Great for Organic Needs
October 24, 2019

Great for Organic Needs

Helen Feest | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SEMRush

We're a small agency team, and about half of us use SEMrush on a near-regular basis. We primarily use it to optimize content and web page copy, track ranks of several businesses, and to do competitive analyses. Another helpful tool is the topic research, which heavily drives the topics for content creation.

Pros

  • The organic rankings analysis is really effective - for example, we did a quick audit of a potential client's website and learned that their primary organic competitor for their target keywords was another domain that they owned. They were actually competing against themselves because they built different websites under separate domains for two different products. This insight eventually won us their business.
  • Again, an organic analysis feature: the 'difficulty' of a keyword compared to its CPC. It's a stat of how likely you're able to get your keyword onto the top page after a year of SEO efforts. I like this because if the client's budget can't afford expensive Google Search keywords, we can focus our efforts on ranking organically.
  • The topic research is great for sourcing 3rd party content, but also finding topics for future blogs. By understanding a) commonly asked questions around topics and b) the types of content already ranking well for those keywords, we can better optimize our future content to rank.

Cons

  • Supposedly, there's a feature in SEMrush that lets you see what keywords your competitors are bidding on, or what their search ads may look like. I've never gotten this feature to work for me - I do recall that their only let you see 'national' campaigns, which I don't really understand - but this may be why I can't get any insights in this area.
  • The estimated web traffic of a given website seems like an awesome tool for competitor insights. However, when I compare it the traffic numbers I have in Google Analytics, it's VERY off. This makes me not want to trust their estimated numbers for my competitors / websites I can't see Analytics.
  • Before we had this tool, we could do the 'good SEO practices' for which we were trained, but we had no way to aggregate data on what other people were doing.
Ahrefs had a strong base in link building, which we don't do a lot of.
The support is limited to glitches - if you want to learn how to use specific tools or features you're paying for, you have to pay for hourly training.

Do you think Semrush delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Semrush's feature set?

Yes

Did Semrush live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Semrush go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Semrush again?

Yes

Generally, I find SEMrush great for organic insights, but not great for paid search insights and some of the competitor-peeking features.

Semrush Feature Ratings

8.1
Keyword analysis
9
Backlink management
9
SERP ranking tracking
9
Page grader
7
Competitive analysis
7
Site audit / diagnostics
8
Site recommendations
8
Task management
Not Rated
Local SEO
3
Social SEO
8
Mobile SEO
8
Global SEO
8
Multi-domain support
5
Integration with web analytics tools
5

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