Item: Semrush
Rating: 7
Author: Jeffrey Smith

Overall Satisfaction with SEMRush

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Often we utilize SEMRush for a broad range of things related to digital marketing. The most important tool by far for my day-to-day job is the keyword ranking tool, since it's imperative that I can consistently demonstrate that we are outperforming competitors in search. The website SEO tool is useful as well but should be utilized with a grain of salt. We fixed quite a few small issues using suggestions from SEMRush, but it crawls pages that are set to noindex, so it often finds issues that aren't relevant to your actual ranking.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Great UI, everything is completely clear and readily available.
Multiple projects make it much easier to track and work with multiple websites seamlessly.
The social media tool allows me to save money on other subscriptions, like Buffer.

Cons

$100/month is steep, and a waste of money in my opinion if you aren't going to really milk as much usefulness out of the product as possible.
Like most tools, traffic is reported incorrectly on competitors' websites since that data isn't publicly available.
Crawler leaves a lot to be desired from an accuracy standpoint.

Return on Investment

SEMRush had a clear effect on our websites overall ranking. I was able to make a clear backlink plan that resulted in several high authority backlinks and a few featured blog entries.
SEMRush made it MUCH easier to follow what areas of the market our competitors were focusing on.

Alternatives Considered

Moz and Buffer

SEMRush is a sort of one-stop-shop for SEO and SEM purposes. Moz is a great tool for website evaluations and backlink pursuit, but it is limited in its ability to actually make marked improvements to your website. Buffer is a great social media management tool, but it has absolutely no website facing assistance. SEMRush contains everything that both tools have, without sacrificing any functionality.

Other Software Used

Moz, Buffer, Hootsuite Enterprise

Likelihood to Recommend

The best use case for SEMRush, in my opinion, is for 2-3 months on a single website. Utilize the tools to improve your website, make corrections anywhere you can, and create a strategy based on keyword research tools and traffic measurements. From there spend the 2-3 month period working on changes and finalizing them, and cancel at the end.

Semrush Feature Ratings

Comments

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SEMRush is a great short term SEO helper