What is SEMrush?
SEMrush (go to the official site) is an all-in-one digital marketing suite with tools covering SEO, PPC, keyword research, competitor analysis, social media, PR, content and more.
Founded in 2008, SEMrush earned a reputation among SEOs as the industry standard for keyword research. More recently the company has broadened the software to cover a wider range of digital marketing work.
It’s a formidable research and analysis tool — a Swiss army knife that surfaces a great deal of data about your own site and your competitors’.
SEMrush is indispensable for anyone working in digital marketing, because sooner or later you’ll need to run analyses of one kind or another, and this tool will be a faithful companion.
SEMrush shows you how Google indexes your site — where it places you in the SERP — lets you analyse the keywords your customers type most, shows which sites point their links at yours and how, and much more.
SEMrush is an unknown world to anyone outside the field, but if you work in digital marketing you can’t afford not to know and use it. It will help you find clients, because you’ll be able to see the results of what you do on the web.
In every kind of business, numbers and analytics are decisive: SEMrush gives you a great deal of data that’s essential to your work, and without which you can’t make the right calls about growing online.
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How does SEMrush work?
SEMrush can help you in several ways. Here are the main ones:
- Analysing a market niche: you can look at monthly search volume, CPC, how hard a keyword is to rank for, and its seasonality.
- Analysing data to build an AdWords campaign: you can study data from your competitors’ campaigns and make better decisions with their numbers in front of you.
- Identifying who your competitors actually are.
- Creating projects: the Projects section in SEMrush has its own set of tools, separate from the analysis reports where you do competitive and keyword research. A project lets you run more than a dozen analysis tools covering every aspect of digital marketing for a single website. Within one project you can run a Site Audit, set up position tracking, monitor brand mentions across the internet, gather ideas for your on-page SEO, plan and analyse social media posts and much more. Alongside your project data you can add widgets with Google Analytics figures if you connect your account. It’s also easy to add images to make your report more personal, or include screenshots from several third-party data sources. If you work with clients, these reports can be branded and white-labelled (on a Business subscription) for a professional finish.
Image from https://it.semrush.com/
- Domain and keyword research: searching a keyword in the database is remarkably easy. Type the term into the search bar and SEMrush populates the “keyword overview” report with everything it knows about that search term. From there you can click through the top-level metrics to generate deeper reports with phrase-match keywords, semantic keyword groups, keyword difficulty, cost per click and more. The Keyword Tool can generate millions of related keywords and sort them into groups to help you organise your research.
- Report generation: every feature listed above can be pulled into convenient, easy-to-read reports.
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SEMrush: similar software and tools
Are there tools similar to SEMrush?
Yes there are.
In our view SEMrush is the best SEO tool because it’s complete and works across international markets. But there are others that fall short only by a little.
Two are worth flagging, and we’ll cover them in upcoming SEO lessons of the Academy:
- SEOZoom: suited for now to the Italian market only
- Moz: a platform devoted entirely to SEO
Image from https://it.semrush.com/
Conclusion
In this article you’ve seen what SEMrush does and where it fits alongside off-page SEO work, and how important that work is if you want to rank your site’s pages as high as possible in search engines. We’ve written plenty of other articles in our SEO Academy where you’ll find everything you need to understand how each individual ranking factor works.
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