SEMRUSH--- Tool Review

[JML1179]

Please review this tool on your personal experiences with it.

I used it on my domain and it reported Search Engine traffic as 10% of it's real (google analytics) traffic. I haven't really mastered GA or SEMRush but I am getting  a bad taste.

Please indicate your experiences. Tell me what you use the tool for. What are it's competitors etc...

[initial]

The biggest things that you want to use SEMrush for are keyword research and competitive analysis. If you need a backlink tool Moz is superior.

Here are 3 videos, the first is a helpful FAQ they put out to help people understand the tool. The second is a nice how to and the third is how to using data mining for offpage factors. Again you can sub in Moz DA/PA for some of the offpage metrics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjs3nwrrxXs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0eeSNVTk6Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGuIjnmFsCw

I'm having trouble making the videos display the titles below, so here are just the 3 urls.

watch?v=mjs3nwrrxXs watch?v=r0eeSNVTk6Y watch?v=NGuIjnmFsCw

[StreamlineMetrics]

I don't know of any other tools that do what SEMRush does as far as telling you the organic keywords any given website ranks for. I have had a membership for years (actually since it went by the name SEODigger) and apparently my rate has been grandfathered in. I just took a look at the price plans now and see that $69.95/month is the cheapest plan now, which is a lot more than what I've been paying. While I love SEMRush, I will admit that I would have to think twice before considering paying that much. Hopefully SEOmoz will build their own version of SEMRush soon!

[JarnoNijzing]

It's really a shame that Semrush doesn't offer dutch results.

Contacted them about it and it would be a possibility but then I have to pay huge amounts of money for it to be created (NO THANKS).

Not my favorite tool.

[JML1179]

I am seeing a lot less value in this tool tonight. I realized when mailing reports it has their logo all over it. You have to pay $150 a month just to get a "custom logo" on the pdf.

This tool is basically a Keyword tracker. It gives me all of the SERPS a site ranks for. It seems amazing at that but that does seem to be it's only utility.

What other tools can do this reliably without the price tag?

[JML1179]

Do you think their analytics on PPC is correct?  It seems pretty inaccurate... Has anyone checked it against their actual PPC campaign to see if it was right?

I don't know if SEMRush is worth the money though. I really liked having it in the RavenTools suite. It's now not going to be offered.

Does Web Master Tools have information on what serps your page is in? I didn't know lol.  That dramatically decreased the value of SEMRush. Is the google provided data not as detailed?

[StreamlineMetrics]

I don't really pay attention to "% of traffic" or "estimated traffic" numbers from SEMRush or any of the other third-party tools like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc. since they are all notoriously inaccurate.

That being said, I love SEMRush.com since it provides data about which keywords a particular website is ranking for and does it instantly. This is especially useful to find out what your competitors are ranking for since they might be targeting some keyword phrases that you didn't even think of which you can then add to your own keyword list.

SEMRush is also quite useful for uncovering keyword phrases that you didn't even know your site ranked for since you weren't getting any traffic from that keyword and thus you didn't see any data in Google Analytics. SEMRush is great because sometimes it reveals that your site ranks 19th on Google for "longtail profitable keyword" when you weren't even trying to target that phrase. So an easy win would be to beef up the content/on-page SEO for that keyword and try to move up the rankings enough to start getting actual traffic from that phrase. (This was a life saver before Google Webmaster Tools came out with their Search Queries report which offers similar data, although I still find SEMRush useful.)