SEMRUSH Review: Is This the Best SEO Tool Out There?

like and how i use it on a daily basis before summarizing those recommendations for you at the end of video but wanted to give you those tracks right up front in case you're just looking to make a snap decision i know some of you are now i've been using some rush since 2011 or 12 probably i used to use majestic seo i believe it's still a product but um it's uh definitely not what it used to be they were the market leader at one point eight nine years ago they no longer are now i would say it's a neck and neck race between semrush and ahrefs and again uh they each of these products has their um their pros and cons i wouldn't say that one is head and shoulders about the other i tend to use ahrefs a little more on a daily basis but some rush has some really indispensable features that i'll show you now so the first thing that i really like about semrush is i just think they have a very easy to digest dashboard um it's designed well especially when you consider how much information they're trying to show you there's really a ton of info here right so you got competitors keywords links on page and tech seo and then rank tracking and then that's not even going into like local seo advertising there's even a new client panel feature a client manager that they recently introduced so there's really a lot going on you can see how coming up with an interface to show to showcase all of this data would be a pretty tricky ux design challenge and semrush actually has done in my opinion very good job of showing that data in a clear concise way so usually what i'll do with some rush is i'll just start with domain overview i don't look at authority score um i tend to rely more on ahrefs domain rank uh so this to me doesn't hold a lot of weight but the organic search traffic data in my opinion is pretty accurate what you're going to find some sites are more accurately their traffic data is more accurate and hrefs some sites their traffic data is more accurate in semrush overall i think i'd give some rush a slight um a slight edge here i find the data to be a little more accurate in general obviously there are exceptions to that but yeah i i run over 20 different sites and their organic traffic the semrush organic traffic measurement is usually within about 15 maybe 20 um accuracy of the uh of the sites that um that i run so it's another way to say that is yeah it's it's sorry it's 80 accurate um with a 20 margin for error so yeah looking at organic traffic is really useful and then organic feature or organic keywords as well so here you can toggle you know if you just wanted to see the top three so this is pretty interesting because as you may know if you're watching this there's really a massive difference between being the top result and the second result in google and um if you're just looking at organic keywords overall like the net number of keywords that your website ranks for uh you might see that trending up over time and think oh you and think that you're in a really good situation when in actuality you might not be what really matters is are you ranking in the top three and are people clicking through and sending you traffic so here you can really get granular here with figuring out exactly how your keywords are distributed and then you can also do that um just one sec in more detail in the organic search traffic tab which i'll i'll show you in just a moment i also really like the paid traffic data that summers gives you this site is just a random basketball site basketball news site that i found before making this video they're not running paid traffic most affiliate sites aren't but paid traffic data is definitely a highlight of the semrush product another thing i like are the serv features so syrup is search engine results page and basically you can see what you're ranking for this is relevant because google is as you might know if you're doing anything in seo it's constantly evolving right so years ago if you got position number two position number three for a competitive search room you'd be happy you'd be making money all would be well with the world right now what's happening is google's really extracting a lot more data to that search transfer results page and as a result just knowing that you rank number two or number four for a term doesn't really tell you that much about the traffic that um that you that that you're gonna get from it so with this you can dive into um your site or a competitor site with more granularity and and see okay like what you know where do most of the um where does most of the traffic come from you know is it purely from organic results or are there images that are driving traffic are there videos uh knowledge panels et cetera so really a useful feature and definitely one that i think just shows the complexity of seo as google continues to evolve and become more complex now going on in the next tab here i've got backlink analytics spoiler alert i don't love semrush for backlink analysis i tend to use ahrefs part of that honestly is i'm just more comfortable with ahrefs i've been using it uh as a power user uh more frequently than i have some rush i think i've been a summerosh user longer overall but i just tend to go to ahrefs for the day-to-day i think that's partially just because i'm more comfortable with it partially because the backlink analysis uh feature is a little bit better in hrefs but it's still pretty solid in semrush especially if you're not really getting like super granular so what you can do here is just look at overall number of referring domains and then backlinks really the key number to focus on is referring domains and then you can also look at this authority score authority squared approximates how strong a website is in terms of the number of links coming in it's a logarithmic scale which basically means that it gets progressively harder so it's harder to to raise your authority score as you go higher so it's really easy to go from one to ten with a handful of backlinks it's exponentially harder to go from you know 80 to 90 um to raise your your authority score by 10 higher up on the scale then referring domains is useful the distinction here backlinks tells you the total number of links to a website referring domains is simply the number of linking websites right because one website could have multiple links um multiple links coming from it to your website or to a competitor's website so it's kind of a rookie mistake that a lot of seos make is they'll look at backlinks and they'll go oh you know my site has ten thousand backlinks i should be ranking perfectly well there's i should be ranking really well well there's ten thousand backlinks could be coming from literally just one website right depending on how it's constructed if it has outgoing footer links etc so referring domains gives you a good just approximation for what kind of link building you're gonna have to do to compete in this niche and then obviously you see monthly visits and keywords so but in this section i really just want to dive into backlinks and so what you would do i mean categories and top anchors are sort of useful but really what i would do is just basically export the um sorry it's been a while actually since i've done backlink analysis here i told you i usually do it in um in ahrefs um so here go to backlinks and then what you're gonna do or what i would do is basically set up some basic uh some simple filters so like i wanna see nofollow and then i don't really care about links per referring domain or actually let's just say one because yeah here we can filter out some of the noise if a site is linking multiple times and then um sponsor does anybody use the sponsor deck i i somebody answered in the comments it's been a while since i looked into that but i thought that was kind of a funny thing that google ruled out and i'm skeptical that anybody's ever gonna use it um and then how's this sorted authority score so it's let's make sure we sort high to low so now it's a lot of high okay interesting so yeah i would have expected that the top links had a higher authority score than 52 apparently not um so this is basically what you do with the backlinks you want to sort by power high to low um i would do i would filter out the nofollow so you just see the do follow um basically nofollow isn't going to pass what we call link juice or link equity so it's a mostly irrelevant link type whereas follow is a powerful link type um so actually here am i filtering only on okay yeah so these should be follow and then so that's my bad industry i filtered on nofollow so these are the do follow links and then um i click export and then from there you're basically just looking through each of these links and you're going okay you know how did the site build this link is it organically earned through a press mention uh an editorial mentioned some kind of content they've created is it a a uh fabricated link through like a guest post is it a directory link and you basically just try and parse out the trends and then what you'll be able to suss out pretty quickly is how is the site building its links um you know and obviously that varies um you might also as i look at these i do because i do see some links going to images yeah so it also probably once i exported i'd probably filter out links to images as well because those tend to be scraper sites and yeah armed with this you'll you'll have a lot of data and you can start working through a competitor's backlinks and figuring out what is our link building strategy and then make an honest assessment as to whether you can out-compete them or not on a link building basis so that's backlinks with some rush now next thing organic keywords organic research so yeah here you're just looking at overall traffic trends man it gets pretty it gets pretty noisy here so every one of these g's represents a google update i believe um you can see we haven't had very many of these and then you can see what they're ranking for right and then this shows you because again i think the key to the key thing to understand is that these search engine results pages they're really dynamic you know now in 2021 more so than ever before so monitoring whether keywords are moving up moving down whether the serp is changing right which i showed you how to do in that initial um in this initial tab here you can look at the server features uh this is really really super important and this is actually one of the reasons i use multiple tools it's because you sort of have to use semrush and maybe a rank track or maybe also ahrefs to triangulate data because what i see from my computer wherever i am in the world is gonna be different than what you see uh when we're searching for the same keyword potentially you know you might get a local result i might not um so there are a lot of like different variables so what that means is it's hard to say that okay this is like single truth for um for google objectively across the entire world if somebody searches best basketball shoes they're gonna see the site in position number two maybe at one point but now google is just a lot more complex and um you might see entirely different results than um than somebody else so that's why sometimes using multiple softwares is really useful because you can take the data from each one and and triangulate it to form a really accurate picture of how your site or competitor site is performing in google now that's for more advanced seos right if you're just looking for something that's directionally pretty damn accurate and that you're going to log into maybe on a daily basis but you're not gonna go super super granular with then just get some rush it's a perfectly uh great research tool it really is or just get ahrefs you know if you find that that suits you a little more um click the link in the video description below take out a free trial of semrush and just see kind of how you like it on a day-to-day basis because a lot of this does come down to what are the individual features you're using and just you might just have like a design preference for one of these over the other you might find one more intuitive than the other um i find some rush a little more intuitive from a keyword perspective um at least with these graphs here i really like these um where you can see you know how a site is ranking uh what percentage of his keywords are in the top three four to ten etc um what else and then yeah position changes is useful because again these serps are pretty dynamic um and then yeah shows you where their traffic is coming from like what specific search features is coming from um yeah so here i mean this is kind of let's take a short answer to a user's query that yeah so just a moment yeah so here you can see like is it ranking for um you know somewhere in the the featured snippet which is where google extracts the data and displays it directly uh in the google search engine obviously more and more of this where google is extracting data but not necessarily giving you a link back to the to the site um it is what it is uh so what i would do if i were running uh keyword analysis is i would export organic keywords that my site ranks for if it ranks for any and then i basically try to identify any keywords between positions two to five or two to six and then those are the ones you really want to focus on after sorting from volume high to low because you're going to get a very large um uptick in traffic if you can bump up from position two to position one where it's bumping up from position nine to position six it's not really going to do much for you in most serps right so that's usually how i use the organic keywords tab is um if it's from my own site i just export and then sort volume high to low and then position create a filter in excel for two to say two to four and then um look at the links go into each of those pages and work out which ones i think i could jump up in rank with a with a handful of links and with competitors it's a similar approach um just looking at volume and basically doing sort of a qualitative assessment of looking for things with high search volume um you know a low amount of links and then some commercial intent right because uh that that's the other thing the last thing i'll mention with organic keywords here is something like this it's got best in it or basketball shoe reviews has reviews in it these are buyer intent keywords right um that shows that there's a strong purchase intent whereas somebody's searching for what is a basketball hoop or where to put a basketball hoop in the front yard they're also potentially looking to buy but they're probably gonna be further up that funnel so really making sure that your keywords have um strong uh buying intent is important that's a rookie mistake i see a lot of uh seos make they get really excited when they write number one for a term and then you look at the term and it's one of very little commercial values so keep that in mind if you're not if you're relatively new to this and keyword gap so this is another useful feature with keywords you can plug in a competitor and then it can show you where the overlap is with that competitor and then um you know where that competitor has more links than you so here i this is really a niche set that i put in the hoops geek so i wouldn't expect them to have a crazy amount of keywords and then where testers is also arguably a niche site but a much much bigger one you know maybe one funded with some venture capital money i don't know but i it's definitely a stronger brand a bigger brand than um than uh the hoops geek so i would expect that this keyword um uh uh keyword circle would be a lot larger so that just sort of gives you an approximate size of a website as far as the keywords it ranks and then you can see okay like where do we overlap where do we not overlap does the site have some keywords that i could potentially steal um and then backlink gap so same um same concept as with the the keyword gap except it's going to show you where a site has backlinks that you don't have um or you know where you share backlinks with the site so really useful feature um the key as with most things link building or uh yeah the key is with muslims link building is you really need to be sure to um you know filter out the noise right so like and that's where filters in excel really come in come in handy so like here you'll see that um if i just relied on what some rush was telling me i put in my guy the hoops geek i put in where testers and then it's basically by default giving me the best prospects for my domain best quote unquote what do i see for the number one recommendation google why because it's probably sorting by authority score high to low is google actually a good place for me to try to get a link for my niche basketball website no not really i mean it's just basically scraped it up into a search index and somewhere along the way there's a link to it so this is where you'll need to um yeah be um make use of filters and yeah filter stuff out pretty aggressively like i'd filter out all github i don't want to see that usda today is potentially interesting um so i jump into that uh something like weebly this is probably user generated content but it's got a high authority score because the root domain weebly.com is really powerful um forbes maybe these guys got a an editorial mentioned in forbes maybe they paid for one um this is also a thing that happens in seo people pay um interns and low paid journalists that work at forbes inc etc for a link placement maybe that that happened um so i look into that uh business insider as well so some of these i would chase down others i wouldn't constant contact that's probably the result just of a newsletter that was sent out by hoopskeek and um that by default i think constant there's a way to set your newsletter to pub to public so that when you send it via constant contact it's then published on the constant contact site so that's probably how this i'm sure this is that that is how this link was um was created so anyway you're just gonna work your way through it um you know behance.net high authority score but probably user generated content maybe these guys had the hoops gank at the hoops geek built a few sketchy backlinks here so i won't really look into this nba.com very interesting where did the hoops where did the hoops geek get a link from at nba.com so you see it's kind of hit or miss right some of these i know from experience not to follow up on others i i absolutely would um but yeah really once you get this a lot of the work's going to be done in excel applying filters sorting authority score high to low and just working out um which of these links you can replicate and which ones you can't so yeah don't be afraid of excel um and don't be and and be sure that you're using a lot of filters there because that's really the only way to sort through all this noise right i mean there are 7 000 referring domains here so you'll need to set up some filters now just because i wanted to show you guys like a comparison this isn't going to be a semrush href side-by-side comparison video i am going to do that um in an upcoming video which i'm going to link to at the end of this so if you want to see that keep watching and that's going to be the next video that shows here at reviews if you're ready to buy go ahead click the link there should be a seven day free trial with discount applied um and if you just wanted a little more info but you don't want to sit through an extensive side-by-side comparison of the new products then this is the sections for you because i'm just going to show you quickly what hoops geek looks like in ahrefs as compared to in semrush so the first thing if we're just doing a side-by-side so let me go back to yeah so here's domain overview this is the default here's the site explorer overview um yeah i guess the first thing is if i were just assigning points for design i think aesthetically the semrush looks a little bit nicer um it just has a slightly more modern looking design to me than hrefs but as far as the ability to capture all the essential information for an seo i think ahrefs probably does that a little bit better so visually i don't find this design as pleasing but as far as me trying to get the information i need which is really ultimately why design really matters that's the purpose of design not whether something looks pretty or not if so if we're looking at just like ease of information access i like address a little bit more um but yeah it's not quite as easy to um drill down into like organic trends uh from the home page as it is in semrush so i i like the organic traffic feature um more in semrush than i do in ahrefs but again a lot of this kind of comes down to personal preference so here you see the same deal right but i guess a future difference is here i can't toggle like if i just wanted to see you know positions one through three i won't be able to do that whereas here they've got these nice filters set up um so that's a point to semrush for sure um and then you know let me just see what the traffic differential is so here semrush is giving me 286k and then here it's giving me a lot a lot lower if this were the case i'd probably just take the average of the what the two tools are telling me uh you know short of actually knowing the webmaster and asking them for their numbers or owning the website yourself that's usually the best you can do or maybe if you did have a site in the niche and you knew from experience because you're comparing semrush or ahrefs traffic to traffic data to what you have in google webmaster tools you know then maybe you could then in that case you could make some educated assumptions about how accurate these either of these tools are or aren't for that particular niche because it does vary by nation by the way if you're wondering where they get their information from um you know some of it's uh some of it they gather themselves like the backlink data for example because ahrefs and rush have bots crawling the internet constantly following links and basically scraping the entire linked internet um but the traffic data they actually buy at least um i i i think the majority of it for in the case of both companies so it's kind of crazy they buy it from a data broker whose name i can't remember right now um but yeah that's how they're getting these these numbers that they're showing you and the data broker that they're buying from they get that data from um i think just uh different plug-ins that people use in chrome and um you know other other browsers so it's it's interesting and and i guess it kind of freaked me out a little bit when i realized that this was essentially bought data at least a lot of it but it is what it is um yeah so let's see and then the last thing i want to show you before we sign off here is just the backlinks so um actually sorry i got ahead of myself one more thing so if we're comparing this is why i said i don't really like authority scores so here these guys have an authority score of 43 whereas ahrefs gives this gives them a domain rank of 35. i tend to trust domain rank more based on what i've seen with this site and the caliber of links it has or kind of the lack of really high caliber links i would be a lot more comfortable putting it at a 35 than a 40 plus like semrush so that's one of the reasons i think ahrefs is slightly um better from a from from purely from a link analysis standpoint for organic traffic for paid traffic i like semrush4 but if i'm just doing link analysis i'd probably prefer some rush so then we'll just compare the backlinks profile and then that will be it for this video and the more extensive um some rush first hrs video will appear um will appear here shortly so yeah to do apples to apples backlink analytics and then i don't want to compare i just want yep so yeah you get these different charts but really what you want to see are why is it yeah sorry i keep missing that and then here i see the backlinks in href so yeah i don't know this just to me it's a little bit noisier and i think semrush doesn't quite collect as many um as as many links as as ahrefs does if i were to do a link analysis i would use ahrefs i do link link type do follow let's compare actually to c um what's my toggle here for follow yes so then i gotta limit it to one so this is giving me 561 and then this is giving me 420 do follows huh that's interesting so semrush assuming i'm using this correctly it's actually showing me more um so maybe the scrollers have improved but also one thing to keep in mind you don't want to like crawler that's going to pick up like every single link necessarily because there are a lot of links that sort of don't matter and shouldn't even be taken into consideration um but yeah and then i sort domain rank had a low and basically worked link opportunities there so yeah for link analysis i definitely prefer ahrefs the interface here is just a little bit less cluttered it's visually easier for me whereas with semrush i do appreciate the the complexity that they have when it comes to traffic analysis and keyword research in particular but for link analysis ahrefs gets the slight edge so that's the video i think some rush is a really good all-in-one seo tool if you're just getting started click the link in the video description below for that seven day free trial i think it works for most people it's gonna work for seo newbies it's gonna work for power users who use multiple softwares and want to you know try angular what they're seeing in semrush hrs and maybe like pro rank tracker and it's going to work for yeah i mean really anybody from casual to expert webmasters and the only thing i would say it doesn't shine in is the the link analysis i think ahrefs does that a little bit better um so if you're just purely looking to build links get ahrefs uh but if you're looking for that all-in-one seo tool that has detailed traffic data and good competitors competitor comparisons semrush is definitely a great choice and in the next video i'm going to show you a more extensive side-by-side comparison so you can really see which product wins um you know with each exact feature and i'll go into a little more detail in each of those so keep watching uh if you are still on the fence and my upcoming semrush hrs video should help you make that final buying decision and then you're off to the races analyzing traffic building links and running seo like the boss that you are all right thanks everybody