Semrush Pricing (2024) — Which Plan is Right for You?

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Written by Chris Singleton | Researched and reviewed by Matt Walsh

In this post, I take a detailed look at Semrush pricing — and help you work out which of its plans makes the most sense for your business or SEO project.

Semrush is an extremely powerful SEO tool which — when used correctly — can have a huge impact on the visibility of your website in search results (and, by extension, your business revenue).

However, there’s no denying it: by comparison to many of the other apps routinely used by businesses, Semrush is quite expensive, and investing in it can feel a bit scary — particularly if you’re a startup without a big budget.

So, if you’re choosing Semrush as your SEO solution, it’s really important to pick the right plan for your project.

That’s where this post comes in — I’m going to…

  • break down the Semrush pricing structure
  • highlight the key pros and cons and value for money of each plan.

By the end of this article, you should know which Semrush plan is best suited to your project and your business — and what alternative SEO tools are available if you feel Semrush isn’t quite right for you.

Let’s dive in — with a quick overview of what Semrush actually is.

Semrush overview

Semrush is a product that is designed to help you achieve higher rankings in search results.

It does this by giving you a lot of information, which you can use to:

  • create web pages and blog posts that that are likely to attract organic traffic
  • identify link-building opportunities (more links, generally speaking, means better search results)
  • change technical aspects of your site so that it stands a greater chance of ranking highly.
The Semrush platform
The Semrush platform

Created in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov, Semrush now features a large user base in 143 countries — and according to the company, over 10 million people have now used the product.

Semrush and the war in Ukraine

Semrush is technically a US-based, publicly-traded company with 23 offices around the world. In the context of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia however, some in the SEO community have understandably voiced concerns about the company’s Russian roots (both its founders are Russian and it has a lot of employees in Russia).

At Style Factory, we are committed to a fully honest, transparent and ethical approach when it comes to product reviews. We are also 100% against the war (and are supporting child victims of the violence in Ukraine). So we wanted clarity on this issue too — for both us and our readers.

We are pleased to note that Semrush has publicly announced its firm opposition to the invasion (which we feel is a brave thing for a Russian-founded organization to do) — and we are still comfortable with continuing featuring Semrush on our site, as we believe the company is ultimately an international organization that has taken as ethical an approach as it can in this situation.

Semrush userbase information.
Semrush userbase information

You can use Semrush with any website builder platform or CMS — i.e., regardless of whether you’re a Shopify, Squarespace or Wix user, the data you can pull from Semrush can help you shape an effective SEO campaign.

But how much does Semrush cost?

Keyword research in Semrush
Carrying out keyword research in Semrush

Semrush pricing options

There are four Semrush plans available:

  • Pro: $129.95 per month
  • Guru: $249.95 per month
  • Business: $499.95 per month
  • Custom: negotiable

If you pay annually, a 16.7% discount is applied to each plan; and a free trial lets you try most features out before subscribing. The standard trial is just 7 days long, but an extended 30-day trial is available for a limited time via this link.

Semrush pricing options (correct at time of writing in 2023).

Let’s take a look at each of these pricing options in turn, and see what sort of users each plan is aimed at.

Semrush Pro — $129.95 per month

The ‘Pro’ plan is Semrush’s entry-level offering.

At $129.95 per month, it gives you the following core features:

  • Domain analytics — the ability to see how ‘authoritative’ your domain (or a competitor’s) is, based on how many links there are to it.
  • Keyword research tools — these let you see how many people are searching for a particular keyword, how hard it will be to rank for it, and what alternative phrases (keyword suggestions) might be worth focusing on.
  • Site auditing tools — these identify technical changes you can make to your site in order to maximise the chances of it performing well in search results.
  • An on-page SEO checker — this assesses your content and gives you ideas on how to improve it. Suggestions range from adding certain keywords to your text and improving its readability to adjusting page lengths.

The important thing to note about Semrush Pro — and indeed all other Semrush plans under discussion here — is that various limits apply to how you can access all the above data (and how often).

The main limits of the ‘Pro’ plan to be aware of are as follows:

The number of reports you can pull

The ‘Pro’ plan limits you to 3,000 reports per day for domain or keyword analytics.

This is pretty generous and compares positively against competing tools — Ahrefs, for example, limits users to a maximum of 500 reports per month on any plan.

But if you are a ‘power user,’ you may require more reports than this limit allows.

How often your keyword metrics are refreshed

The number of times you can get fresh metrics for your target keywords in Keyword Manager per month is limited to 250 on the ‘Pro’ plan.

The number of keywords you can track simultaneously

On the ‘Pro’ plan, you can track the performance of up to 500 different keywords.

This is probably enough if you are using Semrush to manage SEO for just one site; it may not be sufficient however, if you’re hoping to track keywords for multiple (and large) sites.

The number of projects you can run

Of all the limits applied to the ‘Pro’ plan, the ‘project limit’ is probably the most significant.

Creating a project means adding a domain to the Semrush dashboard — doing so lets you access a lot of extra data and functionality, but only relating to that domain.

Creating a project in Semrush.
Creating a project in Semrush

On the ‘Pro’ plan, you can use Semrush on five website projects. When you add a domain to a project, you’ll be able to access the following additional data / features for it:

  • technical SEO / on-page SEO auditing
  • position tracking
  • backlink auditing
  • link building 
  • PPC keyword analysis.

Now, this five-project limit won’t be a show stopper if you only intend to use Semrush with a couple of domains. 

But if, for example, you want to assign a project to your own website, plus several competitor websites, being on the ‘Pro’ plan may prove challenging.

The five-project limit may also rule the ‘Pro’ plan out for users who want to carry out SEO projects for several client websites at once.

The number of pages you can crawl

When auditing a website, Semrush crawls all that site’s pages, looking for technical SEO errors to fix, or improvements that can be made to it.

On each plan, a limit applies to the number of pages you can crawl per month — on the ‘Pro’ plan this is 20,000 pages per project, and 100,000 overall.

Unless you are working on massive sites however, this limit should be fine.

Is ‘Semrush Pro’ right for me?

‘Semrush Pro’ is the best plan for users who…

  • are setting up a new business, and just starting out in SEO
  • need basic keyword research and domain analysis tools
  • are on a budget
  • don’t intend to track thousands of keywords at once
  • don’t need to manage SEO projects for multiple websites at once.

If that sounds like you, you can test the plan out via a free trial here.

If not, it’s time to take a look at the next plan up the Semrush pricing ladder, which is the Semrush Guru plan.

Semrush Guru — $249.95 per month

The next plan up is the ‘Guru’ plan, which costs $249.95 per month.

The key difference between this plan and the ‘Pro’ plan involves something called the ‘Content Marketing Platform.’

This is a suite of tools that aims to help you craft a content strategy.

You can use these to:

  • Find topics to write about that have a good chance of ranking well in search results
  • Manage content creation campaigns (via a task management system)
  • Check the SEO potential of content you’re working on
  • Measure the effectiveness of your content over time
  • Check if anybody has been plagiarising your content

So while you can use the ‘Pro’ plan to generate keyword ideas (mostly through keyword research), the ‘Guru’ plan gives you considerably more options on this front — and lets you manage the process of content creation better.

Carrying out topic research in SEMrush
Carrying out topic research in Semrush using its ‘content marketing platform.’ This feature becomes available on the ‘Guru’ plan or higher.

Another key difference between this plan and ‘Pro’ is that it unlocks access to historical data.

This lets you, as Semrush puts it, ‘go back in time’ and gain insights into your or your competitors websites’ performance with metrics gathered since 2012.

A Google ‘Looker Studio’ integration is also included with this plan — this allows you to make use of Semrush data in Google’s free visual reporting tool, meaning that you can use it to create custom SEO reports and dashboards.

Semrush's Google Looker Studio integration.
Semrush’s Google Looker Studio integration

And a ‘keyword cannibalization report‘ is provided that lets you identify pages that compete against each other for the same search query in Google (either because the topics they cover are too similar, or because you optimized them for the same keyword).

Finally, the limits on the Semrush ‘Guru’ plan are much more generous than the ‘Pro’ plan.

You get more domain reports per day (5,000); more projects (15); more keywords to track (1,500) and a higher monthly page crawl limit (of 300,000 pages).

Is ‘Semrush Guru’ right for me?

The ‘Guru’ plan is a good option for users who…

  • are looking for a content generation / strategy tool
  • are likely to be managing SEO for multiple websites at once
  • have a need to access historical data on websites
  • wish to analyse data outside of Semrush using Google Data Studio.

Let’s move on now to look at Semrush Business. But first, a quick word about the Semrush free trial.

Getting an extended free trial of Semrush

The standard free trial of Semrush lasts just seven days — however, for a limited time, you can avail of a double-length 14 day trial using this link.

This gives you a 14-day window to try out all the product’s key features and access all the data provided by it.

Semrush Business — $499.95 per month

So far, we’ve looked at two plans which are mainly focused on small business owners.

Depending on the size of your organisation, you may be able to use ‘Semrush Guru’ to handle SEO work for a few clients — but realistically, if you have a large client roster, or need to manage SEO for a significant number of websites, you’re going to be best off with a Semrush Business plan, which lets you work on up to 40 projects at once.

This comes at a high cost — it’s $499.95 per month, which is not an inconsiderable investment.

In terms of features, there are a few additional pieces of key functionality to look out for which are missing from the other two plans discussed so far:

  • Semrush PLA (Product Listing Ads) research — this enables you to analyze the performance of an advertiser’s Google Shopping ad campaigns. This is a useful feature for companies that need to gather competitive intelligence on e-commerce rivals.
  • API access — this gives you access to most of Semrush APIs (application programming interfaces), allowing you to integrate Semrush into your own applications, widgets and dashboards; or visualize Semrush data via your own custom interface.
  • The Share of Voice metric — this lets you know the ratio of traffic received to the sum of volumes of your tracked keywords.

Other than the above, the main difference you’ll notice between the ‘Business’ plan and the ‘Pro’ and ‘Guru’ ones is that the limits on pretty much everything are far more generous.

As mentioned above, you can use this plan to manage 40 projects at once; but it also lets you track up to 5,000 keywords, and run 10,000 queries per day. And the number of pages you can crawl per month rises to 1 million.

Is ‘Semrush Business’ right for me?

‘Semrush Business’ is appropriate for users who:

  • need to manage SEO for a lot of websites or clients simultaneously (SEO agencies etc.)
  • run a very large number of queries and reports daily
  • have advanced or custom needs that require access to Semrush’s APIs.

So the ‘Business’ plan will meet the needs of most ‘power’ users — but even so, there may be some businesses for whom these features and limits are not sufficient.

That’s where the ‘Custom’ version of Semrush comes in.

But before discussing that, it’s worth zooming in on two aspects of Semrush which can add to your costs considerably: user management and add-ons.

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User management in Semrush

An aspect of Semrush pricing which you need to be very aware of involves user management. Unlike those of many competing SEO platforms, Semrush plans only come with one user account.

If you want to add more ‘seats,’ you need to pay an additional — and not inconsiderable — fee. These fees are as follows:

  • ‘Pro’ plan: an additional $45 per user
  • ‘Guru’ plan: an additional $80 per user
  • ‘Business’ plan: an additional $100 per user
  • ‘Custom’ plan: negotiable

By comparison to its key competitors, I’d argue that the feature set in Semrush is — generally speaking — more comprehensive, so if you’re just intending to have one user in your organisation work on your SEO, then each plan discussed above represents very good value.

However, if you know you’re going to need a lot of people accessing your account at once, this sense of good value becomes much less pronounced.

There are similar tools — like Ahrefs and Moz — which include more seats as you go up the pricing ladder, or charge less for additional seats.

Add-ons for Semrush

In addition to the features outlined above, Semrush makes more functionality available via paid-for ‘add-ons.’

There are currently five of these to consider: the ‘Semrush. Trends’ add-on, the ‘Semrush Social’ add-on, the ‘Local SEO’ add-on, the ‘Agency Growth Kit’ add-on, and the ‘ImpactHero’ add-on.

The ‘Semrush. Trends’ add-on unlocks metrics that help you analyse how your competitors are performing on the SEO front.

The add-on costs $200 per user per month and the features it includes are:

  • Market Explorer — this helps you identify market players, market shares, audience age, gender and behavior and seasonal peaks.
  • Traffic Analytics — this gives you advanced insights on your competitors’ website traffic (for example, traffic sources, top pages, engagement, and user behavior metrics).

These metrics are useful, but it has to be remembered that they are based on estimates.

As the add-on name suggests, these tools are best used to identify trends and the relative position of a website in a marketplace — rather than being viewed as ways to access to hard data.

Semrush’s ‘market explorer’ feature — this comes as part of Semrush’s competitive intelligence add-on.
Semrush’s ‘market explorer’ feature — this comes as part of Semrush’s competitive intelligence add-on.

‘Semrush Social’ add-on

The ‘Semrush Social’ add-on provides users with several tools to help streamline social media management.

These tools include:

  • The ‘Social Poster’ tool — this lets you post social content on Facebook (Business pages), LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Business Profile, Pinterest and Twitter without leaving the Semrush interface.
  • The ‘Social Tracker’ tool — this provides you with key information about your competitors’ social campaigns such as audience, activity, engagement, and hashtags.
  • The ‘Social Analytics’ tool — this gives you direct access to your internal analytics metrics (new follows, post reach, engagement rate, etc.) for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram from within your Semrush account.
  • The ‘Social Inbox’ tool — this tool collects mentions, private messages and comments from your business social accounts and lets you respond to them from your Semrush account.

The ‘Semrush Social’ add-on costs $29.99 per month, with varying limits applying to how much you can use its features. These limits depend on which Semrush plan you’re on.

Semrush social use limits
‘Semrush Social’ tool limits

Local SEO add-ons

There are two local SEO add-ons available: the ‘Basic Location’ add-on, which costs $20 per month, and the ‘Premium Location’ version, which costs $40 per month.

Both give you the ability to:

  • distribute business information to directories
  • suppress duplicate listings
  • track local rankings
  • manage Google My Business and Facebook listings
  • monitor reviews and user suggestions

Additionally, the premium version gives you access to a ‘local heatmap’ — a way to see how your customers can find your business versus other local companies on Google Maps. This tool includes a ChatGPT-powered keyword suggestion feature to help you optimize your business listings for local search.

The ‘Premium Location’ version also provides you with a facility that lets you respond to reviews directly within the Semrush interface. You can choose to either manually compose your own responses to customer reviews, or alternatively, use Semrush’s ChatGPT integration to automatically generate your responses for you.

The local SEO tools add-on from Semrush
The local SEO add-on from Semrush

How useful the local SEO add-ons will be depend on the type of business you run (or the types of clients you have).

As you might expect, they’re great for helping you raise the search visibility of bricks-and-mortar businesses that serve particular geographic areas — but not particularly useful for websites that aren’t specifically targeting a particular area (i.e., e-commerce sites, blogs, affiliate businesses and so on).

Banner advert for Semrush

The Semrush Agency Growth Kit

If you’re an agency that wants to ‘white label’ all your SEO data, you can pay extra to do this using Semrush’s ‘Agency Growth Kit.’

Semrush Agency Growth Kit
Semrush Agency Growth Kit

This allows you to produce PDFs reports that have no Semrush branding on them; you can also customize these extensively so that your brand guidelines or your clients’ are fully adhered to.

The growth kit also helps you list your business in a directory of Semrush certified agencies, and access a client management tool (the latter lets you create a list of your SEO clients and assign projects and reports to each).

Semrush's directory of agency partners.
Investing in the Agency Growth Kit gets you listed in the Semrush ‘Agency Partners’ directory

There are three Agency Growth Kit plans available:

  • Start — $69 per month (only available on the ‘Pro’ Semrush plan)
  • Scale — $149 per month (available on the ‘Pro’ and Guru’ Semrush plans)
  • Advanced — $249 per month (available on all Semrush plans).

The ‘Start’ plan gives you access to Semrush’s client portal tool along with the ability to create white label-reports; the ‘Scale’ plan gives you premium visibility on the ‘Agency Partners’ platform and also unlimited use of Semrush’s CRM tool; and the ‘Advanced’ plan lets you run an unlimited number of client portals under your own domain name.

Pricing for Semrush's 'Agency growth Kit'.
‘Agency Growth Kit’ pricing

‘ImpactHero’ add-on

The Semrush ‘ImpactHero’ add-on uses artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to help you design and optimize your content based on different customer journey stages.

ImpactHero helps you to:

  • visualize your conversion funnel based on user reach, leads, and dropouts
  • identify your best-performing traffic sources
  • analyze your content based on ‘type’ and ‘length’
  • identify key areas for content improvement within your conversion funnel.

The standard cost for the ImpactHero add-on is $200 per month, with exact pricing depending on the total number of campaigns it is used for.

A banner advert for Semrush

The Semrush app center

In addition to purchasing one of the the main Semrush add-ons, you can also add functionality to your Semrush account by investing in a third-party app / integration from the Semrush app center.

The home page of the Semrrush app center.
The Semrush app center

40 third-party apps are currently available — ranging from $10 to $169 per user per month in cost — and their focus is mainly on analytics and data (you can buy apps that let you analyse or research ecommerce keywords, mobile app performance and competitor advertising tactics).

Key apps in here include Influencer Analytics, an app that’s designed to make finding influencer and content creator partners for your site easier, and AdClarity, an app that gives you a 360 degree view of your competitors’ advertising activity across multiple of different advertising channels (display, social, video etc.)

A couple of the apps provide marketing / design functionality too: you can buy an app that generates social media banners for example, and a form-building app is available too.

Finally, you can also use the app center to subscribe to the main Semrush add-ons listed above (the agency growth kit, local SEO add-on etc.).

Semrush custom plans

So far in our overview of Semrush pricing, we’ve looked at ‘off the shelf’ plans.

However, if you have the right sort of business — and the right sort of budget — another option is to create a more bespoke plan, via the appropriately-named ‘Custom plan’ option.

Semrush's 'Custom plan' option
Semrush’s ‘Custom plan’ option

This will involve a discussion with Semrush regarding what features you need, how many users you want to add etc., and a negotiation on fees (which will be considerable).

But if you go down this route, you can expect premium support, account management, training, bespoke customisations and access to BETA features.

This plan is geared more towards enterprise-level customers than the other ones — you will need a decent budget to pay for a custom version of Semrush, but you can expect a lot of additional value from one.

Advert (Semrush)

Semrush pricing: summary

Overall, Semrush is a feature-rich SEO tool that offers a lot of ‘bang for your buck,’ especially if you only require access to your account by one user. It’s less good value however if you need to have lots of people working with the tool at once — the fees involved with adding multiple ‘seats’ are not insignificant.

The add-ons are useful, but also increase costs quite a lot. Whether or not you need one of them will boil down to your business type — the local SEO tools especially so — and how much you are likely to use them. 

Whilst providing you with a lot of really useful insights, the ‘Trends’ add-on has in particular the potential to make things a lot more expensive — in fact, in some cases you could end up paying more for this add-on than for your basic Semrush plan.

If regular analysis of your competitors’ SEO activities is essential, though, it has the potential to add a lot of value to proceedings.

The ‘sweet spot’? The Guru plan

For me, the sweet spot in the Semrush plan lineup is probably the ‘Guru’ plan, which you can try for free here.

It offers a really comprehensive range of SEO features and crucially, a generous project limit of 15 sites — one that will allow you to manage SEO for quite a few domains simultaneously, or compare your own site with a good range of competitor sites.

Additionally, the content strategy tools that you get access to on the Guru plan are extremely useful for creating the sort of content that really attracts organic traffic (as are the tools for managing the whole content creation process).

You can try out the Guru plan for free here.

Alternatives to Semrush

Semrush is not the only SEO tool of its kind out there — it’s a competitive marketplace! Other big hitters include Ahrefs and Moz; there’s also new kids on the block like GrowthBar to consider.

Check out our reviews and comparisons below for more information on how these tools stack up against each other:

You might also like to read our full Semrush review or our guide to the free Semrush trial.

Trying Semrush out

Finally, it’s worth noting that you can try out most of Semrush’s features for free before committing to a paid-for plan.

Normally speaking, you can only avail of a 7-day trial — but you should note that for a limited period only, you can access a 14-day one via this link

Semrush pricing…over to you!

Got any thoughts or queries on Semrush pricing? Do feel free to add your observations in the comments section below. We read all comments and will do our best to answer any questions you may have.

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