SEMrush Review: Do You Need This Premium Tool?

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

You want to increase website traffic, boost sales and turn your brand into a digital superstar.

Of course, that isn’t easy!

But there are a few digital marketing tools that make the task easier and quicker.

SEMrush ranks top among those digital marketing tools. And it’s loved by millions of bloggers, marketers, and agencies around the world.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

This post will give you an insight look at SEMrush features, pricing and whether it’s a good tool for you or now.

Besides, as a blogger who covers digital marketing, not writing SEMrush review is blasphemous. So, I had to! 😉

Let’s dive in.

Table of Content

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush vs. Free Digital Marketing Tools

The (Many) Features of SEMrush

SEMrush Pricing

Pros and Cons of SEMrush

How SEMrush Can Help You?

Should You Invest in SEMrush?

Other SEMrush FAQs

About Trying SEMrush Free Trial

Conclusion

What is SEMrush?

The fact that you’re reading this SEMrush review, there’s a good chance that you already know what this tool is in the first place.

But if you don’t…

SEMrush is an all-in-one digital marketing tool that helps you manage your brand/business’s online visibility.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

In a more layman’s term, it is an online marketing research solution.

It originally started with a primary focus on keyword research. It grew to become a 360 SEO tool.

Today, SEMrush is a digital marketing suite, packing plenty of features to suit your SEO, PPC, content marketing and social media marketing needs.

You can use the tool to find website issues, monitor its performance, improve SEO, optimize content for higher conversion, create smart PPC campaigns, manage social media, and do so much more.

In addition, SEMrush is a go-to tool for competitive analysis.

Find more about your competitors and their digital strategies; do what they are doing – do it better than them.

SEMrush vs. Free Digital Marketing Tools

SEMrush comes with a cost. Check out the SEMrush pricing below.

One of the common questions people ask is why pay for this when there are free digital marketing tools in the market.

The answer is quite simple…

For the starters, there aren’t many free digital marketing tools out there. And those that are without any cost, their “free plan” is extremely basic and limited. They usually offer a free plan to funnel you down to their premium ones.

Second, there is hardly any free tool out there that offers these many features under a single roof.

As you will see below, SEMrush packs seamless features. It really does make managing your business’s online presence and performance easier and efficient.

When you combine the market price of individual SEMrush features, it would amount to much higher than what SEMrush charges.

So, instead of investing in individual keyword research tools, backlink analysis tool, premium analytics, social media scheduler, and more – SEMrush offers them all at one-stop at a much affordable price.

In addition, there are no tools, including the premium ones, that have such a big database, regular updates, and great support as SEMrush.

SEMrush is much superior to even so many paid tools, let alone the free ones.

So, free tools are good if you’re a casual marketer or freelancer. But you’ve got to go premium for more features if you’re serious about driving results.

But with all said, is SEMrush the way to “go premium”? Is it worth your money?

The (Many) Features of SEMrush

If there’s anything that this tool isn’t, it’s modest.

There are too many SEMrush features. They are broadly divided into five sets:

  • SEO Toolkit
  • Advertising Toolkit
  • Social Media Toolkit
  • Content Marketing Toolkit
  • Competitive Research Toolkit

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

And each of these sets has its own individual tools inside.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Clearly, started just as an SEO tool, today, SEMrush is a 360 digital marketing tool.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Of course, unless you run a big agency, handling too many busy websites or are a mad scientist, you’re not going to need all these tools at once.

Let’s run down these SEMrush features quickly to better understand what you’ll be working with: (A) Tools (B) Analytics Reports (C) Projects

Tools

Keyword Difficulty

Trying to get this post rank higher for “SEMrush review” would be difficult for me – because it’s a bit generic and too many top names are already targeting this keyword.

But on the other hand, ranking higher for search queries like “SEMrush.com review” “review of SEMrush” and “SEMrush tool review” would be relatively easier – because they aren’t too common or competitive.

Now, I am making this guesswork completely on my intuitions. But you don’t have to. That’s what SEMrush’s Keyword Difficulty helps you with.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The Keyword Difficulty tool predicts how easy or difficult a keyword is to rank for.

Based on the difficulty percentage, you can choose the most appropriate keywords that you should target.

The tool helps you avoid highly competitive keywords and bank on the “low-hanging fruits” (less-competitive keywords with decent search volume).

With the SEMrush Keyword Difficulty tool, find more opportunities to rank higher on SERP.

Domain vs. Domain

Compare your website with that of your competitors’ and gain intelligent insights to slay them all.

SEMrush Domain vs. Domain tool helps you with that.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

In one attempt, compare up to five domains side-by-side.

Find out the keywords your competitors are targeting, what’s their position for respective keywords on SERP, how they are doing in paid ads and more.

Also, find visual data that makes comparing and analysis much easier and time-effective.

With SEMrush Domain vs. Domain tool, keep an eye on your competitors’ move – track them closely.

Charts

With so much data around, understanding and making sense of the numbers and facts is challenging.

And this is where SEMrush Charts come in. It visualizes all the numbers in line, bar and pie graphs for easy consumption.

So, understand your competitors’ online performance through visual graphs.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Learn how much organic traffic your competitors are getting from Google and Bing, how much they are spending on Google ads and Bing ads, how much estimated traffic their ads are driving, what keywords are helping them dominate SERP, and what are their positions for respective keywords.

Too much data – represented in a friendly and easy-to-consume visual way.

My Reports

This is very helpful, in particular for the agencies, for client reporting and team working.

With SEMrush Report, download all the data in your dashboard in one PDF file.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The report is highly customizable; it comes with plenty of templates. There’s a drag-drop option to design your own report per your needs, requirements and brand consistency.

It’s very visual, insightful and quite easy to understand.

Moreover, you can schedule to send out these SEMrush reports regularly (assumingly to your clients and teams).

Having such a clean, custom and the detailed report makes improving your digital marketing strategy so much easier.

(And, of course, client reporting becomes quite convenient.)

Keyword Magic Tool

Don’t just stick to your primary keywords – and repeat them over and again in your content.

Find more opportunities to generate higher traffic with this SEMrush Magic Tool.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Put in your seed keyword and the tool will generate you over 2 million keyword ideas.

It also helps you sort, filter, and group the results per the search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, competitive density, SERP features, search topics.

Export these keywords to different SEMrush tools like Keyword Analyzer and Position Tracking.

SEMrush Magic Tool is a powerful tool to create more opportunities in your organic and paid campaigns.

It helps you find the most fitting keywords for your campaigns that assure to generate you more traffic.

CPC Map

Planning ad campaigns isn’t easy. You’re putting in your money – it *needs* to bring you good ROI.

Of course, Google Ads Editor and Wordstream are two top PPC tools. (At least in my opinion!) But SEMrush CPC Map does a fair job – in particular with A/B testing.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The tool gives an estimate CPC based on different niches and regions.

It helps compare the Cost Per Click with the search volume to find high-rewarding keywords.

In provides many ideas to run experiments and split testing to improve your campaigns.

In addition, with CPC Map, you can even find insights on the local competition to decide whether to really invest in PPC or opt for SEO.

For instance, if the competition is high, meaning higher CPC, it might be best to stick to SEO. But if the CPC is low or moderate, PPC can be a good bet for your ROI.

The tool can help you optimize your ad spending significantly.

SEO Writing Assistant

As a blogger and content marketer, this is probably one of the most favorite SEMrush tools. (Ironically, this is far from what SEMrush is known for; it has been added only recently.)

SEO Writing Assistant, as the name suggests, is your assistant in writing SEO-friendly content.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Yes, it’s not always accurate and it has plenty of room to improve. (It’s still in Beta!) But it does a pretty good job.

Foremost, it ensures your content is easy-to-read with readability score. It checks for plagiarism.

It helps maintain the same/desired tone across your content for brand consistency.

And, above all, my favorite, it helps optimize your content with the target keywords.

It recommends you primary, secondary and LSI keywords. It gives keyword stuffing alert. It also alerts about broken links in the texts.

SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant tool is available as an add-on for Google Docs. It also has a WordPress plugin.

NOTE: If you’re really looking for a robust writing assistant, Grammarly is likely the best choice here. Try Grammarly For Free or read Grammarly Review by a Professional Copywriter.

Analytics Reports

Organic Research

“Copy your competitors” – some may think it’s unethical, others believe it is one of the best digital marketing tips.

No matter which side of the rope you’re on, SEMrush Organic Research tool helps you do that.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

First, it helps you discover new competitors.

Know who are playing the field with you; who are fighting for the piece of the pie; who you have to beat to get on the top.

Next, see which keywords are driving the most traffic to your competitors; which keywords have helped them enter Google top 20.

In addition, estimate the value of these keywords by comparing them against several performance indicators, like traffic and search volume.

Third, track the position of your competitors (and your own domain). See how your site is trading on SERP after optimizing it with better, targeted keywords. Observe and improve.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Use SEMrush Organic Research tool to steal away your competitors’ position on SERP much strategically and efficiently.

Advertising Research

Just creating a good paid search ad campaign doesn’t mean you’re going to get good returns.

To drive the desired ROI, you’ve got to keep an eye on your competitors’ campaigns, understand their ad strategies and make improvements in your own.

After all, paid ad is extremely competitive (and over-priced) today. You’ve got to outdo other businesses.

SEMrush Advertising Research tool is a life-savior here.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Based on different factors, it evaluates the PPC strategy and estimated spending of your competitors. This helps you better diversify and manage your ad budget.

To create a high-converting ad campaign, the tool brings you countless examples of ad copies of your competitors and others in your industries. You can tap on this data to optimize your own ad copy with better CTA, trigger words, formats and more.

It helps you discover new (and close) competitors in Google ads that have a high number of common keywords with you. You can compare your campaigns and strategies with them.

In addition, SEMrush Advertising Research tool helps you localize your campaigns.

Analyze the pool of data on keywords and ad texts from over 100 countries and 20 languages to personalize your ads for better conversion.

If you’re looking to master paid ads and unlock high ROI, this tool almost guarantees you that.

Display Advertising Tool

Know what it takes to create high-converting Google display ads.

With SEMrush Display Advertising Tool, enhance your Google Display Network campaigns by monitoring competitors’ display ads.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

It provides an overview of GDN strategies of your competitors – including their ad trends, countries they are active in, devices they target and the ad formats they focus on.

Gain more actionable insights from your competitors’ successful GDN campaigns – right FROM which websites are sending them the most traffic TO what devices and formats are bringing them good value.

Analyze their successful campaigns to find what works better in headlines, images, CTAs and more.

SEMrush Display Advertising Tool brings you rich data that you can incorporate in your own strategy to champion GDN.

Backlinks

Backlink is one of the two most important search ranking factors (content being the other one).

So, having a thorough link building strategy is no less than essential.

And that’s where SEMrush Backlinks tool comes in. It’s a regular backlink checker with a couple of additional features (that you might not necessarily use though).

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The tool helps you do deep link analysis – right FROM checking the incoming links and the geo-location of the referring domain TO finding the anchor texts and knowing the backlink type (doFollow or noFollow).

It also helps you identify the quality of the incoming backlinks through different variables.

This is extremely important today when the quality of the backlinks is more important than quantity.

So, if you’re getting backlink from spam-like sources, you can monitor that and then disavow them.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

With SEMrush Backlinks tool, the strategic part of link building gets a lot easier.

Keyword Research

Well, this is a typical keyword research tool with a few additional features and a lot of data.

First, it would, of course, help you find better keywords for your site and ad campaigns, including the exact match phrases, related keywords, and long-tail keywords.

What’s cool is that with these keywords you will also get a lot of other information.

Aside from the common ones like search volume, CPC and number of results, you will get to know about the trends of specific keywords, ad copies for each search query, and who are ranking (their landing pages) for these keywords.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Also, SEMrush Keyword Research tool helps in finding regional and multilingual keywords thanks to its large 16 languages and 26 country regional databases.

Product Listing Ads

A sweet and simple Product Listing Ads report from SEMrush for the e-commerce players.

It helps boost your Google Shopping campaigns through its insightful PLA data.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

First, identify your Google Shopping competitors and then use the tool to run a competitive analysis on them.

Find out the keywords that you have in common with your rivals, which keywords are triggering their PLAs in paid search results, where do they rank on SERP, which are their best-performing PLAs, and other insights.

Once you have enough information about your competitors – what’s working for them and what not – it’s time to improve your own listing.

Optimize your landing page, re-purpose your product title/description with better-performing keywords, and adjust your pricing.

And just like that, with SEMrush Product Listing Ads report, outdo other retailers and take your e-commerce business to the next level.

Traffic Analytics

Your top competitors get more traffic than you. But how much “more”? How much progress do you have to make to over-take them? What do you have to do to beat them?

SEMrush Traffic Analytics is here for you – to help you optimize your digital marketing strategy through definite insights into your competitors’ web traffic.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Know any website’s traffic and online performance. Including search volume, traffic sources, top pages, mobile vs. desktop traffic, location-based performance, and more.

Monitor their key metrics and various other marketing activities.

In addition to competitive analysis, SEMrush Traffic Analytics is also great to uncover various partnership, investment and growth opportunities.

Before getting into any partnership or other deals, get to know the other party much closely. Track their subdomains, audience overlap map, growth trend, engagement, and more.

In just a few clicks, crowd in front of you a pool of data that packs smart insights about your competitors, customer, partner, or anyone else.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Make informed decisions and grow your business efficiently and cost-effectively.

Projects

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Position Tracking

Are your SEO efforts yielding good rewards? Is your search ranking for different keywords improving? How are you trading in SERP position against your competitors?

SEMrush Position Tracking tool helps answer these questions.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

As is evident with the name, it helps in tracking your position in Google top 100 organic and paid results.

Monitor whether your ranking is improving or getting worse on a daily basis.

You can also use the tool to track the position of up to 10 competitors and see how you compare with them in the ranking.

This SEMrush Position Tracking tool enables you with rich location-specific data; meaning, you can track the search ranking of the site/page in different cities and countries.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The data is available for both desktop and mobile devices.

So, you get plenty of opportunities to optimize your site for different devices and focus more on those that are delivering you higher conversion.

Site Audit

SEMrush Site Audit is perhaps the most intensive and efficient SEO analysis tool.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Its website SEO analysis reports returns with rich and actionable data to help you improve your site for better ranking.

This makes technical SEO quite easy.

Check your website’s overall health.

Detect error pages, deal with duplicate content, optimize your internal/external links, optimize HTML tags, correct broken links and images, and fix various other problems.

Once with the report, make improvements on your site and then re-run the audit. The tool will keep track of all the improvements you made and the SEO progress you’re making.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

SEMrush Site Audit also helps in fixing hreflang, make sure the site is secure and that there aren’t any AMP implementation issues.

Overall, its SEO analysis reports are quite thorough – very adequate to improve your site and boost its ranking.

Social Media Tracker

Social media marketing is not easy – this tool attempts to make it.

Although it provides enough data to help you make an informed decision, don’t expect much from this.

SEMrush Social Media Tracker is a basic tool that helps you track competitors’ data and make improvements in your own social media strategy.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Follow the performance of your competitors on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

Check their number of followers, posts’ reactions and engagement rate, publishing trends and more.

And then compare that data with your own social media performance.

When you know what’s working for your competitors, you can copy that in your own strategy.

SEMrush Social Media Tracker also generates custom, easily-understandable, branded PDF report which is perfect to communicate with your clients and team members.

Social Media Poster

This feature alone has helped SEMrush break its original shell that of “best SEO tool” to become an ultimate digital marketing tool.

And honestly, this makes its premium price worth it.

SEMrush Social Media Poster provides you a centralized dashboard to manage all your major social media platforms under a single roof.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Connect your profiles first. And then start posting on all of them, from a single tab, either individually or together.

It also provides you to schedule your social media posts.

So, no more manually logging in to your profiles every hour to post. Schedule them all in one-sit and save hours of your time every week.

The tool also provides you the suggestion on which is the best time to post based on your audience activities. Not very accurate but a decent feature.

It also has a basic built-in photo editor. Use it to edit images before you post/schedule them.

SEMrush Social Media Poster has good analytics to help you analyze your performance – like the number of likes, engagement rate, audience growth and more.

It is, however, the ‘Poster Chrome Extension’ that steals the show.

It’s an extension for your chrome that once installed makes posting/scheduling articles to your social profiles seamlessly convenient.

Select the text on any page, right-click and post/schedule.

This is very helpful in particular if you’re trying to build a personal brand. You can keep your audience engaged by sharing with them articles and quotes that you are consuming and find interesting.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

By no means is SEMrush Social Media Poster the replacement for robust and dedicated social media tools like Hootsuite and Buffer.

But it does provide enough features and a decent interface that makes it functional and adequate.

Brand Monitoring

A few months back, in one of my posts, I mentioned Larry Kim (Founder of WordStream and CEO of MobileMonkey) and linked it to his Twitter.

A few days back he reached out to me, requesting to link his new site instead of Twitter…

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Of course, I did!

Now, I am not sure how he found my article or which tool he uses, but that’s what SEMrush Brand Monitoring tool does.

It helps you track your brand mentions on the web, and hence analyze your reputation.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Find out who has mentioned your brand name and what they are saying about you.

This unlocks you plenty of opportunities – to get backlinks, for collaboration, for affiliate marketing and more.

Moreover, you can analyze the brand mentions for negative reviews, bad feedbacks and diss. Following, you can ace your PR efforts to deal with them effectively and boost your reputation.

You can also sort your brand mentions based on its sources, dates and segmented tags.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

In addition, as usual, SEMrush also provides you to monitor the brand reputation of your competitors. Get insights of the industry leaders and improve your own branding strategy.

On-Page SEO Checker

There are more than 200 Google ranking factors. Manually checking how your site is complying with these factors is a tedious task.

SEMrush On Page SEO Checker automates it, making it easier and quicker.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The tool audits your site and tells if it complies with the on-page and off-page SEO elements.

It returns with insights of how you can improve the ranking of the pages on your site…

…insights like the relevancy and quality of your site, HTML tags errors and optimization level, the reputation, and trustworthiness of the backlinks and more.

You get actionable suggestions of the changes you can make on-page to rank better for the top 10 keywords on Google that you specified.

Also, you can compare your pages with the top 10 SERP performers for specified keywords.

See what kind of LSI keywords they have used, the number of backlinks they have got, the length of their content, and keywords usage.

Compare them with your page and make the needed improvements.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

SEMrush On-Page SEO Checker is a perfect tool to boost the ranking of your select pages. It not only tells you what’s wrong, but also what you can do about it.

Backlink Audit Tool

Quality of the backlink is a very important part of the conversation in the SEO community today.

Bad quality backlinks can really hurt your organic ranking.

SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool is a typical backlink tool with one unique feature.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

First, it helps you find all domains that are referring your site.

You can even integrate your Google Search Console to get a more comprehensive list of websites that have linked you.

Each of these backlinks also comes with a toxic score. The tool runs down the backlinks through 45 toxic markers to identify which ones are good and which ones are bad.

To remove the bad backlinks, you can approach those particular website owners. In its auditing, SEMrush also returns with the email address of those website owners for your convenience.

If the backlinks are potentially fatal for your ranking, it’s best to disavow them.

Export the list of all the backlinks with high toxic score and upload it to the Google Disavow tool. Just like that get rid of all the bad quality backlinks quickly.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

SEMrush Backlink Audit tool also does automatic crawling every two weeks to check the health of your backlinks, as well as collect data of how many new backlinks you’ve won recently, how many backlinks you have lost, and which links are broken.

If your site is at risk due to bad quality backlinks, you will get notified through email.

In short, aside from its basic offerings, the toxic score is a great feature in an otherwise typical SEMrush Backlink Audit Tool.

Organic Traffic Insights

Get more insights into your organic traffic to get rid of things that aren’t working and focus more on those that are bringing you the most value.

Organic Traffic Insights tool syncs your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to bring you intensive, actionable and easy-to-consume information.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Find out keywords that your pages are indexed for, the amount of traffic these keywords are driving and to which pages, and the amount of conversion they are bringing you.

Following, with such details, you can easily optimize your landing pages with high-traffic-low-competition keywords that are already working for you to get better results faster.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

SEMrush Organic Traffic Insights tool enables you with all the right data.

So, double down on your strengths; focus on aspects that are already working in your favor.

Content Analyzer

Quality of the content is fundamentally the most important part of your digital presence.

Get it wrong and no matter how much money and effort you put in your campaigns, the writing will be on the wall – in the long run, you will eventually fail.

SEMrush Content Analyzer tool is a great addition to the suite that helps you evaluate the quality of the content.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Of course, “quality” is quite subjective, varying for different people.

But there are a few metrics that do give you an adequate idea of whether your content quality was good (and whether your audience liked it) or not…

Metrics like session duration, number of sessions, bounce rate, number of shares the content has, and the number of backlinks.

SEMrush Content Analyzer tool audits your content and brings all these metrics under a single roof.

It also helps you track content performance on social media channels and SERP.

Moreover, using the tool you can also conduct side-by-side content analysis.

This is helpful in answering key questions like which articles/topics are performing better for you, on which platform your content is working better, and more.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

You can go through all the data to figure out the quality of your content. Thereon, you can further improve and optimize the articles and webpages.

PPC Keyword Tool

Running successful PPC campaigns is quite tricky. There are many dynamics to it.

Moreover, picking your winning set of keywords is much more than just doing a basic look-up on your keyword research tool.

SEMrush PPC Keyword Tool looks quite promising, providing some cool features to make your campaigns highly rewarding.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

First, it allows you to create a long list of fitting keywords.

Gather the keywords from all the various sources under a single roof. Also get long-tail suggestions and related PPC keywords.

Merger these keywords to find a combination of new keywords.

Then you can optimize this list on the basis of CPC, search volume, difficulty level, and other variables.

SEMrush PPC Keyword Tool also helps you remove negative keywords through its ‘cross-group negatives’ so that you don’t end up competing with your own ads.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

There are also a few other minor features like recommendation which really enables you to optimize your campaigns better and drive greater returns.

Ad Builder

If you have never run ad campaigns before, this one is going to be a complete winner for you.

SEMrush Ad Builder makes creating ad campaigns quite fun, easy and convenient.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

First, do some research on your competitors and industry leaders; the kind of ads they run and how they are driving results.

Know about their advertising profiles and the keywords they use. Even get the template of their ads that you can copy.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Next, SEMrush Ad Builder provides you a friendly interface to create ads efficiently. It would provide you basic tips and leave prompts if you’re doing something wrong.

In the same interface, you can also create relevant extensions, including sitelinks, callout, structured snippet and call.

Preview how that ad will look to your audience in real-time.

In addition, although I am against (wasting money on) GDN campaigns, SEMrush Ad Builder helps you create display ads for Google Display Network.

So, if you think display ads are worth the investment, SEMrush has got you covered even here.

NOTE: Yes, some of these features are repetitive with just fancy names. But since they were under different heads, I covered them anyway for a proper walkthrough.

SEMrush Pricing

This is an important question… How much SEMrush cost?

Well, for the starters, this all-in-one digital marketing tool isn’t free.

However, they have done a decent job in their plans to ensure there’s something for every kind of need.

SEMrush is available in four different plans:

(i) Pro

(ii) Guru

(iii) Business

(iv) Enterprise

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

The SEMrush Pro Plan is ideal for individuals – marketers, freelancers and new businesses. It comes at a cost of $99.95 per month.

SEMrush Guru Plan – the most popular plan according to SEMrush – is great for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as marketing agencies. It costs $199.95 per month.

SEMrush Business Plan is for larger businesses. Like e-commerce brands, agencies who have more number of clients, and generally companies whose revenue extensively rely on their web performance. It costs $399.95 per month.

And then there’s SEMrush Enterprise plan. It caters to large organizations that need a custom digital marketing solution with unlimited capabilities and most powerful features. Depending on your requirements, the pricing of this plan varies. So, you have to connect to SEMrush and request a price catalog.

All plans include the basic and advanced features – sufficient to suit most of us.

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Here’s a side-by-side feature comparison of the three plans

SEMrush review 2020 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

Point to remember is that you can always upgrade and downgrade your plan.

So, it’s a good idea to start with the basic plan, get the hang of the tool and then upgrade according to your needs and requirements.

Don’t jump on the business or Enterprise plan blindly just because you can afford it.

Before making any financial commitment, you can try SEMrush Pro or Guru Plan Trial for free. First use and then decide.

Try SEMrush Pro 7-Day Trial for Free  Try SEMrush Guru 7-Day Trial for Free

Pros and Cons of SEMrush

If you have gone through the SEMrush features above, you certainly must have found plenty of pros. It is, indeed, an “all-in-one” digital marketing tool.

But then it also has a few cons too.

Here’s a sum-up of all its pros and cons…

PROS:
  • The widest range of tools/features
  • Lots and lots of data
  • The best tool for competitive analysis
  • Clean and organized interface
  • Flexible pricing
  • Quick and reliable support
  • Enough DIY/troubleshooting guides and documents
CONS:
  • Too many features; some of them are unnecessary that you might never use
  • Data isn’t always accurate
  • It costs and not everyone can afford it
  • Long learning curve; it takes time to understand how to use SEMrush efficiently

How SEMrush Can Help You?

Digital marketing isn’t a hit and miss game anymore.

At a time when the competition is high in virtually every industry, every penny needs to be accounted for.

So, your SEO, content marketing, PPC and social media marketing efforts need to be optimized to achieve more in less.

They must be improved for higher ROI.

And this ‘improvement’ is only possible through smart analytics and insightful data.

Because, as mentioned, digital marketing is not a hit-miss game anymore. The decisions must be informed and thoughtful.

SEMrush emerges as a great digital marketing tool here.

It can help you improve website traffic, generate more leads, drive higher conversion from your PPC campaigns, boost revenue, and build stronger brand value.

Broadly put, SEMrush can be approached in two ways.
  1. You gather data of your own campaigns and efforts, analyze the ROI per your goals/expectations and make active improvements.
  2. Learn about your successful competitors – what’s working for them and what’s not. And simply copy their success ingredients in your own marketing strategy.
As a 360 tool, SEMrush can help you in seamless ways in reaching your digital goals.

Millions of people use it despite its slightly higher price – and there’s a reason why.

Check out this 2-minute SEMrush success story video:

Should You Invest in SEMrush?

This is an important question.

Do you really need a premium digital marketing tool like SEMrush?

The answer is subjective, of course.

For instance, if you’re a pass-time blogger, freelancer, and marketer, you don’t need SEMrush. Period. You don’t need to invest that hefty of an amount on a tool.

But if you’re a serious blogger, freelancer, and marketer who wants to…

  • Increase website traffic
  • Understand their niche better
  • Do competitive analysis
  • Enjoy higher ROI from paid ad campaigns
  • Optimize landing pages for better conversion
  • Generate more sales
  • Build brand
  • Manage social media profiles better and conveniently

…SEMrush is definitely a good choice.

Of course, for the startups and SMEs, as well as for the marketing agencies, whose business is based/reliant on the web, SEMrush is a must without any doubt.

So, should you signup for SEMrush?

I’ve got great results using this tool for my clients. But then that itself shouldn’t influence your decision.

The answer largely depends on your needs and goals. If you want better results and consistent growth, using a powerful digital marketing tool is rather important. SEMrush is a great choice here.

Try SEMrush Guru 7-Day Trial for Free.

Other SEMrush FAQs

Here are some of the frequently asked questions about SEMrush:

(i) Can I cancel SEMrush free trial?

Yes, you can cancel your SEMrush free trial at any time.

And that’s what free trial is about – to give users a better understanding of the tool. If they like it, they can make the financial commitment by signing up for the monthly plan. If not, they can leave the trial period at any time.

Remember, though, to terminate your free SEMrush account before the trial period is over and not in the last minutes.

(ii) How does SEMrush get its data?

SEMrush has powerful crawlers and sensors that scrape search results, monitor search queries and pull data from search engines’ API.

They analyze the first 100 organic results of each keyword.

Once the data is collected, it is sorted into different segments – from volume and CPC to trends and niches.

SEMrush has a very robust infrastructure that’s capable to detect millions of new keyword ideas and gather bulk data through different sources every day.

Its database is growing at a very high pace. And, of course, it will continue to grow as we move forward.

(iii) Is SEMrush free?

No, but you can try its plans on trial basis for a few weeks before you make any monetary commitment.

So, even if you’re not sure if is SEMrush worth it, you can still try its free trial to understand its “worth”. If you like, sign up. If not, look for something else.

As mentioned above, SEMrush pricing has four plans to suit different budget:

  • Pro: USD 99.95 / month
  • Guru: USD 199.95 / month
  • Business: USD 399.95 / month
  • Enterprise: Available upon request

(iv) Is SEMrush accurate?

Not always.

When it comes to estimating organic traffic, the tool isn’t very accurate. When you’ll compare it with data from Google Analytics, you will find a difference.

And this is a story of virtually all digital marketing tools.

After all, estimating organic traffic is more like a guesswork given it depends on so many variables, right from the number of searches for keywords to the ranking of the site for individual keywords to the number of clicks the site gets on SERP.

So, you cannot always take data from SEMrush, and any other tool like Ahref, at face value. A lot of numbers you see are “estimate” to just give you an idea of how things are.

(v) Is SEMrush the best?

There are many SEMrush alternatives, including Ahref, Raven Tools, Moz, Serpstat, SpyFu and more.

I have tried SpyFu. It’s good.

Raven Tools I liked the most. It’s primarily for the marketing agencies or for busy marketers who handle many clients.

Honestly, if SEMrush the best is quite subjective.

If you ask that to someone who has used it for quite a while now, you would get a “yes”. But if you’re asking it to someone who uses some other marketing tool, the answer would be a “no”.

Besides, a lot also depends on how you’re planning to use SEMrush. Some of its features are extremely good, others not so much.

So, the answer is something that you’ll have to find yourself here.

(vi) How often does SEMrush update?

The database of millions of keywords gets updated at least once every month.

The update frequency of popular and high-searched keywords is much higher.

Here’s an infographic by SEMrush on the update cycle of its domain and keyword analytics:

SEMrush review 2019 - price, features of this digital marketing tool

(vii) How to use SEMrush for free?

As mentioned above, the tool comes with a cost. So, you cannot use SEMrush for free. Unless someone is lending you their username and password.

You can, however, use SEMrush for free in its trial period. Follow the link…

Try SEMrush for Free

(viii) SEMrush how to use it?

Well, how SEMrush works is something you have to find yourself.

Broadly put, you start by creating an account. Next, you input the URL of the site that you want to analyze.

The tool will spit out a pool of data.

Depending on your needs, go through the data and incorporate it into your own digital marketing strategy.

Since SEMrush offers plenty of features, it has a long learning curve. Meaning, you will take some time to get a hang of it and to use it efficiently.

However, given SEMrush has a fairly neat dashboard and enough DIY guides, the learning process would be rather convenient and enjoyable.

About Trying SEMrush Free Trial

When you’re signing up for the free trial, SEMrush will charge a small amount from your credit card.

This is done to check the validity of your credit card and to confirm that your account is legitimate (and not of an imposter).

The amount charged is REFUNDED, in full, quickly.

Remember, SEMrush won’t charge you anything until your trial period is over.

Conclusion

This sums up SEMrush review and walkthrough.

I tried to be quite in-depth. I genuinely hope this piece helps and adds value to you.

Remember, SEMrush will provide you insights/analysis and help you create a solid digital marketing strategy. But at the end of the day, it is you who have to do the execution.

This tool might be like a magical wand. But it would only work if you swoosh it and read the right spell! 😉

Try SEMrush for Free

If you know any friend or acquaintance who might find SEMrush helpful, share this article with them. It would mean a lot.

Recommended Read: A Complete SEO Checklist (2020 Updated)

Asif Ali

The guy behind Spell Out Marketing. A certified content marketer and professional blogger with 5+ years experience in the domain. Find me on Medium here. Let's talk about inbound marketing, business and side-hustle on Twitter. (And oh, if you're on LinkedIn, let's connect!)