Honest Semrush Review for 2024-Is it Worth The Free Trial?

Digital Arnesh
8 min readApr 11, 2021
Semrush Review for 2021
Semush Review for 2024

Our Overall rating 4.5 / 5

Can’t stand the wait? Tired of doing research the hard way? Try Semrush, the All-in-One Marketing Toolkit.

Semrush is a powerful and versatile SEO Content Marketing Toolkit for both large enterprises and startup companies. Semrush can handle an extensive workload of various complicated and voluminous tasks in the area of Internet Marketing.

Semrush handles the complex SEO and competitive research projects, delivers tons of useful data for achieving better results in paid and organic search, provides database cleaning and building up tools, as well as helps with content planning and creation.

In this article, I’ll be showing you how to use the well known Semrush keyword research toolkit and is it worth calling this tool one of the best tools for SEO and competitor analysis.

We will also dive into that how it can help you increase your rankings on Google and give you valuable insight regarding competitive analysis to ultimately get you more traffic.

As an SEO professional, Semrush is a must-have tool. So if you’re in the business of online marketing or SEO even maybe trying to grow your own business online, then you’re going to need some powerful helpful tools to help you figure out what to do next to help you scale and sustain your business.

Perhaps you may have a limited budget and the reason why I’m pointing this out is that including myself, I have quite a limited budget, because I mostly work as a freelancer for work.

As we move forward in our online business or we are just starting a new blog or even we are creating a micro-niche blog, the first and most important step we all go through is keyword research, and as we say “one good keyword can change your life in the online world”, and for that, you need a tool that can speed up the process for you.

And while in that process we have to pick and choose between lots of different tools that could potentially help us in our business.

And I’ll be honest with you right now if I had to pick or choose between one or two tools, out of hundreds of different tools that could potentially help us with our business, with keyword research, backlinks and all that type of stuff. Semrush will be my first choice without hesitation.

So essentially the way Semrush works is due to its large database of keywords. Semrush’s Google US database contains 2.6 billion keywords.

Isn't that amazing for in-depth research?

Well, pretty much it scraps all the search results and keeps the information in its database.

And when we enter a keyword or a domain it will tell you how much activity is around the keyword, what sites are ranking for that keyword, all that good information that you can use to help with your business, and making very important decisions for your online business.

But I personally use it as a quick way to assess a potential market I might enter, so I’ll have a quick look or a quick glance at the following:-

  1. Search volume of the keywords
  2. Type of keywords
  3. Competition of Keywords

It’s a very powerful tool for competitive analysis also. I even use it to see for what keywords my competitors are ranking for and I’ll pretty much reverse engineer their SEO and kind of steal their traffic.

And yes, you can do it too with this amazing toolkit.

So, let’s get into some action guys.😎

Let’s search a keyword e.gOnline Marketingin the Keyword Overview Section

“online marketing” keyword searched in semrush tool
Semrush’s ‘Keyword Overview’ feature

And as you can see, we have a lot of valuable information regarding the keyword, “online marketing”.

We can see the keyword volume is 9.9k per month, which is a lot of traffic, to be honest, and there is 90.6k in the global volume results.

You can also see keyword difficulty for your keywords which ranges from 0 -100 in this toolkit. 0 being the easiest competition and 100 being the hardest to rank your keyword in the SERP results.

While doing keyword research we also see into 3 columns in Semrush which is an important process in keyword research.

In the above image, we can see the following three columns for the keyword phrase “online marketing

  1. Keyword variations
  2. Questions
  3. Related keywords

We check all these types of keywords for our keyword research and try to take a mix of short and long-tail keywords which have enough volume and have less competition initially so that we can rank our keywords in a short time, but in the case of PPC or Google ads, we go for high competition keywords also.

There’s a lot of information for CPC distribution and some of the trends within the niche and the keyword itself.

And of course a lot of other alternative keywords that we can actually look at, and some more related keywords within the niche itself.

And we can actually even go even deeper and have a live update of like the organic search results.

The ad copy and stuff, so like maybe you in future you might want to set up an ad for this particular niche and get some leads off it.

You can also see ad history if you want to get into that.

So like this Semrush provides us with a lot of valuable information for your keywords to rank. You also get to look at the full report and related keywords as well.

We finished the keyword research section here.

As we looked into some of the features, regarding the things we can do

with the keyword analytic section of the Semrush Toolkit.

So now what we’re going to do is go into the “Domain Analytics” section

domain overview feature of semrush tool
Semrush’s ‘Domain Overview’ feature

And let’s search for a new keyword like the “forbes.com domain. And I can see 45.6M traffic. It’s actually insane while seeing that Forbes have 330M backlinks.

But we don't have to worry because he is not our competition 😀

Along with that, you can see organic traffic share by county wise and for what keywords they are ranking for in different countries. So you can have a lot more information regarding the domain.

Likewise, you can do the same process with your competitor's websites or domains.

Organic Competitors Feature in Semrush

Maybe you have a competitor whose ranking on top of the search, so you can see their top ranking keywords, top-ranking pages and their backlinks also.

Searching backlink prospects can be a time-consuming process. Backlink Analytics provides a set of metrics helping you check the backlinks of a website.

backlinks of forbes domain in semrush review
Semrush’s ‘backlinks’ feature

See the type of backlinks that they actually have in the image above. But in my honest opinion, the Backlink Tool of Semrush isn’t anything special like it’s not really designed for in-depth analysis of backlinks but it can do a good job for you.

The main features of Semrush are the Keyword Analytics Tool and the overall Domain Analytics Tools.

So that’s also what it’s used for and we also have some organic keyword information so we can see here like the majority of the traffic is coming from the US.

Analyzing your competitor's website is the thing I like to do the most, in which basically I am like stealing their traffic or their leads by going to the organic research section.

Top Organic Keywords for forbes.com

Another feature I like the most is that we can actually see where what they’re ranking for and what page is actually ranking for that particular keyword.

You can also put a domain for the top competitor of that niche and get all this information and see exactly what page is ranking on top of the search results. And then reverse-engineer the process.

You can actually find new keywords that your competitor are ranking for.

You also get to see the sample ad texts which are basically examples of the domain’s Google AdWords.

sample ad texts in semrush review for 2021
sample ad texts in semrush

For example, you are trying to rank for “health” keyword or “make money online” as the main keywords and maybe your competitor is already ranking for that keyword and by analysing the keywords you can find some long-tail keywords that have low competition and you have never heard about it and this toolkit can be your savior in that scenario.

This toolkit which really likes gives you all the keywords that they’re ranking for so you can just analyze their traffic and just select the low competition keywords in which you can rank easily.

Furthermore, if your competitor has more backlinks than you then you just have to create more quality backlinks than your competitor and write good quality articles.

Cons of Semrush Toolkit

  1. Semrush seems to be slightly more expensive than others.
  2. If you are a complete beginner it may take a bit of time to get used to Semrush with so many tools helping you manage your SEO and digital marketing strategy, Semrush may not be easy to get your head around.
  3. Semrush is available with only one user account and upgrading is expensive for multiple accounts.

Overall anyone can have a big advantage when it comes to the SEO game using this amazing competitive intelligence tool if one puts little time in understanding this tool although it's so easy to use even for a beginner.

With Semrush, you can easily research keywords, monitor your entire backlink profile, find new and relevant social media influencers, track rankings and identify site errors.

👉 Sign up here for a 7-Day Pro Free Trial to see how easy it is to navigate through the features of this powerful SEO toolkit and grow your business by many folds.

Have any thoughts or questions about Semrush? You can always leave them in the comments section below!👇

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