SEMrush, the essential SEO keyword research tool

Among the many SEO tools on the market, Semrush is probably the best known among search professionals. With more than a hundred features, it presents itself as a complete SEO tool.

Semrush differs from Semji in many ways. It is more of a generalist, aimed at SEO specialists who already know which strategy to run. It is a strong tool for an overview of a domain and a market, for link building, or for generic SEO reports that score a site’s overall health.

Semji is a SaaS platform built to maximize the ROI of SEO content. It helps marketing and SEO teams produce stronger content in less time. If you want a closer look at what Semji and Semrush offer on the content side of an SEO strategy, read our comparison.

This guide is here to make the picture clearer and to walk through Semrush’s features in the context of an organic-search strategy.

What is Semrush?

Ranking well in the SERP takes more than a good product. Search engines have to see you and like you. That means SEO work on your content. Your keyword, for example, should appear several times in the text and in the ALT attributes of your images.

To find a keyword that fits your site and your business, you can use Semrush. It is a keyword analysis tool. It lets you track your positions on a keyword and run multilingual research. With it, you can get keyword ideas to target.

Semrush also lets you analyze your competitors’ strategy. It shows how competitors rank on specific keywords.

Keyword research

The first step toward useful keyword research is a brainstorm of your keywords. List every key phrase tied to your brand and your industry. Think about your audience: who they are, and what they might type into a search engine.

You also have to think about location. Depending on your industry, some of your keywords will be tied to a geographic area (for example: “Hotel in Paris”, “Restaurant in Montmartre”…). You can therefore have several types of keywords, which you will list in an Excel sheet.

By combining Google Search Console and Semrush, you can also pick words with high business value. In Google’s tool, you will see the queries people type that already lead them to you. Those are keywords you already rank for, because they generate traffic. That step gives you another list of keywords to work on.

Then you add all of your keywords, except the ones that are your brand name, into Semrush. The tool will give you similar phrases you can target.

Keyword research is also available in Semji. From your topic and a head keyword, the platform suggests the most strategic queries to target. For more on that, read our article on how Semji helps you get more relevant and more productive from this keyword-research step.

Competitor analysis

Semrush gives you an overview of a competitor’s SEO strategy. Enter the URL of the site you want to analyze. The tool then shows a global view of its metrics. You can look at:

• Organic traffic

• Paid search

• The number of backlinks

• The number of display ads

In its report, Semrush shows the keywords that generate the most traffic on that site. It displays several figures about competitors’ keywords:

• the organic traffic those keywords generate,

• the site’s ranking on those keywords,

• and the cost per click if you were running an AdWords campaign.

You can export those figures to Excel and analyze them in more detail.

Semrush therefore helps you find keywords for your business by looking at what competitors already rank for.

To pick your keywords well, you also have to check how competitive they are. That tells you your chances of appearing in the top 10 of the SERP. The more authority sites you see ranking for a keyword, the harder it will be to outrank them. Long-tail keywords can then be a paying strategy for traffic.

Referring domains and backlinks

A strong SEO strategy needs a quality backlink profile. Semrush lets you analyze in detail how a competitor’s referring domains and backlinks are distributed. The tool gives you several useful figures, such as:

• The site’s total number of backlinks

• The number of referring domains

• Authority Score. This metric measures the strength of a domain. Semrush’s Authority Score is calculated from Page Score, Domain Score, Trust Score, and other data the tool can collect.

It plots the total number of backlinks week by week as a curve. That figure lets you track the growth of your backlinks and your competitors’ backlinks on a root domain.

Semrush goes further on external links: it shows, as a chart, how many backlinks the analyzed site gained and lost each month.

You can also analyze the split of anchors and links by country. The tool shows the top 5 countries that send the most backlinks to the site.

Semrush and SEA

Semrush is as useful for analyzing key phrases as it is for analyzing keywords used in AdWords campaigns (SEA).

SEA (Search Engine Advertising) is a major acquisition channel in an online marketing strategy. Semrush shows you how many keywords send users to the site through AdWords campaigns.

You can also get the number of users expected on that site in the following month through those AdWords campaigns.

The tool will estimate the monthly budget the site spends with Google AdWords.

Semrush also shows the exact phrases the site bids on in AdWords campaigns. You get:

• The keyword

• The site’s position on that keyword

• The search volume it generates

• The CPC (cost per click)

• The share of traffic that keyword represents versus the site’s total traffic

• And the conversion rate that AdWords keyword generates on the site

That last figure is valuable. It has a real money stake. With it, you can judge which keywords matter most for your business.

Semrush and rank tracking

Once your strategy is in place, you have to track it. Rank tracking is built for that. It shows your position on specific keywords. By creating a tracking campaign, you can adjust your strategy in real time. You can follow ranking changes at both national and local level. Rank tracking also shows your competitors’ positions on the same keywords. You can add 5 competitors in the tracking tool.

Through rank tracking, you will also see the devices people arrive on: smartphone, tablet, or desktop. You can then compare your positions on mobile SERPs versus desktop. Those figures help you understand how the site is performing and adjust it.

Semrush plans

SEMrush is sold in several plans.

The Pro plan at $119.95 per month

It lets you manage 5 projects and track 500 keywords.

The Guru plan at $229.95 per month

This plan gives you access to historical data. You can track 1000 keywords and manage 50 projects. Two people can be logged into the tool at the same time.

The Business plan at $449.95 per month

This plan lets you manage 200 projects and track 5000 keywords. With it you get a multi-user account: 9 users can be logged in at the same time.

The tool also offers a customizable enterprise plan.