We started using the Semrush tool in January 2016. Since then, it has become the go-to tool for all our SEO needs. It’s also a popular SEO toolkit that is used by more than 10 million people worldwide. If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO toolkit that offers over 50 SEO tools, Semrush is for you. If you want to increase your search engine traffic, you need to spy on your competitors’ keywords, their backlink sources, and top-performing pages. Here’s where a competitor research tool like Semrush comes in handy. Want to try it for free?

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So in this detailed Semrush review 2023, let’s talk about what is it, how it helps, its features, pros, cons, and so on.

What is Semrush and What Exactly It Does?

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO toolkit used for keyword research, backlink analysis, SEO audits, and a lot more. Using Semrush, you can easily find highly profitable keywords for any niche, conduct link building, manage social media campaigns, etc. Whether you’re looking to analyze a competitor’s website (including their keywords, ads, and backlinks) or aiming for long-tail keywords, Semrush has everything covered for you.

In-depth Semrush Review 2023: Is it Worth the Investment?

Get an instant analysis of ANY domain using Domain Overview

Want to get a full overview of a domain or website? Want to discover the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor and analyze their website’s growth over time? Then, you should definitely check out the Domain Overview tool from Semrush. One of the major reasons most bloggers use Semrush is to do competitor research. With the Domain Overview tool, you can spy on ANY competitor and estimate their traffic, keywords, backlinks, etc.  Here’s what the Domain Overview of a website looks like; As you can see above, the Domain Overview shows you a full overview of the website including;

Authority score (Semrush’s metric used to measure the overall quality of the domain)  Overall organic search traffic Total number of backlinks for the domain Traffic distribution by country Organic traffic growth over the months (or years)

Not only that, but the Domain Overview tool from Semrush also lets you discover all the keywords that are driving traffic to ANY website (including your competitors). Have a look; See that? You’ll get a full list of all the keywords of your competitor along with keyword metrics like;

Keyword intent Current position in SERPs Search volume CPC  Traffic % and more

If you want to find the best-performing keywords that drive the majority of the search traffic to your competitor’s websites, use the Semrush Domin Overview tool. Similarly, you can enter any of the competitor’s website URLs to find out their current website traffic, keywords, backlinks, traffic growth over time, and much more.  The best part? Semrush almost always gives you accurate traffic information of a website or domain as it updates its databases very frequently.

Find question keywords using Keyword Magic Tool

One of the easiest ways to get targeted visitors from search engines like Google to your site is to use “question keywords”. Guess what? Semrush already has an amazing tool called Keyword Magic to find question keywords. What are question keywords? Question keywords are those keywords that a searcher types a complete question into Google. These are usually long-tail keyword phrases because they’re mostly specific. For example, instead of using a general keyword like “Neil Patel”, a question keyword would be “What is Neil Patel’s net worth?”. Have a look at the following example of question keywords to understand better. As you can see, our site is ranking #1 for the above question keyword. Few examples of question-based keywords for various niches:

If you’re in the real estate industry: “how to become a real estate agent” If you’re in the fitness industry: “what’s the best weight-to-age ratio” If you’re into the SEO industry: “what’s the optimal bounce rate for a website?”

Did you get the point? By providing thoughtful and most useful answers to hard questions, better than anyone else including your competitors on the SERP, you position yourself as an expert that your website audience can trust. Here’s where question keywords come into play. Here are a few benefits of finding and targeting question keywords within your content

They help you easily get featured snippets (because you’re answering specific questions and Google loves it) They easily help you get top rankings (even if there’s competition) They can send you highly targeted visitors from search They convert really better

Now that you know the importance of using question keywords, let’s talk about the most important thing: how to find them. How to find question keywords using the Semrush keyword magic tool? Although you can use sites like Quora, Answer The Public, etc to find question keywords but they are not really accurate and don’t give you many search metrics (such as the number of monthly searches, related keywords, competition, CPC value for the keyword and so on). Here’s where the Semrush keyword magic tool comes into play and really helps you with all of those things. Here’s how you can use the Semrush keyword magic tool to find question-based keywords. Once you’re on the Keyword Magic tool, enter any keyword or topic to find question keywords based on it. Once the keyword list is generated, simply pick the “Questions” tab. Have a look; As you can see above, the “Questions” tab on the keyword magic tool will show you a list of question-based keywords that contain your seed keyword. You can also see all the important metrics for each keyword including;

Intent (shows the purpose of a search in a search engine) Search volume Trend (shows the interest of searchers in a given keyword during the period of 12 months) Keyword difficulty (KD%), and much more

Quick tip: While doing keyword research with Semrush, do not select the keywords with a search volume of more than 1000 per month, as they require a lot of effort to get the required traffic for your site. Choose the keywords between 500 to 1000 per month search volume (or even below) so you can get top 3 or at least first page rankings even if you have a new website. Read: Semrush Coupon 2023: Here’s How to Grab Your 30 Days Free Account (Worth $119.95)

Find the Highest Traffic Competitors’ Keywords

One of the BIGGEST reasons to use the Semrush tool is to spy on your competitor’s keywords. You can use Semrush to find the most performing keywords for any of your competitor’s websites. This will help you easily discover keywords that are bringing the majority of traffic to your competitor’s websites. The key here is to create high-quality content around those keywords to outrank your competitors to get more search traffic to your site. To begin, go to the Organic Research tool and enter any of your competitors’ URL. As you can see above, you can easily find all the keywords a website is ranking for. You’ll also get keyword metrics like;

Keyword intent Search features Keyword positions Traffic % Keyword difficulty and more

Using the Semrush organic research tool, you can quickly explore your rivals’ keyword rankings on desktop and mobile along with the traffic percentage. You can also see the position changes of your competitors’ keywords in search engines like Google, Bing. Have a look; See that? You can instantly see the keyword positions of your competitors as you can identify;

Improved keyword rankings Declined keyword rankings Newly ranked keywords Keywords that lost rankings

In a nutshell, the Semrush organic research tool is like having access to Google Analytics of your competitors. You can discover almost every keyword along with its current rankings.

Using Semrush for keyword research

Are you struggling to find the best keywords to increase your overall website search traffic? Use Semrush as it helps you find the best performing and unused keywords in your niche to increase your search traffic. It doesn’t matter whether you want to find better keywords for PPC ads, AdWords, Bing Ads, or simply for your own blog content, Semrush is the right keyword research tool. To start finding keywords, go to Keyword Magic tool in Semrush. Enter any topic or keyword of your choice. As you can see above, once you enter any keyword, Keyword Magic tool instantly generates thousands of keywords. In the above screenshot, you can see the volume of the keyword along with the keyword intent and trend for the “SEO tools” keyword. With these details, you can easily decide whether the keywords you enter are a perfect match for your site or not. Not only that, Semrush also gives you a list of all the Phrase Match keywords, question-based keywords, and related keywords that you can use to increase your blog traffic. See the screenshot below to get a clear idea. As you can see above, for every keyword, you can easily find;

Question-based keywords Broad match keywords Phrase match keywords Exact match keywords Related keywords

With so many keyword suggestions, you can easily find the most profitable and high-traffic keywords in your niche. An important point to remember: Semrush updates its database daily and multiple times a day to give you accurate details about the keyword ranking positions and traffic of a website. Thus, it helps you find the latest report on keyword phrases for your targeted seed keywords list. Try Semrush for FREE

Want to find backlinks of ANY website in the world? Then, Semrush Backlink Analytics tool is just for you. Did you know that Semrush Backlink Analytics tool has a HUGE database of over 43 trillion quality backlinks? If you want to uncover link building strategies along with their backlink sources, you need backlink analysis tools like Semrush. For instance, by knowing who is linking to your favorite blog or competitor’s website, you can reach out to them and ask them to link to your sites too (if you have valuable stuff, they will link to you!). Here’s where the Semrush Pro free account comes in handy. To get started, enter any of your competitor’s website URLs in the backlink analytics tool. As you can see above, Semrush will instantly give an overview of the backlink profile where you can see;

Authority score Referring domains Total number of backlinks Monthly visits and more

If you want to find the backlink sources of the domain, simply click on the “Backlinks”. Have a look; See that? You can easily find out all the incoming links (including do-follow links) of your competitors. You can filter the backlinks in various ways including:

Dofollow Nofollow UGC Sponsored

Apart from the Backlink Analytics tool, Semrush also offers another powerful tool called “Backlink Audit” which you can use to get rid of all the toxic links that are preventing your site from getting higher rankings. Here’s what the overview of Backlink Audit on Semrush looks like; As you can see above, you can easily discover the toxic domains that are linking to your website. You can simply use the Google’s Disavow Tool to remove all the bad backlinks.

Using Semrush to Perform Full Site Audit

Website audits are essential if you want to find and fix your website’s SEO or technical issues. Whether you know it or not, by conducting a thorough SEO audit of your sites, you can find out all the loopholes of your sites and rectify them to increase your search traffic. But here’s thing: conducting a site audit is a painful job and takes a lot of time especially if you’ve a bigger website. Here’s where Semrush comes into play as it makes it extremely easy to perform FULL website audits. All you need to do is to nter your domain and Semrush will start crawling your website. You can overview every single detail of your website including the top 3 issues, errors, and warnings that are causing your site. Here’s what it looks like; As you can see above, you’ll find everything from;

Site health Crawlabilty issues Internal linking issues Core Web Vitals score and more

So start using Semursh to find and fix your site issues with Site Audit tool. Grab 30 days free version of Semrush Pro

Keyword Tracking/Position Tracking: Track Your Own & Competitor Rankings

Increasing SERP rankings is what most smart SEO experts do to increase their overall website traffic. Tracking your current search rankings is hard if you don’t have access to the right tools. Don’t know how many of your keywords are currently ranking at the top of Google search results? Or are you finding it hard to track all your keyword positions? If yes, Semrush can help you track all of your keywords. It creates a list of all the keywords in one place and helps you check their positions whenever you logged into the Semrush pro account. Using Semrush, you can track every keyword that drives traffic to your website including the traffic volumes and rank positions. You can use Semrush to keep track of your keyword rankings on Google, Bing & Yahoo. You can also find keyword positioning in specific countries and devices (Desktop or mobile) of your interest. For this, you have to enter the list of keywords you want to keep track of with the country of your interest and device type in Semrush. Once added you will get the keyword ranking report in your Semrush account as shown below: You will get the updated keyword ranking report every 24 hours which can be exported in CSV and PDF format. Semrush updates its keyword rank tracking databases every single day, so you’ll know the exact positions of your keyword rankings. Here’s the visibility trend for BloggersPassion in the last 7 days. Have a look at the below screenshot. And below is the screenshot for Google featured snippets.

Domain comparison

Domain comparison is basically comparing various domains at a time by showing the increase of links to a domain. It gives you a better idea of which domains are gaining up in Google search results and which ones are going down. You can compare 4 of your competitor domains for a quality check. You can compare up to 5 domains using Semrush. Use filters to sort data by specific keywords, position, volume, CPC, competition, and the number of search results. You can also export this data to XLS and CSV. As you can see above, we compared two sites which are BloggersPassion and Authority Hacker and you can see Semrush is showing similar keywords with search volume and all the other important metrics one can keep an eye on.

Brand Monitoring Tool: Track Your Online Reputation

With Semrush’s brand monitoring tool, you can track your online reputation. It is highly time-consuming to find mentions and may require hours of research. Monitoring your brand is crucial to every business and in the digital space, your brand mentions can affect your business. With the new Brand Monitoring tool, you will automatically be notified of new mentions of your and your competitor’s brands and be able to analyze the results in one place. You can track all your brand, product or service mentions on the web and social media. If you’re finding this Semrush post useful, why not give it a try to this SEO tool?

  1. Keep track of online mentions Surveys show that 70 percent of customers trust online reviews from other people over the information they learn from ads. So, monitoring your online reputation should be your top priority. With this Brand Monitoring tool, You can keep track of online mentions and customer reviews of your and your competitors’ company, product or service and also can estimate their potential reach in Social Media and various online communities. You can identify communities where people talk about you or your competitors.
  2. Find new opportunities to promote your brand If any popular blogger in your niche or even a regular customer mentions your brand then it impacts your business a lot more than conventional advertising. Brand Monitoring tool allows you to get insights into how your competitors and industry leaders create such opportunities. You can adapt their best tactics by researching their past and current promotional activities. You will be able to find new channels for distributing your content without wasting your time and money on trial and error.
  3. Track and manage backlinks Finding mentions with backlinks helps you in growing your SEO rankings. You can compare yourself with your competitors in terms of backlinks. If you have backlinks from trusted and popular sources then Google recognizes that you are doing well and deserve higher rankings. The Brand Monitoring tool helps you identify backlink sources that can serve as an effective marketing channel for promoting your brand. This tool shows you where your brand – whether that’s your own name, or your business name is being mentioned around the internet and where your backlinks are coming from, and opportunities for you to act on them.

PPC Keyword Tool: Manage Your SEM Campaigns Effectively

Semrush’s PPC Keyword Tool gives users the ability to monitor, manage and implement all changes needed to their PPC campaigns. You can organize your keywords at the campaign and ad group level, set up effective negative keywords, and export all of your planned-out data seamlessly into your Adwords account. Simply say, you can build a perfect keyword list for your PPC campaign.

  1. You can collect keywords in different ways You can import keywords from existing AdWords campaigns, .csv, .xls sheets* and .txt files. The interface of the PPC Keyword tool makes it easy to organize your keywords at the campaign and ad group levels. You can import any existing campaigns you have on AdWords into the tool to manage both your new and existing campaigns in the same place. You can find related keywords and phrase matches and also merge keywords to build new keyword combinations.
  2. Manage and optimize keyword lists The advanced filters of the PPC Keyword Tool allow you to choose the best keywords based on CPC, volume, difficulty level, and other vital metrics. You can also filter by word to gather closer sub-groups of keywords. The ‘Remove duplicates’ button will delete numerous duplicates in your list. The ‘word count filter’ allows you to search for long-tail keywords and generic phrases. So that, you can create separate ad groups for long-tail keywords and generic keywords. The tool also helps to remove special characters and unnecessary figures. You can add negative keywords at the group level or campaign level. Negative Keywords are keywords that can be added to your campaign to tell Google not to show your ads when searched.
  3. Say no to cross-negatives Most PPC marketers make one mistake during their campaigns, they set up ad groups with broad match keywords that inadvertently trigger the wrong ad on the results page. If you have similar broad match keywords in different ad groups, you may expect one ad to show, but Google shows another ad instead. By using the ‘Cross-group negatives’ function in this tool, you can avoid any crossover between groups and optimize your campaign. When you manage big campaigns, this ‘Cross-group negatives’ button will save you time. It helps you stay on budget and avoid competition among your own ads.
  4. Polish your keyword list with recommendations Sometimes you might overlook duplicates, negatives, or unnecessary elements in your keyword list and the ‘Recommendations’ feature allows you to bring your campaign to perfection. Always execute the recommendations in the same order they are given. ‘Recommendations’ menu features a few quick links to optimize your campaign. From here you can “clean” your keywords, apply cross-group negatives and remove any empty groups. If you have imported a campaign from AdWords and are looking to improve the efficiency of your adgroups and ads then this helps a lot.

Reverse engineering top-performing content for better results

With SEMRush you can intelligently reverse engineer the social media techniques that are working for others. Collect your master list of competitor domains and start plugging them into the tool, one by one. To analyze the entire domain, remove “HTTPS://” from the URL and enter. Analyze what exactly you want to reverse engineer. Is it their organic rankings or backlink profile or their paid advertising campaign? Whatever it is, you can use the sidebar navigation to dive into that specific set of data and analyze each point.

Detailed competitor analysis

Perform deep organic research With this tool, you can perform deep, organic research. Click “Organic Research” in the sidebar and it will take you straight to the “Positions” analysis. By default, it shows US-specific data but you can change it to your country area. Once you set that, analyze Organic Traffic Estimates. Spy on your competitor’s traffic stats After setting the above, you will see the Organic Traffic Estimates analysis which gives you an idea of both a website’s organic traffic volume and the trend of that traffic over time. You can look at a site’s overall traffic statistics too. Just click “Traffic Analytics” in the sidebar. You will get a complete breakdown of how traffic flows through a given competitor’s site. If you want try their Traffic Analytics, use the following link. Try Semrush Traffic Analytics for FREE Remember, Semrush doesn’t include mobile traffic stats, only desktop. It is just an estimate based on keyword search volumes, organic rankings, and average click-through rates. Find keyword competition Now, return to the Organic Research tab. The ‘Organic Search Positions’ feature shows you all the keywords any domain or specific page is ranking for, allowing you to reverse-engineer their best-performing keywords. SEMRush will sort these results by ‘Traffic %’, or the keywords that are estimated to bring in the most traffic and it is the most effective way to uncover sites’ most valuable keywords. You can pick out the best-performing keywords. Assess SERP competition strength The “Position Changes” analysis shows you changes in organic rankings for any domain or URL. You can check the top 100 organic search results for New keywords, Lost keywords, Improved keywords, and Declined keywords. And you can filter out results based on either of those categories. If you are only interested in keywords that are performing well then narrow it down to the “New” and “Improved” filters. It allows you to identify tons of long-tail keywords that your competitors are ranking for, as well as keywords that are climbing in the SERPs.

PLA research

PLA (Product Listing Ads) reveals your competitor’s ads information including the list of keywords, titles, CPC, cost, and paid traffic. This will help you find out the advertising and paid ad strategies used by your competitors to increase their website traffic and sales. If you are wondering what are PLA ads, here’s a simple explanation. PLA ads are basically cost-per-click ads (CPC) that most online marketers and eCommerce sites buy through Google AdWords to increase their search traffic. These are usually paid ads designed to increase search traffic. Semrush promo code offer helps you find the right PLA ads without wasting your time. You can simply analyze the top-performing CPC ads of your current competitors. Advertising Analysis Tools If you want to check the advertising positions of your competitors, this feature is for you. You can also perform the advertising analysis of your competitors to know their paid strategies. This is similar to the above-mentioned PLA research. You can spy on your competitor’s AdWords ads and you can tweak their ad titles, body text, etc to get the attention of your potential buyers using the “Advertising analysis” feature on Semrush.

Semrush Pricing Options: How Much Does it Cost?

Tip: Activate the Semrush promo code or Semrush discount 2023. It will help you get a Semrush Pro account for free for the next 30 days. You don’t have to pay a penny. Semrush offers 3 pricing options: Semrush Pro Account Features:

Results per report: 10,000 Reports per day: 3,000 Projects: 5 Keywords to track: 500 Pages to crawl: 100,000

Semrush Guru Account Features:

Results per report: 30,000 Reports per day: 5,000 Projects: 15 Keywords to track: 1500 Pages to crawl: 300,000

Semrush Business Account Features:

Results per report: 50,000 Reports per day: 10,000 Projects: 40 Keywords to track: 5000 Pages to crawl: 10,00,000

Grab 30 day free account of the Semrush Pro If you love this Semrush post, make sure to grab the 30-day free version. So what are you waiting for?

How to Save Some Money on Semrush Purchase?

Hands down, Semrush is the only tool you need to take your website search traffic to the next level. So if you’re finding ways to save money on Semrush, go with their annual pricing plans as you can get a FLAT 16% discount on ALL their pricing plans. Here are the discounted prices if you go with their annual plans;

Pro Account for 12 Months: Pay $99.95/mo Guru Account for 12 Months: Pay $191.62/mo Business Account for 12 Months: Pay $374.95/mo

Save 16% on Semrush Annual Plans Now All in all, if you are searching for an SEO tool that helps you in every regard of SEO, try Semrush. As already mentioned, we have been using this tool for a long time now and we already got some pretty good results.

How to effectively use the Semrush competitor research tool to increase your website’s traffic?

Do you want to know how to use Semrush more effectively? Use the following tips and you can easily find ways to increase your overall site’s traffic.

Find a competitor website in your industry that is getting a ton of traffic (especially from search engines) Analyze your competitor domain in the Organic Research Tool using Semrush Check their traffic and Keywords Trend Find out the number of backlinks (find out the sources of backlinks so you can use different link building strategies to acquire those links) Make sure to also check out the Pages section, and filter the URL for which the competitor domain is ranking for In the Page section, you can simply click on the keywords to come up with a BIG list of keyword ideas (including long-tail keywords) for which the site is ranking.

So what are you still waiting for? Grab your 30-day free Semrush Pro account (worth $119.95) Quick tip: Make sure to keep an eye on the website trends graph and if the graph is declining, then it means that they are not monitoring their lost backlinks. So you now have the chance to act upon them to outrank in search results by acquiring such links (through guest posting, email outreach, skyscraper technique, etc).

Pros and Cons of Semrush Competitor Analysis Tool

Most of the Semrush reviews that you find on Google search don’t actually cover its pros and cons. So let’s cover them as well. Pros of Semrush: Cons of Semrush:

Do we recommend the Semrush SEO Tool?

Absolutely yes, we recommend Semrush. If you’re going through this detailed review, you might already have fallen in love with Semrush. It’s perfect for people who want to crush their competitors and dominate Google SERPs. Don’t use it if you want quick results. After all, SEO is a long-term game, not a sprint. So make sure to first grab the tool FREE for 30 days, start using it seriously and if you get good results, go ahead and grab their account.

Semrush competitor analysis tool: Is it right for you?

If you want to find out the keywords your competitors are using, this tool is the best fit for you. If you want to find out the best-performing keywords along with the backlink analysis, this tool is for you. To estimate the traffic of any website, this tool gives you almost accurate results. Although there are a lot of tools out there to check website traffic but this is the trusted source as it has advanced options to give accurate results to the users. Whether you want to increase your income by promoting the right affiliate products or increase your website organic traffic by using the best keywords that your competitors are using – the Semrush SEO tool is for you. A lot of bloggers are posting articles on their blogs just to increase their website search traffic so that they can make more sales and increase the revenue to make some passive income. If you are also one among them, Semrush is the best tool for you where you won’t regret paying around 70$ to grab the best rewards from your SEO efforts. So what are you waiting for? Try Semrush FREE for 30 Days Here are a few essential questions and answers you must know about Semrush tool: Read: Semrush Vs LongTailPro: Review of the Two Best Keyword Research Tools Read: Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which is the Best SEO Tool? → Keyword research→ Site audits→ Keyword rank tracking→ Backlink analysis→ Site positioning→ Content creation ideas→ Competitive analysis and more → KW Finder→ Moz Pro→ Ahrefs Keywords Explorer Browse More SEO Tool Contents:

Serpstat Review: Is it the Best SEO Tool? SpyFu Review: Is It the Best Competitor Analysis Tool? What is Semrush? KWFinder Review: Is It the Only Keyword Research Tool You Need?

Final Thoughts on Semrush Reviews

If you want to spy on competitors and find their advertising strategies, best-performing keywords, and their backlink sources, etc, make sure to get your hands on Semrush and you won’t regret it. As an online marketer or blogger, it’s essential to focus on your competitors along with the perfect keyword research. If you are not spying on your competitors now, you will regret it later. It’s the PERFECT and must-have search marketing tool for every blogger who is struggling to increase their traffic, estimate others’ website traffic or find the best keywords that increase their leads and sales. Have you found this comprehensive Semrush review useful? Still have any questions? Let us know in the comments.