Item: Semrush
Rating: 10
Author: Marston Gould

Overall Satisfaction with SEMRush

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used all of the major SEM competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink analysis, on-page and technical and semantic review tools on the market today. SEMRush is the only one that actually provides both comprehensive information at a reasonable price. There isn't a single set of functions with Searchmetrics, Conductor or Brightedge that is missing from SEMRush. Not one. And unlike those tools, SEMRush doesn't force you to work in those other tool's workflows. At its current price point, we are able to systematically cover all of the important life cycle keywords or their proxies for a multi-location business. Searchmetrics, Conductor and BE are already 10x more expensive than SEMRush while only covering these same needs for for far fewer competitors, pages and keywords. While there are certainly things to add to SEMRush - they are innovating rapidly (more rapidly than the quarterly or 2x a year major releases by their competitors) adding more functionality every couple of weeks. Also unlike the other vendors who tell you they might get a feature request in some time (way in the future), SEMRush actually delivers. I have seen more a dozen really valuable features that I've asked for added to the tool in the last year to 18 months. Like all these tools, it does take some time to configure, but once you have - understanding what is going on with your SEO is much, much easier.

Pros and Cons

Pros

SEMRush is great at telling you not only what keywords you need to rank for, but what keywords you actually are ranking for - and whether or not its the correct page that is ranking or if you have pages internally competing with each other.
SEMRush is great at understanding how semantic usage is allowing competitors to outrank on specific keywords
SEMRush gets down to the nitty gritty details. You can see how you rank in each market for the same keyword, you can see what page elements are working in your favor and which are not.
With new Backlink and keyword analysis tools - you can understand what your backlink profile looks like today and how its changing.
Reporting through the API is simple and easy and internal reporting is improving all the time. The operational charts are simple to use.
New functionality like annotations and integration with Trello is moving SEMRush to the next level.

Cons

(Aggregated) Project level reporting and annotation
Interface and API speed
Correlation of actions/status (competitive/search engine/internal) with SEO changes (position, visibility, etc.)
Aggregated program common task identification and prioritization (e.g. how to find template issues from boilerplate from unique)
Internal link juice analysis for enterprise

Return on Investment

Our SEO traffic is up more than 30% YOY.
We cut costs of SEO tools by 75% moving from other enterprise products and have been able to create an internal process to enhance reporting, project management and execution.
This had generated nearly 8 figures in additional revenue this year alone.

Alternatives Considered

First - SEMRush doesn't spend very much of their money on sales. They don't have a big sales staff to support, so they invest that into top notch product managers and developers - who actually reach out to clients to ask them to give them feedback on alpha/beta versions.

Second - most of the other enterprise tools expect you to follow their internal workflow. Not SEMrush
Third - SEMRush let's the SEO team use information without being pushy about what you should do or not do. I've seen too many enterprise tools suggest that my company take certain actions because a competitor has - without understanding that we're beating our competition because we aren't focused on winning everywhere, but where it matters most.

Other Software Used

Ahrefs Site Explorer, Moz

Likelihood to Recommend

SEMRush works well both for small websites and large ones as well. For websites that track things at a very granular level, SEMRush, while time consuming in initial set up, pays back strongly. For small sites that are trying to get general improvements, it also provides enough actionable insights to make important differences. I have seen companies of both sizes grow their SEO.

SEMRush would also work well in an agency setting as well. The ability to white label reports and to extract key data via the API (albeit at a cost) really enhances this product's ability to work well for a wide variety of business types. It also works well for those businesses that don't need to pay for an overpriced enterprise sales person to fly in and tell you how great their tool is, yet needs someone on their tech team or in office account management to really tell how to use it correctly.

Semrush Feature Ratings

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SEMRush - best full featured SEO tool on market -at a great, affordable price.