Hi Guys, do you want your website to be ranked on the first page and get more traffic in Google or any search engine results? Here you go, SEMrush is one of the best online software platforms to improve your website SEO and ranking position. Now you can get a 7-day free trial of SEMrush’s Pro or Guru premium plan, which contains more than 40 tools with multiple languages.
SEMrush Free Trial
You might as well give it a try as it’s free, that’s really a very good opportunity to audit your website and improve it.
For most people who own, built, or operated a website, SEMrush is certainly not unfamiliar to them. Many people know that this is an online platform with toolkits that focuses on SEO to help websites increase online visibility and traffic, but they don’t know what specific tools are included and how to use them.
I will write an in-depth review of SEMrush in this article to show you if it is worth using SEMrush and how it works.
What is SEMrush used for
SEMrush is known as a SEO tool as I mentioned in above, but not limited to this. it was started as an SEO company in 2008, and now SEMrush is evolving into the biggest online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform.
Before you know what SEMrush can be used for, I think you need to learn what are SEO and SEM:
- SEO – short for Search engine optimization, it improves online visibility and traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets Organic/Natural traffic but not advertisement or paid traffic.
- SEM – short for Search Engine Marketing, it is an online digital marketing way for increasing visibility and traffic to website, but SEM is in opposition to SEO, generally, SEM refers to paid traffic from search engines, like Google ads.
SEMrush named SEM, it actually contains a lot of tools that can be used to analyze, audit, and improve both SEO and SEM of websites and web pages, you can find the major specialized toolkits on SEMrush:
- Domain audit, Get instant insights for your Website
- Keywords Research like target keywords analytics, finding out keywords ideas from millions of related keywords, keywords gap between you and your competitors, Identifying the organic keywords that your website has, etc.
- Backlink analytics, audit, and how to build backlink
- Rank Tracking and Monitoring of keywords and your website in Search Engines
- Competitive Research and Monitoring
- Advertisement Research and Creation
- Social Media analytics and post
- Content Marketing SEO
- One-page Site health and improvement audit
- Project creation and management
- and more
SEMrush Pricing
With so many features, let’s see what the prices are for SEMrush plans.
Plans | PRO | GURU | Business |
---|---|---|---|
Billed Monthly | $119.95/mo | $229.95/mo | $449.95/mo |
Billed Annually | $99.95/mo | $191.62/mo | $374.95/mo |
Free Trial | 7 Days | 7 Days | ✖ |
Results per report | 10 000 | 30 000 | 50 000 |
Reports per day | 3 000 | 5 000 | 10 000 |
Keyword metrics updates per month | 250 | 1 000 | 5 000 |
Project | 5 | 15 | 40 |
Keywords to track for each project (with daily updates) | 500 | 1 500 | 5 000 |
The prices may be higher for beginners, but all Semrush plans include 40+ advanced tools and features to boost your marketing, I think the prices make absolute sense. Whatever, you can go and choose PRO or GURU plan to start a free trial to find out the magic secret of SEMrush.
In the next, I’ll show you how SEMrush works with the major features, and you will make a better decision.
5 Major Toolkits and Other Features – How does SEMrush work
SEMrush shouts out that there’re more than 40 tools, but generally, all the tools are included in 5 major toolkits. you will see some tools are included in different toolkits, that’s because the toolkits are not separated, they complement each other. Let me show you the advantages of the features one by one.
1. Overall SEO Toolkit
The SEO toolkit is the top most important part of SEMrush, and this is also the core of SEMrush, I think. SEO toolkit includes tools for a domain, keywords, backlinks, website audit, ranking, local SEO, etc, it is an overall improvement to your website visibility.
Domain & Website
Is there any way or tools to know the status of your own website like the traffic, keywords, quality, health, and so on? The answer is yes, and this should be the first thing that anyone wants to do with analytics and online visibility tools, SEMrush’s Domain Overview and Site Audit are what you want exactly for analyzing a whole website, both tools can generate reports that make it easy to understand how your website is.
Domain Overview
You can get instant insights into the strengths and weaknesses of any domain from the Domain Overview tool, you can check your own domain or your competitors. Firstly, I recommend you check the status of your own website to know traffic, backlinks, and site quality.
As you can see the Domain Overview displays a series of overview metrics about a domain, you can get a quick glance from the picture for full analytics of a website. What specific info you can know from the domain overview:
1. Authority Score – it is a proprietary metric estimated by SEMrush that is used to measure the overall quality of the domain and influence on SEO, which mainly show you how much Google and visitor like and trust your website.
2. Organic Traffic and amount of organic keywords – Organic means Natural without any additives, so Organic search traffic is natural search traffic by people, not referrer, not paid, no advertisement, the website owners like this type of traffic very much.
The number shows the amount of estimated traffic the domain receives per month from organic search, you can scroll down to check the amount of organic traffic, keywords, and country distribution per month in the organic section too, in the organic search section, it will show the top organic keywords and the main competitors.
3. Paid search Traffic – this is in opposition to Organic traffic, the number shows you the amount of traffic the domain receives per month from PPC ads. Like the organic detail section, you can check the amount of Paid search traffic, and keywords details by switching the button to Paid, and you will see the paid keywords and competitors when scrolling down to advertising research.
4. Backlinks – backlink is known as ‘inbound links’ or ‘incoming links’, it is a link from other websites that pointed to a domain, for example, when you write a blog post, you will insert some links from Wikipedia, these links will be backlinks to the Wikipedia. More external websites use your links on their website, which means your website will be more popular, and it will be liked by Google too.
The blue number in the Domain overview shows the amount of backlinks that SEMrush can find on the whole internet that goes to your website.
5. Display Advertising – This blue number shows the number of display ads that the domain has run through Google AdSense, you can scroll down to Display Advertising to see the top latest publisher and the amount ads displayed on their website, plus the top landing pages and the number of views.
6. Engagement Metrics – these Data are taken from Traffic Analytics for all countries for the last month, this metric is at the bottom of the overview section.
You can compare your domains with other domains (up to 5 domains once), and compare the overview metrics of your domains in different countries, yet you can compare the metrics performance of your website by time period. all you need to do is switch the tabs from Overview to Others at the top of the report.
Not only for Domain, You can use this tool to check the full report for a specific URL, subfolder, or subdomain too. and when you click the blue numbers in the overview section, it will show you the detailed reports for each specific Metric.
Site Audit
The Domain Overview can show you a full report for all kinds of metrics, you can know which level your website stays as well as how quality it is, but you don’t know some exist or potential issues on your website which will affect SEO and online visibility.
Don’t worry, You can audit your site to assess the health of a website for technical issues related to visibility and SEO by using SEMrush’s Site Audit Tool, it is a powerful website tool that will crawl your web pages and allow you to analyze the health of a website. Site Audit is a tool mainly used in Project on SEMrush, but it is like domain overviews that you need to check the insight details and health status of your own website.
A site audit will show you a graph of your website’s health with all aspects of metrics, you will need to know which one you need to improve, and it will also provide you with a list of issues that make it easy to see where exactly your website is struggling, and you can fix the issues one by one according to their tips, once all done, you can re-run Site audit to your website to see the report again.
You can also see some other reports with site audits like crawled pages, and additional statistics for SEO. You can compare crawls and progress to monitor your website’s health over a period of time, these reports give you the ability to follow which errors, warnings, and notices on your site have been fixed and if any new issues have appeared over time.
Like Domain Overview, you can audit a specific URL, subfolder, or subdomain too, the tool will crawl pages according to what you enter exactly.
Both Domain Overview and Site Audit are wonderful tools for overall website insight, not only for your own website, but they are also can analyze competitors, that’s really amazing, you can know how the competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can know their traffic and what keywords they use, which keywords are the trend in your industry, how they advertise on Google, and much more.
★ Keywords Research – Read This Part More Carefully
Keywords are the most important factor for any website to rank top in Google, not one of them. Anyone who wants to search for some low competitive keywords but has a certain search volume per month, once you use those keywords, your web pages will get a really good ranking in search engines. keywords are the intersection of you and your potential customers in digital marketing.
Good content can be friendly to search engines, but if you want to let the search engines know what the content is talking about, then you need to show some keywords to make search engines understand well. when people search for what they want in the search engine, they will enter a keyword, once your content matches the keywords entered, the search engine will display your web page. Hence, SEMrush put the Keywords toolkit in a very important position.
This is where keyword research becomes so important.
Keyword Overview Tool
Like Domain Overview, keyword overview will let you understand the status of a keyword, it is a top-level report to look up any keyword in the Semrush database.
You will see various metrics after entering your word or phrase in the search bar, like the keyword’s search volume per month in the specific country or globally in the last 12 months, the number of results on SERP, the trend for the keyword in the period, keyword difficulty, price and amount for ads, etc.
To understand all the metrics, you may need to know some terms:
- Keyword Difficulty – Abbreviate it to ‘KD’. The keyword difficulty index (from 1 to 100%) shows an estimation of how hard it would be to rank your website on the first page of Google for the analyzed keyword. The higher the percentage, of the keyword is higher competitive, the harder it will be to achieve high rankings for the analyzed keyword,
- SERP – Short of Search Engine Results Page, the number of URLs displayed in organic search results for a given keyword.
- SERP Features: hover over the icons to see which special SERP features are present on the results page for this keyword
- CPC – Short for Cost per Click, this is an Internet advertising model, it shows the average price in $ advertisers pay for a user’s click on an ad triggered by the analyzed keyword (Google Ads) on this SERP.
- PPC – Short for Pay Per Click. another Internet advertising model is used to draw traffic to your website by using ads (Google Ads) where the advertiser pays a price for each click.
- Com. – Competitive Density, the density of advertisers bidding on this keyword for their ads on the national level. A score of 1.00 indicates the highest level of competition, and a score of 0.00 indicates no competition. it can be representative of a keyword’s organic value as well.
- PLA – the top Product Listing Ads (Google Shopping) seen on this keyword’s SERP, if there is no product on your website, it will show 0.
- Ads: the top Google PPC ads seen on this keyword’s SERP
- Trend: how much interest web searchers have shown in a given keyword in the last 12 months.
The report will also show you some top keyword variations and related questions and keywords, you can check all the keywords by clicking ‘view all keywords’ under each list. moreover, it will show a report SERP Analysis, You can compare various metrics after clicking view all keywords, and you may find some keywords to target in the list.
You can also get a SERP breakdown analysis report for the analyzed keyword and evaluate the competition on the right button in the report.
Semrush also allows you to analyze and compare bulk keywords, if you have a list of similar keywords, words, or phrases, you can use the bulk analysis to check which one is better to target on your website.
Keyword Magic Tool
Do you have no idea about where to find keywords, or do you not know what keywords to use even if you get a lot of keywords? The SEMrush’s keyword magic tool is what exactly you are looking for researching and getting keywords to target, it is an easy-to-use keyword research tool that provides all the keywords you need to build your most profitable SEO or PPC campaign.
Semrush’s keyword magic tool is the most powerful keyword research tool that you may improve for the SEO of your website once you know how to use it. It offers you access to an extended database with over 20 billion keywords.
The magic tool will generate a responsive table with a related keywords list and related search terms groups once you enter any single word or phrase into the search bar. The keywords list on the right includes various metrics for each keyword, and the left side shows the related search terms divided into specific topic subgroups, and you can switch the groups by number(amount of topic keywords) or by volume (average monthly search volume).
You can research keywords in specific countries or specific currencies and get target keywords according to your requirements by pressing the buttons of metric filters. SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is remarkable for exploring niche topics, finding semantically related long tail keywords, and collecting and building a master list of keywords with the Keyword Manager Tool.
How to Use Keyword Magic Tool to Find Target Keywords
Step 1. Simply enter a keyword you want into the search bar to start research, the keyword can be called a seed keyword, it will ‘grow out’ a lot of related keywords, and you can choose a specific country before starting searching.
Once you click on the Search button, the tool will generate a complete listing of all the various related terms in the table as that in the above screenshot with the keyword ‘snowboards’.
Step 2. As you can see a lot of keywords in the list, but you don’t need most of those, and you must also don’t need highly competitive keywords, in this step, you need to set the filters to find the keyword that meets your requirements to target. (this should be the most important step)
Before you continue next, You need to understand the meaning of buttons in the the filter board:
- Questions – A list of question-based keywords that contain your seed keyword.
- Board Match – Keywords/search terms including any variation of your keyword or keyword phrase in any order.
- Phrase Match – Exact keyword or keyword phrase in various orders.
- Exact Match – Exact keyword or keyword phrase in exact order.
- Related – A list of keywords that are similar to your seed keyword or related to the same industry
- Volume – The average amount of monthly searches for each keyword in the list over a 12-month period. you can sort it with different ranges.
- KD is Keyword Difficulty, and CPC is Cost per Click, you can check the identification in above
- include or exclude keywords in the list,
- Advanced filters – it includes Word count, Competitive Density(Com.), SERP Features, and Results in SERP, this option is mainly for identifying and filtering content that matched the keywords.
Tips
1. You should set the Keyword Difficult to the lowest level, generally, 0~33.3% is good, then get the keywords with a Com. number as low as possible, if the volume is too small, then you can try to increase the numbers.
Search different keywords or phrases to get several target keywords. these keywords should be low competitive. this is mainly for organic keywords, if you want some keywords to advertise on Google, you need to check the metric of CPC too.
2. then you can check what websites ranked on the first page of SERPs and match them with the target keywords you just found, then you can compare the contents, most of the time, as long as your content with the same keywords is richer than the weaker ones, you will be ranked in the first page.
In addition to filtering keywords from the filters board, you can also organize keywords by groups, it is on the left side of the table, and it shows you all the groups with related words. so you can use groups to explore the subtopics around your seed keyword. You can order the groups in this list by the number of keywords in the group or the amount of average monthly search volume.
You may identify new niche topics and generate ideas for PPC campaign ad groups by using groups of keyword magic tools on Semrush.
Step 3. You should have a list of the keywords you are searching if you do it according to my Tips, now you can use the keywords in your website, and you can add the keywords to related products and product descriptions if you are a blogger, you can use the keywords in the articles, yet you can use the keywords for video if you have a channel in Youtube and so on.
Using Keyword Magic Tool is as simple as above, with only 3 steps, the most important is you need to know what the metrics are used for and the meaning of the buttons.
Explore Related Keywords with Keyword Magic Tool
Although the steps are very simple, there are many other functions for the keyword magic tool.
Related Keywords filter within Keyword Magic is perfect for finding different keywords that you can target with your website to help build up your overall search authority and bring more organic traffic to your site. You can get some related keywords that have less competition and thus give you a better chance of getting a higher ranking for a valuable main keyword.
You can not only build out your amazing keyword list by using related keywords but you may be sparked new content ideas with it for your site’s SEO optimization. Combining the trend of the keywords, related Keywords can be perfect for generating content ideas for any new blog or landing page that you are creating for a future campaign, and you may uncover new profitable keyword ideas for some niche content.
What is long tail keywords?
A long tail keyword is a keyword phrase or search query that includes 3 or more than 3 words based on the main keyword. These are keywords with low monthly search volume and competitive, but higher probability of conversion.
Long tail keywords are smart targets because they are more specific with the user’s intentions. For example, the long tail keyword “best WordPress hosting for beginners” is much more specific compared to simply “WordPress hosting.”
Find Long Tail Keywords
On Semrush, you can find long tail keywords by using the Keyword Magic Tool and adding filters for the number of words in the advanced filters, then you can set KD, Volume, Com., or other metrics to filter the keywords and get what you want to target.
From an SEO point of view, targeting longer, more specific search phrases makes it easier to build a website’s authority to ultimately rank for bigger keywords that carry more search volume and potential traffic. So the Long Tail Keywords are very powerful and important for any content.
Position Tracking
What are you trying to do SEO for? To get more organic traffic for your website. The most intuitive way to know the SEO effect on your website is to see if your page is ranked on the top front of SERPs, Preferably the first page.
No matter what your SEO specialty is, you could do on-page SEO, write content, build links, or run technical audits, chances are you’ll have to measure the impact of your work on the website’s rankings. Is there any way to know the ranking position for the pages with specific keywords in SERPs? yes, SEMrush also provides a tool called Position tracking that lets you track a website’s daily rankings for a custom set of target keywords, it is also called rank tracking.
How can you use Position Tracking to track your page’s position? do you remember there’re lists of organic keywords generated in Domain Overview, when you start to use position tracking, it will import those keywords, you can choose those you want to track or add some keywords manually, then just sit and wait for the report to be generated.
what exactly the position tracking can help you:
- it can track any keyword and domain even those not in the main Semrush database
- Featured Snippet report to look for featured snippet opportunities
- Track and compare multiple geographic locations or device types(desktop or mobile).
- Easy local SEO tracking
- export PDF reports to share results with colleagues and clients
With the Report, you can see how your efforts translate into ranking changes and learn which pages get the most traffic from your target keywords. You’ll be able to identify your weakest pages that need improvement and monitor your competitor’s rankings all from the same place.
★ Link Building Tools
Backlinks are a top factor in Google’s organic ranking algorithm according to many ranking factors study. So, link building and backlink maintenance should absolutely be a part of every SEO strategy, hence, building backlinks is one of the most efficient way to improve SEO for a website.
Not surprisingly, SEMrush also provides tools for building links on your website, The Link Building Tool is another powerful tool, it can work with Backlink Audit and Backlink Analytics to audit, analyze and increase your and your competitors’ backlink profile.
Backlink Audit and Backlink Analytics can monitor your domain’s backlink profile and shows you the health status, which will help you avoid Google penalties related to toxic backlinks. it provides you with everything to audit all of your links, analyze the toxic signals associated with any suspicious links, send emails to you, and ultimately create a disavow file to send to Google once you connected your Google account to SEMrush.
Disavowing files will tell Google not to take these links into consideration when ranking your domain. you can manage all your backlinks with a Google account in SEMrush, it will save you time.
Both of these 2 tools can also give you the ability to study your and your competitors’ backlink profiles and make comparisons between multiple domains side by side as most of SEMrush tools do.
How to build links with SEMrush’s Link Building Tool
Link building is the process of generating links pointing to your website. These links will impact search engines discovering your website and making decisions on how to rank your site in search results, so link building is becoming one of the most necessary aspects of SEO. You should seize every possible opportunity to gain new quality backlinks.
You are allowed to build new backlinks for your website with link-building tools step by step on Semrush:
Step 1: Go to Semrush dashboard->SEO->Link Building->Link Building Tool, in the search box you can choose one project, if you don’t have any project, you need to create a project. you can enter up to 10 keywords and 10 competitors’ domains next, If you don’t have some keywords entered or do not know what competitors to choose, the system will offer you a list based on the information from the Semrush database.
After you entered all, just hit the “Start Link Building” button, the building link tool will collect the information and generate a report.
Step 2: On the report page, you will see domain prospects of backlinks, domains in progress of building links, and other information.
There’re more tabs Prospects, In progress, and Monitor, this actually is the workflow of how to build links, you can start with it in the Prospects tab, choose source Domains and the links that are relevant to your website, and add those to tab “in progress” by clicking on the blue “To In Progress” button, or you can check all and add bulk Source Domains in progress like in the below screenshot.
Step 3: Connect your email address, and go to the tab in progress, you will see the source domains you chose to add are showing the list, click on the button contact, and you can send an email to the website owner or contact person.
It’s just like you usually send emails, select which emails to send your pitch to, drag and drop placeholders into your email contents, and edit your email, you can save the edited email as templates and send it to all similar domain owners.
Step 4: this should be the last step, you can monitor and track your link-building efforts over time. This tab, it will show you a report that prospective backlinks are marked as Active, Lost, Broken, Undefined, or Rejected after you add the domains.
That’s it for links building on SEMrush, I think you should have some idea how SEMrush works to improve your backlinks profile.
On-Page SEO Checker
If say Domain Overview and Site Audit are the tools to show the SEO status of your website, then SEMrush’s On Page SEO Checker can be a tool you could do to improve the ranks of pages with specific keywords on your website. it provides a user-friendly interface and workflow for beginners
When you search any keywords in the search bar, Firstly, it will generate a report with a one-page suggest ideas amount summary including strategies for pages to use keywords, target SERP Features, backlink prospects, semantically related words to your pages, technical SEO idea, target content length, and readability, and easy to learn the users or clients experience on your website once you contact google analytics.
In addition to the ideas, the on-page SEO Checker tool will show you the top pages of your site for optimization, it also includes some other features you switch to each by the tabs:
- Optimization Ideas – In this tab, it shows you all the specific ideas on how to optimize your web page with target keywords, these ideas are the 7 types offered in overviews, and you can optimize them one by one with SEMrush one-page SEO Checker’s ideas. The tool generates these ideas by analyzing strategies from your competitors combined with Semrush data.
- Strategy – Strategy ideas will help Which pages to prioritize and which keywords these pages use will lead to better SEO ranking results.
- SERP Features – Here are suggestions on how to improve schema markup for your pages.
- Backlinks – potential websites where you can build your backlinks.
- Semantic – the tool will semantically suggest related words or phrases by analyzing your competitor’s content.
- Technical SEO – like the Site Audit Tool, including site health, how is your website’s quality, and suggest how to fix or improve.
- Content – give ideas for the content length and readability
- User Experience – you need to connect your Google Analytics account to get these ideas, it will show you how the visitors and users check your pages, such as bounce rates, and time on page…
- Top 10 Benchmarking – this feature shows you a report that analyzes the top 10 competitors on the first page for every keyword in SERPs you requested ideas for, which will give you ideas on how to improve the schema markup and your content by comparing with the rivals.
- Idea Tasks – this is a report that you can track the results of ideas you are proceeding with, you will learn the progress of your SEO improvements and updates over time. the report is a bar graph to measure the trend of ideas’ progress, and there is a list that displays all of your ideas with either a “To do” or “Done” status.
You can export all the reports generated by On-Page SEO Checker to pdf and share them with anyone.
Listing Management(Local SEO)
Listing Management is a simple solution tool for Local SEO on SEMrush, the tool makes it easy to distribute your business data automatically to the most authoritative directories, and people will reach you through Amazon Alexa, Apple, Bing, and Google by voice search.
What the Listing Management tool can help you:
- The tool can keep your business listings consistent and correct across the internet. Generally, you have to manage your business data on various maps, apps, search engines, and social networks, owing to multiple directories cross-checking and validating on Google, with Listing Management, you can edit information in one place.
- Listing Management will monitor users’ reviews, work with their suggestions and keep your listings free of malicious duplicates, ensuring maximum visibility for your business.
- Generate Reports for your business to let you know the listing’s performance.
- You can get emails with location reports generated by Listing management, which you can analyze how well the location performs in search engines and directories.
You can also use other SEO tools like Domain Overview, Site Audit, and One page SEO Checker to audit analyze and improve the listing visibility on search engines.
2. PPC Toolkits- Advertising Research, Creation and Optimization
PPC stands for Pay Per Click you can find the explanation in the above information of Keywords Overview. If you are running some ad campaigns on Google Ads, PPC Toolkits will be your one-stop shop for planning a Google Ads campaign, you are going to benefit and set up your own advertising strategy with keyword lists and ads with these toolkits.
SEO can be the best way to drive organic traffic to the website, then SEM is the best way to drive paid traffic, and Advertising should be the biggest part of paid digital marketing, so optimizing advertising campaigns means improving SEM. The PPC Toolkits will help you plan, analyze and improve your Google Ads campaigns from 3 aspects: Market Analysis, Keyword Research, Ad Creation, and Tracking.
Market Analysis
Analyzing the market, you and your competitor is the first step to running a successful advertising campaign, you will know your competitors’ ad strategies and how they are running their campaigns. You’ll see everything from the keywords they are bidding on to the ad copy they are using for their ads.
The most powerful tool you can analyze your competition on SEMrush is Advertising Research. you can get more information combine with Domain Overview to analyze competitor’s domain.
Enter any competitor’s domain into the search box of Advertising Research, the tool will generate a full analytics report you learn the advertisement campaigns in various aspects.
In the tab of Position, you can see the number of keywords that bring users to the domain via Google paid search results, the traffic driven by these keywords, and the estimated average cost per month to rank for the listed keywords displayed in the table of paid search positions. You’ll see everything from the keywords they are bidding on to the ad copy they are using for their ads. you can see the position changes of each keyword in the position changes tab over time.
There are other tabs to show you more details:
- Competitors – more competitors displayed in the list show you the information like that in the position tab
- Ad Copies – it will show you the top ad copies that the domain running in Google Ads
- Pages – The landing pages that the ads campaigns pointing
- Subdomains – which subdomains are based on the domain you target running ads too.
If you want to check more details about the ads that the domain running on Google ads, you can use Display Advertising, where you can add the amount, ads’ image, ads’ publisher and landing pages even the user’s gender and age, you will also know what the top audience is interested in.
Semrush also provides a tool for users who want to analyze ad campaign performance for goods on Google Shopping, it is called PLA Research, which stands for Product Listing Ads, but it requires a Business Plan subscription. The PLA will be displayed once someone searches for goods in Google and that is also included in Google shopping.
The PLA research tool is very similar to Advertising research. The reports generated by PLA Research are a powerful source of research for e-commerce websites and digital advertising agencies that want to gather competitive intelligence on e-commerce competitors.
Keyword Research
You will want to find a set of keywords for your own ads campaigns once you learned about what your competition is doing, how to find the keywords that will bring you the most revenue, and which keywords are most suitable for your campaign and improve existing campaigns.
In the above of this article, you’ve been introduced that a Keyword overview and keyword magic tool that you can use for keyword research. these are the most powerful keywords tools keywords not only for SEO but also major tools for Advertising campaigns.
You can filter and choose keywords via metrics of kd, CPC, and Com, you can also check the keywords gap between you and your competitors, and you will generate a list of keywords suitable for your ad campaigns.
Plus, SEMrush provides another PPC Keyword Tool special for you to create a perfect keyword list for your Ad campaigns. With this tool, you can use previously created lists via the Keyword magic tool, generate keyword combinations in a click, or get new keyword ideas from Semrush reports, it offers an easy way to filter out irrelevant keywords, and clean and group keywords.
The PPC Keyword Tool will automatically cross-group set up negative keywords and remove conflicting keywords after you completed the work of keywords list and negatives building for ad campaigns, you can export everything to a CSV file including your keywords, negatives, or both at either the campaign level, group level, or both.
The CSV files can be uploaded to Google Ads Editor, Google Ads Editor is a free, downloadable application that allows for offline management of Google Ads accounts, hence, you can easily and seamlessly sync your changes made in the PPC keywords tool to your campaign on Google ads, which you can improve the campaigns.
You can also use the export campaign plan to create and track new ads campaigns on Google and combine advertising display tools, you will know how to write a title, and description or create stunning images for your ads.
3. SSM- SEMrush Social Media Post and Optimization
Social Media has evolved very rapidly in these years, there’s much traffic from Social Media, A lot of data and reports are showing that social media traffic accounts for an increasing proportion of many websites, that’s why SEMrush also provides social media toolkit to help you analyze and optimize posts on the popular platforms.
You can easily create posts and monitor their performance, benchmark your progress against your competitors, as well as create your own compelling social media Ads with social media toolkit.
The toolkit includes 3 tools for you to manage your social media account on the major platforms of Facebook (Business pages), Instagram (Business profile), Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, and Linkinwithout leaving the Semrush interface, it can help you to analyze and optimize the local social of Google Business.
Before you use the Social media toolkit in SEMrush, you need to connect your accounts to SEMrush.
Social Media Poster
You can use Social Media Poster Tool to draft, schedule, and post content on your different social platforms, the tool will also give you ideas to create posts for the social platforms, you can use another tool from the content marketing toolkit called Topic Research tool, find the trending subtopics, Review the related searches and headlines to add top trending content to your posts.
The Poster Tool will also find the best time when you should send out your posts, it is automatic only if you schedule the created post. you should willing to know whether your post has an effect or not, then you can use the tab analytics of the Social Media Poster Tool to find out how is your post running and other information about your social account.
You will find out which content works great for your audience, track your audience growth, and even get to know your audience: age, country, and when they are online from the analytics of Social Media Poster.
Social Media Tracker
You may also want to know how your competitors run their campaigns too, then you can use the tool: Social Media Tracker, which lets you track the social media accounts of your closest competitors and compare their growth and engagement levels to yours.
The competitors are probably trying to reach a similar audience as you do on social media platforms. With the Social Media Tracker tool, you will know your posts aren’t receiving as many likes or shares as your competition, even you will find what they miss and fails, then you know there is space for improvement.
You can try to share different types of content and posting at the right time can influence how much engagement your profile gets. the social media tracker will be able to track the growth of your competitors’ page and yours, show your day-to-day engagement levels, and finally find the best way to post on social platforms.
Social Media Ads
It is overwhelming to many people to start an ad campaign on a social media platform, Social Media Ads is a tool in SEMrush to help users create and monitor ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, FB Messenger, and FB Audience Network. it is only available on Facebook and Instagram.
The friendly interface of Social Media Ads makes it easy for users to run and manage Facebook and Instagram ads in one place, you no longer need to struggle with complicated settings on the platforms. what Social Media Ads can help you more:
- Monitor the performance of ad campaigns and receive notifications
- analyze social ad campaigns, what weaknesses, see your low-performing ads, and optimize them
- Save time on little things: auto naming, streamlined creation, easy-to-set-up ads, and more
4. Content Marketing Improvement
Content Marketing Toolkit is a platform that marketers can use to manage their tasks, create and improve content. But all tools in Content Marketing are only available in full with a Guru or Business level subscription.
If you are a blogger or writer, or you just want to write something to share on the internet, then this toolkit can be right for you, please check what exactly it can do.
You can use The Topic Research Tool of Content Marketing to analyze your target or competitors’ content and find subtopics and top-shared headlines around a topic, discover the top questions people ask about a topic, it will give you ideas to write winning content.
Once you find some relevant topic in your niche that is low competitive, you can start creating some content for your niche, SEMrush provides you tools for creating content that resonates with your audience. The Semrush SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant make it easy to create content briefs that will lead to content loved by both people and search engines:
- You enter keywords that you want to target with your content.
- The tool analyzes content on Google’s top 10 ranking pages for your target keywords.
- You receive recommendations on how to create SEO-friendly content.
If you are still struggling with creating wonderful content, you can use an extra tool Marketplace of SEMrush to hire some professional writers to write content for your website.
With the Semrush content marketing toolkit, you can also audit, analyze and improve your content with content audit tool; you can use Post Tracking to measure your off-site content performance by tracking its backlinks, referral traffic, search engine rankings, and social shares in one place; even use Brand Monitoring tool to track, analyze and benchmark your brand’s performance.
5. Competitive Research and Monitoring
As the famous saying: Knowing yourself and others can win every battle. Semrush provides users with very powerful features for Competitive Research and Monitoring. As you can see above the article, whichever toolkit you read you should find they have the functions to analyze, research, and monitor even help you win the competition in all aspects.
That’s right, you can use all the above 4 toolkits to do Competitive Research and Monitoring as you do to your own website, you can find the keyword gap, backlink gap, the weakness and strength of your competitors’ advertising, social media, and contents.
Besides, Competitive Research Toolkits offers 2 dedicated tools for Trends of the market: Traffic Analytics and market explorer.
Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics is more like the domain overview, it is a market intelligence and competitive research tool that you can easily get a full view of any company’s online performance with website traffic analysis, check traffic metrics of any domain, compare several websites’ traffic data side by side and even analyze up to 200 sites at once from your custom list.
The traffic analytics tool is divided into multiple sections: Traffic Overview, Audience Insights, competitors’ best-performing pages, Benchmarking against competitors, and all domains including subdomains, The data in these reports offers quick insights and thorough analysis on the competition and market.
Market explorer
Market Explorer is another powerful tool in SEMrush for competition, in which you can fully dive into a niche and understand the audience you want to target. This tool makes it easy to benchmark how your site compares to the competition and get a better understanding of any market.
You find the main channels to send website traffic to competitors in your market with Market Explorer and determine the best competitor by evaluating the market size, in addition, you can analyze the audience and their age, gender, and interest, the Market Explorer can also provide regional and historical data filtering for you.
More Tools and Features
SEMrush also provides extra tools and more features, which will assist to monitor and improving your website from all of aspects.
Management Toolkit
The Management toolkit in SEMrush includes a set of solutions that will help you manage all your marketing campaigns from one place.
- Projects: You can use the Semrush Project to manage any specific domain with most of the tools.
- Client Manager: manage clients and customer information in one place, never worry forget any client name or contacts
- Notes: Save notes for any important dates or events related to your work.
- Marketing Calendar: Plan and manage several marketing campaigns in an interactive and shareable calendar.
Amazon Tools and Extra Tools
SEMrush also provides more extra tools, which will assist you to monitor and improving your website and business from all of aspects.
- Sellerly – Professional Amazon tools developed by SEMrush. it is a separate platform out ofSEMrush Toolkits, which means if you want to use Sellerly, you can purchase it separately.
- Marketplace – This is a content creation marketplace. You can hire professional writers to write content that love by people from here. it can also help you post on social media, etc.
- ImpactHero – This is an AI content enhancement tool that will analyze your website content according to user behaviors, and then segment the content to provide you with the best method.
- Agency Partner – This is also similar to a marketplace, but with Agency Partner you can find marketing and professional marketers to help you improve your website SEO and online visibility.
- Prowly – a SEMrush PR tool, which is what we call public relations, a tool to help you promote your brand online and build brand reputation.
- Splitsignal – This is an A/B testing tool to help you find the best campaign plan to obtain organic traffic.
Cons of SEMrush
1. It seems that some SEMrush tools don’t have a global report, like keywords magic tools, position tracking, etc., it is not good for some websites with global business.
2. SEMrush is complicated to beginners indeed, and some features are relatively repetitive, like the competitive toolkits, you can find most of the functions for these tools in other toolkits. Probably, developers think that segmentation is easier to understand, but some users may find the functions complicated and inconvenient to operate in multiple places.
Comparison
Ahrefs | Moz | Mangools | Jaaxy | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Billed Monthly | $119.95/mo | $99/mo | $99/mo | $49/mo | $49/mo |
Billed Annually | $99.95/mo | $82/mo | $79/mo | $29.9/mo | $41.6/mo |
Free Trial | 7 Days | 7 Days Trial for $7 | 30 Days only for Pro | 10 days | Starter Trial Plan |
Site Audit | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Keyword Research | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Adverting Research | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Content Markting | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
Social Media | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Competitive Research | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Is SEMrush worth the price or to use?
Once you know the traffic is money in this period, you will know how valuable and important a tool that can help a website drive traffic, especially for organic traffic, which can not only save your time, it also help to save your money, do you know if you don’t have any tools, you need to pay how much to learn to run a successful ad campaign on Google or Facebook.
Only the tools of Keywords are much valuable for many websites, do you know many marketers optimize SEO mainly depending on research keywords? and SEMrush gives you chances to gain backlinks for your website, as I know, many high-traffic website owners will charge much for inserting a link required by other websites, and how much time you will need to spend to find a suitable website for building a link? SEMrush saves you a lot of time.
In addition, Social media and content marketing tools can help you earn more audience and visitors even revenue, the amazing thing is SEMrush let you research and analyze your competitor and their behavior, you can find out what their weakness and strength, and you have changed to win them in the competition of SEO and SEM.
Overall, I think SEMrush is much worth the price, though many people thought SEMrush is complicated, and it may have some shortcomings. As it really made a considerable income and save much time for me.
Final Thought
SEMrush can be said to have the most feature-rich in the industry. That’s the reason that the price for SEMrush is a little higher compared to other online visibility platforms, though, It improves a website overall in almost all aspects, actually, you will find some interesting functions(like collecting emails to put a free site audit widget on the website ) and some wonderful features that I may not review in this article, as you can’t really write all in only one article. you can check SEMrush official courses.
However, in fact, not all users need all features SEMrush provides, so many small website owners want to use it but won’t buy it. I personally think it would be better if SEMrush could sell its software in two ways:
- Maintain the existing Plans subscription, all toolkits are sold together, The customers who want all features bundled they can purchase the plans as in the present.
- Split some of the toolkits and sell them separately, and lower the price for the plan subscription. every single toolkit can be priced at around $25 according to the actual value. customers who do not need all the features can only buy the tools they need. SEMrush gains more sales and customers, and users get what they need and save money. Is this a win-win?
This is my good wish, I am afraid that the SEMrush team may not see it either. Anyway, start a trial, you can quit it if you think it is very hard to use or for any reason in 7 days trial, you won’t be charged.