Semsrush review (image of the company's logo plus the word 'review' beside it)
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…
Keyword research features
Rank tracking
Backlink analysis
Link building tools
Site auditing features
Interface and ease-of-use
Pricing and value for money
Customer support
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).
The Semrush platform
The Semrush SEO platform
Semrush helps you improve your SEO by giving you a lot of data — information that you can use to:
find out what people are searching for on Google
create new web content that is likely to attract traffic
identify link-building opportunities
tweak technical aspects of your site so that it achieves higher search rankings.
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.
Performing domain analysis on the New York Times website using the Semrush 'domain overview' tool.
Performing domain analysis on the New York Times website using Semrush’s ‘Domain Overview’ feature
Metrics provided by Semrush’s ‘Domain Overview’ feature include:
An ‘authority score’
The total number of visitors to the website per month
The total number of external links (‘backlinks’) pointing to the website
The total number of keywords the website ranks for, and the ‘search intent’ behind them
Anchor text commonly used in links to the website
Top performing keywords
Display advertising stats
Competing websites
Of the above metrics, the one that gives you the quickest understanding of site quality is usually the ‘authority score.’
The Semrush authority score (highlighted with arrow) gives you the quickest understanding of the quality of a site.
The authority score (highlighted above with arrow) gives you the quickest understanding of the quality of a site.
Semrush calculates this based on:
backlink data — the number of links pointing to the site
‘spam markers‘ — how many low quality or ‘spammy’ links are contained within a site’s backlink profile
organic search data, including organic search traffic and keyword positions.
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 ag
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