What Is Semrush?

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Semrush can be used for everything (in the realm of SEO and digital marketing). From identifying target keywords, and analyzing your competitor’s backlink profile to monitoring your social media presence, Semrush does it all.

Semrush should not be viewed as a singular tool.

The software boasts a range of toolkits, each of which contains unique features that can be used to tweak, monitor, and improve your SEO campaign. The most popular is the SEO toolkit.

Other SEO strategy aids come in the form of toolkits dedicated to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media, content marketing, management, and agency growth.

Sound like a lot?

Well, it is. 

To help you out, I’ve devised this ultimate guide to bring clarity to the many facets of Semrush’s toolkits.

Along the way, I’ll answer questions such as ‘how can I use this tool to improve my domain visibility?’, and explain how to use Semrush to perform keyword research, conduct site audits, compare your domain to your competitors, and more.

Try Semrush Pro free for 7 days

With Semrush, you get to analyze data, track rankings, and uncover valuable insights that can help you tailor your content and strategies more effectively. Sign Up Now

 

SEO Toolkits — What You Will Find

The SEO Toolkit

In this toolkit, you’ll find all the tools you’ll need to construct a successful SEO strategy.

From tracking your keyword rankings to link building, and conducting keyword analysis, this toolkit leaves no stone unturned in the SEO puzzle.

However, with 20 unique tools and dashboards at hand, the SEO toolkit can appear slightly overwhelming at first glance.
Which tool should you pick up first? How do you even use the featured tools?

Don’t sweat — I’m going to break down all the features found within this bundle.

And the best place to start?

The SEO Dashboard provides you with a great overview of the tools found within.

Let’s take a look…

SEO Dashboard

The SEO Dashboard breaks down all the features of the SEO Toolkit into one neat control desk.

You can use it to get a brief overview of your website’s online presence.

The top banner is dedicated to Domain Analytics.

Here, you can review your site’s current authority score, check how much organic traffic is coming to your site, view how many organic and paid keywords your site is ranking for, and keep track of your referring domains.

Other sections of the SEO Dashboard include:

• • Position Tracking

• • Site Audit

• • On-Page SEO Checker

• • Backlink Audit

• • Traffic Analytics

• • Organic Keywords

• • Backlink Analytics

• • Organic Traffic Insights

• • Link Building Tool

Why it’s useful:

To put it simply—the SEO Dashboard allows you to view key metrics quickly.

Instead of looking at the Traffic Analytics or Referring Domains sections individually, you can quickly review them all in one place.

It provides the right amount of data to gauge how things are going without being overwhelming.

You can access the individual sections by clicking on any of the widgets for a deeper dive.

When you create a Semrush project, you’ll see Copilot AI on your project dashboard. It provides recommendations and insight based on AI analysis of six Semrush tools at a time.

Pretty cool.

How to use it:

To create an SEO Dashboard, you need to first create a project. You can easily do this by clicking on ‘SEO Dashboard’, entering your domain, and hitting ‘Create project’

Domain Overview

Another way to quickly view a site’s metrics is through the Domain Overview feature.

Why it’s useful:

When it comes to competitive analysis, fewer tools give you a head start quite like Domain Overview.

This feature provides you with a full breakdown of how a domain is performing.

By identifying your site’s strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors, you’ll gain insights into what you need to do to outperform them.

At the top of the Domain Overview, there are four tabs:

First off, we have:

The Overview report: This report provides a thorough breakdown of a domain’s authority score, organic and paid search traffic, and backlinks.

Clicking on one of these widgets, such as ‘Backlinks’, will take you to a more in-depth analysis.

Further down the page, there are a ton of other useful insights you can find, like:

• • Organic and paid traffic distribution by country, and changes in this over time

• • Top paid and organic keywords and organic position distribution

• • Keywords by intent

• • Your main competitors, both organic and paid

• • Anchor text usage

• • Referring domains

• • Indexed pages report

• • Branded traffic trends

• • Backlinks, including information on the type (text, image, etc) and nofollow vs dofollow.

And even competitive positioning maps for both paid and organic competitors.

Secondly, we have…

Compare domains: Through this tool, you can size your domain up against four of your top competitors.

Thirdly:

Growth report: The growth report lets you see changes in a domain’s paid traffic, organic traffic, keywords, and backlink profile over a specific period.

And, last but not least:

Compare by countries: This feature lets you compare up to five countries at a time, giving you an insight into how well your website is doing in each location.

Pretty neat, right?

How to use it:

To get the data, all you have to do is paste the URL into the search bar and hit ‘Search’

As standard, Domain Overview will run a ‘worldwide’ search. However, you can choose to focus the analysis on a specified country.

With a free account, you can run 10 Domain Overview searches per day. With a Guru account, you can run 5,000.

Reveal any company’s website traffic

Traffic Analytics

First off, when you analyze a site with Traffic Analytics, you get an estimate of that site’s overall traffic numbers:

You also get access to how people interact with the site. For example, you can see a site’s average page views per visit, session duration, and bounce rate:

There’s also a chart so you can see how these metrics have changed over time:

But the real meat and potatoes of this feature is the Traffic Journey tab.

Here, you will see a breakdown of a site’s traffic sources:

And a list of the exact sites that send your website the most traffic:

For example, you can see that I get a decent chunk of traffic from perplexity.ai:

You can also see which social media platforms send your competitors the most traffic:

Again, this is a great way to reverse engineer what’s already working for your competitors.

Organic Research

The “Organic Research” feature put Semrush on the map.

And it still works GREAT.

To use it, put a competitor’s website (or your own site) into Semrush and you’ll get access to lots of exceptionally useful data:

Overview

First up, you have “Keywords”:

This is the total number of keywords that a domain ranks for in the top 100 positions.

Second, you have “Traffic”.

This is an estimate of how much monthly traffic that site gets from search engines:

Next, we have the metric that I pay the most attention to: “Traffic Cost”:

Traffic cost estimates how much that site’s organic traffic is worth.

(By “worth”, I mean how much you would have paid if you had gone with PPC instead of SEO).

Because this metric takes into account traffic AND the value of that traffic, it’s my favorite metric in the entire Semrush suite.

For example, if you put Nerd Wallet into Semrush, you can see that they get an astounding $89.6 million worth of traffic from SEO every month:

Positions

Here’s where you get to see all the keywords a domain ranks for (And where they rank.)

This is SUPER helpful for keyword research.

Instead of mining for gold in the Google Keyword Planner, you get a list of awesome keywords presented to you on a silver platter

After all, if your competitor ranks for these keywords, so can you.

Now:

By default, Semrush shows you how much traffic was driven to the website via the chosen keyword for the chosen time period:

Which is a helpful starting point.

But there’s so much more you can do by filtering this data.

Using the Filters

Positions:

With the positions filter, you can see how keywords rank within your chosen of range of positions.

The default setting will show positions in the top 100. But, you can choose between other filter options, such as: Top 3, Top 10, Top 20, and Top 50.

Additionally, you can search for keywords in a #1 position, as well as those in #4-10, #11-20, #21-50, and #51-100 positions.

The good news is, you can take advantage of the Semrush free trial and experience all its premium features for 14 days. Take note that this is only available through the exclusive Master Blogging offer (Pro and Guru plans only). 

How much does Semrush cost for each subscription plan?

Without further ado, let’s talk about the price of Semrush Pro, Semrush Guru, and Semrush Business: 

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Semrush Pro plan pricing 

• Monthly subscription: $129.95 per month
• Annual subscription: $108.33 per month ($1,299.96 upfront cost)

Semrush Pro is the most affordable solution for website owners who need a complete digital marketing platform. It’s the perfect choice for new bloggers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and marketers that only manage five sites or fewer. 

This entry-level subscription has everything you need to build an online presence, keep up with the competition, and generate website traffic. It lets you find keyword ideas, generate competitive analysis reports, all track domain analytics—all for an affordable pricing structure. 

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Semrush Pro features:

• Track up to 5 projects
• Track up to 500 keywords
• Get up to 10,000 results per report
• Competitor analysis
• Keyword research
• Website audit
• Advertising management tools
• Social media management tools

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Semrush Guru plan pricing

• Monthly subscription: $249.95 per month
• Annual subscription: $208.33 per month ($2,499.96 upfront cost)

If you’re moving up the ladder and need a little more than position tracking, keyword research, and domain analysis, go with the Semrush Guru plan. This unlocks a host of amazing features that will take your SEO and content marketing efforts further. 

A great example would be the Content Marketing Toolkit, which lets you dive into the performance of your content. Using the content audit report, analyze what works and what doesn’t in your content strategy to make data-driven decisions. 

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Semrush Guru features:

• Track up to 15 projects
• Track up to 1,500 keywords
• Get up to 30,000 results per report
• Everything in Semrush Pro
• Content Marketing Toolkit
• Historical data
• Multi-location tracking
• Multi-device tracking
• Looker Studio integration

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Semrush Business plan pricing

• Monthly subscription: $499.95 per month
• Annual subscription: $416.66 per month ($4,999.92 upfront cost)

Semrush Business is for established businesses that want to cement their dominance in the online landscape. With the highest limits available, it’s also the only plan that matches the needs of large agencies that manage dozens of client websites. 

Get Semrush Business if your goals go beyond what Semrush Pro or Guru can handle. But with the steep pricing, Semrush Business isn’t recommended for your average blogger, business, marketer, or entrepreneur. 

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Semrush Business features:

• Track up to 40 projects
• Track up to 5,000 keywords
• Get up to 50,000 results per report
• Everything in Semrush Pro and Semrush Guru
• Share of Voice metric
• Semrush API access
• Free migration assistance (from other third-party tools)