Semrush Review and Test: The benchmark professional SEO tool

By Axel Moreau

Published: May 5, 2025

Whether you're a user or not, you've probably heard of us. Starting with the blog, which for years has been a source of answers to the most frequently asked questions in digital marketing. It's one of the world's best-known and most popular marketing tools.

How does it work? What are its advantages? Will it work with my software?

Today, we'll answer all your questions about one of the most important tools in the world of SEO and marketing in general.

See all software Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Introducing Semrush

Semrush was founded in Boston in 2008. Starting with a group of SEO enthusiasts who developed a Firefox plugin called Seodigger. Later, after the transition to SeoQuake, the software we're all familiar with was born: Semrush. At the time, this Swiss army knife offered two SEO tools; today, it offers 48, and is expanding its activities internationally.

Today, Semrush is :

An established presence in 7 different countries
More than 900 employees
5 search awards in different countries

Why is Semrush so popular? Find out in our step-by-step guide to its features.

Features for SEO

As mentioned above, this tool was primarily born as an SEO platform. So it's not surprising that a large part of the tool is still dedicated to this branch of digital marketing.

Competitor analysis

The number of places available on the first page of Google is 10, sometimes less, and it's important to bear in mind that, while you need great content, you also need to be better than the competition in every respect.

The Semrush platform therefore offers us a wide-ranging tool for analyzing your competitors' activities. Simply enter the domain overview via the URL of the exact domain, sub-domain or page you need. You'll then be taken to a dashboard with a general report on your performance:

Authority Score: a Semrush indicator (scale 1-100) that shows the overall quality of the site, this indicator is associated with Domain Ranking, which is a sort of ranking of known web domains in the platform's database. It is naturally compared to the old pagerank offered by Google in the past.

Organic traffic: the overall measure of the monthly traffic a site is able to generate thanks to pages positioned naturally (without recourse to paid ads) on the first page of Google for certain keywords.

Paid: Share of traffic generated by paid advertisements produced for the website.

Backlink (or referring domains): number of external links pointing to the website in question.

Display advertising: indicates the number of display ads currently online for the site.

You'll then be able to view section highlights in the form of graphs, to be found later in the menu dedicated to competitor analysis.

Traffic analysis

This tool takes traffic analysis a step further, distinguishing between organic and paid traffic. The data made available to the user is varied:

Geographical distribution: from which countries does site traffic originate?

Monthly traffic volume: Where does this traffic come from, from which queries and via which pages?

Keyword count: Which keywords does the site rank for?

Serp features: Obviously, this section only concerns organic traffic. It shows whether the site appears in serp features such as Snippets, images, videos, reviews, etc.

Organic search

This function allows you to view crucial information on the site's SEO traffic through various parameters:

Page's main organic keyword
Keyword distribution by ranking
Main search competitors
A map of organic search rankings: Semrush provides a graphical representation of your positioning compared to your competitors, based on your competing keywords.

Brand traffic

In this section, you can get an idea of how brand traffic has evolved in recent months. You can also see the relationship between brand traffic and generic traffic to get a rough idea of brand reputation.

Keyword and Backlink Gap

This tool allows you to analyze up to 5 domains to see the backlinks or keywords behind our competitors' success. It also lets you select the most interesting keywords and links to generate a list and implement your own strategy.

Keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation of a content-based SEO strategy. Semrush is the tool of choice for defining this strategy.

Thanks to this section, you'll have more tools at your disposal to select the right keywords for your content and thus develop a relevant content strategy.

Initial information is already available via the keyword overview. Simply enter a keyword to get an overview of search volume in different countries, the number of results on Google and SERP functionalities. Although we're still in a section dedicated to organic traffic, Semrush also provides us with some useful information such as cost per click and competition for SEA (Search Engine Advertising) campaigns. This variable gives us an indication of the perceived value of the traffic obtained via the query analyzed.

Semrush also provides us with the following information for each keyword:

Keyword difficulty: This is a percentage indicator showing how difficult it is to rank on the first page of Google. This function has recently been updated to include an advice section on what needs to be done to achieve the objective (structured content, backlinks, etc.).
Trends: Displays search trends over time. It can be useful to understand whether a keyword whose volume is still low today could represent an opportunity for the future. It can also be used as a tool to analyze the seasonality of certain topics.

Keyword variations: Represents the overall number and volume of keywords that have the same intent as the main keyword.

Questions: Questions related to the searched keyword. Similar to the related searches offered by Google at the end of the search results page.

SERP Analysis: An overview of the search results and the metrics and KPIs relating to the pages positioned.

Keyword Magic Tool

This is Semrush's dedicated keyword research tool, enabling you to find derivatives and related keywords, thus creating a semantic cluster or semantic cocoon. It's a good alternative to Google Ads, with reliable metrics.

You can choose between different types of keywords:

Broad query: All searches close to the initial query are included in the broad query.

Expression match: Standard keyword searches.

Exact match: Volumes and KPIs corresponding to the exact query.

Related queries / keywords : Searches associated with the initial query

For each keyword, volume, difficulty, CPC, competition, functionality and results are available.

Keyword Manager

A keyword tracker that lets you select the most interesting topics and opportunities to exploit. What's more, thanks to the tagging system, it's possible to assign tags to each topic. This facilitates the creation of an SEO query backlog.

You can create your backlog using the multitude of search tools offered by Semrush:

Keyword Magic Tool
Keyword Overview
The Content Gap

By adding them manually

Once you've selected your keywords, you can register them with Position Tracking to track their progress.

Position Tracking

As mentioned above, you can select the keywords you wish to monitor. With Position Tracking , you can receive daily updates on changes in position, visibility and traffic. As with the Keyword Manager, you can add tags and then track different groups of keywords for effective performance monitoring.

Link building

In this section, we can work on the inbound link profile of our own site or that of a competitor. Up to 4 sites can be compared simultaneously. This crucial information can be used to identify differences in inbound link profiles between sites. Overall or page by page.

The information provided gives us a complete picture of a site's link profile, so let's take a closer look:

Referring domains and backlinks

Via a graphical view, we can check the referring domains and the number of backlinks. At the same time, it shows trends in terms of link volume and the ratio of links gained and lost.

We can also choose to have a view over the last six months, the last year or a complete view.

Main anchors and DR categories

As most experts know, a link's anchor is important for conveying the right content contextualization message to Google. Thanks to Word Cloud's graph, you can get an idea of the distribution of anchors and correct any anomalies.

Another indicator not to be underestimated is the consistency between the issues you address and those of your reference domains. This allows you to be more precise and cautious when analyzing the sites that have given you a backlink.

Authority scores, types and attributes

Referral domains classified on the basis of authority score, the indicator that shows the quality of a site according to its backlink profile.

At the same time, it shows us the type of backlink depending on whether it's placed on an image, text, form or frame.

Finally, the graph shows the attributes of a backlink:

Follow

No follow

Sponsored

UGC (User Generated Content)

Other information

Other indicators are presented to give an overview of the situation. For example :

Distribution of TLDs (Top Level Domains): The distribution of referring domains according to top-level domain type.

Countries: Indicates the countries from which backlinks originate

Similar profiles: Other sites with a similar backlink profilebacklink

Backlink Audit

This is an analysis that Semrush offers in which, in addition to tracking updates, it flags any toxic referrer links and estimates the site's level of health. This tool has an integrated link devaluation file creation function, which can then be imported directly into Search Console to disavow toxic links.

Link Building Tool

Without getting into Black HatSEO and questioning the legitimacy of a netlinking strategy, there are still link opportunities that can be exploited naturally. With Link Building, you can identify the keywords in your domain and those of your competitors to find link opportunities. If you wish to modify the competitors and keywords suggested by the software, you can insert those you find most relevant.

This tool can be a devilishly effective way of finding out which types of content bring in lots of backlinks from sites with similar themes to our own.

Site audit

Of course, no SEO tool can be considered complete unless it includes technical SEO functionalities. Through graphics and error messages, it takes into account :

Loading speed
Site exploration
Detecting content problems

Metadata tags

Internal link network
HTTPS protocol errors (404s, 301s loops, etc.)
CSS and JSerrors

These analyses are then compiled into intuitive reports. By connecting Search Console and Google Analytics to your SemRush account, you'll be able to get even more precise information.

SEO Content Template

This is one of the first features to be strongly oriented towards editorial content. Enter a keyword and you'll have an editorial plan with :

An overview of competitors
Keywords to enter to enrich semantics
The domains from which to obtain a backlink
Recommended text length
The editorial tone to adopt

In addition, it shows previews of competitors' content to see how they have used keywords and structured their content.

Log File Analyzer

In addition to providing a technical audit of the site, this software includes server log analysis. This is a new feature for most SEO software. To use it, you'll need to import your server log history into the software, using a simple drag-and-drop system. Semrush will then sort the data to give you important information about the crawl coverage of Google and other search engines.

This feature is particularly important for sites with a very large number of pages, as new content or product pages may be indexed too slowly. Checking that Google actually crawls these pages is the first step. Seeking to propose a better optimized access path to encourage crawling is a second step, which can be carried out using Semrush's log analyzer.

Local SEO

This is a package dedicated to geo-localized marketing strategies. The possibilities for this type of strategy are in line with those of the classic SEO package:

Keyword tracking

Listing Management

On page SEO Checker
Organicresultsoverview

PPC Advertising Toolkit

As mentioned in the introduction, although Semrush is primarily an SEO solution, over the years the software has benefited from a package dedicated to advertising campaigns. One of the features that will be available for each type of paid campaign is the keyword gap to recover lost visibility compared to competitors.

Let's take a look at the tools in this package:

Ad search

As you'll have gathered, this type of software pushes hard to highlight competitors' activities in order to profit from them (a double-edged sword if you like, as they may do the same to you 😉 ). In this case, it shows you the keywords used by your competitors for their advertising campaigns. In addition to this, for the different campaigns, you'll also get examples of PPC campaignsto see what works best.

Display Advertising

Thanks to a dashboard, information on competitors ' Display Advertising campaigns will be visible, and it will be possible to analyze content and track results. Finally, it's a valuable ally for finding publishers in your sector.

PLA search

Focus on the Google Shoppingcampaigns of you and your competitors. This tool also offers a pricing perspective so you can implement an aggressive pricing strategy. Finally, thanks to the keyword research tool , you'll be able to choose the best keywords on which to display your products.

Advertising on social networks

This feature is available in beta version and for the moment only in English. It automates the workflow involved in social media campaigns. This starts with creation, right through to performance tracking. It will also show you the "weakest" campaigns for which optimization is required.

Not to be confused with Social Media Ads, this package enables you to manage your entire social media marketing strategy.

Key features include

Campaign planning and article publication, borrowing from solutions such as Buffer or Hootsuite.
Advice on how best to set the publication calendar
Content import via CSVfile
Tracking via UTM

Content Marketing

This package, dedicated to content strategies, particularly blogging, is very similar to an SEO strategy. Indeed, one of the first features we find is the content model.

This tool follows the editorial strategy right through to publication.

Topic search

You may have a vague idea of a topic. If you don't want to have to write a whole novel, you need to refine and focus your writing around this idea by finding a clear, concise topic on which to concentrate and develop content. Via Semrush, simply type in a keyword or topic to obtain a wealth of additional information, such as :

The most interesting sub-topics
The most frequently asked questions
The most successful titles

SEO assistant (Copywriting assistant)

Semrush's SEO Assistant takes you step-by-step through the writing process. This feature can be accessed directly from the site, but what really makes it interesting is its integration with Google Docs. For each word written, it will be possible to consult the content optimization score according to various criteria, such as :

Readability : Google robots and your users will need clear text, so you'll need to adapt the type of language to your audience, the number of words, the quality of the title and the overall clarity of sentences and paragraphs.
SEO: Respect for the main keyword, correct use of associated keywords, possible ALT attribute and link problems .
Originality / Uniqueness of content : it's worth repeating that content must be unique, not only to respect intellectual property rights but also to comply with strict Google SEO guidelines.
Tone: unfortunately, this type of analysis is currently only available in English.

Who is SEMrush for and how much does it cost?

Having seen the main features of Semrush, let's take a look at who the solution is aimed at.

Thanks to its various price plans, it's aimed at intermediate to expert SEOs, but obviously for the lower price ranges, we'll find far fewer features. Ancillary functionalities beyond SEO may also be of value to certain other marketing professions, but they are rather complementary and won't motivate the purchase of the solution.

Pro: Mainly for startups and freelancers, the price is $120 per month, but you lose access to the Content Marketing platform.
Guru : The plan most widely used by businesses. It costs $230 per month and includes all Semrush features, but with limitations on the number of keywords. Aimed primarily at SMEs and larger companies.
Business - $450 This is the full access package to SemRush features.

It's also important to note that each additional user costs $200 per month. Watch out for the bill to skyrocket.

What about competing software?

Ahrefs is probably the most relevant outsider to compare with Semrush. Although Semrush is less widely used in France, it's a different story on the other side of the Atlantic.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush are frequently used, and both have advantages that can tip the balance.

Semrush probably has the largest database available on the market for keyword research. We found a greater difference in search volume with Ahrefs than with Semrush when compared with our Search Console on different queries.

On the other hand, Ahrefs provides additional information when performing a keyword search. For example, you can have a projection of 0-click searches, or an overview of the number of backlinks you need to obtain in order to rank.

When it comes to backlink analysis, we prefer Ahrefs, which tends to offer a more complete and detailed list of existing and lost links.

Finally, we also appreciate ahrefs' Content Gap functionality, but we feel that Semrush's interface and infographics are still superior for an overall view of the competition.

In the final analysis, these two solutions offer relatively similar SEO functionalities, but their interfaces are based on very different philosophies. Ahrefs is very analytical and "straight to the point", while Semrush puts more emphasis on a polished interface, without being much more intuitive. Finally, there's the price of each solution, which we'll compare in the last part of this test.