In today’s review article, we will shed some light upon an ever-growing Best SEO Tool called “SEMrush.” You may have heard the name of SEMrush before, but if you clicked on this article, that means that you are also curious about what features of SEMrush make it distinct from the others. All those tips, features, and benefits that SEMrush is becoming immensely popular among freelancers and web-owners will be discussed today one by one. This article will help you explore the world of SEMrush and how it works, and if you are already using it, you will surely learn something new.
So, without wasting any time, let’s kick off our review article about SEMrush. The contents of today’s article are listed below.
- What is SEMrush?
- Features of SEMrush
- User Interface
- Pricing Plans
- Keyword Research
- Rank Tracking
- Domain Analysis
- Backlink Analysis
- Backlink Audits
- Site Auditing
- Pros and Cons of SEMrush
What is SEMrush?
In simple words, SEMrush is an SEO tool that helps you optimize your content for search engines. With the rise of the freelancing industry, there are plenty of search engine optimization (SEO) tools, but several factors make SEMrush unique and more efficient.
The tool was first created in 2008 by two developers named Dmitry Melnikov and Shchegolev. Afterward, after some modifications, the outcome of the SEMrush started appealing to the people, especially in the fields of content writing and small businesses. Thus, after almost twelve years of success, SEMrush is now hosting over 7 million users. The stats are a piece of evidence that SEMrush is among the most extensive SEO tools which are used daily.
If we talk about the working of SEMrush, you might have got an idea as to what we have stated above. However, to the readers entirely new to this optimizing magician, we would like to give a comprehensive overview of SEMrush.
Let’s take an example that you are a content writer, blogger, or runs a website, then SEMrush will help you to grow your audience or sphere when you use the information provided by the SEO tool to:
- know what people are browsing on the internet
- identify link-building chances
- new ideas to attract traffic
- technicalities to increase search ranking over various search engines.
Features of SEMrush
SEMrush is packed with several useful features to make your business, blogs, or website credible and valuable. In this article, some of the fantastic elements will be touched on to develop an understanding.
Competitor Analysis
This feature of SEMrush allows you to keep an eye on your competitors. By competitor analysis, you can quickly assess how your competitors are performing by using elements like backlink data, market explorer, and traffic analysis.
Project Management
The incredible feature of SEMrush is its dashboard which permits you to make detailed plans about your traffic analysis and keyword monitoring to boost SEO strategies.
Progress Reports
The progress reports submitted by SEMrush provide you an overview of your performance and suggest improving some areas where improvement is needed. Such statements make your business and traffic grow within a short time.
Local SEO
Local SEO is another feature of SEMrush by which you can utilize heatmaps, customer reviews, and local rankings to increase the outcome of SEMrush plans.
Domain Analysis
This feature can be seen on the SEMrush dashboard, and it tells you about the domain’s quality. Domain analysis also helps you find out those factors that impact the domain’s authority.
Keyword Research
The keyword research feature provides a wide range of suggestions from where you can choose a keyword that has a greater probability to drive more traffic. Due to keyword research, SEMrush is considered the best SEO tool of the present era. This feature is described in detail in the rest of the article.
Those were a few highlighted features of SEMrush. However, to give you guys a complete picture, we have to dive into SEMrush working. Therefore, let’s begin the journey of the SEMrush review to get a comprehensive understanding.
User Interface
In starting our review in detail about SEMrush, we would like to begin from the user interface of the SEO tool as we have found it the most interactive and easy to use.
The most astonishing thing about the SEMrush user interface is its dashboard. There are multiple SEO tools whose dashboards are interactive but could not be as eye-catching as SEMrush. At first look, to beginners, the dashboard appears to be very extensive and challenging. But, after using it for a couple of days, it would become more convenient as you work on MS Word or Excel.
It is also important to mention that a user doesn’t need to use every tool of the SEMrush dashboard because it depends upon the nature of your work. For example, your areas of interest will be keyword research, domain analysis, and more for a content writer. In addition, if there is a tool that you are failing to comprehend, then customer support is one click away.
SEMrush Pricing Plans
Although a portion of SEMrush features is available at no cost, which is hugely beneficial for students, paying for SEMrush brings several benefits to your organization and website. Generally, there are four plans that SEMrush offers in exchange for its utilities, and the most prominent among them is the “Pro Plan,” which costs $99.9 per month.
Here a question arises: Why is it necessary to pay to enjoy the advantages of SEMrush tools? To answer this, we know that finding the best SEO tool is not easy because there are various options available. Also, SEMrush features are mainly made to enhance small industries and businesses. That is why it is valuable if you pay for SEMrush tools, and interestingly, you can choose from the four plans given below.
- Pro Plan – $99.9/month (Suitable for small businesses and companies).
- Guru Plan – $199/month (Designed for medium-level companies).
- Business Plan – $399.9/month (Applicable for eCommerce, established businesses).
- Enterprise Plan (The pricing will be custom and according to the requirements of large-scale organizations).
Keyword Research
Writing a blog post or an article to attract traffic about your business or website requires appealing keywords. The role of keywords in the internet world is pivotal and makes useful SEO tools play their part. Similarly, the keyword research feature of SEMrush suggests several keywords by showing trends and volumes of online searching.
In simple words, whenever you type a potential keyword for your blog or article, SEMrush will display suggestions regarding that keyword to increase traffic. Amazingly, keyword research is not all about words only. You can also find broad and exact vital phrases to increase the probability of attracting more volume.
Rank Tracking
Another tool of SEMrush which makes it the best SEO tool for growing businesses is rank tracking. The tool is designed to keep you updated by providing competitor analysis. Rank tracking combines progressive reports and SEO tools that analyze competitors’ performance and compare their progress with your business or website.
You can access such tools by clicking the tab “Projects.” After comparing and analyzing, the feature would suggest enhancing your SEO. Rank tracking is also used in content marketing, where blog posts and websites are ranked after typing specific keywords.
Overall, the rank tracking feature aims to maintain and improve your presence on a search engine like Google. Thus, it will help you to engage more traffic and grow your sphere of audience.
Domain Analysis
As described earlier in the features of SEMrush, domain analysis is designed to accumulate the quality of a domain. It is pretty significant before launching an SEO project to analyze a domain so that you can project its outcome and performance. In domain analysis, you can take any of your competitors to compare and make improvements to outlast your domain over the others.
Moreover, if you want to establish a building link (which will be discussed in detail in the next heading), then linking a well-known or high-quality site would boost your SEO project, and it is always better to consider a few successful links before launching an SEO.
From the above paragraphs, the working of domain analysis will be easy to understand. Nevertheless, if you think that the SEMrush domain analysis is challenging to use, then the answer is no. Because SEMrush has already made its domain analysis tool super easy. All you need is to submit a domain in the search bar, and as a result, relevant statistics alongside information will be shared with you to choose your domain.
Another insight of domain analysis is its “authority score” that works on two fundamental principles, and they are:
- Positions of keywords in the domain.
- Organic traffic of the domain.
- No. of backlinks connecting to the domain.
Backlink Analysis
SEMrush’s backlink analysis allows you to check the quality of the links and make improvements whenever your rankings start to fall. The fall in the ranking of a domain also occurs when spamming or links of low quality are pointed towards the domain. Therefore, a user must check the domain after every suitable interval.
When it comes to planning an SEO strategy, quality backlinks play a vital role, and to strategize your SEO, SEMrush offers a wide range of features to carry out this task. Through the backlink analysis in SEMrush, you have access to view all those backlinks that point towards the domain. To understand how backlink analysis works, only enter the domain into the search bar. Relevant results will be presented that will show each backlink attached to the domain with the anchor text.
You can discover and analyze competitors ‘ backlinks if you want further experience with the SEMrush backlink analysis tool’s services. Also, you can see their linking with the sites to get an idea of their performance.
Backlink Audits
Backlink audits are somehow connected to the backlink analysis, and they are considered one when the tools and features of SEMrush are discussed.
The essential difference between backlink analysis and backlink audit is that backlink analysis allows you to discover all the backlinks that point towards your site. Meanwhile, backlink audits let you enhance the quality of the links. If there are any links of the low-quality present on your website, your profile is deemed spam.
The use of backlink audits is excellent if you want to improve the overall performance of your SEO. If you think that some links are decreasing your SEO performance, then enter those links to “Google Search Console” and stop impacting those low-quality links. Just like backlink analysis, a user should be attentive to check backlink audits at an appropriate time to keep the site’s performance more than average.
Site Auditing
Our last heading to the readers to better understand SEMrush is Site Auditing, whose functionality is directly related to the efficiency of an SEO. An SEO is regarded as functional and progressive if it has no or minimum technical problems. Thus, to people who care about their site’s ranking, the site auditing tool of SEMrush is of great use.
By using site auditing, SEMrush will audit your business or website and notify you if there will be any factor that impacts your SEO performance. Among such factors could be keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and missing headers. All such technical issues are presented as a checklist which helps you to eradicate the issues efficiently.
Another function that site auditing performs is the “On-Page SEO Checking.” Your website is scanned thoroughly through this tool, and suggestions are made for every page to enhance SEO productivity.
Pros and Cons of SEMrush
After having a detailed review of one of the best SEO tools for businesses and small brands, it is time to list some advantages and disadvantages of using SEMrush.
Advantages of SEMrush
- Easy to Use
- Interactive dashboard
- SEO and Keyword recommendations
- Perfectly structured tools to improve SEO performance
- Backlink tracking and auditing to increase content’s quality
- An extensive database helps in selecting keywords
- Real-time tips on website’s pages to minimize technical flaws
- Competitor analysis to keep you updated
- 30 days of the free trial
Disadvantages of SEMrush
- SEMrush is only valid for the search engine of Google.
- Few features for competitive analysis are not included in the plan and bought at additional cost.
- Free trial requires credit card details.
- On smartphones, SEMrush is quite hard to handle.
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