SEMrush Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
This is about the best all-around SEO software that you can find. It does a good job at about everything and doesn't have a lot of weaknesses. The competitive analysis is really the best reason to buy the software, it's comprehensive and gives you a good look at potential competitors. There are always new features being added and tested which is fantastic and gives the software good value. Some features are better than others, but the audit and competitive analysis really are fantastic. I've used the software in various forms including Business, Guru and free. The free version gives you a taste, but the full experience is generally worth the money. Guru is worth the extra money over Pro as it gives you branded reports and the ability to manage quite a few more projects. Exports and reoccurring reports are very nice and simple to set up. Overall, this is a great tool for SEO and PPC campaigns. If you need an all-in-one type software solution then I would recommend SEMrush as it's probably the most well-rounded tool you can find.

Cons
If you're looking for rank tracking then I'd suggest looking elsewhere, it's a little wonky and not as easy to use as other rank tracking solutions. However, if you don't want to buy multiple pieces of software then the rank tracker will get the job done. The software is kind of a 'jack of all trades, master of none'; so you'll be able to get by with just this as your main piece of software, but if you want something a little more specialized then you should probably look elsewhere. You might end up not using a lot of the tools because there is so much to explore, but most of the tools that are there are pretty valuable. Other than that, some of the reports need some extra interpretation if you are going to present them to a client which isn't optimal but is understandable.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
My favorite thing about SEMRush is the keyword search tools. Even though keywords are everything when it comes to SEO anymore, they're still very important both for ranking and as an insight into a company's market share. I was an early user of products like Market Samurai and the Google keyword tool back when they both actually told you something useful. This isn't exactly like the early days of SEO, but it's close. You can search keywords and actually return quality, actionable data that you can use in your AdWords campaigns, on-site SEO, and Social Media optimization. Then once you've found the words you're looking for the Keyword Magic function allows you to drill down and discover long-tail and phrase match keywords. Whether you're looking for keywords to help you rank locally, nationally, or across the world, SEMRush is the best option for the money in my opinion.

Cons
I really don't dislike anything about SEMRush. If I had to find a least-liked feature, it would be the steep learning curve. Unless you have a firm understanding of SEO concepts and strategies, it's easy to get lost in there. That said, the reason why there's a big learning curve is because there are so many features packed into one application. Keyword searches are only the beginning. You can monitor your Social Media rankings, your backlinks, your online reputation, and so much more with SEMRush. There's a lot to learn, because there's a lot to use.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
SEMrush is our primary SEO tool and it really does it all, especially with the massive upgrades in the last year. It tracks keyword ranking positions, offers a few keyword research tools, and compares the domain to others related to it. You can automate reports that are white labeled, too. It also does domain analysis, backlink tracking, and site audits which we use all the time in our SEO business. They have recently rolled out link opportunity and outreach tools as well as brand monitoring on social media, though we haven't used those as much lately (but plan to).

Cons
SEMrush is an advanced tool for sure, not for newbies with little knowledge. However their support and tutorials are great. I'd like some more customization and styling options for the report tool, since we use SEMrush as our main report generator. Now we end up pasting images or combining it with other separate reports. I'd also like a client-facing dashboard for easy reporting. The keyword research tool isn't as good as the google one used to be, but now that google is making their keyword research tool more and more ridiculous, SEMrush is looking pretty good.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I own a small ecommerce business so analytics is critical for our success. I've tried a few other SEO services in the past but nothing beats SemRush in terms of features and accessibility. While other services' interfaces are clunky and hard to understand, SemRush lays everything out on their page in an easy-to-use format. The features are incredible, especially the Site Audit, which compares your keyword goals to the content that is already on your site and gives you tips on how you can rank higher for your chosen keywords. Even more incredibly, they provide "SEO templates" which makes content creation easy and friendly. It's nice to have such an easy platform for writing excellent-quality articles that converst. When you're only using Google Analytics, there's still a ton of information about your content and backlinks that you're not really seeing. SemRush makes this information available to you.

Cons
I wish the subscription cost was a bit cheaper.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
What I like most is that Semrush offers a lot of useful features and they are constantly adding new ones and developing the tool. Positions tracking is only small part of it - you cancreate different projects to automatically track changes in positions for keywords that are important for your business - for ex. by geo location, which is very useful for an international business. A great one is the Site Audit feature - which sums up pretty much all kinds of issues you're currently having with your website - like craw issues, hreflang conflicts, pages with 4xx status codes, broken links, duplicate or missing meta information. The competitor analysis feature is awesome - you can analyze your competition and where you stand comparing to them and perform gap analysis - where they rank where you don't, etc. I like the backlink audit tool, because it was useful in detecting "toxic" backlinks we weren't aware of. The number of analyzed links is low in comparison to our overall backlink profile, but still, it's a very useful feature since it analyzes links based on criteria that detects link/website spam - which saves us a ton of manual work.

Cons
The subscription generally offers access to only 1 user. Adding additional users is costly (which is relative of course).

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10