SEMrush Review | A Complete SEO Toolkit for Every Online Marketer

SEMrush is powerful, versatile and all things considered, remarkably accurate.

With that being said, SEMrush’s advanced features can be both a gift and a curse. With advanced functionality often comes complexity and it’s fairly easy to get lost in SEMrush’s broad array of features.

SEMrush offers a variety of metrics to help you understand the domains your website competes with, your general market and industry of your business. You can use this tool to help develop your advertising strategy and determine the general direction of your business.

SEMrush has 140+ databases covering regions all across the globe as well as search on mobile and Bing.

The software currently contains over 30 tools with the ability to analyze 3.7 billion keywords and 4 trillion backlinks.

As of November 2017, SEMrush had more than 1.8 million users worldwide register an account.

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

SEMrush Features

Organic Research

• Get a quick understanding of competitors’ keyword rankings, both in desktop and mobile search. You will see all their searched terms grouped according to the domain’s position in Google’s and Bing’s top 20 organic search results (1-3, 4-10, 11-20).
• Estimate the value of keywords. Compare them against main web performance indicators, such as traffic, search volume, estimate of CPC, competition, the number of search results, and trend.
• View competitors’ landing pages displayed in the SERPs for every given keyword. By evaluating competitors’ web texts, you will get new ideas for your content optimization.

Advertising Research

Here are different ways to use SEMrush to get SEO data

Find all of a website’s rankings

Enter the root domain into SEMrush’s search bar. Do not include “http://” or “www.” else SEMrush will default to rankings for that specific page (more on this in a bit). Click on the Organic Research sidebar, which defaults to the ‘Positions’ submenu.

Scroll down to “Organic Search Positions” where you’ll see a comprehensive list of keywords, their search volumes, which of your pages rank and in what position (plus other relevant details).

Find all of a subdomain’s rankings

Start with the same process as above. Under “Organic Search Positions” create a filter. To find out what pages on rcs.seerinteractive.com, a sub-domain of our main website, are ranking, we’ll select Include > URL > Containing > rcs.seerinteractive.com

You could also create the filter Include > URL > Begins with > rcs. This would be less specific, but helpful if you wanted to find rankings for multiple subdomains that began with the same string of text.

If your blog is located by itself on a subdomain, this is how you can find where your blog pages rank.

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

Find all of a specific page’s rankings

In the search bar, enter the full page URL, including the HTTP prefix. SEMrush will recognize that you’ve entered a page URL and only show  keywords/rankings for that URL.

Find rankings for all URLs with a specific word/phrase in them

Let’s say you want to find all URLs with a specific word in them, such as “seo.”

Create the filter: Include > URL > Containing > seo

If you have multiple subfolders across different URL structures, you can use this method to find their rankings. Say you have seerinteractive.com/philly/seo/ and seerinteractive.com/san-diego/seo/ and you want to find rankings for pages in those seo subfolders, but you don’t want to include pages outside those folders that might have seo in the URL (such as seerinteractive.com/blog/seo-tips/).

Create the filter: Include > URL > Containing > /seo/

Find all this information in another country

What’s VERY cool about SEMrush is that for international SEO, you can find any of this information for different Google databases. Up top, select one of 28 different countries to see different results.

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

Find a site’s estimated organic traffic history

SEMrush will show you a site ’s estimated organic traffic based on rankings, but I take this metric with a grain of salt. It is, at best, an approximation given the available data and should be treated as such.

You can use this to evaluate a competitor’s potential traffic, but it’s more useful in terms of traffic trends – a big drop could indicate that a site was affected by an algorithm change. Gains could suggest that a site has put greater emphasis on their SEO efforts or launched new campaigns to rank higher or rank for more keywords.

Find rankings for a specific keyword

Type your desired keyword into the search bar up top and SEMrush will present detailed information about that keyword, including results 1-100.

Find keyword suggestions for keyword research

Type your starting keyword into the search bar, scroll down to the “Phrase Match Keywords” section and click “View full report.”

This will show you other keywords containing the keyword you entered. This is by no means highly conclusive but can give you a good starting point.

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

Find keywords with a specific number of search results

This is probably one of SEMrush’s least used features, but it’s easy to find keywords with a certain number of total search results. Create the filter: Include > Results > (Greater than|Less than|Equal) > 6,000,000 (or whatever number you want).

Find keywords with/without a specific word in them

Similar to URL, you can filter by keyword contents. You might want to find where a site ranks for queries containing the keyword “seo.” Create the filter: Include > Keyword > Word matching > seo.

This ensures the results will only include strings where “seo” is present as its own word, and not as part of another word. If you want to be less specific, you can create the filter: Include > Keyword > Containing > seo.

Other options include “Begins with” and “Ends with”

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

Find out who your competitors are

By selecting the “Competitors” tab under “Organic Research” you can find all kinds of information about search competitors. If you’ve done your due diligence, you probably already know who a site’s competitors are. A college for example, might say “our competitors are University X, University Y and University Z.”

That’s great, and you could compare just those four sites, but looking at competitor data from SEMrush might also reveal that non-university websites such as U.S. News & World Report rank highly for education-related keywords. SEMrush will provide such data as:

• What other websites share common keywords.
• The percentage (and raw number) of keywords these other sites have in common.
• The total number of keywords other competitors rank for (including non-mutual keywords).

Clicking on any of these results will take you to SEMrush’s Domain vs. Domain analysis tool.

Compare rankings for 5 domains at once

If you want to compare a website’s rankings to that of its competitors, Domain vs. Domain makes it very easy. This varies from the “Competitors” tab in that it allows you to select specific domains to compare.

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

First make sure you’ve selected “Advanced Mode” otherwise you’re limited to 3 domains. Next, enter the different domains into each box and click “Go.”

SEMrush will essentially perform a very basic gap analysis, identifying keywords where all of the domains rank, and reporting on what position each domain ranks in. It does not, however, tell you what URL is ranking for each domain, which makes it difficult to manually compare pages.

In order to get a more in-depth look, you can still use SEMrush but will need to export rankings for each of the domains and use spreadsheets and VLOOKUP to compare URLs.

Find all backlinks to an entire site (root domain, including all subdomains)

Enter a site’s root domain into the search box and make sure the Root Domain box is selected below the search box. SEMrush will default to a snapshot overview page but by selecting the Backlinks submenu on the Backlinks sidebar you can see a full list of backlinks. This list operates similar to the Positions database and will find all of the backlinks to the root domain that SEMrush has in its index.

Find all backlinks to a domain (excluding all subdomains)

By selecting the Domain box below the search bar, you can instruct SEMrush to exclude all subdomain backlinks. A word of caution: this will exclude backlinks to www. pages (since www. is a technically a subdomain).

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

Find all backlinks to a specific subdomain

If you want to look at to a specific n subdomain, select the Domain box and enter that subdomain into the search bar. Do not include the HTTP header or SEMrush will default to backlinks for that specific page.

Find all backlinks to a specific URL

Enter a specific page URL into the search bar. Including the HTTP header will instruct SEMrush to look at page-specific metrics.

CLICK HERE to try it for 7 days so that you can see the results for yourself.

Find how many other internal/external links (to any site/page) are on a source URL

Within its list of backlinks, an interesting metric SEMrush provides is the number of internal and external links present on the source URL. A high volume of external links could be an indicator that the site is low-quality or directory-focused.

Find the estimated age of a backlink

A common obstacle with backlink indexes is that they’re sometimes out of date. The First Seen and Last Seen columns can be useful to determine the estimated age of a backlink, although it’s still wise to use Screaming Frog’s custom search feature to crawl a list of backlink source pages and see if they’re still present.