Specifications
SEMrush is a platform for researching and analyzing keywords and domains.
Features include organic research reports that cover a range of keyword analytics; keyword research and ranking tools; AdWords and AdSense research reports; tools to analyze and compare organic and AdWords keywords across multiple domains; backlinks data; and more.
It also includes a site audit tool that that detects issues related to website crawlability, accessibility, content, semantics, internal links, and coding.
Cost
Monthly plans range from $69.95 to $449.95. Price breaks are available with annual plans.
User
Brandon Seymour, SEO director at BodyLogicMD, has been using SEMrush for about a year and a half.
How do you use it?
It’s very user friendly. You enter a domain or a keyword you want to analyze. Then you can see rankings for keywords or compare your website to competitors’ websites.
The platform also gives you some top-level metrics like domain authority, which is the number of links pointing to a site and the quality of those links, linking root domains, and more.
It’s very straightforward. I’d say most people who have even a minor knowledge of marketing could figure it out.
If you have a problem you can call, email, or fill out a support ticket on the website. SEMrush has a huge staff on Twitter – from community managers to tech support specialists. Response is pretty quick, so I usually use it if I have any questions.
How does it serve your business needs?
BodyLogicMD is a network of doctors that provide bio-identical hormone therapy services. We have 45 locations, so we track a variety of keywords for a variety of markets. It’s a lot to track, and it gets exponentially greater when you consider all the competitors we have to track in individual markets.
SEMrush lets me compile a ton of data around our website bodylogicmd.com and provides a bird’s-eye view of the data. We can also track organic search engine results over time to see how we’re stacking up to our competitors.
Using SEMrush, I’m able to delve into granular details of what competitors we need to beat in terms of organic rankings so we can stay in the top three. It gives me an aggregate level view so I can prioritize which markets need attention. It’s important that our site stays high in organic search rankings because the higher the site is in the rankings, the more Web traffic we’re going to get.
We also use SEMrush to conduct backlink analyses and track which domains are linking to competitors to identify potential linking opportunities.
I use a lot of the information gathered with SEMrush to dig deeper with different tools, including BuzzSumo and Moz Open Site Explorer. For example, I can perform content analysis that might show we don’t have a lot of content around a specific keyword but our competitors do. Then I can determine what we can do to close that gap.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from an IT standpoint?
It’s all Web-based, but it allows export options. For example, you can export SEMrush data into Excel and put it in graphs, etc.
What are the main benefits?
The ability to gather competitive intelligence. It also helps us run content gap analysis and allows us to see daily, weekly, and monthly changes in organic Google results.
What are the main drawbacks?
Only real drawback – at least with the plan we’re on – is you can only have one person logged in at a time. It would be nice if there were room for two or three people to be logged into our account at the same time.
What would you like to see improved/added?
I’d like to be able to have more than one user logged in at once.
Competitors
Searchmetrics: provides enterprise SEO and content marketing analytics and tools.
SpyFu: provides a variety of paid and organic keyword and domain analytics. Features include historical rankings; lists of most profitable keywords and ads; domain reports; and more.
