SEMrush Review: Benefits, Features, Pricing (2023)

Everyone in digital marketing or any adjacent field has heard of SEMrush.

It’s an all-in-one digital marketing and SEO tool that’s almost synonymous with marketing software, with over a million total users as of 2023, including 104,000 paying ones.

But does SEMrush live up to the hype? Read our comprehensive SEMrush review to learn everything you need about its features, pros and cons, and whether it justifies its price.

What Is SEMrush?

SEMrush is a SaaS platform developed by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitri Melnikov in 2008 and owned by a Boston-based company of the same name. It was developed as an SEO tool for identifying market trends and best industry practices, with a particular focus on keyword research.

Over time, SEMrush developed far beyond a keyword research tool, turning it into an all-in-one digital marketing solution. It includes a broad array of advanced SEO tools and dedicated tools for market research, content distribution, advertising, and social media management.

Who Uses SEMrush?

SEMrush is commonly used by everyone looking to create engaging internet content or to increase and optimize their online reach. We’ll go over the types of companies and individuals likely to get the most out of SEMrush.

Benefits of Using SEMrush

There are countless ways in which an online marketing tool like SEMrush could prove useful. Here are some of the top ones.

Monitor and Manage Your Page’s Organic Rankings

If you’re uncertain about your website’s search engine visibility, its top keywords, and how well it ranks against its top competitors, SEMrush has you covered. It gives detailed reports of your site’s metrics, such as organic traffic, site audits, keyword metrics, and much more.

SEMrush also goes beyond simple reports, with its keyword analytics tools showing how your performance metrics have changed over a select period for up to 90 days. It even takes the discrepancies between desktop and mobile organic rankings into account, showing separate metrics for both.

Take Your Content Marketing Strategy to Another Level

SEMrush’s advanced keyword and traffic analytics will help you understand which keywords and content fare the best in bringing traffic to your site. It also provides keyword suggestions and other ideas on how to optimize pages for improved search rankings.

This is additionally boosted by robust competitor analysis tools that help you see what your competitors are doing for pages that use the same target keywords. Additional features such as a backlink audit tool all contribute to gathering valuable intel for developing a strong SEO strategy.

Analyze Your Social Media Output

SEMrush’s analytics features extend to social media, too. The brand monitoring tools mark any time your brand is mentioned on social media. This helps with researching potential marketing opportunities and quickly seeing feedback for any potential issues.

The tools follow Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to track your brand’s social audience, with competitor analysis tools that let you see how well your social network campaigns are performing compared to your competitors.

Create Automatic Data Reports for the Whole Team

SEMrush can collect all the data it processes and export it as a customizable report that can be generated as a PDF or an Excel sheet. These reports are easily shared with the entire team through a link or an email, letting them stay updated on the latest info at any time.

Most importantly, the automation frees you from writing any reports by yourself and endlessly filling spreadsheets.

Key Features of SEMrush

As an all-in-one SEO and marketing tool, SEMrush offers a broad array of features designed to make your content marketing funnel easier and more efficient. We will list the most important and unique ones.

Domain Analysis

The starting point for any serious SEO project is domain analysis — the evaluation of a domain’s overall SEO quality. SEMrush’s domain overview tool excels at this. You can enter any domain name — either yours or a competitor’s — and SEMrush will instantly bring up a detailed supply of different metrics.

These metrics include an overall authority score (calculated based on backlink data, spam markers, and organic search data), the total number of visitors per month, keyword search volume, search intent behind ranking keywords, top-performing keywords, the total number of backlinks, advertising stats, and competing websites.

Competitor Research

Competitor analysis is a field where SEMrush is ahead of similar SEO tools. Entering a seed keyword brings up competitor pages along with all relevant metrics, with their top-ranking keywords particularly worth mentioning. The keywords also show information on whether targeting them will help you compete.

You can also use the Market Explorer feature, which utilizes search engines to discover and show all websites similar to your own. You can analyze these websites, see how they got their traffic, and gain SEO ideas to improve your website’s search volume and other crucial metrics. 

Keyword Magic Tool

SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool can generate up to three million related keyword ideas based on a single target keyword. The related keywords are divided into several groups and subgroups based on the frequency of certain words that are featured inside them.

The tool can filter keywords according to keyword difficulty and the SERP features they trigger. It can also find all the keywords that contain questions. This helps target Google’s Featured Snippets search feature and increase your page’s visibility.

SEMrush Pricing

SEMrush features three different paid plans and a free plan — the subscription level determines the number of available simultaneous projects, tracked keywords, and report volume. Each paid plan can also be tried with a 7-day free trial.

Here’s a breakdown of each of the plans, their features, and fees.

Free Plan

These are the features of SEMrush’s Free Plan:

Pro Plan

The Pro Plan, designed for newbies and small teams, is available for $129.95/month or $108.34/month with annual billing. It includes everything included in the free plan, plus:

Guru Plan

You can purchase the Guru Plan, meant for agencies and mid-size businesses, for $249.95/month or $208.33/month with an annual billing discount. It includes everything listed above, along with:

Business Plan

The Business Plan is designed for large agencies and enterprises and is available for $499.95/month or $416.66/month with yearly billing. It contains everything included in the above plans, as well as:

Paid Extras

You can also access extra features and tools for an additional subscription. Here’s a full list of the available extras and their price.

Pros of Using SEMrush

With SEMrush, you can expect to see major improvements to your regular workflow. Here are some of the top upsides of using it.

All-in-One Tool

SEMrush keeps keyword research, keyword analytics, link-building, SEO optimization tools, and much more under a single roof. This makes it possible to keep all your marketing and SEO tools in one place, saving time that you’d spend juggling between apps.

Humongous Database

SEMrush has the largest keyword database in the market, with over 21.1 billion keywords it can generate as potential keyword suggestions. And if that wasn’t enough, the backlink database has over 43 trillion links.

Generous Usage Allowances

Many similar tools fall flat when it comes to use limits, making it impossible to use them past a certain threshold. SEMrush takes care of that problem by offering high usage allowances that just keep increasing with more expensive subscription plans.

Cons of Using SEMrush

Not a single software tool is without its flaws, and SEMrush is sadly no exception. These are the main drawbacks you’ll encounter while using it.

The Data Is Sourced Only from Google

While SEMrush’s database is impressively huge, it only covers Google search data. Many other SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, source their data from a broader array of sources.

Partial Inaccuracy

SEMrush’s accuracy with keyword research and backlinks is close to perfect, but the traffic data research is only a rough estimate, so avoid relying on it for critical decisions. Social media and paid search data also leave things to be desired in terms of accuracy. 

It’s Quite Expensive

Although the free plan offers most of SEMrush’s features without paying a single dollar, to get the most out of the software, you need to cash out a formidable amount of money. This is especially true if you go for optional extra feature packages.

In Summary

Despite its flaws, SEMrush lives up to all the hype surrounding it. Undoubtedly, it’s the most comprehensive online marketing platform available right now, even in its limited free version.

It combines a huge array of tools with an equally enormous number of metrics available to view — all wrapped up in a highly accessible user interface. The entire package has everything an individual entrepreneur or a small or medium enterprise would ever need when picking up an online marketing tool.

To conclude this SEMrush review, it’s safe to call it a benchmark tool that, despite the high price of its paid plans, still offers better value for money than its main competitors. If you’re still not convinced, try out the free version or a 7-day free trial for yourself and see for yourself what SEMrush has to offer.

Frequently Asked Questions