SEMrush is an advanced research and spy tool for SEO and PPC professionals. This SEMrush review will cover the “Guru plan” for $199.95 per month.

SEMrush Plans and Pricing

SEMrush offers three main plans:

• Pro ($99.95 per month)
• Guru ($199.95 per month)
• Business ($399.95 per month)

The pro plan is the most affordable but also the most limited plan available. It offers access to 28 different tools including competitor traffic analysis, traffic sources, rankings, social results and more.

Historical data is only available from the Guru plan. The Guru plan also has higher result limits on all of the reports provided.

Some features like Google Product Listing Ad reports and specific location reports are only available from the Business plan level.

Most users should be able to get all the data they need from the Guru plan.

Domain Analytics

The tool domain analytics offers a variety of reports on specific domains including organic research, backlinks, advertising research, PLA research, display advertising and traffic analytics.

The overview report shows you the overall search engine marketing strategy of a specific domain. In the screenshot above you can see amazon.com’s organic and paid traffic ratio, number of backlinks and display advertising traffic.

The following reports will provide you with deeper insights into the different aspects of the organic and paid strategy.

Organic Research

The organic research report is the best place to start when it comes to SEO. It will show you the estimated traffic of a domain, keyword positions, position changes, competitors, pages that rank highly and subdomains.

The positions report is lets you check which keywords a domain ranks for and with which URL. So if you are looking to establish similar keyword rankings this report shows you what you are up against in terms of content.

Backlinks

The backlinks report will display all backlinks including anchor texts for a domain or a specific URL. This report is very useful to find domains that might be willing to link back to your website.

The report will also score the importance and trustworthiness of each backlink. That way, you can easily find the most powerful backlinks pointing to a website and try to replicate them.

Advertising Research

The advertising research report displays paid search position data for all of the keywords targeted on Google Ads.

This report helps you reverse engineer the paid search strategy of a domain. It can also uncover keywords you are not yet targeting as part of your own strategy.

For example, the screenshot above shows that amazon.com is targeting the keyword “123movies” and sending people to their Prime Video free trial landing page.

PLA Research

The PLA research report shows the domains use of Google Ads product listing ads. This report is great for eCommerce websites that are using product listing ads.

Under the Guru plan the data in the PLA report is limited. In order to get access to the full feature you need to upgrade to the Business plan ($399.95 per month).

Display Advertising

The display advertising report provides data on the advertiser’s Google Ads display activity. It shows you in which countries the advertiser is running ads, what the ads look like, what landing pages are used and on which domains the ads are running.

The publishers report is especially interesting if you are looking to expand or optimise your display strategy. It shows you exactly where an advertiser is running ads.

Traffic Analytics

The traffic analytics report is very helpful to get an idea of the overall traffic distribution of a website. It can show you the breakdown of direct, referral, search, social and paid traffic of a domain.

The example above shows amazon.com’s traffic breakdown for August 2018. According to the report amazon.com’s traffic breakdown was as follows: 50% direct, 14% referral, 32% search, 4% social and less than 1% paid traffic from Google AdWords.

While these results might not be 100% accurate, they can provide a good indication of how a website is acquiring its traffic.

Keyword Analytics

The keyword analytics tool allows you to check search volume and cost per click for keywords. It also helps you find related keywords via the phrase match option.

The phrase match report will generate keyword phrases that can have another keyword before and/or after your main keyword. In the example above our main keyword is “loan”. Phrase match keywords would include “car loan calculator” or “payday loans”.

The phrase match report is useful to find additional relevant keywords to your main search.

Keyword Difficulty Tool

The keyword difficulty tool is useful in picking SEO keywords that you want to rank for. It shows a difficulty score from 1 to 100% of how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword.

Is SEMrush Right For You?

SEMrush is a great tool for agencies and digital marketing professionals that are working on SEO and PPC strategies.

It allows you to research and reverse engineer the search and display advertising strategies of your competition. This in turn provides you with additional ideas to expand your advertising campaigns profitably.

It also provides useful data to improve your SEO strategy. You can check what keywords your competition is ranking for and which of their website pages generate the most organic traffic. SEMrush also helps you find new domains that might be willing to link back to your website.

If you are still not sure whether SEMrush is right for you, there’s a 7-day money back guarantee.

Check out SEMrush here.