Semrush Review: Every Major Tool Tested, and Is It Worth It?

This Semrush review comes from going through every major tool in my own account, for keyword research, on-page and technical SEO, backlinks and PPC, and setting up a full project for one of my websites. My verdict: Semrush is worth it if SEO is a main channel for you, because its database and the way it presents the data make keyword and competitor research far faster than piecing it together elsewhere. It is also a lot to learn. Beginners can be overwhelmed by the data, people with some experience often use only a small part of it, and a few tools aren’t worth paying extra for as a small business.

Affiliate disclosure: links marked “affiliate link” earn me a commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. Semrush offers a free trial, and I only earn if you go on to pay. How I review tools. I recorded the walkthrough in January 2024 on the Pro plan, so the numbers below are what Semrush showed then; I rechecked the plans and prices on 28 September 2026, and some menus and plan names have changed (see the next section).

Prefer to watch? The full walkthrough is almost six hours long, with a timestamp for every tool.

Jump to a part of the video:

• 01:08 Keyword research
• 1:53:51 On-page and technical SEO
• 2:39:05 Off-page SEO and backlinks
• 3:51:51 PPC research
• 4:07:23 Setting up a project
• 5:38:25 Low-competition keywords with Reddit
• 5:47:10 Long-tail keywords

What has changed in Semrush since I recorded this?

Mostly the plans. The Pro, Guru and Business plans I mention in the video have been replaced by SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced, with AI search visibility tracking in every plan and a free plan alongside (the prices are further down). Some features I couldn’t show on Pro, such as content optimisation, keyword cannibalisation analysis and multi-location or multi-device tracking, are now listed under Pro+.

Some tools have moved as well. The Good Content page now redirects to Semrush’s Content Toolkit, the old Log File Analyzer page redirects to the Site Audit page, and the backlink features page no longer lists the Link Building Tool or Bulk Analysis (outreach now sits in an AI PR Toolkit), so expect a few tools to sit in different menus from the ones in the video. The way each tool works, and the way I use the data, hasn’t changed.

Which Semrush tool does which job?

How good is Semrush for keyword research?

This is where Semrush is strongest. You start broad with one keyword, then narrow it down with filters until you have a list you can actually work with. These are the tools I use, in the order I use them.

How does the Keyword Overview tool work?

It gives you a summary of one keyword, with links to go deeper (video: 01:11). Enter a seed keyword or topic, such as “weight loss” for a weight loss blog, and choose your target country; you can also go down to state or city level. You can enter up to 100 keywords at once, but I recommend one at a time and saving the rest for Bulk Analysis. Switch between desktop and mobile, because results, SERP features and even search volume differ between them.

What each number means:

• Volume is how many people search for the keyword on Google each month. It is an estimate, an educated guess from Semrush’s data, because Google doesn’t reveal the real numbers to SEO tools.
• Keyword Difficulty runs from 0 (easiest to reach the top 10) to 100 (hardest). “Weight loss” scored 100%, meaning a lot of on-page SEO, link building and promotion to rank.
• Global Volume shows the same keyword in other countries. For “weight loss” the global total was almost four times the US figure, and India searched it more than the US did, which is a way to find other target markets.
• Intent says what the searcher wants. Google tries to serve pages that match intent, so matching your content to it matters; for “weight loss”, Semrush said informational.
• Trend shows the volume month by month. A steady keyword looks flat; a seasonal one, such as “Christmas gifts”, spikes in November and December. It also shows rising and declining keywords.
• CPC is what advertisers pay per click in Google Ads, about $3.40 for “weight loss” at the time. It is a good way to judge a keyword’s value and estimate the return from ranking.
• Competitive Density is ad competition from 0 to 1. It has nothing to do with organic rankings, so don’t confuse it with Keyword Difficulty.

Further down, Keyword Ideas showed 775,000 variations with a combined volume of about 18.1 million, including more than 100,000 question keywords. SERP Analysis shows a cached copy of the results, and it taught me something: the first organic page was really in fourth place, because Top Stories, People Also Ask and a video carousel sat above it. If you make videos, that carousel is a target.

For each ranking page you also get Semrush’s Page Authority Score, a proprietary metric built from backlinks, organic traffic and the link profile. A higher score doesn’t guarantee a better ranking: in my example a page scoring 81 ranked below pages scoring 63 to 76. Referring domains matter more than raw backlinks, because links from many different sites are worth more than lots of links from one. The last column shows that a good page ranks for far more than one keyword: one URL ranked for 14,600 keywords and got about 30,000 visits from them.

How do you find keyword ideas with the Keyword Magic Tool?

Enter a seed keyword, then filter (video: 23:23); my Semrush keyword research guide takes the whole process from ideas to tracking. This is my favourite Semrush tool. When I recorded, Semrush had about 25.4 billion keywords across 142 country databases, and “weight loss” on broad match returned more than 780,000 keywords with over 20 million combined volume.

That’s far too many to scroll through, and you can’t go after “weight loss” as a new blog anyway. The point is to find low-competition keywords that bring early rankings and momentum, and go after the hard ones later. The match types help:

• Broad match returns every variation of your seed keyword in any order, the largest set.
• Phrase match keeps the exact form in various orders, excluding plurals and variations such as “-ing” or “-ed”.
• Exact match keeps the exact form in the exact order.
• Related is my favourite. It compares the pages ranking in the top 20 for your keyword and returns other ways of saying the same thing, such as “lose weight fast”, “losing weight” or “how to lose fat”. When I’m new to an industry, this shows me the terms I didn’t know.

Switch on Questions to see only question keywords. They are usually longer and less competitive, they make the intent obvious, and they can win featured snippets and People Also Ask places. If you are writing a guide, answering those questions in it helps build topical authority.

Then filter. There is no right or wrong combination; this is what I did live:

1. Volume of at least 99 took 780,000 keywords down to about 22,000.
2. Keyword Difficulty of 0 to 50 left about 9,000.
3. An intent filter left about 7,000.
4. A minimum CPC showed only keywords that advertisers pay for. That doesn’t make zero-CPC keywords worthless; it’s just a filter.
5. Include and Exclude words, which I use a lot. “All” requires every word you list, “any” requires one of them, and Exclude removed everything containing “2023”.
6. Under Advanced filters, Word count of five or more finds long-tail keywords: longer keywords are usually less competitive and have clearer intent. “Weight loss” could mean anything; “when to drink protein shakes for weight loss female” tells you exactly what the person wants.
7. SERP Features filters by what appears on the results page. Choosing Featured snippet showed keywords like “how to use MCT oil for weight loss”, where a well-structured answer could take the snippet.

That left about 1,683 keywords. Sort by Keyword Difficulty, lowest first, and there were keywords like “low GI diet 12 week weight loss plan PDF” at a difficulty of 12. The groups panel on the left clusters keywords by shared words: 1,645 contained “weight”, 104 of those contained “recipe” too, and one more level added “juice”, which is a ready-made content category.

You can save keywords to a Keyword Manager list (up to 2,000 per list), refresh the data with Update metrics (the Pro plan allowed 250 updates at the time), hide columns you don’t use and export to Excel or CSV.

What does the Keyword Manager do?

It turns keywords into clusters (video: 56:50). A cluster is a group of keywords with similar intent, and there are two ways to use one: build a pillar page with supporting articles around it, or write one in-depth guide that covers the subtopics as headings.

Give it up to five seed keywords and it collects the rest. From “weight loss” and “lose weight” it built a list of about a thousand keywords in 41 clusters within a couple of minutes, marking the pillar page and suggesting internal links. You can filter clusters by volume, difficulty and intent, see the ones with the highest ranking potential for your domain, and view them as a mind map or a table. Each cluster shows its keywords and the best-ranking articles to use as references, and “Write content” sends it to the SEO Writing Assistant.

How do you use Organic Research to find a competitor’s keywords?

Enter their domain or URL (video: 1:05:59); my Semrush competitor analysis guide shows how I combine it with Domain Overview, Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap. This is competitor-based keyword research: instead of reinventing the wheel from seed keywords, you take the keywords a competitor already ranks for. Search your main keyword on Google (or Google Maps for a local business) to see who your competitors are.

One weight loss article from a large health publisher ranked for 9,800 keywords; its whole domain ranked for 2.9 million, with an estimated 6.5 million monthly visits. The overview shows the keyword trend over time with Google update markers, traffic cost, branded versus non-branded traffic, SERP features they own, top pages and their main competitors. Position Changes lists keywords they have gained, lost, improved or declined: a keyword a competitor lost may be one you can take.

In Positions, I filtered those 2.9 million keywords by “weight” in the keyword, difficulty under 50, more than four words and a minimum volume, and was left with about 2,300. Sorted by lowest difficulty, “cycling 1 hour a day weight loss” had about 210 searches at a difficulty of 11, and “does coke make you lose weight” had 200 at 14.

How does the Keyword Gap tool compare competitors?

It compares up to five domains and shows the keywords each is missing (video: 1:24:34). Compare root domains, subdomains, subfolders or exact URLs, for organic, paid or product listing keywords. The results are split into:

• Shared: keywords every domain ranks for.
• Missing: keywords your competitors rank for and you don’t. These are the first to write content for.
• Weak: you rank, but lower than all of them.
• Strong: you outrank all of them.
• Untapped: at least one competitor ranks and you don’t.
• Unique: only you rank.

In my demo, with Ahrefs set as “my” domain, “Google Search Console” showed Ahrefs at 21, Semrush at 7 and Moz at 9, which is a clear weak keyword.

How do you track rankings with Position Tracking?

Add your domain, choose a search engine (Google for most people), a device and a location down to city level, then add the keywords you care about (video: 1:31:58). For a local business, add your business name as well, and it tracks your Google Maps pack position too. Tag keywords to group them.

In the video I show the tracking for MatchMaker.lk, a matrimony site for Sri Lankan users. The overview shows visibility, estimated traffic and average position, a ranking distribution (top 3, top 10, top 20, top 100), keywords with positive and negative impact, SERP features you own and competitors you add. For a non-US database, estimated traffic often came out very low, but visibility and average position were accurate. Other tabs cover pages, cannibalisation, competitor discovery (it found about 290 competitors for me) and featured snippet opportunities.

What does Organic Traffic Insights add?

It shows the “not provided” keywords Google Analytics hides, by combining Google Analytics, Search Console and Semrush data (video: 1:49:58). Connect your Google account and you see users, sessions and engagement next to the keywords Semrush and Search Console found for each page, so you don’t need three tabs open.

If you want free ways to find keywords too, see my Google Keyword Planner guide and my ChatGPT prompts for keyword research.

How well does Semrush handle on-page and technical SEO?

Well, mainly because every issue comes with an explanation and a fix. I run a Site Audit first to fix what is broken, then use the content tools to improve individual pages.

How do you set up and read a Site Audit?

Set the crawl scope, page limit and source, then go through the settings before you start (video: 1:53:54). My Semrush SEO audit guide covers Site Audit, the On Page SEO Checker and log files in more depth. One tip: don’t press the big start button straight away, because it runs with the default settings. Click through the settings on the right instead:

• Crawler settings. I set the user agent to Googlebot desktop or mobile to mimic Google, since the problems it finds are likely the ones Google finds. You can set a crawl delay, respect robots.txt and switch on JavaScript rendering.
• Allow and disallow URLs containing certain words, and remove URL parameters such as e-commerce filters.
• Bypass restrictions or crawl with a username and password.
• Schedule the audit to repeat, for example weekly.

My demo site scored 88% site health against 92% for the top 10% of sites, and the report splits problems into errors (fix these first), warnings and notices, each with an explanation and how to fix it. One error was a broken link because I had forgotten the “mailto:” on an email link. A warning showed 96 unminified JavaScript and CSS files, which on WordPress a speed plugin such as LiteSpeed Cache or WP Rocket fixes for every page at once. You can send issues to Trello or Zapier if you work with a team.

Crawled Pages shows crawl depth: keep the pages you want to rank within three clicks. Statistics shows how many pages have schema markup, Open Graph and more, and Compare Crawls and Progress show whether your fixes are working. Semrush’s help centre has a free site audit course if you want the theory behind each issue.

What is the SEO Content Template for?

It builds a content brief from the top 10 Google results for your keyword (video: 2:12:02). For “how to start a web hosting business” it listed the semantically related keywords to include, domains worth getting backlinks from, a target readability score (55) and a text length of 1,475 words, plus how competitors use the keyword in titles and URLs. Export it to a document for a writer, or send it to the SEO Writing Assistant.

How does the SEO Writing Assistant help while you write?

It scores your text as you write (video: 2:16:13); my SEO Writing Assistant guide goes through the brief-to-draft process in more detail. It works inside Semrush, Google Docs and WordPress, and it highlights readability, SEO, tone of voice and originality issues. Some AI-written sample text I pasted in scored 3.5 out of 10: too short, no title, missing the target keyword. As soon as I added the keyword, the score went up. You don’t need to fix every suggestion, just get to a good score. Its Smart Writer can rephrase, expand or summarise, and rejecting a suggestion doesn’t use credits.

What does the On Page SEO Checker suggest?

Improvements for specific pages and keywords, ranked by potential traffic (video: 2:21:16). It imported 32 keywords for four pages on one of my sites and grouped ideas into strategy, backlinks, user experience, technical SEO, SERP features, semantic and content. Examples: mark up aggregate ratings because competitors do, avoid keyword stuffing, make the text more readable, and earn backlinks from domains that link to the top 10. Top 10 Benchmarking compares your page with the ranking pages on content length, referring domains, video and readability, and Idea Tasks turns everything into a to-do list.

What does a log file analysis show?

How search engine bots actually crawl your site (video: 2:30:24). Download the raw access log from your hosting (in cPanel it is under Raw Access, or ask your host) and upload it. It shows how often Googlebot visits, the status codes and file types it gets, and pages with inconsistent status codes, which in my case was a feed returning a 301.

How good are Semrush’s backlink and competitor tools?

They cover everything from a quick domain summary to outreach and disavow files. Start with the domain-level view, then go down to individual backlinks. For the full backlink workflow, from filtering a competitor’s links to cleaning up your own, see my guide to Semrush backlinks.

What does Domain Overview show?

An instant summary of any domain (video: 2:39:08). For semrush.com it showed an Authority Score of 83 out of 100, about 2.6 million organic keywords worldwide (about 577,000 in the US) split by intent, paid keywords, and about 47 million backlinks from more than 150,000 referring domains. Below that are engagement metrics, a traffic trend with Google update markers, SERP features, position distribution, branded traffic, competitors, sample ads and anchor text. Each figure links to the full tool. If you want a free way to check a site’s strength, try my domain SEO power checker.

Is Traffic Analytics useful for a small business?

Not really (video: 2:53:59). It estimates visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, visit duration, bounce rate, traffic channels and countries (22% of Semrush’s own visitors came from India), but most of it needed a separate subscription when I recorded, and the demographics and traffic journeys are built for large companies. For a small business or a blog, I wouldn’t pay extra for it.

How do you find link prospects with Backlink Gap?

Compare your domain with up to four competitors (video: 3:01:55). It lists domains that link to them but not to you, with each prospect’s Authority Score and how many of your competitors it links to. A site linking to four of your five competitors is a strong prospect. Select the ones you want and send them to the Link Building Tool.

How do you analyse backlinks with Backlink Analytics?

Enter a domain, then filter the backlinks down to the useful ones (video: 3:06:04). The overview shows referring domains, backlinks, outbound domains, a toxicity score, Authority Score, new and lost links, categories, anchors, TLDs, countries and similar profiles, which are usually your competitors. The network graph is powerful but complex; even I don’t use it to its full potential.

In the Backlinks tab, I cut Semrush’s 47 million backlinks to about 50,000 with a few filters: follow links only, one link per domain (the strongest from each site), links placed in content (they carry more weight than header, footer or sidebar links), English pages and mobile-friendly pages. Sort by Page Authority and you have the strongest links a competitor has, and pages you could approach for your own.

How do you clean up bad links with Backlink Audit?

Set up an audit, review the toxic links, then ask for removal or disavow them (video: 3:24:55). Add up to 10 brand names, a category and target countries, and connect Search Console by adding Semrush’s email as a user so it imports your backlinks too. The audit gives each link a toxicity score, and you can whitelist good links, move bad ones to a remove list, and email the site owner from inside Semrush with a template. If they don’t respond, move the link to the disavow list, export the file and upload it to Google’s disavow tool. Lost & Found and Target Pages track what changes. My penalty recovery case study shows why cleaning up low-quality signals matters.

How does the Link Building Tool work?

Give it up to 10 keywords and your competitors, and it finds prospects (video: 3:41:20). It found 991 prospects for my test. For each one you choose an outreach strategy (guest post, directory, product review, link to a mention, recover a lost link or a manual link), connect a Gmail or Outlook mailbox and email them from Semrush with a template and a follow-up. When the link goes live it moves to Monitor. Be clear on one thing: there is no automation here. It won’t create backlinks with one click; it gives you the data, and you still have to do the outreach.

When would you use Bulk Analysis?

When you want to compare a lot of domains at once, up to 200 domains or URLs (video: 3:49:57). You get Authority Score, backlinks, referring domains, traffic and link types for each, and every number links to the full report.

Is Semrush useful for PPC research?

Yes, for research rather than running campaigns. There are four tools, starting from a competitor’s domain or a keyword, and my guide to Semrush Advertising Research goes through each with screenshots. I am more experienced in SEO than PPC, so this is what each shows rather than a verdict from a PPC specialist:

• Advertising Research (video: 3:51:55) shows a domain’s paid keywords, ad traffic and cost, which pages each keyword sends people to, position changes, competitors, their ad copy and an ad history that shows the months they didn’t hold the top spot.
• PLA Research (video: 3:58:43) does the same for Google Shopping product listing ads; eBay is a good example to try. Most of the detail needed the Business plan when I recorded.
• PPC Keyword Tool (video: 4:01:58) organises keywords into campaigns and ad groups, removes duplicates, finds negative keywords and exports a file for Google Ads.
• Ads History (video: 4:05:49) works from a keyword rather than a domain: enter “loans” and it lists every site running ads for it.

Keyword Ads History in Keyword Overview is useful too: in a month with fewer advertisers you can lower your budget, and in a busy month (89 ads in April for my example) you need to bid more.

How do you set up a Semrush project for your website?

Create a project with your bare domain, then set up each tool inside it (video: 4:07:23). Enter the domain without “https://” or “www”, give it a name and share it with teammates if you need to. The project dashboard pulls a summary from each tool: domain analytics, keywords gained and lost each day, traffic, and backlinks by authority. Connect Google Analytics so it uses Google’s own data.

The tips I give while setting up each part:

• Position Tracking: track your focus keywords, not every keyword you can import. Pick them from your keyword research first.
• Site Audit: keep the scope on the root domain, set a page limit above your real page count so nothing is missed, use Googlebot as the user agent, and schedule it weekly.
• On Page SEO Checker, Backlink Audit and Link Building: set them up once and let them collect data. My Backlink Audit took about 45 minutes for 2,000 backlinks.
• Brand Monitoring finds mentions of your brand across the web for link opportunities and reputation management, and the social tools track and schedule posts.

What else comes with Semrush?

Two things beyond the core tools (video: 5:30:14):

• Integrations. Semrush connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Business Profile (as an add-on), Gmail for outreach, Google Docs, Looker Studio and Google Sheets, as well as WordPress, Wix, All in One SEO, Trello and Zapier.
• The App Center. A collection of free, trial and paid apps. The free plagiarism checker allowed 50 checks a month of up to 800 words each, and when I tested it with text copied from Semrush’s knowledge base, it correctly reported 99% and found the original source.

Can Semrush find low-competition keywords?

Yes, and these two methods are the reason I keep using it. My guide on how to find low competition keywords goes through the Reddit method step by step.

How do you find low-competition keywords with Semrush and Reddit?

Run Reddit through Organic Research and filter for easy keywords (video: 5:38:25). Reddit has become very visible in Google, ranking for a huge number of searches, and when Reddit ranks in the top 10 the competition is often low. My filters:

1. Enter reddit.com. It ranked for about 129 million keywords.
2. Keyword Difficulty: Very easy. That left about 15 million.
3. Intent: Informational, good for blog posts and reviews.
4. Word count greater than five, for long-tail keywords.
5. SERP filter: Reddit ranks in the top 10. About 392,000 left.
6. Include a modifier word such as “best”, “how to”, “vs” or “review”. “Best” left 3,200.

Sort by volume, not Reddit’s traffic, and scroll for ideas. “Best bait for mouse trap” caught my eye, so I added “trap” as an include word and found a whole small niche; “ship” did the same for shipping keywords. “How to” alone returned about 45,000 opportunities.

How do you find easy long-tail keywords with the Keyword Magic Tool?

Set difficulty to Very easy and word count to five or more (video: 5:47:10). To prove it works for anything, I took random words from a random word generator.

For “beer”, those two filters left more than 5,000 keywords with an average difficulty of 7. “How to make beer in little alchemy 2” had about 1,300 searches at a difficulty of 11, and the ranking pages had almost no backlinks, with videos in the results too. Switching on Questions left 757 keywords averaging 9.

For “idea”, the same filters (which stay applied when you change the keyword) left 12,996 keywords, and a minimum volume of 200 left about 700. “Ideas for 50th birthday cake” had about 2,400 searches at 12, and “cake ideas for a 50th birthday” about 1,600 at 3%, with Pinterest and image results on top and no backlinks behind the top pages. Always click Update metrics before you commit to a keyword.

How much does Semrush cost?

On 28 September 2026, Semrush’s pricing page showed me prices in euros, so check it for your own currency:

There is also a free plan with one demo project and 10 reports a day, a seven-day free trial on the paid plans, and add-ons such as extra users (from €43 a month). Starter adds more keyword research and competitor tools and tracked AI prompts to the SEO plan; Pro+ adds historical data, content optimisation and cannibalisation analysis; Advanced adds share of voice and API access.

What I liked and what I didn’t

What I liked:

• The size of the database, and the way Semrush presents it. When I recorded, it had about 25.4 billion keywords, and every number links through to a deeper report.
• The Keyword Magic Tool, my favourite, especially the Related keywords, include and exclude words, word count and SERP feature filters.
• Competitor research. Organic Research and Keyword Gap give you a competitor’s keywords instead of making you start from seed keywords.
• Site Audit explains every issue and how to fix it, which helps if you aren’t technical.
• Backlink Audit and the Link Building Tool keep outreach, removal requests and disavow files in one place.

What I didn’t:

• It is overwhelming at first; there is so much data that beginners don’t know where to start.
• Volumes and traffic are estimates. For non-US databases, Position Tracking’s estimated traffic often came out very low, although visibility and average position were accurate.
• Several features I wanted were locked to higher plans or paid add-ons when I recorded, such as full Traffic Analytics and sending clusters to the SEO Writing Assistant.
• Traffic Analytics is built for big companies and isn’t worth paying extra for as a small business.
• The backlink network graph is hard to read; even I don’t use it to its full potential.
• The Link Building Tool finds prospects, but you still do all the outreach yourself.

Who should use Semrush?

Anyone for whom SEO is a main channel: consultants, agencies, and businesses or bloggers who research keywords and competitors every week. You will use enough of it to justify the price, and the depth of the keyword and backlink data is hard to match. If you are just starting, use the free trial first: set up a project for your own site, run a few keyword searches and see whether you use it.

If the amount of data puts you off, my Semrush vs Morningscore comparison covers when a simpler, beginner-friendly tool makes more sense, and my Semdash review looks at a cheaper way to get Semrush-style data. New to the subject altogether? Start with what SEO is.

Try Semrush free here (affiliate link).

FAQ

Is Semrush worth it for a small business?

If you will use it every week for keyword and competitor research, yes. If you only need a few checks a month, the free plan, the free trial or a simpler tool may be enough, and I wouldn’t pay extra for Traffic Analytics.

Is Semrush’s search volume accurate?

It is an estimate. Google doesn’t give SEO tools its real data, so Semrush’s volumes are an educated guess from its own databases. Use them to compare keywords rather than as exact numbers.

What is the difference between Keyword Difficulty and Competitive Density?

Keyword Difficulty (0 to 100) is how hard it is to rank organically in the top 10. Competitive Density (0 to 1) is how many advertisers compete in Google Ads for the keyword, and has nothing to do with organic rankings.

Does the Link Building Tool build links for you?

No. It finds prospects, suggests an outreach strategy and lets you email and monitor them, but you still have to do the outreach and earn the link.