I have been blogging since 2019. This site is my third one. Sometime in July 2020, I decided to use SEMrush, and I want to share with you what I think about it.
I love the tool.
It gave me insights about SEO that I would never have thought of seeing had I not used it.
Is it worth it? I firmly believe that yes, subscribing to this tool is worth it. If I did not subscribe, I would have blindly just published blog posts and see if I got lucky.
With this tool, I can make data-driven decisions to improve the performance of my online businesses.
In this SEMrush review, I will discuss:
- What is SEMrush?
- Who uses SEMrush?
- SEMrush Domain Analytics
- SEMrush Keywords Analytics
- SEMrush Site Audit
- SEMrush Position Tracking
- SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker
- SEMrush Backlink Audit
- How to add your website as a project
- SEMrush Pricing
- SEMrush SEO review: is this SEO tool worth it?
Authority Score is a score given by SEMrush. This score is between 1 and 100. The authority score represents the overall quality of your domain and your influence in SEO. The higher the score, the better your website is likely to perform.
By the end of this review, what I want is to help you make an informed decision: should you buy SEMrush or not?
NEXT: What is SEMrush?
What is SEMrush?
SEMrush is a tool that goes beyond SEO. While it is marketed as such, it can actually do more than that.
In a nutshell, SEMrush is an online tool where you get to see your website the way search engines see it.
The problem that many bloggers face is that they do not see the “codes” and the events that happen in the background. 02
Sure, you may have done your SEO research. So, after you publish your post, you wait for results.
And then nothing happens.
Why?
Because there are problems from behind the scenes that you will never know unless you know what you are looking for.
The SEMrush tool is going to show you what is wrong once you have audited your site.
But I will discuss more about this later on.
For now, I want you to take a look at this dashboard:
SEMrush is a tool that:
- Shows your underlying issues about your website
- Helps you see how you stack up against your competitors
- Allows you to analyze the strength and weaknesses of other websites
- Helps you optimize your website pages for search engines
- Gives you keyword research data to guide you in content publishing
- Provides you with information on how you can best optimize a blog post
Founded in 2008, SEMrush is many things. As of today, it has over 5 million users. The goal of this tool is to help you build a website that is fully optimized—something that you cannot do on your own.
Who uses SEMrush?
Is SEMrush for everybody?
Not really.
SEMrush is for people who want to take their business to another level. If you are just starting out in your blog or online store, your key focus is to build content.
Once you have created content, like what I did with my other blog, Just Keep Shippin’, it is time to optimize your website.
Yes, you can do this right at the get-go, but keep in mind that SEMrush is a paid tool. The last thing you want if you are starting out as a blogger is to spend.
If you have the budget, then go ahead. I would definitely recommend that you spend on a credible SEO tool. But if not, do as I did.
Build your content first, and optimize the whole website later.
I started using SEMrush in July of 2020 for a blog that I started in November 2019. The blog is about e-commerce.
Take a look at this:
By the end of July, my user count jumped from 165 to 502. As far as pageviews are concerned, it jumped from 320 to 660.
All thanks to SEMrush.
Okay, so it is not 660 million pageviews, but this is a blog in a seriously competitive niche. I am competing against Shopify, BigCommerce, and other bigwigs in the e-commerce industry.
On my e-commerce website, Just Keep Shippin’, I wrote more than 100 blog posts before I started to optimize my content with the help of SEMrush.
And that is what I recommend.
Who should use SEMrush?
SEMrush is for people who:
- Have established a blog with lots of content
- Want to start optimizing their content and ensure their content is the best
- Need to understand their site’s performance
- Want to boost their traffic with the right SEO practices
- Are interested in what their competitors are doing
- Want to get backlinks from the same sites backlinking to their competitors
And so much more.
SEMrush is an analytical tool for people who want to treat their blogs seriously. Websites like Quora and eBay use SEMrush.
Now, bloggers who are just beginning their online journey may think that the price costs an arm and a leg.
And I would understand.
If you know how to use Excel, then you are in a good position to do the analysis yourself, which I am also doing with my BlogFilliate Tracker, which you can get for free if you join Backlink Society.
SEMrush mainly uses data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. If you know how to use Excel, and you are willing to put in the effort, you can download your Excel raw data from both Google sites, and then plug them in the BlogFilliate Excel tracker made for bloggers.
Now, let us take a look at the main features of SEMrush.
NEXT: SEMrush Domain Analytics
SEMrush Domain Analytics
Domain analytics is a tool that allows you to check the performance of your competitors.
You can also use it for your website if you want.
Once you have logged in, click on the drop-down arrow of Domain Analytics and choose Overview, as shown in the screenshot below:
You will see the following screen:
Now, type the name of your competitor and then click search. Before that, choose the country where you want the data to come from.
What does this mean?
In SEMrush, you cannot choose the whole world as your source of data analysis. The creators believe that SEO optimization is best used if you drill down your investigation per country.
In our example, I will use a competitor for one of my blog sites, which is also about e-commerce.
Once you hit that search button, you will see the following results:
There are three main components here that I want to talk about.
Authority score
Authority Score is a score given by SEMrush. This score is between 1 and 100. The authority score represents the overall quality of your domain and your influence in SEO. The higher the score, the better your website is likely to perform.
SEMrush uses many data points to measure this score, such as your organic traffic, backlink strength, and the domains referring to your website.
Organic Search Traffic
This is a representation of the website’s traffic from its keywords. These keywords measured for traffic are only those that are on Google’s top 100 for that specific keyword.
Backlinks
This is the total number of backlinks to the site. The thing with SEMrush is that this number includes your internal links.
Take note that the backlinks do not mean the number of referring domains. If one domain has backlinks to you, all the backlinks will count and show on this dashboard.
What else is here?
Let us explore the other things that you can take away from the Domain Analytics feature.
Keyword by country and Traffic Trend
If you scroll down, you will see the number of keywords that the website is ranking for. Take a look at the screenshot below.
On the left side is the keywords by country graph. As you can see, this website has 19,200 keywords ranking in the United States.
On the right side is the traffic trend, and you can see that on a monthly basis for the last two years, the traffic of this site has grown from less than 3,000 to a peak of 26,000 visits per month.
Organic Keywords and Organic Position
Scrolling down further, you can also view the top organic keywords that your competition is ranking for. The keyword table on the left shows:
- The keywords
- Their position on Google search results
- The search volume
- The percentage of traffic that this keyword brings to the website
On the right side, you will see how many keywords the website is ranking for, and at what ranges.
For example, this website has 2,000 keywords that are found in positions 4 to 10. You can view these specific numbers if you highlight on the columns of the graph.
So, how will these things help you?
If you know what keywords your competitor is ranking for, then you have to definitely aim for that keyword, too. You need to write content for it, and make sure that yours is better.
All you have to do is to type the keyword in Google, and then open the page of your competitor that shows on the SERPs. Read your competitor’s post, and write something that is longer, better, and more valuable.
If you do not have time to do this, I suggest that you hire an affordable copywriter who understands SEO and the skyscraper technique.
Once you have a blog post for that keyword that is highly optimized, your next step is to look for people who will give your backlinks.
You can find these people on this site. We are a group of bloggers, store owners, and affiliate marketers who swap backlinks with each other for free.
Backlink Profile
Scroll further, and you will see a backlink profile like the one below.
On the left, you will see the top five websites linking to this competitor. You will also see the anchor text that was used, and what articles are being linked to.
On the right side, you will see the percentages of do-follow and no-follow backlinks, plus the percentage of backlink types based on text, images, etc.
If you want to see a full report on your competitor’s backlinks, click on VIEW DETAILS and you will see this:
The screenshot above is just a preliminary report. You can see a summary of the backlink report, and you will have an idea of how this website got to an Authority Score of 43.
If you need more details, scroll down, and you will see this:
For here, you can see which websites are linking back to your competitor, the anchor text, the URL of the backlink, and when the backlink was published.
How is this going to help you?
If you know where your competitor is getting backlinks, you can reach out to these websites and ask them for backlinks too.
If you do this, you no longer have to do a blogger outreach where you are guessing where to ask for backlinks or where you can publish your guest post.
NEXT: SEMrush Keywords Analytics
SEMrush Keywords Analytics
Now, let us take a look at how you can use SEMrush to look for keywords.
On your SEMrush dashboard, click on the Keyword Magic Tool link like this:
Your next step is to type the keyword at the top portion of the page. In our example, I will use “aquarium hobby” as my main keyword, then I will hit search:
Once the results are in, you will see the data below:
The keyword magic tool provides you with several data points, which I will explain below:
- Keyword – these are the recommended keywords by SEMrush. These are variations of your original keyword.
- Volume – this number is the average monthly search volume for that keyword for the country you selected. See the highlighted area in the image earlier.
- Trend – this is a visual representation of the demand for the keyword over time for the last 12 months.
- KD% – this is the keyword difficulty. The higher the number, the more difficult it is to rank.
- CPC $ – this is an estimated amount of how much you will pay Google if you advertise and use this keyword. The dollar value is the cost per click.
- Com – this is a competitive density that is rated between 0 and 1.00. Competitive density tells you an estimate of how difficult it is to get ranked for this keyword based on advertising data. A high density means that many companies are bidding for this keyword.
- SF – this means SERPs Features. The numbers show you the number of SERPs features that appear for this keyword in the Google search engine.
- Results – this shows you the number of URLs displayed organically on the SERPs. This does not include results that are paid through ads.
Now, how do you use it?
What you want is to use keywords that have high volume. You are not limited to using only one keyword. You can use several, but they must be used in your blog naturally.
At best, you have to pick the keyword with the most search volume as your main keyword. Use this in your title tag, meta description, H2 tags, and body of your article.
How does this help you?
If you know what keywords have a high search volume, you will have an idea of what words to use in your blog posts.
As a result, your blog post will get indexed for that keyword, and your page will get more impressions. More impressions mean more opportunities to rank and more traffic.
It is also up to you if you want to use Broad Match, Phrase Match, or Exact Match keywords.
NEXT: SEMrush Site Audit
SEMrush Site Audit
The audit feature of SEMRush is something that you use to check the overall health of your website’s SEO.
Before you can access this, you need to add your website as a project in SEMrush. Next, SEMrush is going to connect with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console properties.
All these are easy to do. Once you have signed up for a free SEMrush account, the tool will give you easy-to-follow instructions.
Now, on to the site Audit.
To get here, you need to click on Projects > specific project name. See below:
In this example, we will check my other website, Just Keep Shippin’.
Once there, you will see this:
You have to click anywhere on the Site Audit block. And then you will get to this page:
Here is a breakdown of the different numbers you see here. I will only discuss the most important.
- Site Health – your score must not be lower than 90%. You can improve this score by fixing the errors, warnings, and notices shown to the right.
- Errors – errors are critical; sometimes, it is only a code that is causing this error. For example, I have 604 pages here that have mixed content as the error. Once you click on the errors, SEMrush has a section that says, “What is it and how to fix it.” Just click on each error to analyze what is going wrong.
- Warnings – these are not too crucial errors on your site. Examples of these are un-minified Javascripts, like if you have ads on your website. This also includes other SEO issues like pages with no heading, or pages with low HTML to text ratio.
- Notices – this is the last that you have to check. Most of these are not that important and have little to no impact on your site health. Examples of these are pages with permanent redirects, pages that are blocked from crawling, etc.
Your main focus is to fix the RED ERRORs.
Let me show you how.
The first step is to check the error.
To do this, you have to click on the error block as shown below:
Then, you will see this:
In this case, I will click on the 604 issues link. This is the biggest problem so I will investigate. But before I click that, I will click the “why and how to fix it.”
This is what I get:
Once I click on the 604 issues, this is what I see:
There are 604 URLs here, but most are coming from only one page, my review of GoDaddy.
Now, the issue is the SSL Certificate. If you will look at the PAGE URL, the link for the review starts with HTTPS. But if you look at the RESOURCE URL, the link starts with HTTP.
This is what is causing the error. It seems like my SSL Certificate has expired.
In that case, I have to go to my web hosting service provider, and then figure out what went wrong.
SUGGESTED READING: SiteGround Review: My Experience with SiteGround
On my web hosting security panel, I will select an SSL type, and then activate it.
Now that it is active, the next thing I will do is to see if it worked.
What this means is that I have to tell the SEMrush tool to do a re-audit. To do this, just go to the upper area and clock on RE-RUN CAMPAIGN.
This is going to take a few minutes. What SEMrush will do is to re-audit your site for errors.
After 20 minutes, here is the new result:
As you can see, site health improved from 90% to 93%. Now, the SEO site health is 1% better than the 92% that average site health of sites in this niche.
The next thing to do is to see the other errors and work on them.
How does this help you?
If you can see your SEO errors, you will know how search engines view your website. You will be able to correct these errors so search engines, especially Google, will love your pages.
NEXT: SEMrush Position Tracking
SEMrush Position Tracking
The next valuable feature of SEMrush is called position tracking. It allows you to determine how you are ranking for your chosen keywords.
Here is how it looks:
That highlighted is a summary. And it changes every day.
If you click on that area, you will see this:
As you can see, I have one keyword that is on the top three results (yellow bar). You can toggle the column chart and see how your website has performed in the last 90 days.
As you can see, my blog pages are ranking each day differently. Sometimes, you lose a ranking, and sometimes one of your blogs will be on the top spot. Naturally, you will get more traffic as you have more keywords ranking on the top pages of Google.
How to Set-Up SEMrush Keyword Tracking Tool
Before you can use the Position Tracking Tool, you need to set it up. You can find this on your dashboard. See the image below:
After clicking on set-up, you will see this page:
For the location, I will use the United States because that is where I want to track my position. You can only choose one country now.
Once you have entered that information, click on Keywords:
The next step is to add the keywords. You can copy and paste the keywords you are tracking from an Excel sheet or from your notepad. Hit the Add to Project, then click Start Tracking.
Once this is completed, you will now see how your website is performing for the keywords that you are targeting.
If you want to add more keywords, just go back to your Position Tracking page, and then hit the link beside the word “keyword.” This will open the same box where you can type and track more keywords as you publish more content.
Measuring Performance Against Competitors
At the top of your SEMrush Position Tracking tool, there is a link where you can add competitors.
If you click that, you will see this:
What you have to do is to type the domain of your competitor or click on the suggestions of SEMrush. Click on the blue + sign once the domain name is in the box, and it will get transferred to the right. Then click Update.
Once you are done with this, you will be able to see how you are ranking against your competitors. To view this report, go back to the Position Tracking Tool, and then scroll down.
You will see a graph like this:
As you can see, my site is at the bottom. If you hover your mouse on each bubble, you will see some details about that website. You will see the number of keywords for that site in the top 100, the average position in Google, and the visibility percentage.
Visibility percentage refers to the likelihood that people will see your content. The higher it is, the more likely your content will be seen by a user.
How does this help you?
If you know how you are ranking against your competitors, you know what to do. In this case, if I want to outperform Digit Clicks, I will enter that domain name in the Domain Analytics tool. I will find out where this website is getting backlinks, what kind of articles it has, and so much more.
Analyzing Your Keyword Performance
On the same page, you will see this report:
As you can see, the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool tells me if my keywords have improved or not in terms of position.
Now, there are many reasons why your position fluctuates. You need to dig deeper if your position is tanking. It may be that the users do not like it—they do not spend enough time on your page, and Google thinks that you are not adding value.
It is also possible that there is a new contender for that keyword—they wrote better content than yours, so you lost your position.
How does this help you?
If you know how your targeted keywords are performing, you can either make changes or get best practices from your blog post that is ranking high.
Over time, you will be able to understand what your audience likes, what writing style works best, and what kind of content ranks high on Google.
SEMrush SEO review: is this SEO tool worth it?
I would say that it is definitely worth it. however, I will not recommend it to you if you are just starting out in your blog, or if your blog is not yet earning money. The tool costs $99 per month, and this is a hefty price for an SEO tool for a blog that is not yet earning money.
Summary
One way or another, you need an SEO tool that can tell you how your website is performing. SEO is not just about keyword selection. If it were, then nobody would have a need for SEMrush. But since SEO also has something to do with your page speed, you need a tool that tells you what is wrong with your website.
Get SEMrush if you have the budget to pay $99 per month. If not, you need to do your SEO the manual way. You have to rely on Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Once you start earning money, then you can certainly subscribe to the services of SEMrush.
