SEMRush Review : Complete Test and Tutorial

Introducing SEMRush

SEMrush is an all-in-one platform for digital marketing professionals. It offers comprehensive solutions for SEO, SEA and social networks.

With over 7 million users worldwide, this tool provides invaluable insights for outperforming the competition in the SERPs.

Thanks to its exhaustive database, SEMrush canidentify the most relevant keywords, analyze competitors’ content strategies, and perform a technical audit of your website.

It stands out for its ability to provide detailed data on traffic and user behavior. It gives you a 360° view of SEO opportunities and challenges.

Whether you’re a small or large company, SEMrush is the tool of choice for improving your online visibility and optimizing your digital marketing strategy.

SEMRush is for you if you’re…

• 👨‍💼 A Digital Marketing Professional: Whether you’re an agency or a freelancer, SEMrush is your strategic partner for deploying winning SEO and SEA campaigns.
• 📈 A Company: From fast-growing start-ups to SMEs, or multinationals, SEMrush offers valuable insights to improve your online presence.
• 🖥️ A Site Editor, Webmaster or Web Developer: With its site audit and backlink analysis tools, SEMrush is indispensable for maintaining your site’s technical health and boosting your domain authority.
• ✍️ A Writer, Content Creator or Blogger: Optimize your content with SEMrush by identifying the topics that captivate your audience, improving your on-page SEO, and tracking the performance of your articles.

Key SEMRush features

SEMRush is recognized as one of the most comprehensive SEO tools on the market. In fact, I’m only going to focus on the SEO-related features here.

But SEMRush can also be useful as part of a 360° digital strategy that includes SEA and social networks.

1 – Competitive analysis

SEMRush has some of the most advanced features for carrying out your SEO competitive analysis. Knowing how your competitors position themselves enables you to :

• Find new keyword ideas;
• Find new backlink opportunities;
• Refine your added value and translate it into your SEO strategy.

⚠️ Your SEO competitors are not necessarily your historical competitors.

Ex: If you sell boxed books: In addition to the other players who sell boxed books, Fnac is also a competitor, as Internet users visit its site to make their book purchases.

It can compete with you on queries like “book gift”, for example. So keep an open mind on this subject.

A – Domain Overview / Organic Research: Get an overview of your site’s positioning, or that of your competitors.

The Domain Overview feature provides you with a wealth of valuable information about your site and those of your competitors.

It can be a good starting point to see how a site is positioned when you’re not sure where to begin.

Domain Overview gives you access to the following information:

• Monthly traffic ;
• Traffic trends over different periods;
• Breakdown of traffic by country;
• Volume of positioned keywords;
• Evolution of positioned keyword volume;
• Authority Score (SEMRush metric) ;
• Volume of backlinks ;
• TOP positioned keywords ;
• Distribution of keywords according to search intent;
• Competitors positioned on the same keywords…

For SEO data only, go to Organic Research.

This information enables you to evaluate theevolution of a site’s positioning. Is it in an upward phase (increasing keyword volume and traffic) or a downward phase (decreasing keyword volume and traffic)?

What are the best keywords on which my main competitors are positioned? This will give you the essential keywords to work on for your site.

B – Keyword Gap

Feeling a little lost when it comes to choosing your keywords? Analyze those of your main competitors!

SEMRush provides you with theideal tool for comparing your site’skeywords with those of your competitors.

1. Enter your site and those of your main competitors.
2. Discover the volume of keywords shared or not with your competitors.
3. Find out which keywords your competitors are working on, but not you.

These are surely interesting keywords to add to your site!

C – Backlinks Gap: Find inbound links to your competitors’ sites to reveal new opportunities.

The same principle applies to backlinks! Which sites are linking to your competitors but not to your site?

SEMRush gives you a potential list of sites to approach to unlock new backlink opportunities.

(Of course, it’s always up to you to analyze the relevance or otherwise of these incoming links!)

2 – Keyword analysis

One of SEMRush’s greatest strengths is its extensive and ultra-complete keyword database. The tool will be able to meet just about all your keyword research and analysis needs.

💡 If you’re not familiar with the tool, just try typing a keyword into the search bar and you’ll see the breadth of information on offer!

A – Keyword Magic Tool: Find keyword ideas on a given theme

If you’re in the early stages of your keyword research, you may be looking for inspiration to find all the keywords typed by your target audience.

With the Keyword Magic Tool, it’s super simple:

1. Go to the feature or type a keyword directly into the tool’s search bar.
2. Select the type of queries you’re interested in: All or Questions.
3. Select the type of match you want: Broad Query, Expression or Exact.

For example, if you type “red shoes”.

• Broad query: Displays all keywords closely or remotely related to your search: synonyms, variations in any order.

Example of queries that might come up: buy red running shoes.

• Expression: Displays all keyword variations containing your search, in any order.

Ex: buy cheap red shoes online.

• Exact: Displays all keyword variations that begin with the query you typed.

Ex: red shoes size 40.

You can also sort and filter queries by :

• Search volume ;
• Level of competition;
• Search intent.

This allows you to fine-tune your keyword selection to your exact requirements.

B – Keyword Overview: Get all the information on specific keywords

Let’s say you already have some idea of the keywords you want to use on your site.

Perhaps you’re still hesitating about which keywords to include in your strategy and which not.

1. In this case, click on “Keyword Overview“, in the “Keyword Research” section.
2. Add all interesting keywords.
3. Take advantage of the essential information on your keywords: monthly search volume, search intent and level of competition (among others).

In this way, you can base your analysis on figures.

⚠️ Each tool has its own biases. The data presented are estimates given by the tools to guide you, but they are not necessarily exact.