SEMrush: the essential tool in SEO?
Whether you are in an agency or with the advertiser, SEMrush Is a complete platform for keyword analysis, keyword monitoring or even technical and semantic auditing. Its use extends from traffic analysis to evaluating the position of your website.
- Convenient for keyword research and site audit
- Ergonomic and easy to handle tool
- Despite the paid Guru version (quite high), you can quickly be limited
- Lack of reliability for some data, such as the number of visits
Why choose SEMrush?
Simply because it's such a cool tool. And if not more seriously, as you will see below, in addition to these various complete functionalities for SEO, it is an ergonomic and easy to use tool, which allows you to work effectively on various client (or internal) projects.
What is SEMrush?
Before going any further, for the novices who pass by here and ask themselves “but what is SEMrush?”, here is a definition:
SEMrush is a data analysis tool of keyword research, mainly used for natural referencing (SEO) and online advertising (SEA). It allows you to monitor online performance, search for keywords, analyze the competition, and much more to optimize and boost your strategies.
In summary, SEMrush is an all-in-one tool that allows you to analyze pages, backlinks, find keywords, track positions, and everything related to natural and paid referencing.
As said above, SEMrush is the Swiss Army Knife tool for SEO. It offers a range of features that cover all search engine optimization needs.
Les fonctionnalités de cet outil
SEMrush is primarily known for its keyword analysis tool. It allows you to search for the best keywords for your site and to track their positions.
Another advantage of SEMrush is that it is a complete tool for auditing your website. In addition to analyzing your traffic and your backlinks, you can see the technical and semantic optimizations necessary to improve your site.
SEMrush also allows you to optimize your content, by giving you ideas, by generating optimized briefs but also and above all thanks to its SEO Writing Assistant, which allows you to control the SEO quality and the uniqueness of your text, make it more readable and adjust its style.
SEMrush gives you the opportunity to analyze the strategies of your competitors. You can see which keywords they are positioned on, and therefore, those on which they are not succeeding.
SEMrush offers detailed reports and customizable dashboards to track the evolution of your SEO strategy.
SEMrush offers various tools to analyze backlinks and audit your profile, it also offers you different possibilities of links to make.
At Sales Odyssey, there are 3 features that we couldn't do without: keyword research, position tracking, and SEMrush audit. We have therefore prepared explanations for you!
Keyword research
There's nothing like keyword research to generate traffic! And that's good news, SEMrush offers various tools and functionalities in this area.
Do you know the Keyword Magic Tool ? It allows you to generate an exhaustive list of search phrases based on the keyword entered. And to group these keywords together, you can use the Keyword manager, which allows you to gather groups of keywords ready to use for your project.
SEMrush also gives you access to tools for analyzinganalyze the keywords of your competitors. This allows you to identify keyword opportunities that you may not have thought of and to understand the strategy of your rivals.
Last but not least, SEMrush offers accurate metrics for each keyword: search volume, difficulties, cost per click, etc. The advantage of this data is that it helps you assess the opportunity of a keyword.
Position monitoring
Just like keyword research, the position tracking plays an essential role in SEO. Because yes, it's all well and good to optimize your pages with the right keywords, but if you don't see if your strategy is working, it's a shame (even downright useless).
SEMrush offers a tool for efficient position tracking which allows you to observe in real time the evolution of your rankings on search engines for target keywords.
With this feature, you can:
- Follow the variations in the positioning of your site on Google.
- Compare your positions with those of your competitors.
- Identify the most efficient pages on your site.
- Identify fluctuations in the ranking of your site.
The site audit
The SEMrush audit gives you the ability to detect more than 150 potential technical errors that could affect the health of your site (in terms of technique but also semantics). To be even more efficient, you can also link your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts.
In this audit, he can analyze problems such as URL errors, content problems, site speed or even internal linking problems!
A little extra: you can customize your audit settings. For example, you can define the domain and the number of pages to crawl. You can also choose to analyze your site in a mobile version or in a desktop version.
3 points that we don't like
The lack of reliability for traffic
Even though SEMrush is known for its comprehensiveness and the precision of its data, we have noticed that there are sometimes big discrepancies between the results provided by SEMrush and the reality of the traffic. Some people tend to say that SEMrush inflates the statistics, but for us it's quite the opposite. For example, for one of our customers, SEMrush reports monthly traffic of 300 visits, when it is more her daily traffic.
In short, although SEMrush is a complete tool, on this point, we advise you to remain vigilant and to cross your data with that of other tools (such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console).
Impression of having a free version despite the paid version
By investing in SEMrush, we expect a full range of functionalities. However, the reality is different. That's why at Sales Odyssey the paid version of SEMrush sometimes gives us the impression of looking like a free version.
In some cases, despite taking out a subscription, some functionalities remain limited. For example, backlink analysis or competitive analysis may require a higher subscription level to have access to all options.
In addition, the number of reports that can be generated every day is limited, which can become a barrier when working on several projects at the same time.
Not to mention that you have to pay for each additional user. Something that can be frustrating, in fact, it does not unlock anything more, we have exactly the same number of projects whether we are 1 or 20. Too bad, no?
SEO Checker: the deception
Our big disappointment remains the SEO Checker. As a reminder, this feature is supposed to allow us to improve the positioning of certain pages of our site, thanks to a very comprehensive list of suggestions (advice on building links, writing content, targeting SERP functionalities, etc.).
Continuing our analysis, we were disappointed by the SEO Checker from SEMrush. Certainly, this tool promises to diagnose technical problems impacting the site's SEO and offers suggestions to remedy them. In theory, it's a nice feature. In practice, it gets complicated.
For starters, despite Semrush's promise to detect over 140 common technical issues, we found that some issues fell through the cracks. Whether it's tagging issues, broken internal links, or missing title tags, not all of these critical errors were spotted by the tool.
Then, the optimization suggestions provided by the tool are often generic and not always relevant. Indeed, the recommendations are not always adapted to the specificity of the site analyzed, which can mislead the less experts in SEO.
Another black spot, the SEO Checker tool seems to duplicate the “Site Audit” tool (which is a powerful one) from SEMrush, making its use somewhat redundant.
In short, although the idea of having a tool dedicated to the diagnosis of SEO problems is attractive, the SEMrush SEO Checker is far from fulfilling all its promises, we advise you instead Semji.
Conclusion: Is SEMrush validated or not?
At Sales Odyssey, despite the 3 negative points we presented to you, it is a tool that we appreciate. Indeed, we worked with SEMrush for several years! He was a great ally for us: whether it was to establish our content strategies, to monitor keywords but also to conduct SEO audits.
However, as stated above, in addition to the unreliability of some data, our big black spot is the fact of having a tool that we pay for that gives us the impression of having a free tool. This created frustration within our team. That's why we decided to move on to another tool: Sistrix.
Our score: 4/5
SEMrush Prizes
SEMrush is good, but how much does it cost? First of all, you should know that SEMrush works in a subscription format. Each package offers access to a full suite of SEO features, with different limits in terms of the number of projects, the keywords to track, and the results compared.
Here is an overview of the three main packages available:
- The Pro package at €119.95 excluding VAT per month.
- You have access to 5 projects, 500 keywords to track and 10,000 results per report.
- It gives access to SEO, PPC and search tools.
- Competitive analysis, keyword research, website audit, backlink analysis, advertising tools, etc.
- The Guru package at $229.95 per month.
- You have access to 15 projects, 1,500 keywords to track and 30,000 results compared.
- It gives access to all the features of the Pro package.
- Plus: Content Marketing Toolkit, historical data, multi-site and device tracking, Looker Studio integration, and more
- The Business package at $449.95 per month.
- You have access to 40 projects, 5,000 keywords to track, 50,000 results per report.
- It gives access to all the features of the Guru package.
- Plus: Share of voice, extended limits, API access, PLA analyses, free migration from third-party tools, etc.
Did you know that?
- A free version is also available, although it is limited in terms of features and capacity.
- SEMrush offers a free 14-day trial period to allow you to test its tools before you commit.
