?

You see backlinks talked about a lot, and there is no denying that they are an important area to focus your efforts on improving. But why?

  • This will Help you to Rank higher
  • They are the one way Google Finds a New Page
  • They Boost your Trustworthiness
  • They send referral traffic to your page

This is what a Backlink is, Let’s ComeBack to Backlink Analytics.

The Backlink Analytics section in Semrush lets you enter a domain name and view a list of all the backlinks it can find to it.

You should look at two things while coming to Backlinks one is Backlink Analysis the other one is Backlink Audit.

Backlink Analysis

How accurate Semrush’s backlink analysis is, of course, depends on the size and quality of its link database.

At time of writing, Semrush claims to have a Whopping 43 trillion URLs in its link database, which if accurate compares positively with its key competitors — Ahrefs (26 trillion), Majestic SEO (10 trillion) and Moz (41 trillion).

The number of backlinks found by each tool was pretty similar, with Semrush performing better on websites with a smaller number of domains linking to them — it identified more linking domains than competing products Ahrefs or Moz.

Once you have loaded up a domain into the tool, you are ready to start gaining a deeper insight into the site’s link profile.

But on paper, Semrush’s database is larger than its key competitors, and it definitely provides you with a very comprehensive set of results that is definitely comparable to those of other leading SEO tools.

Backlink Audit

In simple terms, a backlink audit is the evaluation of all links pointing to your website.

It means you need to find them, identify the bad and good ones, and develop the right strategy to deal with them.

The core purpose of doing this is to establish the ‘toxicity’ of backlinks pointing to your site and determine its ‘site health’.

This effectively tells Google to ignore these toxic links — and, because Google penalises sites with lots of poor-quality links pointing to them, disavowing bad links can have a beneficial impact on your search rankings.

Combining our new backlink database with integrations from Google and Majestic and our toxic link evaluation , you can improve your backlink portfolio in these 5 easy steps.

Link building in Semrush

As we saw above, link building — the process of getting other sites linking to yours — is absolutely vital to the success of any SEO project, because search engines typically reward sites with more links pointing to them with higher positions in search results.

I already explained it with the Image, But again I’ll try to make you clear what Link Building is and why am I insisting again and again,

When website A links to website B, it’s a strong hint to Google’s algorithm that it deserves to rank higher for relevant keywords, and you might hear these referred to as inbound links, backlinks, external links, or, quite simply, just links.

Why is Link Building Important For SEO?

It is also hard to get right, meaning that those who can successfully execute tactics to build better links than their competitors typically see significant growth in organic traffic and revenue.

Semrush Link Building is Worked by these things

  • Determining who your competitors are and what they’re ranking for
  • Examining the content on your site
  • Asking you the keywords you want to rank for

Where possible Semrush even provides you with email addresses for each website, and the option to save an outreach email as a reusable template (see screenshot above).

Broken Link building in Semrush

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken Link = SEO, Nevertheless it is important

Broken link building involves finding broken external links on other websites in your niche and reaching out and recommending your own content as a replacement.

For broken link building to be successful, you need to break down your process into three steps:

  1. Finding broken links from relevant web pages
  2. Identifying (or creating) content that is worth linking to
  3. Conducting outreach to persuade a website owner to replace the dead link on their page with yours

As we say good things about Semrush, Let’s see how their competitors are giving their best too. Still, there’s some room for improvement here:-

Ahrefs, for example, simply lets you hit a ‘broken links’ option and returns a list of all the broken outgoing and incoming links for a specified domain.

There are even ways that you can speed up and optimize the task of finding opportunities, and we can walk you through the steps to properly develop a broken link building plan.

Semrush Review 2021: Site Auditing

With the Side Audit option, we can easily get an overview of the Negative issues which are stopping your site from good SEO.

If there are issues that mean that your site cannot be properly crawled and indexed, your content doesn’t stand up against your competitors, or you have toxic links (just a few common issues that an audit could highlight), you will be missing out on organic traffic.

  • Slow-loading content ( Lack of using Media Shortener )
  • Duplicate ( Copying )contents
  • SSL problems
  • Crawl errors
  • Missing headers
  • Overuse of keywords ( Stuffing Keywords )

These are the Main Issues that arise on a Site audit, This Site Audit is used in many areas, mainly the Sales & Competition.

When you are missing out on traffic, that also means you are missing out on sales. It will be your competitors who enjoy this traffic and these conversions.

Another thing that’s great about Semrush’s site auditing features is that it doesn’t just tell you what things to do, it tells you why you should do them.

Most Common Reasons why you need to audit your site include:

  • You just landed a new SEO client and are putting together a growth strategy.
  • You started a new job and, like the above, are putting together a strategy.
  • You bought a website and want to figure out your next steps.
  • You experienced a drop in organic traffic and need to discover why.
  • Part of your ongoing SEO strategy includes regular audits to allow you to find and fix issues quickly.

Important SEO tools

You absolutely don’t need a large number of tools to successfully perform an SEO audit.

Throughout the audit process, we will be using just 4 core tools:

  1. Google Analytics
  2. Google Search Console
  3. Google PageSpeed Insight

Semrush Review 2021: Pricing & Value for Money

That’s understandable however, as you’re not just paying for functionality, you’re paying for access to really large quantities of data, including a lot of competitor intelligence.

Semrush Offers three main plans,

Pro: $200

Guru: $230

Business: $450

As usual We’ll see the Competitor Offerings. In terms of how the length of this trial compares to those offered by competitors, it’s better than Ahrefs Offering (a paid-for 7 day trial) but less generous than Moz’s (a 30-day free trial).

It’s important to note that if you want to check Semrush out before committing to a paid-for plan, a free trial is available.

The standard version lasts 7 days, but for a limited time the company has made a 14-day trial available — you can access the extended free trial here.

Rather disappointingly, this add-on costs $200 per month. To be fair, most of the above metrics could be considered worthy of paying a bit extra for, but $200 per month feels rather steep.

Verdict

As we saw, Semrush Is by far the Best SEO tool in the Market. I Don’t prefer any alternatives Semrush is a really solid SEO tool that gives you all the key data you’ll need for a successful SEO project. For me, its standout features are its link building and site auditing tools.

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