What is SEMRUSH?
This paid third-party platform is most renowned for its sophisticated keyword planning functions, but SEMrush prides itself on being ‘more than a keyword tool’. This is due to the incorporation of competitive business intelligence data, backlink profile analysis, technical auditing, social media listening and position tracking capabilities – the platform is matched with forerunner Ahrefs when it comes to the all-in-one SEO platform.
Keyword research
Keyword research is all about establishing the search volume and ranking difficulty for a particular keyword, whilst building a picture of your target audience’s search semantics and aligning your strategy with this.
SEMrush’s Keyword Overview and Keyword Magic tools identify search terms that will most likely generate search traffic, with great intuitive suggestions to expand and inspire your strategy.
It is not always easy to dredge through thousands and thousands of keywords, but SEMrush has great filtering functions (ie to filter between long and short tail keywords or SERPS ranking).
SEMrush provides you with an amazing amount of SEO intelligence that can help you with keyword and content strategies – the data is there, so the key to success is having the ability to pull the strongest insights out of often large data volumes.
Semrush competitive research and domain analysis
As with most leading SEO tools, SEMrush allows you to analyse domain and URL performance, looking at authority scores, backlink and referring domain profiles, traffic quality, common anchor text and competing domains.
Ahrefs has the slight edge here, as all the information is hosted on a single dashboard, making it quicker and easier to gather insight.
However, SEMrush offers a couple of backlink features that are not matched in Ahrefs. Their backlink auditing tool identifies potentially toxic links which can be easily outputted and uploaded to google as a ‘disavow’ file and their backlink building tool analyses your domain/URL giving you a list of websites to target for backlinks!
Technical site auditing
SEMrush provides a site auditing feature that allows you to monitor on-page and technical site performance.
Once a site is crawled, a wider range of technical SEO suggestions are reported. Semrush’s SEO checker is really easy to use as it contextualises each recommendation, and provides content and link profile improvement suggestions. Ahrefs audit tool in comparison is much more technically focussed.
SO MUCH MORE..
SEMrush offers such a wide range of tools that even we occasionally learn new ways of utilising the platform to the fullest.
There are not just tools for content & SEO but other accompanying disciplines such as Market Research, Advertising & Social Media Management.
This really is the ‘all-in-one’ tool for increasing online visibility, and a tool we would recommend to businesses and agencies of all sizes.