Semrush: The Ultimate SEO tool in 2020

I found helpful data such as:

• Long-tail keywords to use
• Average monthly volume of searches
• A trend graph
• Keyword difficulty (KD)
• CPC (average cost to advertise for the keyword)
• Competition for entering Adwords auctions
• Number of SERP Features found for the keyword

You can also see a table to the left helping break down commonly used keywords associated with “Affiliate marketing.” Like over 1,166 searches contain the word “Program.”

NOTE: To rank for a particular keyword, Make sure the keyword difficulty (KD) is bellow 40.

You also have the option to check the “questions” box which will give you all the who, what, why, when, where, and how questions people type in for that keyword.

Now, all those results can be overwhelming and hard to parse through. Simply add a check into the box next to the keywords you find valuable and you can send them to the Keyword Analyzer tool for future use.

Keyword Analyzer tool

The keyword analyzer tool lets you further explore up to 1,000 selected keywords of your choosing.

From here you can:

• segment keywords further for analysis
• export them to a spreadsheet
• send them to other tools like the position tracking tool.

Domain Overview tool

With SEMrush, you don’t have to stop at researching new keywords. You can also learn a bit of information about your own website including keywords you already rank for.

Oftentimes, you may not even realize some of the keywords that are bringing traffic to your site, or the volume of traffic those keywords are bringing you.

In addition to that, it is also a best practice to overview your competitors’ domain. This will give you insights on the kind of keywords they are ranking and other useful information

To gather information about your competitors’ domain, simply enter their root domain into the Domain Overview tool.

Before we continue, one thing that should be pointed out is that in SEMrush’s domain overview of a website, where it displays the monthly traffic, those numbers do not accurately reflect any site’s total monthly traffic.

Rather, it’s giving organic and paid search traffic from keywords that SEMrush has in its database of 120 million keywords. They use an algorithm to estimate monthly traffic based on number of keywords, position of keywords, and average CTR of those keywords.

Your website traffic may be much higher when you calculate in direct traffic, social media traffic, and traffic from email campaigns.

With that said, let’s take deep look at some of the amazing metrics SEMrush can offer in their domain search when you type in any website domain:

• An overview of the amount of traffic that keywords known to SEMrush are bringing to a website through organic traffic.
• The amount of traffic a site might be bringing in with paid search.
• Number of backlinks from referring domains
• Visual representations of sources for organic and paid keywords.
• A graph showing traffic by organic and paid sources over time (can choose 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, or all time).
• The top 5 organic keywords that are bringing traffic to a particular site. You can click into this section for a ton more analytics (more on these metrics below).
• A graph showcasing organic position distribution, e.g., how many of your keywords rank in the top 3, how many rank in positions 4-10, 11-20, etc. up to the top 100 results.
• Who, based on traffic and overlapping keywords, are your top organic competitors. Many of the competitors listed may not even be ones you knew about.
• A graph showcasing a competitive position map based on number of keywords and organic search traffic
• A chart showing the top paid keywords bringing traffic to the site (can be expanded to view a full report for more metrics
• A graph showing paid position distribution of the keyword ads a site target.
• A chart showing the main paid competitors (top 5 are displayed. More info can be gathered by clicking into the chart).
• A graph showing your competitive positioning map relative to how many paid keywords you, and your competitors are targeting as well as traffic brought in from PPC keywords.
• A sampling of some PPC ads
• Some of the backlinks that refer to your site or your competitors’ site, what those sites are and the anchor text and URL that those backlinks link to.
• The top anchor texts used in backlinks bringing referring traffic to your site.
• Referring domains that are driving traffic to your site sorted by those with the most backlinks pointing to your webpages.
• Finally, most popular indexed pages that are back-linked by other domains.

Keep in mind that all of this information is just an overview of the metrics.

Organic Research tool

With Organic Research tool you can get a lot of information about the keywords you, or your competitors, currently rank for.

In the Overview tab, you get a nice graph showing your keyword growth over time. You can change this graph to show all top 10 page results, top 5 page results, top two page results, first page results, and even top three results.

Let me quickly breakdown each of the metrics on this page.

First up, you have “Keywords”

This is the total number of keywords that a particular site ranks for.

To be honest with you, this metric isn’t actually helpful. For instance, let’s say a site ranks on second page for 1,000 different keywords. All those 1,000 keywords send almost zero traffic to that site. Because this metric doesn’t focus on keywords that rank in the top 10, it’s not that useful.

Second, you have “Traffic”.

This is an estimate of how much monthly traffic that site gets from search engines:

And lastly, we have the metric that I pay the most attention to: “Traffic Cost”:

Traffic cost estimates how much that site’s organic traffic is worth.

(Imagine you paid for that same traffic with PPC)

Because this metric takes into account traffic AND the value of that traffic, it’s my favorite metrics in the entire SEMrush platform.

Organic Keyword Trend

The graph above shows changes in the number of organic keywords on analyzed domain has positioned for

Organic search positions

On the table above, we can see a full set of keywords that SEMrush has information on that is bringing traffic to a website.

By default, SEMrush lists the keywords in order of those bringing the highest volume of monthly traffic. However, other data points can be used to sort the keywords such as:

• Position the keyword has for organic search results with an arrow showing the previous position.
• The difference in position gains or losses compared to the last crawl.
• The estimated number of monthly searches for that keyword.
• The Cost Per Click to advertise for the keyword.
• The URL page the keyword is associated with.
• The CPC average.
• The competitive density of the keyword for those wishing to advertise for it.
• The total number of indexed URL’s that contain the keyword
• Trends over time by popularity of searches
• The SERP, or snapshot of the first page of results in a search engine.
• And when the keyword’s data was last updated.

Note: It can take SEMrush several weeks to recall a keyword in this tool. If you’re looking for more up-to-date information, move the keyword to the Position Tracking tool.

SEMrush Ratings

Overall, SEMrush is an amazing tool that can provide comprehensive information for anyone looking to optimize their website, find the most profitable keywords to target, and/or uncover loads of information about their competitors.

From what we’ve studied (and hopefully you can now see for yourself) SEMrush is easily the best SEO keywords tool available on the market right based on the immense amount of information and metrics available for view.

In any case, SEMrush may not be best for the casual user as it can take quite a bit of time getting comfortable with finding all of the useful data one can compile to improve their site and keyword strategy.

SEMrush Pricing and Plans

All plans include 7-days free trial and can be extended till 30 days.

You can also compare features:

SEMrush deals

And of course if you agree to pay annually rather than monthly, you can expect to see additional savings.