© Semrush
Today, Semrush is certainly the most complete tool on the market for ensuring good monitoring of the visibility of a site and a brand on the web. This translates into software recognized worldwide for natural referencing (also available in French, with quality French support), a tool for monitoring and managing interactions on social networks, and a section dedicated to paid campaigns such as Google Adwords (SEA). In our Semrush test, tutorial and review below, you can see an overview of the service's great features.
Introduction to Semrush
Semrush is a platform that allows you to do a lot of things, so much so that you can quickly get lost. To give you an idea of the architecture of the service, you should know that SEMRush allows you to monitor SEO campaigns over the long term via what it calls “projects” ; (see below in our Semrush test). In parallel with these projects, it is possible to obtain live analyzes on the SEO of certain domains (including competitors), on social interactions or even on paid traffic campaigns (SEA). We will conduct a test and give you our opinion on Semrush and all these services.
The Semrush tool can be used to monitor its positions on a daily basis (and more generally its brand image on the internet) but also that of competitors. This is the great strength of the service: with millions of sites that are screened daily, Semrush offers a very good overview of the competitive ecosystem around a domain . Whether for natural referencing, for social interactions or for paid traffic campaigns – it is always possible to compare its positioning with that of its competitors.
Be careful, Semrush doesn't do everything. This is a toolbox that allows you to support a webmaster in their natural referencing strategy, their social strategy, or even their paid traffic strategy. It thus encompasses all sources of traffic acquisition to a website, and in fact becomes a complete tool for monitoring and understanding the evolution of its traffic. It’s truly a global offering which, in our opinion, is the strength of Semrush.
Before giving you our Semrush opinion, we have developed a whole tutorial for you which will allow you to understand the different services available on the platform. As a one-time user of the service, we have also added all our comments to allow you to better understand the use and usefulness of all the features present.
We will present to you in this Semrush test the following parts: domain analysis, keyword analysis as well as the construction of a project. The objective is to allow you to understand these 3 main features which will allow you to use a large part of Semrush's resources. There are other less important tools that you can then discover for yourself, some of which are still in beta. The company is constantly looking for feedback to improve its existing products and release new ones, which is really appreciated.
To get a trial period on Semrush, click here:
Domain analysis via Semrush
Overview and organic search
The domain analysis feature is available in a limited version for free, to everyone. Simply go to the Semrush home page and enter a domain name to get some (unfortunately limited) results on it. This tool is really relevant because it gives an excellent overview of the SEO power of a domain, its traffic, the keywords on which it is positioned and its competitive environment.
By default, when you define a domain to analyze, you get an overview of Semrush which looks like the screenshot below below. While this overview gives an overall overview of a site's performance, simply click on any widget on the page to get a more in-depth look at each of these. performance indicator. This report can be downloaded and sent (possibly to a client if you are an agency) directly by email. It really is a tool that allows you to have an excellent overview of the SEO power of the domain at a glance. Below in our Semrush review, an overview of the platform.
Analysis of a domain, overview © Semrush x Presse-citron .net
Interesting analysis points on Semrush software:
- We can directly see an estimate of traffic from organic traffic and paid traffic (see image above in our Semrush review). Having tested several websites, this figure is not always very precise but it gives a good indicator. For sites that have a lot of traffic from Google News, you shouldn't really take into account the organic traffic shown here. This mainly concerns traffic from queries in the search engine directly.
- The graph located a little below on the right shows the traffic trend over a given period. And if the figures do not really correspond, it is clear that the evolution is very relevant. Semrush manages to measure quite effectively whether a site tends to gain traffic or lose traffic, month after month. By clicking on the graph (or directly from the left menu), you can have a breakdown of the organic search. It is by using the search volumes and the position of the analyzed site that Semrush will be able to estimate the traffic at a given time. For each query, it indicates an estimated CPC (for purchasing traffic) or the overall volume trend. As you can see, this is not a daily measurement tool since the updates on a keyword (last column on the right in the image of our Semrush review below) can be done up to one week later. To follow the strategy of a direct competitor, simply look at the keywords with the highest traffic and try to position yourself on them.
Organic searches © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Better yet, since Semrush is constantly crawling the web, you can get an overview of how a user's positions are changing domain on a number of keywords over time. For example, for the site in question, we obtained an a posteriori analysis of the evolution of overall positions on strategic keywords. This also allows you to see if a domain has recently moved a lot, and if it has potentially been affected by a penalty. Below in our Semrush review you will find an impression of the screen which displays the position changes.
Evolution of positions © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Still in this section “organic research”, it is possible to have a global overview of the competitive ecosystem. This graphic repeats the one displayed on the home page. The idea is to see who the competitors are, and how they position themselves on similar keywords. If you find a competitor that is particularly good, it is worth running a full analysis on that area to see what keywords they are ranking for. It is possible to then compare the keywords and positions of each to see which ones might have been forgotten. This is a very handy feature on Semrush in our opinion.
Competitive ecosystem © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Let's now move on to analyzing backlinks in our Semrush review. This is an important part of the site which competes with many other services available on the internet. However, Semrush has worked hard to offer today the most advanced inbound link analysis service on the market.
Backlink analysis on Semrush
Semrush wants to step on the heels of services specializing in backlink analysis like Ahrefs or Majestic. The service has developed a dedicated section which allows you to push the analysis really far and determine the backlink profile of a site. If you are used to a Majestic or Ahrefs, it may seem difficult to learn, but you will find almost the same information there.
Below you first have an overview of the backlink profile for the domain you have decided to analyze. You can see the number of inbound links you have, how they have evolved over time, the type of backlinks (text, image; nofollow, dofollow; anchors, referring domain extensions) as well as the toxicity score & #8211; which we also find in the “projects” that can be created directly on the Semrush platform.
Below in our Semrush review, a preview of the feature.
Backlinks on Semrush © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
To go into detail about the link profile of the domain in question, you will need to use the horizontal menu of the category in order to obtain more information on the domain strategy. For example, you can obtain a list of all the backlinks that are made to your site, with precise detail for each of the backlinks: anchor, number of external links from the page that points to its site, number of internal links, type of anchor, last seen. This therefore also makes it possible to see which backlinks (external links) were lost – like what we see in the image below from our Semrush review.
Backlink details © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
It is also possible to then see all the referring domains as well as their Authority Score – an indicator created by Semrush that allows you to see how powerful a domain is. It's quite similar to the Trust Flow that you can have on Majestic, or the Moz Rank that you can find on Moz. This allows you to see which are the most powerful domains that point to your domain (or that of a competitor).
Better than a Google Keyword Planner, the tool that allows you to analyze keywords on Semrush is in our opinion one of the great assets of the service. A myriad of services around this analysis are available and make it possible to expand the added value of the platform.
Keyword analysis
Another very interesting feature of Semrush is none other than the keyword analysis system. This section is as relevant as all the others because it allows you to obtain ideas for content to produce, on popular keywords. As you can see in the screenshot below, you will first need to define a keyword for which you want to obtain its trend as well as the entire lexical field around it. It is therefore no longer a question of domain, but really of trends around keywords. This reinforces our positive Semrush review.
Keyword analysis © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
The Semrush tool therefore allows you to discover keywords, to be able to create content around them and generate traffic. The Keyword Magic Tool allows you to generate numerous keywords (with their traffic and trend) around the lexical field. This goes much further than a Google Keyword Planner because the Semrush tool will really look beyond the first circle of keywords, which in our opinion is a strong point of the Google Keyword Planner. Semrush tool.
Keyword Magic Tool © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
One last interesting tool in this Semrush keyword section is the “Keyword Difficulty”. As the name suggests, you can see the estimated difficulty of reaching the top positions on Google for a certain keyword (even if it may seem logical). The principle is simple: you must enter the keyword that you wish to evaluate, and Semrush then displays a certain amount of associated information. For example, we can see the volume of searches, the number of results or even information on the SERPs (images, videos and other carousels present on the first page of the search engine).
Difficulty on keywords © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Second step of this Semrush test and review: build a long-term project. The platform strongly encourages its users to create such a project in order to offer long-term monitoring of its website. This analysis is thus distinguished from the one-off analyzes that we presented to you above.
Semrush Test: Build a project
A large part of our opinion on Semrush is based on this product, 'building a project', which is the great strength of the tool if you want to keep it for the long term. Beyond the SEO monitoring functionalities of this or that site at a given moment, Semrush has also developed a system of “projects” which allows you to effectively monitor your website over the long term. This tool is particularly interesting for those who want to measure the evolution over time of their SEO strategy (and that of rivals) while benefiting from relevant recommendations from Semrush.
Monitoring via these projects only concerns the SEO part, and the Social Media part. However, this does not (yet) include the “Advertising” which allows the monitoring of purchased traffic campaigns (paid traffic) and which is still very independent today.
Wherever you are on the Semrush site, you will always have access to the “project” located in the menu on the left of the screen. But it is already on the home page that Semrush invites its users to use this very powerful functionality which proves to be an effective tool for measuring its long-term performance.
As you can see in the visual of our Semrush review below, the first phase requires defining the domain name that should be tracked by Semrush. As indicated, this project will allow you to monitor the evolution of the site's positions on search engines, possible technical problems, activity on social networks – and Semrush even offers to provide additional recommendations. Be aware, however, that this is a support tool, and that you should not hope to 'cracker' it. SEO thanks to this tool.
Semrush home page © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Once you have created your project as we did in our review on Semrush, you will have a dashboard which allows you to configure and monitor different strategic points for the SEO of a website . Among the features available on the platform, we find all those marked in the image below. We're going to go into detail about some of them, but we strongly recommend that you take a free test of Semrush to see the power of all these features.
Semrush dashboard © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Let's now move on to auditing sites in this Semrush tutorial and review.
Site audit
This tool allows you to measure “technical health” of a website. It may seem simple, but many websites have technical errors which heavily penalize their SEO positions, or their traffic. This site audit allows errors to be corrected to make the site more relevant in the eyes of different search engines, and improve the visitor experience. Among the few important variables for a site that we can cite, there is obviously the HTTPS certificate, the structure of the AMP content or even the structure of the site.
The first thing to do for the site audit is to define what should be analyzed by Semrush: domain and/subdomains, number of pages to crawl, crawl source, browser settings. crawler, URL bans, URL parameters etc. If you're not really comfortable with all these concepts, no problem: these criteria are optional, so you can run a site audit without configuring these points and you will still get a relevant result. You can request that an email be sent to you each time an audit is carried out, in order to store this information more easily.
The image below from our Semrush review illustrates the interface for setting up the audit.
Audit settings © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Once you have launched the site audit, you will have to wait a few minutes before seeing the results. Once this is available, Semrush displays an overall score for the technical health of the website in the project. It then defines a “thematic score” which highlights the sensitive categories that have a real impact on the SEO performance of a site: explorability, performance (speed), HTTPS, internal linking. You can click on each of these scores to see in detail all the areas for improvement. Below, a Semrush report which in our opinion gives a good overview of the technique of a site.
Audit results © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
You can therefore click on each of the thematic scores to see in detail the technical problems and the recommendations made by Semrush. To take an example, below the category “performance” of the site in question defined in the project. In this case, Semrush makes very few recommendations because it is recognized as being particularly fast.
Semrush displays on the left the page loading speed, and particularly the number and loading speed of Javascript and CSS (files which generally tend to slow down the speed of a site). On the right, Semrush displays all the problems that may exist on the site and which penalize performance. Associated with each problem, the number of errors recorded: here, everything is in green, marked “no problem” which shows that there is no problem on each of the lines. In the event of a problem, the number of errors is displayed, and you just have to click on them to see them and obtain answers to correct them. In our opinion, this is what makes Semrush an interesting platform.
Detail of the performance (speed) of the site © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
The site audit is done on a regular basis, but it is always possible to force a new audit from the project dashboard. We recommend that you regularly check the technical health of your site as it can change at any time. This is a basic indicator, and it is essential to have a good technical structure to be able to claim top positions on search engines like Google.
The next section of our Semrush test concerns position tracking – a key element at the supplier.
Position tracking on Semrush
Obviously, position tracking is an essential element for the SEO of a site, since it clearly indicates whether the efforts have paid off. In this case, as part of a project on Semrush, a section dedicated to this allows you to monitor the performance of your site, from this or that geography, on this or that search engine (Google or Baidu), this or that device (mobile or desktop), and in relation to the competition (up to 20 competitors can be selected). It is possible to define up to 1,500 keywords to track. You can type them manually, import them via a txt file, or retrieve them from Google Analytics.
Configure position tracking © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Once you have defined all these parameters, you will then have to wait a few seconds to see the result displayed on Semrush. The main page that displays the results is below. We see an overall summary of its performance in relation to the keywords that were entered. You can also see how competitors are positioned on this same page. But it is possible to go into much more detail in this analysis thanks to the menu located in the middle of the page: overview, rankings distribution, rankings, landing pages, competitors discovery – are all categories that allow us to deepen our understanding of our positions.
Result of the analysis © Semrush x Presse -citron.net
One of the interesting tools of this position tracking analysis is that it is possible to discover all the actors who position themselves on the keywords that you have defined in your query, and which therefore have these keywords in common with the site of our project. We can thus discover other players that we would not have thought of, and we can analyze the keywords on which they are positioned to generate even more traffic, and better target the keywords.
Discovery of competitors © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Another highly relevant part in our opinion at Semrush: the On Page SEO Checker. It now provides relevant advice for optimizing its content pages – which no other service does in this depth.
On Page SEO Checker
As part of the project, there is another very powerful tool called 'On Page SEO Checker'. Clearly, Semrush positions itself as a guide which gives advice on optimizing your SEO. By default, it will select around fifty pages which it will analyze in depth (it is also possible to define them yourself) and provide a complete summary of the improvements to be made.
Unlike “Site Audit” (above) which focuses on the technical part, the On Page SEO Checker will analyze the selected pages in more depth to deliver an in-depth SEO analysis. This concerns the netlinking strategy, semantics and technique of these pages. Once you have started the analysis of this tool, you have to wait several long minutes to obtain an interesting result.
Results of On Page Checker Semrush © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
For each page that has been analyzed via Semrush's On Page Checker, it is possible to obtain recommendations whose objective is to position yourself better on Google, and thus increase traffic. As you can see, the recommendations are of different types: overall strategy, backlinks, SEO technique, user experience, semantics, SERP and content.
Below in our Semrush review, you have an example of an analysis carried out for a given page. For each of the recommendation categories, you have complete details of what needs to be improved in order to gain positions on search engines like Google or Bing. You can send all these tasks directly to Trello using the button at the very bottom of the screen.
Report per page © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
Various project features on Semrush
- Social Media Tracker: this feature allows you to track the activity and engagement of your audience on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. Once again, it is possible to compare these interactions with those of its competitors. To obtain the performance of your marketing campaign on social networks, you must give Semrush access to the different social networks. This will automatically search for the accounts that are associated with the domain name defined for the project. If necessary, it is possible to change them.
Social Tracker on Semrush © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
- Social Media Poster: as its name suggests, the Social Media Poster allows you to control publications on your different social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest) from a single interface. You must give Semrush access to its various social accounts to manage this. It's a bit the same principle that we find at Buffer or Hootsuite. From the Social Media Poster, it is possible to plan publications and view all upcoming deadlines on a calendar. Semrush then displays the performance of each post.
- Brand monitoring: this tool is very recent on Semrush, and it allows you to track mentions of a brand across different social networks and on search engines. You must therefore configure the brand that you wish to follow, and the language in which you wish to obtain information. For major brands, this brand monitoring tool allows you to monitor publications on a daily basis, which is quite relevant. It remains to be seen whether this report is comprehensive enough for major brands that track their mentions in real time.
Brand Monitoring © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
- Backlink Audit: Once again, the name says it all. To use the backlink audit tool on Semrush, it is recommended to connect the service with Google Search Console – but it’s not obligatory. By connecting Google Search, Semrush will then analyze the incoming link profile in a relevant way (each has a toxicity score), and will use its database (more than a billion domains) to determine the links that are potentially “toxic”. They are the ones who will then have to be disavowed via Google's Disavow tool.
Semrush toxic score © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
When you have the result, simply click on the overall toxicity score to obtain a breakdown of all incoming links with their toxicity score. The “delete” allows you to send the domain in one of the two tabs of the menu “remove” or “disavow”. As you go along, you can therefore send all the toxic links to the “disavow” then download the file which will then have to be uploaded to Google to disavow these toxic links. Semrush makes your work easier by creating a compatible file so that Google no longer takes these harmful reference domains into account. In our opinion, Semrush keeps its promise perfectly.
However, you should know that today, Google claims that it hardly gives any more importance to the disavow file. Indeed, it believes that it is capable of distinguishing by itself which sites are harmful (also for negative SEO campaigns), and therefore it no longer takes them into account in its search engine. This feature, although practical, seems quite obsolete for SEOs.
Result of the backlink audit © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
- Link Building: with this tool, Semrush offers to support you in your link strategy. It's more of a tool for tracking your activity than a tool that really allows you to get the job done. You could absolutely follow your linking campaign on independent tools like Asana or Trello for example. Still, it's quite practical on Semrush because you can concentrate everything in the same place. Below you can see all the links recommended to you (which are not necessarily very relevant: here in our review, Semrush confuses the cosmopolitan magazine and the cocktail). However, this allows you to have new ideas for placing (or exchanging) links and building your SEO.
Link building advice © Semrush x Presse-citron.net
- PPC Keyword Tool: Semrush has worked a lot on its offering for traffic buyers. The PPC Keyword Tool aims to help determine the right keywords in order to plan a paid media campaign (like Google Adwords). Semrush helps find keywords and optimize them over time. For those who want to create media campaigns in addition to tracking their visibility on Google, our Semrush review is very positive.
- Ad Builder: second tool for managing your traffic purchase campaigns, the Ad Builder. Semrush is doing really well in this niche, and we have to admit that it's really useful. This tool allows you to create Adwords campaigns directly (which you can then export to Adwords) and compare them with those of competitors. Even for those who are not interested in SEO, and who want to focus on “paid traffic”, Semrush provides real added value with this tool. We can thus see precisely what keywords were targeted by competitors, and what different types of ads they ran.
- Organic Traffic Insights: How to discover what's behind “not provided” of Google Analytics ? It’s with this tool that Semrush helps you understand which visits are brought by SEO, and on which keywords. You must connect Google Analytics and Search Console via Semrush to obtain relevant results.
- Content Analyzer: this feature allows you to directly analyze the content of certain URLs to then see if it has performed on several levels: at the level of interaction between readers and the ;#8217;article (time spent, traffic…) but also on social networks (number of shares, etc.). Semrush also gives the possibility of comparing these performances with those of competitors.
In our Semrush review, let's now move on to the prices and offers available.
Semrush solution pricing
By default, Semrush offers three subscription models to its platform: the Pro version at $108.33 per month, the Guru version at $208.33 per month and the Business version at $416.66 per month. An even more complete Enterprise version is also available, but it must be made on request. For this, a dedicated form on the Semrush website is available.
In terms of features, as you can imagine, the Pro version offers fewer things than the Guru version and the Business version. But depending on the uses, it is not necessarily justified to go for the most expensive model. If independent SEOs will be largely satisfied with the Pro version, agencies and SMEs will instead have to go for the Guru version. As for the Business version, it only concerns large groups that have a strong presence on the web.
To get a 14-day trial and test Semrush risk-free, click here:
As for the differences between one package versus another, the difference lies in the number of results, reports and other projects that can be be recovered per day (or per month). Note that regardless of the model that is chosen, the subscription only gives access to a single user by default. To have several, you will have to pay an additional monthly fee (between $70 and $140 per month), which is not cheap.
In our opinion, Semrush is rather expensive – but for all the built-in features, the price is well worth it.
© Semrush
Conclusion: our opinion on Semrush
Today, Semrush is the only powerful tool that allows you to track the evolution of the visibility of a site (and a brand) on the internet. From a purely SEO point of view, it is a tool that encompasses all the strategic points to improve your SEO: analysis of the structure of the site, optimization of content, tracking of positions and analysis competition. On “social media” and on paid traffic campaigns, Semrush is also very complete, it allows you to control everything from a single interface.
Our opinion on Semrush is very positive on all levels, although it is (necessarily) expensive. The investment really quickly pays off, especially for the time it saves and the advice it can give. Indeed, each position gained on Google can bring in a lot of money, so it's not a hundred euros per month that should deter SEO specialists.
How to use Semrush ? Everyone obviously has their preferences, but you should see the tool as a way to follow the evolution and trend of positions over time (notably thanks to ’ ;#8220;projects”). This is not a tool that we will necessarily consult every day (the position statement is not daily), but rather a tool that the user must consult every day. #8217;we will open every week to see its positions, and to discover the SEO strategy carried out by its competitors. Be careful, there is so much information that you can quickly waste time on the platform and forget the most important thing: getting your hands dirty to change your positions. Once again, in our opinion Semrush is a good guide, but he is not the one who will do the work for you.
The length of this Semrush tutorial also says a lot about the number of features of the platform: you can get lost at first, but you quickly get back on your feet. This is just a usual question, and it's worth looking into. However, certain features added over time by Semrush (and some still in beta) are not the most relevant, and this can clutter the screen. Between the main menu located on the left and the submenus in the tabs, there can sometimes be redundancies – which also doesn't make navigation easy. As you can see in our Semrush test and review above, the interface still remains very intuitive.
Coming now to the prices, we must recognize that the service is not cheap. For independent SEO, the cheapest is $108.33 per month. It's certainly a little more expensive than competing services, but the latter are not as complete. You would have to add the price of at least 3 competing services to obtain all the features found on Semrush. So in the end, Semrush's price is in our opinion largely justified.
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FAQ
After reading our review on Semrush, you still have questions about this SEO tool? To try to answer them, we offer you a series of questions and answers.
What is Semrush?
Semrush is what we call an SEO tool. It is a SaaS solution (for Software as a Service in French: software as a service) which aims to help freelancers and businesses improve the SEO of their website, but also more generally, their marketing strategy.
The service allows you to: search for keywords to target, analyze your competitors, create a strategy to obtain new backlinks, monitor the ranking of your pages on Google, etc.
Is Semrush a better SEO tool than Ahrefs?
After having been able to use both solutions for a long time, we have a preference for Semrush. We indeed find the service more complete.
That said, we would like to point out that Ahrefs remains an excellent SEO tool. If you opt for it, you probably won't regret it. Small downside: unlike Semrush, Ahrefs does not offer a free trial.
How to use Semrush for free?
The best way to use Semrush without paying anything is by taking advantage of its 14-day free trial. This is an exclusive for our readers (otherwise the free trial only lasts 7 days).
, create an account, enter your bank card (you will be billed only after the test period – now it is possible to cancel the whole thing in order to avoid not be charged), then enjoy Semrush free for 14 days.
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