SEMrush Review (2020) – Details, Features, Pricing & Free Trail

SEMrush has become a favorite tool for SEO experts around the world. Below, find our SEMrush review, features, pricing, SEMrush free trial, and a complete tutorial on this SEO software – which allows you to monitor and optimize your website ranking on search engines.

We think you’ll agree with us if we tell you:

There is nothing harder than driving more traffic to your site!

Between the competition, Google updates, and all the conflicting information you find online, there is cause for despair.

However, there is a very simple solution to get out of the game:

Copy what works with your competitors and find their loopholes to acquire the traffic that escapes them.

SEMrush is a swiss knife for SEO and Digital Marketing experts because it is simply the best at analyzing the competition and dethroning it.

Today, SEMrush is certainly the most complete tool on the market to ensure good monitoring of the visibility of a site and a brand on the web.

This results in software recognized worldwide for Search Engine Optimization, a tool to monitor and manage interactions on social media, and a section dedicated to paid campaigns such as Google Adwords. (SEA).

In our SEMrush test, tutorial, and review below, you can see an overview of the great features of the service.

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SEMrush is a platform that allows you to do a lot of things. To give you an idea of ​​the architecture of the service, you should know that SEMRush allows you to follow long-term campaigns via what it calls “projects” (see below in our SEMrush test).

In parallel with these projects, it is possible to obtain live analyzes on the SEO of certain areas (including competitors), on social interactions, or even on paid traffic campaigns (SEA). We will run a test and give you our opinion on SEMrush and all those services.

The SEMrush tool can be used to monitor its positions (and more generally its brand image on the internet) but also that of competitors on a daily basis.

This is the great strength of the service: with millions of sites that are sifted daily, SEMrush offers a very good overview of the competitive ecosystem around a domain.

Whether for SEO, for social interactions, or for paid traffic campaigns – it is always possible to compare your positioning with that of your competitors.

It is a toolbox that allows to support a webmaster in his seo strategy, his social media strategy, or his paid traffic strategy.

It thus encompasses all sources of traffic acquisition to a website, and in fact, becomes a complete tool for monitoring and understanding the evolution of its traffic. It is really a global offer that in our opinion is the strength of SEMrush.

Before giving you our SEMrush review, we have developed a whole tutorial that will allow you to understand the different services available on the platform.

As a user of the service, we have also added all of our comments to help you better understand the use and usefulness of all the features present.

We will present to you in this SEMrush test the following parts: domain analytics, keyword analytics as well as the creating a project.

The goal is to allow you to understand these 3 main features that will allow you to use a large part of the resources of SEMrush.

There are other less important tools that you can later explore on your own, some of which are still in beta.

The company is always on the lookout for feedback to improve its existing products and release new ones, which is really appreciated.

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Overview and organic research

The domain analytics feature is available in a limited version free of charge for everyone. Just Click this link and enter a domain name there to get insights of your website traffic.

This tool is really relevant because it gives an excellent overview of the SEO power of a domain, its traffic, the keywords on which it is ranked, and its competitive environment.

By default, when defining a domain to analyze, we get an overview of SEMrush that looks like the screenshot below. If this overview gives a global overview of a site’s performance, just click on any widget on the page to get more detail on each of these performance indicators.

This report can be downloaded and sent (possibly to a client if you are an agency) directly by email. It is really a tool that gives an excellent overview of the SEO power of the domain at a glance. Below is our SEMrush review, an overview of the platform.

Interesting points of analysis on the SEMrush software:

The graph located a little below on the right gives the traffic trend over a given period. And if the figures do not really match, it is clear that evolution is very relevant.

SEMrush manages to measure quite effectively whether a site is tending to gain traffic or lose traffic month after month. By clicking on the graph (or directly from the left menu), you can have a detail of the organic search.

It is by using the search volumes and the position of the analyzed site that SEMrush will be able to estimate the traffic at a given time. For each request, it indicates an estimated CPC (for the purchase of traffic) or the overall trend on volume.

As you can see, it is not a daily measurement tool since updates on a keyword (last column on the right in the image of our SEMrush reviews below) can be made up to a week after. To follow the strategy of a direct competitor, just look at the keywords with the highest traffic and try to position themselves on them.

Better yet, since SEMrush is constantly crawling the web, you can get insight into how a domain’s rankings have changed on a number of keywords over time.

For example, for the site in search, we obtained an analysis of the evolution of rankings overall on strategic keywords. It also allows you to see if a domain has moved a lot recently and if it has potentially been affected by a penalty.

Below is our SEMrush review is a printout of the screen that shows the position changes.

Also in this “organic search” section, it is possible to have a global overview of the competitive ecosystem.

This graph is based on the one displayed on the home page. The idea is to see who the competitors are, and how they rank on similar keywords.

If you find a competitor who is particularly good, it is worth running a full analysis on that area to see which keywords they rank for. It is then possible to compare the keywords and the positions of each to see which ones we could have forgotten.

This is a very handy feature on SEMrush in our opinion.

Let’s now move on in our SEMrush review to the analysis of backlinks. This is an important part of the site which competes with many other services available on the internet.

However, SEMrush has worked hard to offer the most advanced inbound link analysis service on the market today.

Backlink Analytics on SEMrush

SEMrush wants to work on backlink analytics service platforms such as Ahrefs or Majestic. The service has developed a dedicated section that allows you to really push the analysis further and determine the backlink profile of a site.

If you are used to a Majestic or Ahrefs, it is easy to learn.

Below you first have an overview of the backlinks profile for the domain you have decided to analyze.

You can see the number of inbound links you have, how they have evolved over time, the type of backlinks (text, image; nofollow, dofollow; anchors, referral domain extensions) as well as the toxic score – that one also finds in the “projects” which one can create directly on the platform SEMrush.

Below is our SEMrush review, an overview of the feature.

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To go into the details of the link profile of the domain in question, you will have to use the horizontal menu of the category in order to be able to obtain more information on the domain strategy.

For example, you can obtain the list of all the backlinks that are made to your site, with precise detail for each of the backlinks: anchor, number of external links of the page which points to its site, number of internal links, type of anchor, last time seen.

This also allows you to see which backlinks (external links) have been lost – like what we see in the image of our SEMrush reviews.

It is also possible to then see all the referring domains as well as their Authority Score – an indicator created by SEMrush which allows you to see how powerful a domain is.

It’s quite similar to the Trust Flow that we can have on Majestic, or the Moz Rank that we can find on Moz. This allows you to see which are the most powerful domains that point to your domain (or that of a competitor).

Better than a Google Keyword Planner, the tool that analyzes keywords on SEMrush is in our opinion one of the great strengths of the service. A myriad of services around this analysis are available and make it possible to enhance the added value of the platform.

Another very interesting feature of SEMrush is none other than the keyword analytics system.

This section is as relevant as any of the others because it provides ideas for content to produce, on popular keywords.

As you can see in the screenshot below, you will first have to define a keyword from which you want to obtain its tendency as well as all the lexical field around.

It is no longer a question of the domain, but really of trends around keywords. This supports our positive SEMrush review.

The SEMrush tool, therefore, makes it possible to discover keywords, to be able to create content around them and generate traffic.

The Keyword Magic Tool is used to generate many keywords (with their traffic and their trend) around the lexical field.

This goes much further than a Google Keyword Planner because the SEMrush tool will really search beyond the first circle of keywords, which in our opinion is a strong point of the SEMrush tool.

A final interesting tool in this SEMrush keyword section is “Keyword Difficulty”. As the name suggests, you can see the estimated difficulty in reaching the top positions on Google for a certain keyword (although it might seem logical).

The principle is simple: you have to enter the keyword you want to evaluate, and SEMrush then displays a certain amount of associated information.

For example, you can see the volume of searches, the number of results, or even information on the SERPs (images, videos, and other carousels on the first page of the search engine).

Second step of this SEMrush test and opinion: build a long-term project. The platform strongly encourages its users to create such a project in order to offer it long-term monitoring of its website. This analysis is thus distinguished from the one-off analyzes that we presented to you above.

Much of our opinion on SEMrush is based on this product, “create a project”, which is the great strength of the tool if you want to keep it for the long term.

Beyond the SEO monitoring functionalities of a particular site at a given time, SEMrush has also developed a system of “projects” which allows its website to be effectively monitored over the long term.

This tool is particularly interesting for those who want to measure the evolution over time of their SEO strategy (and that of rivals) while benefiting from relevant recommendations from SEMrush.

The follow-up via these projects concerns only the SEO part, and the Social Media part. However, this does not (yet) include the “Advertising” part which allows the monitoring of purchased traffic campaigns (paid traffic) and which is still very independent today.

Wherever you are on the SEMrush site, you will always have access to the “project” section located in the menu on the left of the screen.

But it is already on the home page that SEMrush invites its users to use this very powerful feature which proves to be an effective tool to measure its long term performance.

As you can see from the visual of our SEMrush review below, the first phase requires defining the domain name that should be tracked by SEMrush.

As indicated, this project will allow you to follow the evolution of the site’s positions on search engines, possible technical problems, activity on social networks – and SEMrush even offers to provide recommendations in addition.

Once you have created your project as we did in our review on SEMrush, you will have a dashboard that allows you to configure and monitor various strategic points for the SEO of a website.

Among the features available on the platform, we find all those that are marked in the image below. We’ll go into some of them in detail, but we strongly recommend that you take a free SEMrush test to see the power of all of these features.

• READER EXCLUSIVE: Click here to Get 7 Days SEMrush Account for FREE (worth $99.95)

Now let’s move on in this SEMrush tutorial and review to site auditing.

This tool makes it possible to measure the “technical health” of a website. It may sound simple, but many websites have technical errors that heavily penalize their SEO ranking or traffic.

This site audit thus makes it possible to correct errors to make the site more relevant in the eyes of the various search engines, and to improve the visitor experience.

Among the few important variables for a site that we can mention, there is obviously the HTTPS certificate, the structure of the AMP content, or the structure of the site.

The first thing to do for the site audit is to define what should be analyzed by SEMrush: domain and / subdomains, a number of pages to crawl, crawl source, crawler parameters, URL bans, URL parameters, etc.

If you are not really comfortable with all of these concepts, no problem: these criteria are optional, so you can run a site audit without configuring these points and you will still get a relevant result.

You can request that an email be sent to you each time an audit is performed, in order to store this information more easily.

The image below from our SEMrush review illustrates the interface for setting up auditing.

Once you have started the site audit, you will have to wait a few minutes before seeing the result. Once this is available, SEMrush displays an overall score for the technical health of the website in the project.

It then defines a “thematic score” which highlights the sensitive categories that have a real impact on the SEO performance of a site: crawlability, performance (speed), HTTPS, internal linking.

You can click on each of these scores to see in detail all the areas for improvement. Below is a SEMrush report which in our opinion gives a nice overview of the technique of a site.

You, therefore, have the possibility to click on each of the thematic scores to see in detail the technical problems and the recommendations made by SEMrush.

To take an example below is the “performance” category of the site in question defined in the project. In this case, SEMrush only makes very few recommendations because it is known to be particularly fast.

SEMrush displays on the left the page loading speed, and in particular the number and loading speed of JavaScript and CSS (files that generally tend to slow down the speed of a site).

On the right, SEMrush displays all the problems that there may be on the site that penalize performance. Associated with each problem, the number of errors identified: here, everything is in green, marked “no problem” which shows that there is no problem on each of the lines.

If there is a problem, the number of errors is displayed, and you just have to click on them to see them and get answers to correct them. In our opinion, this is what makes SEMrush such an interesting platform.

The next section of our SEMrush test is about position tracking – a key part of the vendor.

Obviously, rank tracking is an essential element for the SEO of a site, since it clearly indicates if the efforts have paid off.

In this case, as part of a project on SEMrush, a section dedicated to this makes it possible to follow the performance of its site, from such or such geography, on such or such search engine (Google or Baidu), such or such device (mobile or desktop), and compared to the competition (up to 20 competitors can be selected).

Up to 1,500 keywords can be defined to track. You can type them in manually, import them via a txt file, or retrieve them from Google Analytics.

Once you have defined all these parameters, you will then have to wait a few seconds to see the result displayed on SEMrush.

The main page that displays the results is below. We see an overall summary of its performance compared to the keywords that have been entered.

We can also see how the competitors are positioned on this same page. But it is possible to go into much more detail in this analysis thanks to the menu located in the middle of the page.

Overview, rankings distribution, rankings, landing pages, competitors discovery – are all categories that allow to deepen the understanding of its positions.

One of the interesting tools of this rank tracking analysis is that it is possible to discover all the players who position themselves on the keywords that we have defined in their request, and who therefore have these keywords in common with the site of our project.

We can thus discover other players that we would not have thought of, and we can analyze the keywords on which they are positioned to generate even more traffic, and better target the keywords.

Another highly relevant part in our opinion at SEMrush: the On Page SEO Checker. Today it provides relevant advice to optimize its content pages – something no other service does in this depth.

Within the framework of the project, there is another very powerful tool called “On Page SEO Checker”.

Clearly, SEMrush is positioned there as a guide that gives the advice to optimize its SEO.

By default, it will select about fifty pages that it will analyze in-depth (it is also possible to define them yourself) and provide a complete summary of the improvements to be made.

Unlike the “Site Audit” (above) which focuses on the technical part, the On Page SEO Checker will analyze the selected pages in more depth to deliver a thorough SEO analysis.

This concerns the backlinks strategy, semantics, and technique of these pages. Once you have launched the analysis of this tool, you have to wait several long minutes to obtain an interesting result.

For each page that has been analyzed via the SEMrush On Page Checker, it is possible to obtain recommendations whose objective is to allow better positioning on Google, and thus increase traffic.

As you can see, the recommendations are of different types: overall strategy, backlinks, SEO technique, user experience, semantics, SERP, and content.

Below is our SEMrush review, you have an example of an analysis performed for a given page.

For each of the recommendation categories, you have complete detail of what needs to be improved in order to gain positions on search engines like Google or Bing.

You can send all of these tasks directly to Trello using the button at the very bottom of the screen.

Social Media Tracker: This feature allows you to track the activity and engagement of your audience on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even YouTube.

Again, it is possible to compare these interactions with those of its competitors. To obtain the performance of your marketing campaign on social networks, you must give access to SEMrush to the various social networks.

This will automatically search for the accounts associated with the domain name defined for the project. If necessary, it is possible to change them.

Social Media Poster: As its name suggests, the Social Media Poster allows you to control publications on your various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest) from a single interface.

You have to give SEMrush access to its various social accounts to manage this. It’s a bit the same principle that we find at Buffer or at Hootsuite.

From the Social Media Poster, it is possible to schedule publications and view all upcoming deadlines on a calendar. SEMrush then displays the performance of each post.

Brand monitoring: This tool is very recent on SEMrush, and it allows you to track the mentions of a brand through various social networks and on search engines.

You have to configure the brand you want to follow and the language in which you want to obtain information.

On major brands, this brand monitoring tool allows you to track publications on a daily basis, which is quite relevant.

It remains to be seen whether this report is comprehensive enough for the major brands that follow their mentions in real-time.

Backlink Audit: Again, it says it all in the name. To use the backlinks audit tool on SEMrush, it is advisable to connect the service with Google Search Console – but it is not mandatory.

By connecting the Google Search, SEMrush will then analyze in a relevant way the profile of inbound links (each has a toxicity score), and will use its database (more than a billion domains) to determine potentially “toxic” links.

They are the ones who will then have to be disowned via Google’s Disavow tool.

When you have the result, just click on the overall toxic score to get detail of all the inbound links with their toxic score.

The “delete” tab allows you to send the domain to one of the two tabs of the “remove” or “disavow” menu.

As you go along, you can therefore send all the toxic links to the “disavow” section and then download the file which will then have to be uploaded to Google to disavow these toxic links.

SEMrush makes your job easier by creating a compatible file so that Google no longer takes these harmful reference domains into account. In our opinion, SEMrush is keeping its promise perfectly.

However, you should know that today, Google says that it hardly attaches importance to the disavowal file.

Indeed, he considers that he is able to distinguish by himself which are the harmful sites (also for negative SEO campaigns), and consequently he no longer takes them into account in his search engine.

Link Building: With this tool, SEMrush offers to support you in your link strategy. It’s more of a tool to track your activity than a tool that really gets the job done.

You could perfectly follow your backlinks campaign on independent tools like Asana or Trello for example. Still, it’s quite practical on SEMrush because you can, therefore, concentrate everything in one place.

Below you can see all the recommended links. However, this does allow you to have new ideas for placing (or exchanging) links and building your SEO.

PPC Keyword Tool: SEMrush has done a lot of work on its offering for traffic buyers. The purpose of the PPC Keyword Tool is to help determine the right keywords to plan a paid media campaign (like Google Adwords).

SEMrush helps find keywords and optimize them over time. For those who want to create media campaigns in addition to tracking their visibility on Google, our SEMrush review is very positive.

Ad Builder: A second tool for managing your traffic purchase campaigns, the Ad Builder.

SEMrush is doing really well in this niche, and let’s face it, it’s really useful. This tool allows you to create Adwords campaigns directly (which you can then export to Adwords) and compare them with those of competitors.

Even for those who are not interested in SEO, and who want to focus on “paid traffic”, SEMrush brings real added value with this tool.

We can thus see precisely which keywords were targeted by the competitors, and what are the different types of ads they have run.

Organic Traffic Insights: How to find out what is behind the “not provided” of Google Analytics? It is with this tool that SEMrush helps you understand which visits are brought by SEO, and on which keywords.

You have to link Google Analytics and Search Console through SEMrush to get relevant results.

Content Analyzer: This feature allows you to directly analyze the content of certain URLs to then see if it has performed at several levels: in terms of the interaction between readers and the article (time spent, traffic, etc.) but also on social networks (number of shares, etc.).

SEMrush also gives the possibility to compare these performances with those of competitors.

In our SEMrush review, let’s move on to the prices and offers available now.

As for the differences between one plan over another, the difference is in the number of results, reports, and other projects that can be retrieved per day (or per month).

Note that regardless of the SEMrush pricing plan that is chosen, the subscription only gives access by default to a single user. To have more than one, you must pay an additional monthly fee (between $ 70 and $ 140 per month).

In our opinion, SEMrush is quite competitive – but compared to all the features built-in, the price is well worth it.

By default, SEMrush offers three subscription models to its platform: the Pro version at $ 99 per month, the Guru version at $ 199 per month, and the Business version at $ 399 per month.

An even more complete Enterprise version is also available, but it must be made on request. For this, a dedicated form on the SEMrush site is available.

In terms of functionality, as you can imagine, the Pro version offers less than the Guru version and the Business version.

While freelance SEOs will largely be content with the Pro version, agencies and SMEs will have to go for the Guru version instead. As for the Business version, it only concerns large groups that have a strong presence on the web.

• READER EXCLUSIVE: Click here to Get 7 Days SEMrush Account for FREE 

SEMRush is the world’s number 1 platform specializing in web traffic generation. It combines the best of SEO tools with very powerful marketing features (for canvassing, posting on social networks, etc.).

SEMRush is extremely strong on 3 points:

It focuses on the payload, while others like Majestic provide more data, but less usable.

It makes it easier to study the competition from a traffic generation perspective, while others like Ahref will focus primarily on backlinks and ignore other aspects important to driving traffic.

It allows you to manage the entire process, from identifying opportunities to acquiring links, including content creation.

SEMRush is therefore an all-in-one solution that is as practical as it is powerful.

The variety of features of SEMRush, its ease of use, and, most importantly, its ability to identify the keywords that really bring visitors to your competitors make it the most powerful solution today for both getting more backlinks and to generate more web traffic.

How to use SEMrush? Everyone obviously has their preferences, but the tool must be seen as a means of following the evolution and the trend of positions over time (notably thanks to “projects”).

It is a tool that we will necessarily consult every day (the ranking statement is not, moreover, daily), and to discover the SEO strategy pursued by its competitors. Once again, in our opinion, SEMrush is a good tool.

We have arranged a free 7 days trial for our readers. It doesn’t cost anything and we`re sure it will help you drive more traffic to your site! Click the below button to claim your free offer now!