Semrush Review — All the Pros and Cons

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In this Semrush review, I explore the pros and cons of one of the best-known SEO tools available. Does it live up to its reputation — or should you investigate some alternatives?

Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, and because of its ‘industry standard’ status within the SEO community, a lot of site owners naturally gravitate towards it. But is it actually right for you?

Well, in this post I’m going to help you answer that question. I’m going to discuss how Semrush stacks up in terms of…

And more!

Let’s start things off with a look at Semrush’s background.

Semrush: the background

Created in 2008 by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov, Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools available, with around 112,000 paying subscribers (source: Semrush Q1 2024 Financial Report).

Semrush helps you improve your SEO by giving you a lot of data — information that you can use to:

For example, based on the phrases you enter, Semrush can give you keyword suggestions that can be used as the basis for writing blog posts that are likely to perform well in search results.

It can also tell you how difficult it will be to rank for specific search queries.

It will suggest websites that might be worth approaching for backlinks.

And it allows you to perform SEO audits on your website to find out if there are any technical improvements you can make to it that will help you achieve better search results.

That’s just the beginning though — there are many other features provided by Semrush that are designed to help you improve your site’s search rankings.

I’ll go through these in depth below, highlighting all their pros and cons.

Let’s continue by looking at something called domain analysis.

Domain analysis features

Most SEO projects start with some basic domain analysis. This means getting a simple overview of the ‘quality’ of a domain from an SEO point of view.

You typically perform domain analysis on your own website — to see where SEO improvements could be made — or on a competitor’s, to see how difficult it will be to outrank them in search results (and to find ways to do so).

You might also perform domain analysis on a website in order to see if it’s worth approaching its owner for a link from that site to yours — this is because external links (‘backlinks’) from high-quality websites to your content can boost your site’s overall performance in search results.

It’s easy to perform domain analysis in Semrush — you just enter a domain URL in its ‘domain overview’ section, and you get an immediate sense of how it’s performing in Google.

Below you’ll find a screenshot of some domain analysis being performed with Semrush on a hugely popular website, the New York Times. As you can see, a rich supply of data on this site is provided by the tool.

Metrics provided by Semrush’s ‘Domain Overview’ feature include:

Of the above metrics, the one that gives you the quickest understanding of site quality is usually the ‘authority score.’

Semrush calculates this based on:

Now, what’s important to remember about the domain overview statistics provided by Semrush is that while the majority of them are based on hard data, the traffic figures are estimates.

And my experience of them is that these estimates are not always 100% accurate — especially where smaller websites are concerned.

This observation is based on some tests I ran, where I compared Semrush traffic estimates against Google Analytics data for websites that I have access to.

While Semrush managed to estimate the traffic levels for sites with 50,000+ organic visits per month reasonably well, its estimates for sites with lower than 5,000 monthly visits were not accurate at all.

To be fair to Semrush though, it doesn’t actually claim that the traffic figures are 100% accurate — if you navigate to its ‘Traffic Analytics’ tab, you can view an estimate of how accurate its traffic stats for a particular site are likely to be (low, medium or high).

Nonetheless, it’s best to treat the traffic stats in Semrush as something that gives you an indication of site popularity. The figures are best used to put your site into context against those of your competitors, or to identify sites that are worth approaching for backlinks.

There are other metrics provided by Semrush’s domain overview tool that also help you gain valuable insights on both your own site and others.

For example, Semrush’s ‘competitive positioning map’ lets you see, at-a-glance, where a particular site fits into a particular market — and how well it fares is against its competitors.

The ability to break things down by country is also helpful — it helps you get a sense of where in the world a site is performing particularly well.

Getting historical data is particularly straightforward in Semrush’s domain overview section — a simple dropdown menu lets you access snapshots of a domain’s performance in search from specific months and years (data is provided from January 2012 to the present day).

But worth a particular mention is the ‘at-a-glance’ breakdown of the search intent behind the keywords a domain ranks for (see screenshot below).

Search intent data gives you more context about why people click on search results for a particular website — to research something, locate a specific page, sign up for something, buy something etc.

Many competing tools are yet to provide this easy-to-access ‘search intent’ data — they require you to ‘infer’ search intent yourself (Moz and SE Ranking being notable exceptions — both these tools give you good search intent data too).

The only thing I feel is missing from Semrush’s domain overview is a ‘traffic cost’ figure, which lets you know how much it would cost each month to buy ads that generated an equivalent amount of traffic.

(To be fair, you can get this data in Semrush, but you have to go to a separate ‘Organic Research’ page to see it.)

Other tools, including Ahrefs, display this as part of their domain overview analysis.

Overall though, the domain overview section of Semrush is very useful, and this aspect of the product on its own gives you a huge insight into how a website is performing from an SEO point of view.

The ‘Semrush Sensor’

In addition to letting you check how an individual website is doing from an SEO point of view, Semrush also provides a tool — ‘Semrush Sensor‘ — for checking how the internet in general is behaving when it comes to search results.

The Semrush Sensor tracks volatility of Google search results to activity that could indicate an update to Google’s algorithm. This lets you place any fluctuations in your own rankings in a broader context.

Semrush Sensor provides volatility figures globally, or by niche — and you can also set up your own ‘personal sensor’ too. This is based on a set of keywords you’ve entered for position tracking purposes — if there are any major fluctuations in your rankings, the personal sensor will let you know about them.

(The more keywords you track, the more accurate the information provided by this tool will be.)

Keyword research in Semrush

Keyword research is generally about: 

Semrush gives you a keyword research tool that makes it very easy for you to find out all the above information.

Accessing basic keyword data

To find basic statistics about keywords in Semrush, you simply enter a phrase into its ‘Keyword Overview’ tool.

Doing so shows you a wide range of keyword analytics, the key ones being:

As with domain analysis, you can do this on a per country level too, which is helpful.

One of the most important metrics returned here is the keyword difficulty score.

Semrush uses a percentage to indicate this — with a higher percentage indicating that it’s going to be harder to rank for a particular keyword.

As the arrow in the screenshot below shows, Semrush can also give you an indication of the number of backlinks (links from other content to yours) that it will take to rank for your target search phrase.

In general, this feature works great, but sometimes Semrush doesn’t output the number of links it thinks you need to get a piece of content ranking for your target keyword.

Instead you’ll occasionally get a slightly vague message about needing “lot of on-page SEO, link building, and content promotion efforts” to rank.

(This issue usually crops up when ‘very hard’ keyword difficulty scores are returned – see screenshot above for an example of this).

It would be better if, like its competitor Ahrefs, Semrush could be more specific in those contexts instead.

For me the very best aspect of Semrush’s keyword overview tool is its new AI-powered ‘personalized data’ option. This lets you get a sense not just of how generally difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword, but how difficult it will be for your site to rank for it. Semrush works this out based on how topically relevant your website is for the keyword you’re looking at.

I tested this out by looking up the keyword difficulty of the phrase ‘Shopify’ in Semrush. As you might expect — and as you can see from my screengrab below — Semrush’s ‘standard’ response was that it would be next to impossible to rank for this phrase.

But when I entered the Style Factory domain into the ‘Enter domain for personalized data’ box, I got a different result entirely. Realising that there is a huge amount of content related to Shopify on the Style Factory website, and that we have a lot of ‘topical authority’ for that particular query, Semrush viewed our chances of ranking for it much more favorably — the keyword difficulty score dropped from 100% to 56% (see screenshot below).

(Topical authority is earned by sites that display signs of exhaustively covering all aspects of a topic. Such websites can get preferential treatment in search results.)

This personalized data option adds a huge amount of context to keyword research and it’s a feature that I have yet to come across in any competing tool I’ve tested so far. A very big thumbs up to Semrush for launching it.

Keyword suggestions

To get detailed keyword suggestions based on a phrase you’ve entered, you’ll need to use Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ tool. This sits under Semrush’s ‘Keyword Research’ menu.

This feature provides you with a list of keywords that are related to the phrase you entered, along with filters that you can use to sort them, including:

A ‘Keyword Magic’ feature I particularly like is the filters it gives you to help surface keywords that are easy to rank for.

You just use a simple dropdown menu — pictured below — to view related keywords by difficulty. These range from ‘very easy’ to ‘very hard,’ and you can also use a custom range of difficulty scores to filter keyword suggestions.

This makes it easier to spot the keywords that you can realistically rank for in search results.

In addition to the keyword difficulty filter, Semrush gives you a wide range of other ways to segment keyword suggestions — you can filter by the number of searches per month for them, words to exclude and how closely keyword suggestions should match your entered phrase.

(A ‘beta’ filter now lets you filter by language, too.)

Used correctly, these filters really let you hone in on the keywords that are going to work best for your project.

Overall, the keyword suggestion data you get from Semrush is good. But there is one notable omission: global search volumes. In Semrush, you can only ever view the number of searches for particular phrases by country — not the total made per month globally.

Localized keyword research data will be fine for a lot of content creators — but there are niches where it’s important to get an immediate sense of how popular certain phrases are overall, not just in individual countries. Indeed this is the case in our niche — software reviews. We have readers all around the world, and when considering what to write about, we want to know the total number of people who are searching for content on a particular topic, not just those in country X or Y.

Personalized keyword suggestion data

The keyword research features I listed above are comprehensive — but relatively similar to what you’ll find in competing tools like Ahrefs or Moz. However, what sets Semrush apart from its rivals is the inclusion of personalized keyword data in its list of suggestions.

I explained above how Semrush can use the topical authority of your domain to work out how difficult it will be for your site — rather than sites in general — to rank for a keyword. And the nice thing is that this personalized data is also included in the lists of keyword suggestions that Semrush provides.

As you can see from the above screenshot, when Semrush surfaces keyword suggestions based on a phrase, it shows you the ‘personalized keyword difficulty’ (PKD) alongside the regular keyword difficulty scores. You can sort and filter by this column, and this allows you to get the ‘real’ sense of how difficult it will be to rank for specific keywords.

Again, I’ve yet to see this kind of data in competing SEO platforms.

Keyword gap analysis

A keyword gap analysis tool is designed to let you spot keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. Using one is a great way to get keyword suggestions that you might never have thought of.

To use Semrush’s Keyword Gap Analysis tool, you enter your domain and those of your competitors. The tool then compares keyword rankings across these sites and surfaces the keywords unique to you, unique to competitors, or shared between domains. You can then review key metrics for them like search volume, keyword difficulty and CPC.

One of the things I like the most about this tool is the way it auto suggests competing domains for you (see screenshot below).

And its Venn diagram approach to letting you separate out shared or missing keywords makes it really easy to zoom in on keyword opportunities.

The only negative aspect worth pointing out is that by comparison to its key rival, Ahrefs, the number of sites you can compare is quite small — while Ahrefs lets you work with up to ten competing sites, you’re restricted to comparing your domain against just four others in Semrush.

Accessing search intent data

A key thing that differentiates Semrush from several of its competitors in the keyword research department is its inclusion of comprehensive ‘search intent‘ data.

When you are given a list of keyword suggestions, they are accompanied by little letters — I, N, C or T.

These labels respectively let you know whether a keyword suggestion is informational, navigational, commercial or transactional.

These are defined by Semrush as follows:

These labels give you much more context about a particular keyword than just search volume alone — and help you make better decisions regarding whether a particular keyword is worth targeting or not.

For example, selecting the ‘transactional’ option on the keyword intent filter drop-down menu lets you focus exclusively on keywords that are more likely to lead to a purchase.

So all in all, Semrush’s keyword research tools provide you with all the key information you need to make decisions on which phrases to target as part of an SEO project.

However, there is some scope for improvement, because the core keyword research data provided is for Google searches only — it would be better if metrics were available for some other search engines.

Now to be fair, the overwhelming majority of searches continue to be made on Google — nearly 90.8% at time of writing (source: Statcounter).

But there are territories, not least the USA, where other search engines enjoy a decent slice of market share (in the US, for example, around 7% of searches are currently made on Bing).

(Semrush does let you access some data from other search engines, however. Its position tracking tool lets you track rankings not just on Google but Baidu and Bing too.)

Keyword lists and topic clustering

Like similar SEO tools, Semrush lets you create lists of keywords that you can use to gather and organize keywords for organic SEO or PPC campaigns.

In Semrush, this is done via its ‘Keyword Strategy Builder’ tool, pictured below — once you create a list, you’ll get to see evolving data about the keywords it contains (search volume, keyword difficulty, search intent etc.).

Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder tool differs from many competing products’ equivalent feature however, in that it also gives you a ‘topic clustering’ feature (pictured below). This automatically surfaces topics that you should consider writing about in order to gain topical authority for your site — and each of these ‘topic clusters’ contains individual article ideas.

When I tested this feature I found myself quite liking it — but I did feel that on occasion the topic clusters and keywords suggested for them didn’t really hit the mark. It’s definitely useful, but be prepared to do some manual ‘tidy-up’ work on the suggestions produced.

Semrush’s content marketing toolkit

In addition to providing keyword research tools, Semrush also provides you with a suite of ‘content marketing’ tools (so long as you are on a ‘Guru’ plan or higher – more on pricing plans shortly).

These allow you to:

• identify new topics to write about
• identify keywords that your competitors are using in their posts
• assess your content from an SEO perspective.

My favorite feature in Semrush’s content marketing toolkit is the ‘SEO Writing Assistant‘ tool. This allows you to copy and paste content into Semrush for review, or import it from the web by entering a URL.

(You can also write copy within Semrush and get real-time advice on it).

Once you’ve done that, you’ll get suggestions on ways you can improve its performance in search results. These include encouragements to increase or decrease word count, recommendations that you add certain keywords to your text and warnings if your content looks like it has been scraped from other sites.

(The feature also comes as a WordPress plugin and an add-on for Google Docs and Microsoft Word, which is helpful for those producing content in those platforms.)

You can also access AI-powered writing tools using Semrush, in the form of its ‘Contentshake’ app — a ChatGPT-style content generation feature can be used to generate copy automatically for you. An additional $60 per month fee applies to use this, however.

Now, what about keeping tabs on your existing search rankings?

Rank tracking

‘Rank tracking’ (also known as ‘position tracking’) is the process of monitoring how your website performs in search engines for a particular keyword over time.

It’s easy to set this up in Semrush — you go to its position tracker section, enter a domain name and the target keywords you’d like to track, and you get a report showing you how your site is currently ranking for those keywords. You can also track these phrases on a per-country basis.

As time goes by, and more data about your site flows into Semrush, you’ll be able to monitor the progress of your attempts to rank more highly for your keywords.

Signficantly, Semrush’s position tracking features now show you when your content is appearing in Google AI overviews (Google’s recently introduced — and highly prominent — AI-generated summaries of search results).

You can also enter competing websites into Semrush’s position tracker tool. This allows you to compare (again, over time) how your competitors are performing in search too.

And finally, you can avail of regular rank tracking email notifications — you can subscribe to weekly position tracking summaries, or create ‘triggers’ that send you an email whenever something significant happens with your rankings.

(For example, you can request a notification of when a particular piece of content has entered the top three results for a specified search query, or left the top ten.)

All in all, the position tracking functionality in Semrush is strong — no complaints really here. The only thing to watch out for is limits on the number of keywords you can track: these vary by plan, with the entry-level plan imposing a 500 keywords per month tracking limit (more on pricing later).

Backlink analysis tools

How well a site performs in search results typically depends on how many ‘backlinks‘ — links from other sites to it — exist for the site in question.

There are three main ways to go about looking at backlinks in Semrush:

Let’s look at each method in turn.

Backlink analysis

The ‘Backlink Analytics’ section in Semrush lets you enter a domain name and view a list of all the backlinks it can find to it.

You can also use this section to view:

All the information is laid out very clearly, and lets you see when a domain has gained or lost backlinks, along with the value of the links in question. You can use the data provided to improve your own SEO efforts — or gain insights into a competitor’s.

Now, how accurate Semrush’s backlink analysis is of course heavily dependent on the size and quality of its link database. At time of writing, Semrush claims to have over 43 trillion URLs in its link database, which if accurate compares well with its key competitors Ahrefs (35 trillion) and Moz (45 trillion).

Assuming these figures are correct, this makes the Semrush link database one of the larger ones.

I was curious to see how this played out in some real-world tests however, so I performed some backlink analysis on some well-known sites — domains for the ecommerce platforms and design tools we typically work with — to see how Semrush fared against competitors Ahrefs and Moz when it come to surfacing referring domains.

Below you’ll find the number of referring domains that I found for these sites when testing each of the three tools.

Referring domain test results

As you can see from the table above, in the test, Semrush ‘won’ six of the contests — more than either Ahrefs or Moz. And where it didn’t win, it tended to come second.

As this was a relatively small test, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from the results, but they do indicate that Semrush’s links database is robust, and capable of surfacing results that are as comprehensive as those provided by rivals (if not more so).

Backlink audits

The other way to look at backlinks in Semrush is by performing a ‘backlink audit’. The core purpose of doing this is to establish the ‘toxicity’ of backlinks pointing to your site and determine its ‘site health.’

During a backlink audit, Semrush compiles a list of links that it thinks are spammy, which you can then review, export and upload to Google as a ‘disavow’ file.

This effectively tells Google to ignore these toxic links — and, because Google can penalize sites with lots of poor-quality links pointing to them, disavowing bad links can have a beneficial impact on your search rankings.

(Note however that it’s important to tread very carefully when it comes to disavowing links — read Google’s guidelines on the topic before doing so!).

Semrush’s backlink audit tool is good at spotting poor-quality links and makes it very easy for you to prepare a disavow file for upload to Google.

However, it should be noted that not all SEO professionals think that link spam identification tools are actually that helpful — many believe that a more manual approach to identifying poor-quality links works better.

And in fact, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller is not a fan of the concept of toxic links at all, or using SEO tools to identify them. He has said that it would be rare for link disavowals to lead to a positive impact on search results.

(Mueller has even gone so far as to suggest that webmasters who have never had a manual penalty should consider deleting their disavow file entirely, and that the disavow tool itself may in fact be retired entirely at some point).

Do what you will with that information!

The whole topic of whether or not to disavow links is a controversial topic and an increasingly grey area — but at least with its link toxicity report, Semrush gives you data to act on should you wish to.

Identifying backlink gaps

Finally, there’s Semrush’s ‘Backlink Gap’ tool to consider. To use this, you enter your domain and those of your competitors. The tool then compares the backlink profiles of all the domains entered, and identifies sites that are linking to your competitors but not to you.

In other words, it highlights any ‘gaps,’ or missed backlink opportunities, and lists the relevant websites to reach out to for new links.

(You can filter these results by the quality of the referring domains so that only high-authority sites are surfaced. This helps you prioritize your outreach efforts.)

This tool is very easy to use — the only thing to note is that, like the Semrush ‘Keyword Gap’ tool, you can only compare your domain against four others — this is rather less than Ahrefs’ limit of ten.

Link building in Semrush

One of the standout features of Semrush is its link building tool.

As mentioned above, link building — the process of getting other sites linking to yours — is absolutely vital to the success of any SEO project, because search engines typically reward sites with more links pointing to them with higher positions in search results (so long as the links in question are located on high-quality, relevant websites).

Semrush’s link building tool works by:

and then surfacing a list of ‘prospect’ websites that it thinks is worth approaching for a backlink or guest post opportunity.

Not only that, but it provides you with some extremely useful tools for doing so. You can connect your mailbox to Semrush and send outreach emails from within the tool.

You can then keep tabs, CRM-style, on the progress of each approach.

If that wasn’t enough, where possible Semrush even provides you with contact email addresses for each website, and the option to save an outreach email as a reusable template (see screenshot above).

All this goes well beyond anything that’s offered by Semrush’s key competitors in the link-building department — and it’s one of the strongest arguments for using Semrush over them.

Broken link building

Broken link building can be a very effective SEO tactic.

It involves three steps:

This approach allows you to build up new backlinks to your content — and as mentioned previously, the more (quality) backlinks that point to your website, the better your content is likely to perform in search.

To find broken backlinks with Semrush, you need to run a backlink analytics report, navigate to an ‘indexed pages’ section, click a ‘broken pages’ option and then export the results to an Excel or CSV file. You can then sort or filter this file to identify the 404 errors (i.e., the broken links).

Although not overly complicated, this process could be made a bit more straightforward — Ahrefs, for example, simply lets you hit a easy-to-find ‘broken links’ option (pictured below) that immediately returns a list of all the broken outgoing and incoming links for a specified domain.

Site auditing

A really useful feature of Semrush is its site auditing functionality.

During a site audit, Semrush will identify issues that might be having a negative effect on your search ranking, including:

It will give then give you an overall ‘site health’ score plus a list of issues to address.

And in a nice touch, Semrush allows you to export any problems it finds as tasks to the popular project management app Trello (you can also use Zapier to send them to other task management platforms if you prefer).

You can also send these tasks to Semrush’s own simple CRM tool, which is built into the platform.

I particularly like Semrush’s on-page SEO checker, which scans your entire website and gives you actionable tips for improvement for each page (in order of priority).

These can include suggestions on:

…and lots more useful SEO ideas.

Another thing that’s great about Semrush’s site auditing features is that it doesn’t just tell you what things to do, it tells you why you should do them.

A ‘Why and how to fix it?’ link accompanies each suggestion, and when clicked, explains in plain English the rationale behind each recommendation.

(You can actually learn a lot about SEO simply by reading these tips.)

The site audit feature is superb and, as with Semrush’s link building features, arguably outclasses similar offerings from competing tools.

Finally, it’s important to note that Semrush’s auditing features work irrespective of the CMS you’re using — i.e., it doesn’t matter whether you’ve created your site with Squarespace or WordPress, Wix or Shopify etc.

You’ll get a comprehensive list of tips that you can use to improve your site’s SEO setup, no matter which site builder you’re using.

AI features in Semrush

AI is everywhere these days and you’ll now find it in Semrush too, in the form of its new ‘Copilot’ tool. This feature is intended to save you time by surfacing AI-powered insights at the top of your dashboard.

Copilot draws on data from 6 Semrush tools, namely:

Using this data, it then provides you with SEO ideas and suggested actions to take (see screenshot below for some examples of the kind of things it suggested during my tests of the tool).

These recommendations are generated by machine learning algorithms that have been trained on large volumes of Semrush data.

In terms of how helpful all this is, I’d say ‘quite.’ Copilot is not yet a substitute for eyeballing data closely — but it does provide you with a list of really obvious things that you need to fix, and the way that it alerts you to significant drops in keyword rankings is helpful (or, depending on your state of mind, scary!).

Using Semrush to track Google ‘AI Overviews’

Google AI Overviews are generated snippets or summaries that appear at the top of search results, designed to provide users with quick and concise information based on their queries. These overviews use advanced AI algorithms to pull relevant content from various sources, delivering immediate answers to searchers without them needing to click through multiple links.

Semrush’s Position Tracking tool helps users monitor their website’s visibility within these AI Overviews — it lets you see when your content appears in an overview involving a keyword you’re tracking.

Additionally, Semrush’s ‘Sensor’ tool tracks the frequency and industry presence of AI Overviews within the top 20 search results. This allows users to analyze trends and adjust their SEO strategies to better align with content that is likely to be featured in AI Overviews.

Interface and ease-of-use

The Semrush interface is similar to those of competing products like Moz and Ahrefs — as with these tools, you get a menu of options on the left that you use to access functionality on the right.

The menu options are grouped together in useful categories — competitive research, keyword research, link building, rank tracking, on-page SEO and reporting.

There is a lot of data to contend with — this may feel overwhelming at first, but you soon get used to it (and the whole point of tools like Semrush is, of course, to provide you with a lot of data!).

Additionally, the data visualization that Semrush provides helps you get over this sense of overload — most of the metrics provided are graphed in ways that make the information presented much easier to understand.

It would be nice however if Semrush’s interface could be made to work better with smartphones — as things stand, it’s not fully ‘responsive,’ so if you log into Semrush on a mobile device, you see the standard desktop interface. This means that you’re dealing with very small text and a lot of pinching and zooming.

On the plus side, there is a mobile app available from Semrush that lets you access your position tracking data on mobile devices. It would be better however if it wasn’t restricted to iOS users only, and gave you access to some of the other key Semrush features too.

(As for the user reaction to the position tracking app, it hasn’t been enormously positive — it’s currently rated at 2.5 out of 5 on the iOS app store).

Overall, Semrush’s interface is laid out in an intuitive fashion and is straightforward to use — but you will need to be using a desktop computer rather than a mobile device to get the most out of it.

Pricing and value for money

Compared to other types of ‘SaaS’ (software as a service) apps, SEO tools like Semrush are expensive.

That’s understandable however, as you’re not just paying for functionality, but access to really large quantities of data too, including a lot of competitor intelligence.

Semrush offers three main pricing plans:

(Discounts of up to 17% for the above are available if you pay upfront for a year — the equivalent monthly costs become $117.33, $208.33 and $416.66 for the above three plans respectively.)

For larger organizations, Semrush also provides an enterprise-grade plan — ‘Semrush Enterprise’ — which offers automated workflows, AI-driven data analysis, and access to top SEO consultants and freelancers. It also includes features such as integrated data lakes, automated SEO tasks, and AI-powered analysis tools.

To get a pricing quote for Semrush Enterprise, you’ll need to contact Semrush’s sales team and discuss your requirements.

Additionally, there’s also a ‘Custom’ version of the platform to consider — this lets customers with a budget create their own bespoke plans (with more generous limits on reports and queries, more user accounts etc.).

It’s important to note that if you want to check Semrush out before committing to a paid-for plan, a free trial is available.

The standard version lasts 7 days, but for a limited time the company has made a double-length free trial available — you can access this extended free trial here.

You have to enter your credit card details to avail of the fully-featured trial, which — while common enough practice where a lot of SEO tools are concerned — is a bit annoying.

But on the plus side, the cancellation policy is pretty straightforward — you can cancel your trial at any point, and you’ll get a full refund if you cancel a paid-for plan within 7 days of starting it.

If you don’t enter your card details, you can still use many of the Semrush features — but you will be limited to just 10 queries per day.

Semrush’s fees are broadly comparable to those charged by key competitors Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic (that said, Majestic offers a lower monthly plan for $49.99 per month, but it is considerably less functional than the entry level plans provided by its competitors).

The main differences between the Semrush plans involve:

The more you pay, the more you get of all the above.

Let’s zoom in on a few aspects of the pricing structure to highlight where Semrush offers particularly good — or bad — value for money.

Seats

Probably the worst thing about Semrush’s pricing structure is that all plans — even the $499.95 ‘Business’ plan — only include one user account or ‘seat.’

If you want more than one person in your organization to have access to Semrush, you’ll need to pay between $45 and $100 extra per user, per month, depending on plan.

This compares negatively with the approach taken by many of Semrush’s competitors, which generally increase the seat count as you go up the pricing ladder (or charge less for extra seats).

If seat count is an issue for your organisation, you may need to investigate purchasing a ‘Custom’ plan from Semrush — as its name suggests, this allows you to negotiate pricing for a solution involving a custom number of features and users.

Projects

It’s important to be aware that quite a few Semrush features can only be used on domains that have been added as ‘projects.’

Key features that fall into this category include site audits, backlink audits, link prospect identification, on-page SEO checking and rank tracking.

How many projects you can have on the go depends on the Semrush plan you’re on — the entry level plan, at $139.95 per month, facilitates five; the ‘Guru’ plan 15 and the ‘Business’ plan 40.

These limits won’t necessarily be a showstopper for every business — if you’re only interested in running SEO campaigns for your own website, they’ll usually work out fine.

However, if you have a lot of sites that you need to manage SEO for — or do a large amount of competitor analysis — it is something to be aware of.

Report requests

Semrush is very generous when it comes to the number of reporting requests you can make each day: even on its entry-level plan, you can pull 3,000 domain analysis reports per day — this significantly outnumbers the 500 reports you can run per month on the Ahrefs entry level plan, for example.

This generosity continues as you go up the pricing ladder — you can pull 5,000 reports per day on its $249/mo ‘Guru’ plan and a whopping 10,000 reports per day on its $499/mo ‘Business’ plan.

This makes it much more generous on the reporting front than most competing tools (with the key exception of Ahrefs, which no longer limits number of reports you can pull on its non-entry level plans.)

Competitive intelligence tools and add-ons

There are quite a few Semrush features for analysing competitors’ websites that are not available without purchasing a ‘Semrush.Trends’ add-on.

When you buy this you get access to:

Rather disappointingly, this add-on costs $289 per month per user (regardless of plan type).

Now to be fair, most of the above metrics could be considered worthy of paying a bit extra for — but nearly $300 extra per month feels rather expensive.

(In fact, if you’re on the entry-level Semrush Pro plan, the add-on works out more expensive than your actual plan!).

Additionally, if you want to access local SEO features, you’ll also have to pay extra. There are two local SEO add-ons available: ‘Basic,’ which costs $20 per month, and ‘Premium’, which costs $40 per month.

Both give you the ability to:

The premium version also gives you access to a ‘local heatmap,’ which lets you see how your customers can find your business on Google Maps (and compare the visibility of your business on Google Maps to that of your competitors).

It also provides a feature that lets you respond to reviews directly within the Semrush interface (with AI being used to suggest wording for your responses).

Recently, Semrush added a new content analysis add-on to their collection: ‘ImpactHero.’ This is described by the company as an ‘AI tool that breaks down your content by buyer journey stages, detects the most impactful copy, and gives tips on reinforcing your efforts.’

In practice, ‘ImpactHero’ seems quite similar to Google Analytics — my feeling is that if you’re already using Google Analytics in a smart way (using events and goals etc.), you might not necessarily need this add-on, which costs a significant $200 per month.

There’s also ‘Semrush Social‘ which lets you manage your social media accounts (content posting, replies etc.) from your Semrush account, and analyze competitor activity on social media. This costs $29.99 per user, per month.

And finally there’s the ‘Agency Growth Kit‘ add-on to consider — this is aimed at digital marketing agencies that want to ‘white label’ Semrush data for their SEO clients.

The add-on comes in three flavors: ‘Start,’ ‘Scale’ and ‘Advanced’ which are priced at $69, $149 and $249 per month respectively.

All three versions let you produce custom PDFs reports that have no Semrush branding on them; list your business in the ‘Agency Partners’ directory of Semrush certified agencies (probably the most useful aspect of the add-on); use a lead finder tool and access CRM tools.

The ‘Scale’ version lets you take advantage of enhanced visibility on the ‘Agency Partners’ directory; it also gives you unlimited use of Semrush’s CRM features and access to more leads.

The ‘Advanced’ version lets you create an unlimited number of client portals (with these being accessible using your own domain name).

The Semrush ‘App Center’

In addition to purchasing one of the the main Semrush add-ons discussed above, you can also add functionality to your Semrush account by investing in an app from the Semrush ‘App Center.’ Some of the apps available in this store have been built by Semrush, but the majority originate from third-party developers.

This is something of a unique feature for Semrush — competitors like Ahrefs and Moz, while letting you make use of their APIs, don’t provide similar app stores.

Around 50 apps are currently available from the Semrush App Center; many have a focus on providing enhanced analytics and data, and they typically range in cost from $10 to $200 per month.

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

Free trials or cut-down free plans are available for most apps in the app center, along with some entirely free apps (examples of the latter include apps for improving the accessibility of your website, a Google Ads assistant and a local listings health check app).

PPC data

If you’re working on a mix of SEO and PPC projects, you may find that Semrush represents better value than some of its competitors.

This is simply because by comparison to its competitors, the PPC data provided by Semrush is pretty exhaustive.

While other tools tend to give you basic CPC figures for individual keywords, Semrush goes way beyond this, giving you detailed CPC competition and distribution data, live ads and ad history. You also get access to some PPC campaign planning tools and Google Shopping (PLA) data.

Customer support

SEO tools like Semrush tend to be quite complex in nature, so the availability and format of customer support is a key consideration for prospective users.

The good news is that you get three channels of customer support with Semrush: phone, email and chat. This contrasts positively with competing products, not all of whom offer phone support (Moz and Majestic don’t even offer live chat support).

And, unlike some other SaaS products, Semrush makes its contact details easy enough to spot — a help chatbox is visible at the corner of each page, and it displays the wait time you’re likely to experience before being connected to an agent.

Additionally, phone numbers are relatively easy to find — to call Semrush, you go to their ‘contact us’ section and then click a ‘call regional support’ link (this could be slightly more prominent, however).

Semrush review: the overall verdict

Overall, Semrush is an excellent SEO tool that gives you all the key data you’ll need for a successful SEO project.

Its keyword research tools are superb, and, thanks to the introduction of an AI-powered ‘personalized data’ feature, are amongst the very best available on the market (perhaps the best).

Its link building and site auditing tools are also particularly good — the former gives you an excellent ‘CRM’ style method of building backlinks and the latter gives you a super-easy checklist of ways to improve your technical and on-page SEO.

Also worth a particular mention is Semrush’s ‘search intent’ feature — this really helps you identify the target keywords that are most likely to generate sales and conversions, and focus on creating content for them.

But what are the main disadvantages of Semrush? Well, the only search engine Semrush provides data for is Google, all accounts only come with one user account (‘seat’) and several key features can only be used as part of a ‘project’ (with limits applying to the number of projects you can run concurrently).

It’s also a bit disappointing that some of the competitive intelligence features can only be unlocked via a rather expensive $289 per month add-on.

And I’d love to see global search volumes for keywords introduced into the tool. Not every user will need them — but if you produce content that you know will be consumed by a worldwide audience, you will really miss them.

But overall, Semrush is a great SEO solution that provides you with the key information you’ll need to improve your Google rankings. As with all the products we review though, we recommend that you try the tool out extensively yourself before purchasing — an extended free trial is available here.

I’ll leave you with a summary of the key pros and cons of using Semrush, and some information about alternative SEO products.

And of course if you have any questions or feedback on the platform, please do leave them in the comments section at the end of this post.

Semrush pros and cons summary

Alternatives to Semrush

The main competitors to Semrush are probably Ahrefs, Moz, SE Ranking, Similarweb, Spyfu and Majestic.

We have review and comparisons for some of these available — just follow the links below to access them:

From my previous use of Ahrefs and Moz, I’d argue that what differentiates Semrush most from these two competing products is the generous reporting limits — Semrush’s entry-level plan gives you access to a huge number of reports per day by comparison to the those of the above two competitors (Ahrefs’ reporting limits becomes more generous than those of Semrush as you go up the pricing ladder though).

The ‘CRM-style’ approach that it brings to link building campaigns is another key advantage of using Semrush over Ahrefs and Moz, as is its ‘keyword intent’ feature.

Key competing products can be more generous when it comes to user accounts however — if you have a lot of users in your organization who need to access an SEO tool, you may find one of the alternatives end up being a more cost-effective option for you.