SEO tool: why is Semrush the best choice?

Semrush is the most complete SEO tool and the real leader of this sector. If you want to work on the SEO optimization of a website, climb the Google SERP or increase the visibility of your blog, you need to know what Semrush is and how it works.

Although there are many different SEO tools available on the market, Semrush stands out among them because it actually offers much more. In fact, we could define it as an all-in-one platform to manage the SEO, content marketing, advertising, competitive research and social media of your website.

Are you ready to find out more about this SEO tool? Keep reading!

Introduction on the SEO tool of Semrush

Semrush is a SEO tool, born in 2008, that helps you optimize your website for search engines. It is used by over 6 million users worldwide and is one of the most popular SEO tools currently available.

If you have already created a website but it is not yet getting the traffic you want or if you are in the process of creating one and you want to give it the best structure right away to make it grow and monetize, then Semrush will surely help you. In fact, it shows you a lot of information about your website, or a competitor’s website, that you can use to:

• Create new web content to generate traffic;
• Do link-building for your website by hunting for opportunities;
• Work on the content of your website or the technical side to improve its SEO ranking on search engines.

You just need to add a project, connect Google Analytics, Google Search Console and the social media you use to get analysis and suggestions to optimize your website.

If you still are not sure why you should use this SEO tool, give a look at this list of its main benefits:

• Easily track and manage your organic rankings;
• Develop compelling and creative PPC campaigns;
• Improve your content marketing;
• Create simplified reports;
• Analyse and track social media effectiveness.

Now that we answered to the “why”, let’s see the main features offered by Semrush and how it works.

The main features of Semrush’s SEO tool

Are you ready to drive more traffic to your website and start generating more leads? With this SEO tool you can achieve these goals and also much more! In fact, Semrush’s features can be divided into 4 main macro-topics:

• SEO;
• Content marketing;
• Advertising;
• Social media.

Let’s see each one of them into more details.

SEO

What makes this SEO tool great is undoubtedly its SEO section which allows you to analyse your website and that of your competitors.

Through the menu on the left, you can open the “SEO” tab to access all the SEO features. From this menu, you can analyse every aspect of your competitors’ online presence: their traffic, the marketing strategies they have adopted, how they are positioned and for which keywords and so on. These are the SEO features that we will see in more detail below:

• Domain Overview;
• Keyword Gap;
• Backlink;
• Keyword Overview;
• Keyword Magic Tool;
• Position Tracking;
• On Page SEO Checker; 

Domain Overview

Most SEO projects start with a general domain analysis. In this way, you get a first overview of the “quality” of a domain from a SEO point of view. Semrush allows you to perform domain analysis: 

• of your website, to find SEO improvements;
• of a competitor’s website, to analyse its positioning;
• of a blog related to yours, to evaluate if it is worth approaching its owner for a link from his website to yours. 

The domain overview shows your key website statistics, or the ones of a competitor, in easy-to-read data and graphs. In this way, you get insights on what you are doing well or what your competitors are doing. Just enter a website in the search bar to get all the information of that domain, such as: 

• The authority score
• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Backlinks
• Distribution by country
• Organic keywords
• Main competitors 

The authority score is the metric that gives you the fastest understanding of the quality of the website. The SEO tool calculates it by crossing different data, such as the number of backlinks pointing to your website (and quality), organic search (traffic and keyword position) and website traffic (monthly visits).

Keyword Gap

The keyword gap is a tool that allows you to compare up to 5 domains, including yours, and analyse all keywords in depth.

All you have to do is enter the domains and choose the types of keyword rankings (organic, paid, or PLA keywords) to analyse. The report will then show you all the top opportunities for each website, total keyword overlap, common keywords shared by all sites, and more.

In this way you can see, for example, which keywords your competitors are ranking for but are missing in your blog, or the strongest keywords that you can use to create a better SEO strategy.

Once the analysis is done, you can export all the data in XLS or CSV.

Backlinks

Quality backlinks are a very important element in building a strong SEO strategy. Through the backlink gap in this SEO tool, you can analyse which are the best backlinks of your competitors or which websites in your niche have had the most backlinks in the last 3 months, so as to intercept all the best opportunities for your strategy.

Furthermore, through the backlink analysis function, you can check the quality of all your backlinks, for example by eliminating all toxic domains thanks to Google’s disavow.

Keyword Overview

The keyword overview is a top-level report to look up any keyword in the Semrush database. Just enter a keyword (e.g., SEO) to immediately see:

• the number of monthly searches for that keyword on Google;
• the keyword difficulty score;
• the keywords related to your search;
• the seasonal trend in searching for your keyword;
• a list (SERP) of websites ranked for it.

As with the domain analysis, the keyword search on this SEO tool can also be conducted by country or device (desktop or mobile).

One of the most important metrics is the keyword difficulty score. Semrush uses a percentage to indicate it: the higher the percentage, the harder it will be to rank for that keyword.

Keyword Magic Tool

Through the Keyword Magic Tool, you just need to enter any keyword to get:

• Difficulty of the keyword, the index that shows how difficult it would be to overtake your competitors in the top 20 Google results for a given keyword;
• Search volumes, a monthly search estimate that helps you evaluate the potential search engine traffic for each keyword;
• Competitive density, i.e., the level of competition between the different advertisers who focus on a given keyword for their PPC campaigns;
• Functionality of the SERP, i.e., if the keyword appears (and on which domain it appears) on Google for example as a snippet, image, video, frequently asked questions and so on.

In addition, once you have entered the keyword in the SEO tool, you can get all the results related to that keyword, such as:

• Generic matches
• Sentence matches
• The exact matches
• Related keywords
• The questions that are asked about the keyword you searched for

You can also view each keyword specifically to get search trends, keyword difficulty, number of monthly searches as well as get new keywords, ideas for new articles and long tail keywords.

Position Tracking

Position tracking is another very useful tool to check the results of what you are doing but also to keep the results of your competitors under control, tracking any variation in the positioning of your keywords.

In fact, you just need to enter your domain to:

• Get an overview of the ranking distribution, i.e., view and compare your positioning and that of your competitors for the top 3, 10, 20 or 100 search results;
• Check which blog pages or articles are most successful for a particular domain;
• Monitor which pages have started or stopped ranking for a given query;
• Identify your competitors;
• Monitor the performance of a website based on the place or device used;
• Find out about your opportunities to appear in Google’s SERPs with the featured Snippets section;
• See detailed graphs of visibility, estimated traffic and average position for the selected keyword;
• Track the ranking of all your keywords;
• Find out about your competitors locally;
• Create visual reports.

If you wish, you can receive regular email updates on your rank tracking progress.

On Page SEO Checker

This tool allows you to analyse all your pages and articles and compare them with those of your organic competitors, who rank for the same keywords. The result will be a series of information and suggestions to further optimize the articles of your blog, both in terms of content and SEO optimizations, in order to be able to climb the Google SERP.

More specifically, through this feature of the SEO tool you can get:

• Ideas on strategies: the checker analyses the pages of your website and suggests how to optimize them for certain keywords.
• Ideas about backlinks, identifying websites that could help your ranking.
• Ideas on SEO techniques: the checker analyses your website and reports all technical errors to you, suggesting how to correct them.
• Semantic and content ideas: the checker analyses your content by comparing it with those of your better positioned competitors and offers you suggestions for optimizing your articles, with words and topics to enrich your content, make it more informative and respond more accurately to users’ search intent.
• Ideas about the user experience, analysing Google Analytics data and suggesting how to improve the UX.
• SERP functionality ideas: the checker analyses the first search results on Google and suggests how to optimize your texts to be able to activate the SERP features.

Content marketing

Semrush offers very powerful tools for optimizing content that allow you to:

• identify new topics to write about;
• check your existing content from a SEO point of view;
• identify the keywords your competitors are using in their posts;
• track mentions of your brand. 

The SEO tool offers different features for content marketing, but we will focus only on the most important ones:

• Topic Research
• SEO Content Template
• SEO Writing Assistant
• Brand Monitoring
• Post Tracking
• Content Audit 

Let’s see them in detail.

Topic Research

Topic research is another very useful tool for keyword research. In fact, you just need to enter a main topic to get hundreds of keyword suggestions, such as:

• Trending topics;
• The most effective headlines;
• The most popular questions on Google on that topic;
• Local keywords;
• The themes linked to the related keywords. 

SEO Content Template

Another absolute gem of this SEO tool is the SEO Content Template that helps you write the content for your blog in a SEO key starting from the keyword alone.After entering one or more keywords, in fact, Semrush will analyse the top 10 search results on Google and will automatically generate a model with all the suggestions to be able to position you in Google’s top positions.

SEO Writing Assistant

One of the coolest features in the Semrush content marketing toolkit is the SEO writing assistant, which allows you to copy and paste content into Semrush for review (you can also write text within Semrush and get advice on real time). Once this is done, you will get tips on how you can improve its performance in search results.  This feature of the SEO tool, in fact, helps you to: 

• keep track of the score according to the metrics of SEO, readability, originality and tone of voice;
• monitor the use of keywords in the text;
• it automatically suggests all the related and secondary keywords that you need to use in the article to make it rank better. 

Brand Monitoring

Brand monitoring is a tool that allows you to monitor the mentions of your online brand but also to keep under control the topics that interest you most. Through Brand Monitoring you can: 

• Measure your estimated reach;
• Get backlinks;
• Identify who mentions you and how;
• Analyse the sentiment that generates the mention.

An excellent function, therefore, to develop your personal branding and your PR strategy. 

Post Tracking

Post Tracking is a fantastic resource for checking the progress of guest posts you have written for other blogs. With this feature of the SEO tool, you can track the metrics of 50 guest posts. Just enter the URL of the article and you can get: 

• The number of shares on social networks.
• The number of backlinks.
• The estimated coverage, i.e., the number of people who viewed the article.
• Referral traffic, or how much traffic that article is bringing to your blog. 

In this way, you can identify which of your guest posts are performing best and further optimize your guest posting strategy. 

Content Audit

The content audit allows you to monitor the progress of all your articles in real time and offers you valuable suggestions for optimization, such as: 

• Rewrite or remove: these are articles published for over 24 months that have recently received few views.
• Update: here are reported the articles that could rank better if they are updated.
• Quick Review: relatively new articles and pages that can be optimized to rank even better.
• Poor content: identify articles that are not performing and that should be deleted or aggregated with other similar articles that rank better. 

Advertising

While many SEO tools stop at specific domain, keyword and backlink analysis, Semrush also includes tools for marketing and social campaigns.

Let’s see some of the main features of this section of the SEO tool:

• Advertising Research
• PPC Keyword Tool
• PLA Research

Advertising Research

With the Advertising Research reports of the SEO tool, you can discover your closest paid search competitors, see the keywords your competitors are bidding on, and analyse live ad examples from your campaigns. Analyse keywords by CPC (cost-per-click), competitive density, and more competitive metrics. With this data, you will be able to research, plan, and create successful campaigns and audits.

PPC Keyword Tool

It is the tool for optimizing and creating ad campaigns. Here, you can import the good keywords obtained from other sections (keyword research for example), you can create ad groups and bring all the material to Google Editor.

PLA Research

If you need data for shopping campaigns, there is the section of the SEO tool called “PLA research”. PLA is the acronym for “product listing ads”. There is a wide range of information and graphics, trends, volumes and even here you can see the ads used, in addition to the related keywords and the products to which they refer.

These reports are a powerful source of research for e-commerce websites and digital advertising agencies that need to gather competitive intelligence on e-commerce competitors.

Social media

The social media features of the SEO tool allow you to create, publish and check the progress of all the contents of your social networks, as well as track the progress of your competitors’ social networks.

The social networks that you can connect to the Social Media Toolkit are:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest

Some of the main features of this section are:

• Social Media Poster
• Social Media Tracker
• Social Media Analytics

Social Media Poster

It offers users an easy way to draft, schedule, and post content on the main social media without leaving the Semrush interface. By using this tool with the Social Media Tracker, you will have access to a full suite for managing a social media workflow and analysis all in one place.

Social Media Tracker

This feature of the SEO tool lets you track the social media accounts of your closest competitors and compare their growth and engagement levels to yours. The reports make it easy to identify the top performing content in your niche, which allows you to stay aware of your target audience’s social media preferences.

Social Media Analytics

It allows you to see your internal analytic metrics for your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram channels.

With each of these channels you can see the number of new followers, the post reach, post engagements, and the engagement rate. In addition, below each of these data, you can see the percentage gained or lost over the given time frame. A positive change will be shown in green, while a negative change will be red.

Semrush free training courses: learn everything on this SEO tool

We have seen so far the main features of Semrush to write articles and optimize them for SEO, but this SEO tool does not stop there because it also offers a lot of training content. If you want to get a complete and free training on SEO, content marketing and the use of Semrush, you are spoiled for choice.

Let’s see what resources it makes available:

• Blog: whatever you are looking for regarding SEO, content marketing, social media, e-commerce, case studies and digital marketing, you can find the answer on the blog.
• Academy: it offers free digital marketing courses, in particular on SEO, content marketing, PPC, SMM and competitive research. At the end of the course, you can receive a certificate.
• Ebook: there is also a section where you can find numerous PDF ebooks available for download on many different topics and written in many different languages.
• Webinar: Semrush also has a rich variety of free webinars on a variety of digital marketing topics. You can book future webinars or review all past ones.
• Podcast: if you love podcasts, then you can follow Marketing Scoop, Semrush’s podcast program on the latest digital marketing news and trends.

Pricing

Semrush offers a free plan and three paid plans. The free plan is limited, which means that you can enter only one project and do no more than 10 searches per day. However, if you want to get a taste of all the features, you can take the 7-day free trial which removes all usage limits for one week. If you cancel the plan before 7 days, you will not be charged any amount.

Otherwise, you can choose one of the 3 paid plans of the SEO tool:

• Pro: it costs $119.95 per month and it is the most suitable for marketing newbies and small teams.
• Guru: it costs $229.95 per month and it is the most suitable for SMEs, growing agencies and marketing consultants.
• Business: it costs $449.95 per month and it is the most suitable for large agencies and enterprises.

Conclusions on the SEO tool of Semrush

The purpose of this article was to give you an overview of the SEO tool Semrush and explain its functioning in the easiest way. However, if you want to learn more, you can give a look at the free resources mentioned above and at the YouTube channel.

If you want to find out other SEO tools, please also read “ SEO tools: the best ones for beginners”.

Be curious! Do not limit yourself and do not stop at our proposal of tools! Check out our article  Software Discovery platforms: the top 9 for us to find the one that best suits your needs.