The importance of search engine marketing in today’s day and age cannot be overstated. If you are a business owner with a website, then it is essential to understand how search engine marketing (also known as SEM) affects your business.
That’s exactly where SEMrush.com comes into the picture. One of the top SEO tools available today, SEMrush is designed to provide a boost to your online marketing efforts by helping you build and manage your SEO campaigns. The service also gives you the ability to see what others in your industry are doing as far as online marketing and SEO are concerned.
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In its short history, SEMrush has already managed to attract a great deal of attention. In addition to winning numerous awards, the service has been highly praised by several influential online marketing experts. If it works well for them, chances are that it will work equally well for you.
Below is our in-depth review of SEMrush.com. We break down the details of the service for those that are interested in using this one-of-a-kind SEO tool to boost their online business.
About SEMrush.com
As is mentioned above, SEMrush is an online SEO tool with numerous functions. You can use the service to perform keyword analysis, audit paid ad campaigns, examine content strategies, analyze backlinks, track keyword ranking, identify website monetization opportunities, and much more. In other words, it lets you track the performance of nearly every aspect of search engine marketing.
Available through the cloud with no extra software to download, SEMrush is focused on providing the best rapid SEO and PPC competitive analysis. The service has an amazingly vast database of information. In fact, it is possibly the most comprehensive SEO research tool on the market today. The database contains over 106 million keywords that are pulled from 97 million domains.
But wait – it gets even better. SEMrush not only has one of the most extensive keyword databases of any service, it also provides updates in real time. That’s right. SEMrush.com comes through with real time data for the most accurate and up to date information possible.
Known formally as SEMrush Inc., the company is respected around the world for its top-rated keyword research and online competitor analysis software. With offices located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and St. Petersburg, Russia, SEMrush has been able to attract an international audience. Over 100 dedicated full-time employees ensure that the SEO tool is working perfectly at all times.
The Importance of Search Engine Marketing
Chances are that if you’re reading our review of SEMrush.com, you are already well aware of the importance of search engine marketing. For those that need a little reminding, let the following information act as a brief refresher course.
Search engine marketing brings with it a few chief benefits over other types of marketing. First and foremost, it is a low cost technique. It is much cheaper to create and maintain an SEO/SEM campaign than most other forms of marketing. Second is the fact that search engine optimization works 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Advertising isn’t crunched into a timeframe, rather it keeps on going at all times.
Finally, as I’m sure you all know, SEM brings you new business. It directs a new audience towards your website by improving your page ranking on search engines like Google. This in itself is one of the most effective ways to grow your website or online business.
As you can see, SEM has a number of impressive benefits that no business should overlook. So how does SEMrush help you in particular? As mentioned above, it boils down to keyword research, competitor research, site audits, and backlink analysis. SEMrush.com can provide tools for all of this and more. So continue reading the review below to find out exactly how the service can help you accomplish your goals.
Top Features of SEMrush.com
SEMrush offers a wide variety of different features and functions that aid the user experience and make the SEO tool that much more effective. A handful of the most important features that you should take note of are outlined in detail below.
Analytics Reports
A number of analytic reporting tools make up the backbone of SEMrush.com’s SEO tool offerings. These include organic research reports, advertising research reports, display advertising reports, backlinks analytics, product listing ads analytics, and keyword research reports. Each of these analytics reports is broken down individually below.
Organic Research
Reach the top of the search engine results with organic research. SEMrush’s organic research analytics help you select the best keywords to use as building blocks for this goal. The tool allows you to see your competitor’s best keywords, discover new organic competitors, and observe position changes of domains.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of the SEMrush organic research tool is that it helps you estimate the value of keywords. You can compare them against main web performance indictors. These indicators include such factors as traffic, search volume, estimate of CPC (cost per click), competition, number of search results, and trend.
Advertising Research
Achieve maximum ROI (return on investment) from your PPC (pay per click) campaigns with advertising research. SEMrush’s Competitive Intelligence tool allows you to do just that.
In specific, advertising research from SEMrush consists of uncovering your competitor’s advertising strategies and advertising budgets, analyzing their ad copy and keywords, discovering new organic competitors, and localizing your business’s own advertising campaigns.
Display Advertising
Google’s Display Network has changed the face of online marketing. By showing millions of websites from around the world where you can promote your products and services, it has become a huge part of the search advertising world.
However, blindly bidding on impressions and clicks (that don’t bring leads or sales revenue) is both a waste of time and a waste of money. SEMrush’s display advertising analytics gives you the ability to learn from Google Display Network’s top performers.
Display advertising analytics lets you see the top publishers and advertisers on this network, analyze their display adds, find new publishers before anyone else, and view the displays from a variety of different devices.
Backlinks Research
A backlink is essentially a positive vote for your website. It is a testament from another website that yours is trustworthy and of high quality. Though they are not the only factor that matters, backlinks are among the most important as it pertains to popularity and credibility.
The backlinks analytics feature from SEMrush helps you find out which links are directing people back to your website. It also helps you gather link intelligence on your competitors. It even allows you to see the geo-location of the backlinks your website receives.
Product Listing Ads
Product listing ads (PLAs) are a great way for online businesses, especially e-commerce retailers, to attract new customers. However, they are often thrown together haphazardly, resulting in a lot of lost money.
The product listing ads tool from SEMrush.com aims to boost your Google Shopping campaigns with high quality PLA data. It helps you find out who your product listing ads competitors are, what they are doing to attract customers, and what their highest-performing PLAs are doing right.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most valuable SEO tools. And the keyword research tool from SEMrush helps you find the absolute best keywords to use for your online marketing campaigns.
In addition to finding the right keywords for your SEO and PPC campaigns, SEMrush also helps you gather phrase matches and related keywords, find new long-tail keywords, and even explore multilingual environments.
Tools
SEMrush.com also provides a number of additional tools to benefit your website’s SEO. These include keyword difficulty tools, domain vs. domain tools, and charts. These tools help you visualize SEO data so you can easily compare oftentimes complicated information. Each of these tools is broken down individually below.
Keyword Difficulty
If your website doesn’t rank high on search engines for relevant keywords, chances are that few people will organically find your site. SEMrush.com provides a keyword difficulty tool that helps you find out which keywords your competitors are using to beat you out in the rankings.
As the tool’s name implies, it also lets you instantly calculate the difficulty of ranking in the top 20 for that particular search term. The SEMrush keyword ranking tool points you towards relevant keywords with less competition. This allows your company to then focus your SEO efforts on these keywords for the best search engine ranking possible.
Domain vs. Domain
Another great feature of the SEMrush service is their domain vs. domain analysis tool. It provides quick Big Data visualizations of a domain’s common and unique keywords. These side-by-side comparisons make visualizing data easy. Simply put, the SEMrush.com domain vs. domain tool makes it easy to gather complex data on your competitors without spending much time or money on the task.
Charts
The charts feature is yet another unique tool offered by SEMrush. Indeed, it sets the company apart from its competitors. It allows you to easily and instantly conduct competitive analysis on your competitors. The resulting data is then illustrated in intuitive and easy to understand charts and grafts. You can select line, bar, or pie graphs depending on your particular preferences.
The charts function lets you analyze several different areas at once. These include seeing how many users visit your competition’s websites, see how much of this traffic is driven by paid searches, and estimate how much your competition is spending on paid campaigns such as Google AdWords and Bing Ads. The feature also helps you find out which keywords are helping your online competition and which keywords are no longer useful for bringing websites in your industry to the top of the search engine rankings.
Projects
The final category of features offered by SEMrush.com is known as projects. These are a series of tools that are designed to help you launch effective global marketing campaigns. They also help you get the necessary metrics on all of the information you need including keyword rankings and on-page health. The two main project tools are position tracking and site audit.
Position Tracking
SEMrush’s position tracking tool has proven to be very effective at tracking any domain or keyword from any location. Searching with geo-location allows you to discover local competitors and target different audiences.
Site Audit
The site audit tool from SEMrush gives you the chance to check your website’s overall health. The tool analyzes your website’s SEO. The results help you prioritize which SEO issues are the most important so that you know which aspects you need to fix first. Finally, the site audit tool allows you to track search engine optimization progress so you can actually see which techniques benefit you and which don’t.
SEMrush.com Pricing
The services offered by SEMrush.com are reasonably priced compared to the competition. It’s important to note, right from the get-go, that the service is subscription based.
Though most people tend to subscribe to one of the three monthly plans, the annual plan is the most cost effective route to take. In fact, the annual plan can save you up to $1,100 depending on the type of account you select.
The three account types offered by SEMrush are known as Pro, Guru, and Business. Each of these three accounts, including their price, is broken down in detail below.
Pro Account
The Pro Account from SEMrush.com costs $69.95 per month. It runs 3,000 reports per day with 10,000 pages per report. You can run 5 projects per month, tracking 500 keywords and crawling 100,000 pages in the process.
Guru Account
Heralded by SEMrush.com as their “best choice,” the Guru Account costs for $149.95 per month. It runs 5,000 reports per day with 30,000 pages per report. You can run 50 projects per month, tracking 1,500 keywords and crawling 300,000 pages in the process.
Business Account
The Business Account from SEMrush.com is their most expensive and most thorough offering. It clocks in at $549.95 per month. It runs 10,000 reports per day with 50,000 pages per report for up to four different users. You can run an unlimited number of projects per month, tracking 6,000 keywords and crawling 1,200,00 pages in the process.
All of the accounts offered by SEMrush.com come with a 7-day money back guarantee. They also offer a free fully featured 14-day free trial.
Pros of Using SEMrush.com
Now that you have a solid understanding of the various account types and features of SEMrush.com, as well as its basic pricing scheme, it is time to discuss just how well all of these factors perform overall. Below are the top benefits of using SEMrush for your website’s online marketing and search engine optimization needs.
Keyword Research
Perhaps the biggest benefit of SEMrush is its applications for thorough keyword research. It doesn’t matter what your website is about, the service will help you find the best keywords surrounding this phrase.
One aspect of the keyword research tool that stands out in particular is the SERP result. This allows you to see what the search engine result pages for each particular key term looks like without actually typing in that key term yourself.
Another great aspect of the keyword research tool is that it lets you easily look deeper into related terms. So instead of just seeing phrase matches, you also get to see search terms you might not have originally thought about using.
Competitor Research
By now in this review, you probably know that one of SEMrush’s biggest advantages is its competitor research functions. You basically use this tool to see what competitors are doing regarding the keywords you research. You can compare different domains side by side to see how the overall competition is for each search term.
Probably the most unique, and interesting, aspect of the competitor research tool is that it shows the estimated cost the organic traffic would have cost the competitor’s website in question. In some ways, there is almost too much information on this page, but it is so cleanly and clearly organized that even the information you have no need for doesn’t get in the way and clog up the information you do need.
Site Audit
The site audit tool is another feature that stands out after putting it through the hoops. Indeed, the functionality is nearly spot-on, making it easy to better understand the overall health of your website.
The site audit tool is particularly useful for three main tasks. These are highlighting penalties, getting a traffic estimation for your website, and finding out where and when there are peaks in traffic.
Backlink Analysis
After using SEMrush.com extensively, we’ve come to appreciate its backlink analysis as one of its best features. Regular link review is always a good idea when running a website and SEMrush makes this very easy to do.
The service displays your website’s backlink data in an easy to understand graph. Another nice aspect of this feature is that it shows you the domain type that each link is coming to. For instance, you can see if backlinks originate on a .com, .org, .edu, etc.
Tools
The tools section is another aspect that makes SEMrush well worth the money. As is mentioned above in the features section of this review, one of the tools here is the domain vs. domain side bar.
SEMrush breaks down your website versus your competitor’s website in a Venn diagram. It helps you show the number of keywords your site and the other are competing against. You can also line up two of your competitor’s websites to see what their organic keyword rankings are.
The domain vs. domain tool also provides information on trend. This area simply shows what different people have been searching fro during the last twelve months.
Cons of Using SEMrush.com
Naturally, no service is perfect. SEMrush.com included. Though it does have its fair share of advantages, it does come with a handful of disadvantages as well.
Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of SEMrush is that much of the information it provides is somewhat redundant. You might have suspected as much simply by reading this review. Though all of the information that the service provides is valuable, much of it is the same data presented in different ways. While this is slightly annoying, it is an easy disadvantage to get past. Especially when you’re getting so much excellent information in the process.
The only other real disadvantage of SEMrush is that it is not always 100% accurate. But it is just about as close as it gets. The website doesn’t update on a daily basis for certain areas.
So, for instance, the keyword research isn’t in real time. However, when it comes to something like keyword research, this fact doesn’t really make much of a difference for you. This disadvantage is sort of just something to be nitpicky about. And SEMrush does just as well at staying up to date as the vast majority of its competition.
SEMrush.com Customer Support
Great customer service is important no matter the type of company you’re talking about. Fortunately, SEMrush kills it in the customer service department.
You are able to contact the company’s customer service department during business hours by phone. All of the representatives are friendly, professional, and knowledgeable. They will answer your question or concern in short order. SEMrush can also be contacted through an email form or even contacted for a face-to-face chat via Skype.
One of the best parts about the customer service staff at SEMrush is that they take the time to actually talk to you. It never seems like they are in a rush to get rid of you, even if you’re just calling for more information about the service before acquiring it yourself.
But a lot of the time you won’t even need to go as far as to reach out to customer support. SEMrush has an extensive “knowledge” section on their website. Here you can find a manual, a FAQ, video tutorials, a glossary of terms, and other information. Webinars are also available to help those new to SEMrush learn its many ins and outs.
Final Thoughts on SEMrush.com
At the end of the day, SEMrush is a solid service for its price. You definitely get what you pay for.
And the fact that it is designed by SEO professionals for other SEO professionals means that it has nearly everything you’d want out of such a service.
SEMrush has a great track record so far and that’s sure to remain the case well into the future.