SEMRush Review 2023 | Complete PPC & SEO Tool

SEMRush! Most of you might have heard a little about it, some might have seen some banner ads about it on different websites and if you are related to Internet Marketing, Digital Marketing or a relevant field to this then I’m sure, You might have visited their website. It’s a pretty common tool for webmasters, bloggers and search engine marketers. So I have written article on this tool, Semrush review.

SEMRush Review 2023

So this is going to be a full fledge review about one of the famous tools which is being used by Digital Marketers, SEO Professionals, Social media experts, website owners and many professionals who have an online presence. I hope you find it useful.

• What is SEMRush?
• Features of SEMRush?
• What is missing from SEMRush?
• Keyword Research For SEO & PPC via SEMRUSH?
• How to do Competitor Analysis for SEM & Google Adwords via Semrush?
• Doing site audit using Semrush?
• Can Semrush help you in Search Engine Optimization?
• How Semrush can help you in PPC (Pay Per Click) Campaigns?
• You will learn How It can help your business? Is Semrush for me?
• Pricing
• My Personal Opinion.

What is Semrush?

SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.

It all starts with entering a domain, url or keyword in the search bar.

Just for your information, SEMRUSH has a database of 28 countries over Google and Bing. So you have ample of countries data to research on.

What are the features of SEMRush?

Following are the features which are provided by the SEMRush

SEO and Organic Research :

• It can help you in SEO and Organic Research
  • You can research Keywords to rank for.
  • You can analyze keywords (difficulty level, number of searches per month, competition level)
  • Track Competitors, Finding where they are ranking well.
  • Observe position changes for your site in Google and Google country specific listings.

SEM, PPC & Paid Marketing :

• It can help you with Search Engine Marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click) and Paid Marketing.
  • Track your Competitors Marketing Activities
  • Uncover their online ad spend and Keywords
  • Find their Ad copies and bidding strategies.
  • Observe and analyze before you do mistakes, waste money and learn from them.

Google Display Advertising Network

• It can help you with Display Advertising (Google Display Network)
  • Analyze top publishers and advertisers.
  • Uncover other display advertiser strategies. (Their headlines, success strategy, bidding strategy, placements, banners and a lot more).
  • Catch new advertisers and monitor them so u can learn from their strategies and observe how do they change it over time.
  • Find how same advertiser performs over different devices. (This also helps you in finding which devices are going to be best for your campaign and where to spend your most budget).

Site Auditing

• Find and fix your website issues, such as duplicate content, meta descriptions, broken links, alt descriptions and other things which are necessary to get the best score.

Backlinks

Research on your own Backlinks as well for on your competitors backlinks.

Content Planning.

It also helps with Content Planning.

Position tracking and monitoring.

If you are constantly worried about your serp position rankings and looking for a good tool which can track it automatically, you can rely on this tool.

Video Research.

It’s great library also helps with video research.

Product Listing Ads.

Semrush also helps with Product listing ads.

Social Media Tools.

It also has various Social media tools which can enhance your digital marketing skills and experience.

What I like about SEMRush?

• SEMRush comes with one of the industry’s finest customer support, a large community of users, and a good knowledge base available to every subscriber.
• They also actively contribute to the community by actively doing weekly webinars on SEO/SEM/PPC/SMM issues and tutorials.
• SEMRush can be easily integrated and connected with Google Analytics and search console to track the website performance.
• They never get satisfied, SEMRush team is continuously enhancing, updating and adding more features to it’s tool.
• It’s an all in one digital marketing tool.

What’s Missing in SEMRush Review?

Obviously, nothing is perfect and everything needs improvement. A success of any product lies on open to criticism and new on-going development of the product. There are few features which I feel are missing with SEMRush.

• Lack of white label reports, although you can brand your own logo but still your clients will know that you are using SEMRush to obtain data.
• The data is always not accurate, I have personally experienced it, sometimes it’s shown a little more then what the things actually are, however to tackle that, by time I have my own experience and judgement to analyze it, but thats the feature where they need to work on.
• Comparative to what we are paying, it’s an awesome tool, but will be nice to see if they do add Facebook ads and Linkedin Ads analysis in their service, but even without it, worth every penny.
• When it comes to Paid Advertising, I couldn’t find more on Location Based Geographic campaigns and I did have a trouble in organising the ads, since I have the option to see all ads only.
• The display advertising is limited to Google Adwords Display Network Only, Having BuySell ads or Facebook ads can also be a great option.
• I would like to see something related to Instagram so people can use it to make money from Instagram effectively!
• It will be great if they can reveal about CTR performance for Search Results and Paid Listings for Specific Domains, I know I’m asking too much here, but it always be great to see this feature, some day.

I also feel that the monthly subscription cost is quite high for marketers and most of the newbies think to buy it pirated or in a joint venture, which i strongly don’t recommend at all.

How SEMRush can help in increasing your website traffic?

According to a study at Search Engine Watch, a typical website may receive up to 64% of traffic from search engines. Even more; Most of the people typically type a website name in the search box to learn more about a website, it’s authority and it’s image. So it’s important to have organic traffic on your site.

SEMRush can help you with finding out on what keywords you are ranking at the moment; how you can improve it’s position on search engine; what are your competitors ranking on; how you can rank them.

Apart from organic traffic customer acquisition; SEMRush can be a big help if you are doing Paid advertising and interested in finding out on what kind of paid online marketing activities your competitors are doing.

How to do Keyword Research For SEO & PPC via SEMRUSH?

The importance of Keyword Research can never be under estimated! It’s your first step towards your SEO or Paid Marketing Campaign. Do checkout my article on The Right Way to do the Keyword Research for PPC & SEO.

For a quick revision, if we are selling iPhone 6 and with a quick query at Semrush.com we find the following keywords

Semrush give’s us the ability to search them on country specific domains for Google to find how the competition is different at every TLD.

I’m selecting Google US here as the Search Engine.

Now further scrolling has shown me

Okay Now I have more then 200,000 + Keywords Variations relevant to what I’m searching for. The keyword research tool of SEMRush has been very effective for me, specially for my own Keyword Research when it comes to PPC & SEO.

So SEMRush Review has provided me with

• General Keyword Analysis with Organic Search and Paid Listing Details.
• Phrase Match Keywords Relevant to the Search Term.
• Related Keywords Relevant to the Search Term.
• Organic Search Results
• Number of Ads Running on the Keyword.

So I clicked on the phrase match keywords to find out more on the keywords.

Here I can See Following things for Keywords :

• Volume : The average number of search queries over the past 12 months for the given keyword.
• CPC : Average Amount Advertiser’s Pay for each click via an Ad triggered using the Keyword – This is beneficial for Google Adwords Analysis.
• Com. : Competitive Density explains the competition on the keyword in the paid listing. One (1) means highest competition.
• Results : The number of urls being displayed in organic search results for each keyword.
• Trend : This is the graphical view of volume of searches done in the past 12 months.

But How to Find Profitable Keywords That Not Only Ranks Well But Brings Sales Too?

I clearly mentioned this strategy in my The Right Way to do the Keyword Research for PPC & SEO. However for a quick revision, after researching on the consumer buying cycle process and learning which are buying/shopping keywords. (depending upon what you are offering and how you are going to sell your product or service to the consumer) we will do the following steps

• Analyze the volume of a keyword and displayed results.
• Find the variations/mis-spellings of the Keyword. (You can also take help from UberSuggest  and then research on those queries via SEMRush)
• Using SEMRush, investigate top 20 results, analyze their on-page seo using Site audit feature by SEMRush.
• Analyze all of their back-links and research if you can build links better then them.
• I also suggest to research on your competitors PA (Page Authority), DA (Domain Authority) and Social Shares of the domain.

The above analysis will give you a clear idea on if the keyword can be rank-able or not and how much resources you need to accomplish this task.

How to do Competitor Analysis for SEM & Google Adwords via Semrush Review?

This is a very important feature of SEMRush. Using this tool, I can find competitor’s online strategies they are using on Google Adwords Network. This is an awesome feature which I can’t thank enough to them. Ever since I have started spying our competitors, I have improved sales as much as of 200% for most of my PPC clients.

Understanding Your Competitors is very important. You will have a clear estimates on what cost’s you are going to bear for running your marketing strategy; what is their competitive edge and how they are cashing it;and other things as necessary.

You can do competitor analysis using two ways.

• Write your competitor website.
• Write your targeted keywords.

If we enter our competitor’s website, SEMRush will find all the keywords where they are advertising on Google or where they are ranking in organic results.

Note : I’m considering the word ‘affordable seo services’ as a test keyword here and www.highervisibility.com as a competitor. I’m in no way affiliated with them and I’m in no way promoting them as this is for learning purposes only.

So I entered the term ‘affordable seo services’ and I found following websites advertising on the keyword.

I clicked on www.highervisibility.com ad and it lead me to :

So you can see that I was able to find all of their 86 ads through which they are advertising on Google Search. I also have an option to export it for later use too and I can also check what ads he is running for mobile devices. Usually company differentiate ads between different devices.

However now I wanted to know on what keywords www.highervisibility.com is advertising, so on the left navigation bar, I selected the ‘Positions’ in Advertising Reach Column and I was able to find 433 keywords on which they were advertising.

So this give me a quick idea on how much they are spending on their paid marketing, what kind of ads they are running, what kind of keywords they do have, what is the average competition and cpc (cost per click) of each keyword.

Click here to Sign-up for Your SEMRush Trial!

How to do site audit using Semrush?

This is another very important feature of SEMRush which i personally like it very much. For those of you who are struggling in generating more visitors, good impression and more authority for your website, this is a must have feature for them to use.

Let’s discuss some of the features this tool have

• It can find broken links on your site. (This is going to be an awesome thing, specially if you have too many pages and you are doing inter or external linking a lot.)
• This tool can help in finding pages with duplicate content on your site.
• You can find pages which do not have a meta description.
• Can find pages where there is low Text to HTML ratio.
• Additionally it can find all other problems which are blocking your SEO Progress in some way.

When it comes to tweaking websites for clients, it’s a must have tool. Like even for my site, for me it looks perfect but when i tried to do Site Auditing of my website using SEMRush, I came to know so much error’s in my website which I wasn’t aware of.

In order to analyze this tool, I did a quick research of my website. Please check the results below

So my site score came as 68% so let me make it better. Overall this tool pointed me few things as below

• My Site has broken links. (33 internal links and 5 external links.. damn!)
• 51 Pages Don’t have meta descriptions.
• 198 Images don’t have alt attributes.
• 36 Pages have a low text-HTML ratios.
• 4 Pages have duplicate content issues.

So let’s get them corrected. The first thing i want to get corrected is broken links because they are hurting the user experience of my website; so I installed a plugin; as being mentioned my top 14 wordpress plugins post.

Internal and External linking Errors

I discovered all the non working links, even in the comments section. These internal and external linking errors were causing me two disadvantages.

• Poor User Experience (As user’s were redirected to 404 error pages.)
• Hurting SEO Strategy (Google also doesn’t like that the links you are referring are now 404 error pages.)

So it took me around 45 minutes of time to discover and sort out all bad links. After removing them, I did a test again on SEMRush Audit tool to see how my site is performing in terms of SEO Score.

So I got +7 Score, as I was able to increase my Site Score from 68% to 75%. Cool Isn’t it? Now Let me add Meta descriptions to all of my pages and find, how it’s going to effect my score. I know 100% isn’t my target, but I’m looking forward to improve it as much as possible.

So now using Yoast SEO, I’m going to add meta descriptions to all pages and see how does it’s going to effect on my site score. I used the bulk editor tool since i didnt add any of the meta descriptions before and it was a great help in saving time, since manually opening the page and adding it will cost me a lot of time, however i did it within 45 minutes.

Now let’s have a look now on after adding meta descriptions.

So I was able to get 76% score which is fair enough; I know it can be made better with further features the tool does have like i know I have yet to optimise my images which can further increase my site score from 3 to 4%.

For the time being; I think it’s fair enough to say that this is a solid tool to judge your site health when it comes to search engine optimisation.

There are many other site auditing features which comes with it. For instance

Broken Images Analyzer:

Images are an important part of your blog and it has been rightly said that a picture says thousand words.

The site auditing tool can help you analyse, find and fix broken images in your site. This may not be a great thing at start, but once your site have more then 50 articles and it will get really difficult to check each page every day so this will be a great help.

Https Security :

Google has officially announced Https as a ranking factor. You can’t ignore the fact that your site needs to have an SSL certificate installed. With this feature of SEMRush, you can check out what pages are not yet configured for https and if there is any redirection problem on your site with http or https, it can help you in figuring out.

Now once i figured and corrected all of the above things, I reached to 84%. I think it’s good.

How SEMRush can help you in Search Engine Optimization?

Without a doubt, it’s an awesome tool when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. For me, it’s a life savior when it comes to SEO. I have been using this tool for almost all of my SEO needs however for a reminder, it can help me in following ways

• It can help you in doing keyword research for seo, it has a keyword difficulty tool, can tell relevant keywords, phrase match keywords etc. I can also find the competition details too.
• It can help me in doing competitor research, I can find on which keywords my competitors are ranking and how many back links they do have, additionally I can find see those back links.
• The site audit tool is an awesome tool to detect on page site issues, broken links, meta descriptions, duplicate content and other issues.
• The Position Tracking tool can help me analyze where my site is ranking for several keywords.
• The SEO idea’s is another great addon,not only it compares your site optimization with your competitors but it also generates fresh keywords and bring other relevant idea’s to optimize.

How SEMrush can help you in PPC (Pay Per Click) Campaigns?

Keeping in mind the importance of Pay Per Click Market and realizing that time is money, again this is one of the best tools I use and I recommend it to everyone. Understanding your PPC goals, SEMRush can help you achieve various objectives such as :

• It can help you in doing keyword research for ppc. I posted a detailed tutorial on how to find the right keyword for your Paid Marketing and this is a great tool to do it.
• Using the competitive analysis feature, you can find your competitor’s ads, their keywords and CPC (Cost Per Click) bids. This will give you a clear idea on how your competitor is having an edge and how you can do it too.
• It can track data on 28 variations of Google and analyze paid data on Bing Search engine.
• Their PLA (Product Listing Ads) feature reveals your competitor’s ads information. (It’s a great help for e-commerce sites.)

I will personally recommend this feature to everyone, I have been using this feature to spying on our competitor’s and it’s a great help to me and my team. So click here to get your free SEMRush trial now.

Display Advertising; SEMRush Benefits

Google’s Display Network plays a huge role in online search advertising market and with SEMrush’s Display Advertising feature you’re able to analyse how other companies create successful display ads.

It can help you in finding your competitor display ads, bids, settings,  you can also view the amount of ad impressions and the ad’s ability to generate conversions.  This makes SEMRush exceptional over the other tools available in the market.

Deeper Targeting:

Interestingly, they also help you in deeper targeting by providing a SEMrush Adsense Publisher’s Report which can help you discover the websites your competitors are advertising. It’s extremely important to know this, because not every relevant site is generating leads, so finding exact sites where your competitors are targeting is a great feature.

How It can help your business? Is SEMRush for me?

As mentioned above, it’s a great product to have. I cannot emphasise enough on how much important it is to track and spying your competitors, not only it will help you in finding loop holes in your own strategy; but you can also learn your competitor’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and implement it for your own company too, that was the pure reason, I wrote this SEMRush review for you guys. If something is working for me, I will definitely want others to get benefit from it.

Stay Updated with the Market :

No matter what product/service/site you have, you always need to find out what’s happening in market, what are the right keywords to target for your site, what are your competitor’s back links, what are your site issues which you are not aware of, SEMRush is your best bet in all of them.

Definitely, it’s a must tool to have for every business, individual or co-operation who have an online presence.

If you are still not convinced, then i highly recommend you to try their free trial before deciding whether the tool is right for you or not.

Try SEMRush Now!

But what about Pricing? Let’s have a look on what SEMRush is offering.

If you are a starter, then I will recommend you to go with PRO plan and then upgrade it according to your needs. For most users, the PRO plan is a perfect plan to go with, however if you have higher needs or you handle Digital marketing needs for your clients too; then you may chose the package as per your requirement.

Click here to start using SEMrush

Refund Policy :

If for any reason, you are not satisfied with the product or if you are looking to get your money back, they have a 7 day no obligation refund policy to claim on.

After Sales Support :

Understanding the importance of customer satisfaction, they have a great after sales support to deal with. You can mail them, call them, send a message on skype, twitter and they do have a contact us form on their site too. For more details, click here.

However in the end..

It Doesn’t matter if you are a beginner or a professional, SEMRush is undoubtedly the must have SEO/SEM Tool in the market. So grab your free trial and start dominating the online market! Good luck!

I will personally rate the tool at 8.5/10. Overall It is an essential market tool which I believe every blogger, digital marketing professional and every business owner should have it.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Popular question & answers related to this digital marketing tools are discussed here.

What Functions does SEMRush have?

As per their knowledge base, it’s an all in one digital suite with following features :

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• PPC (pay-per-click advertising)
• Keyword Research
• Competitive Analysis
• Social Media
• Public Relations
• Content Marketing

Is SEMRush free?

No. SEMRush is not free at all. Although they give very few limited requests every day with very very limited data availability but it is not free.

How much does SEMRush cost?

As per their page, SEMrush offers three options for monthly subscriptions: Pro for $99.95, Guru for$199.95 and Business starting at $399.95. All three plans are recurring subscriptions.

Can SEMRush help me in improving my organic rankings?

Yes, even i recommend to use it in case if you are working on improving your organic rankings on search engine. In fact, it personally helped me in grow rankings of my sites.

Does SEMrush helps with Youtube Video SEO?

Yes, it can help you in video ranking of your Youtube videos.

SEMRush vs Moz :

Both are great tools. Moz is also widely known for helping people with rankings, but it does not help much in Paid Marketing.

SEMRush vs Ahref :

Ahref is primarily used for organic rankings and SEMRush is beneficial for both organic and paid rankings.

SEMRush vs Spyfu

Both Softwares have similar features however SEMRush can give you more countries in depth data without increasing cost, unlike Spyfu.

Is this a Paid SEMRush Review?

No. This SEMRush Review is not paid or it’s or it’s not done by SEMRush Editorial team, rather it’s a personal effort and i tried to be neutral to give you a honest opinion about the tool.

Will SEMRush be helpful for Google Ads Professional?

Definitely, even if you want to do Google Ads Certification, SEMRush can be really helpful as it will help you in finding loop holes of your strategy as well spying well on your competitors.

Your Turn and Conclusion on SEMRush Review

Without a doubt, SEMRush is a beast for digital and internet marketers.

I tried to discuss every possible feature of SEMRush so you can see a detailed review on it. Many marketers use it, in fact i use it most of the time myself to analyse my site, check my competitors and for a lot of other things.

It is indeed of one of the best tools to start working with. If one thing i can recommend you, is to get SEMRush.

What do you like about this SEMRush Review 2023? Which Features would you use in SEMRush? Do you think is there any feature’s it misses on? Do you want me to add anything more in this article? Please let me know your thoughts via comments section, thank you.

Start your SEMrush free trial now!