If you are wondering whether SEMRush is worth the investment, you are in the right place to find the answer.
My short answer is “Yes, it’s worth it”.
The problem is that the cheapest plan starts at $99.95/month and if you are a small startup or a blogger, this price would probably not fit within your monthly marketing budget.
This price acts as a gate that keeps those outside wondering what they could achieve with SEO if they were allowed in. It creates sort of a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).
For years, I was one of them. When I just started out my own blog in 2013, my full-time job salary was just £18,000/ year. 😭 And I thought I could get as good for free, so for a long time I used Google Search Console.
But when I moved to an SEO agency in London, I had access to a SEMRush agency account for a wide variety of clients.
And I always wondered, why is SEMRush so expensive? Why are so many people (and companies) willing to pay SEMRush’s high price?
Being an SEO who needs to generate traffic and rank keywords on top positions on Google in extremely competitive industries, SEMRush for me is a must-have tool.
Also, every client I worked for already had a SEMRush account. And I also ended up becoming a SEMRush guest author.
Ready to go through my journey?
SEMRush pitch
When I first used SEMRush in 2013, I was sold completely.
As the friendly Account Manager trained me in using the tool, he showed its ranking reports, the keywords research tools and reporting capabilities.
I added 500 new keywords to a project, then waited a few minutes for the data to show, then I started to use their SEO writing assistant tool and optimise my content.
I even started a backlinks audit using their auditing tool and I got alarmed by the number of “toxic links” that SEMRush was showing. I thought there was something really wrong with my backlink profile and SEMRush finally discovered it!
I had the feeling that SEMRush was really helping me in discovering new issues that no other tool was able to discover.
So during the whole experience felt like “I need this tool, it’ll help me getting to the bottom of the reason my sites are not ranking so well”.
PRO Membership (SEMrush pricing is $99.95 for a month if you pay annually)
SEMrush Pro membership is restricted to many of its features, including a three thousand reports generation limit for keyword and domain analytics and three projects.
The Pro membership users are also bound to limit 250 new keywords tracking that you want to target into your project.
GURU Membership (SEMrush pricing is 191$ for a month if you pay annually)
The other SEMrush membership plan is next to the PRO membership plan and is more generous in terms of limitations. The primary difference between the PRO and GURU membership plan is about the Content Marketing specification.
With the Guru plan, SEMrush also offers access to your historical data. The historical data feature lets you check your site performance with time and check for any historical comparison with your competitors.
Guru Plan enables you to download your SEO branded reports for your clients.
There is a reduced number of limitations on the GURU membership SEMrush plan. The limits are as follows:
- 5,000 reports per day
- More projects, up to 15.
- Keyword tracking limit of 1,500.
Business Membership (SEMrush pricing is 374$ for a month if you pay yearly)
If you have a large business and have a good client base, and are looking for some exceptional SEO service, your business membership plan can benefit you.
SEMrush business membership cost is a 399$ per month and a bit higher than other membership plans.
Business membership is also backed with e-commerce tools, including product listing ads information that gives you access to evaluate the advertiser’s performance against any e-commerce ad campaigns.
The Business Membership plan is also more generous in terms of limitations compared with the GURU membership plan. The limits under a business membership plan are as follows:
- Track 5,000 keywords in a day
- Manage 25 projects at once.
Which is a perfect choice for you?
Despite the high price for the most basic plan that would allow me to track just 250 keywords in total, the level of efficiency this would add to my SEO campaigns is significant.
I would argue that no SEMRush account by itself is worth the monthly price of $119 (especially if there are alternative SEO tools almost for free).
SEMRush real value is in the convenience of having a large number of tools in one place.
What people are really paying for at SEMRush
SEMRush collects and analyses information from search engine results pages (SERPs) using a proprietary algorithm that has been developed and optimised over time. Every month, the rankings data for the keywords in each of our global databases will be refreshed.
This way, you know that the information you take from Semrush is based on the actual rankings of Google’s most recent results pages, per country.
Now, with 50 tools across digital marketing, SEO, PPC and social media, SEMRush has the ambition to offer everything digital marketers need to do their job a little bit better.
When considered the added value of having so many tools in one place, the high price tag becomes more digestible.
For me, doing keywords research and adding those keywords in the project, then optimising my content for it, make my job much easier than having three separate tools doing three different things.
The added variety is also very handy.
Need to check if your previously published content can be further optimised? Use the Semantic content tool and optimise the page for better ranking.
Need to reach out to bloggers and website owners to share your latest content piece? SEMRush got you covered: you can use their link building tool.
The good thing about this feature is SEMrush offers a connection to send the emails to these potential websites within the metric. It also tracks the progress and response from each email.
The SEMrush also provides email addresses for these potential websites. This feature is an exceptional feature-no complaint here, and it creates a strong argument for using SEMrush.
Link building is an extremely crucial step for any successful site.
If you tend to spend your money on several SEO tools to accomplish a certain number of tasks, SEMRush can easily be worth the price, as other tools cost each $30/month.
Beside efficiency and variety of tools, SEMRush is also probably the best SEO tool out there for keywords strategy.
The Venn diagrams showing keywords gaps and opportunities can visualise your own SEO strategy in a matter of a few seconds.
And if any other SEO tool also offers the Keyword Gap Analysis, it’s because SEMRush was the first one to introduce it to the market, and the other tools just copied it.
SEMRush keeps creating new tools every month
New SEMRush tools are now being launched every month. Either via users’ feedback or via their own product development teams, SEMRush is very active with creating new SEO automations.
If there is something you want and a large number of people ask for it, SEMRush delivers it, without changing its pricing.
SEO pros are routinely seen to ask SEMRush for new tools and automations on Twitter.
SEMrush is currently supporting 50 marketing tools for its multi-functional users and professionals.
This massive feature set and all in one marketing tool pack seem challenging to navigate and find the perfect feature for the specific requirements.
Still, the convenient user interface is already user-oriented and easy to use.
The good thing about the tool is that SEMrush frequently updates the interface to improve the user experience and simplify navigation.
How SEMRush makes SEO easier
It’s 09.00am in the morning and I am exchanging emails with a link building agency.
“Hi Luca, I updated your links on the website, they are live now”.
Of course, for me to check this update and make sure everything was set up correctly, I open their URL and look for my link being added.
There is a problem: this sort of task can become repetitive and very time consuming when the amount of links is in the hundreds every week.
That’s when SEMRush real time link building report comes handy.
Backlink analysis in real time
Backlinks play a crucial role in the site’s performance on the Search engine results page.
SEMrush claims to possess 32 trillion databases of backlinks. If this is an accurate claim, then SEMrush is the best tool for backlink analysis as compared with its competitors having smaller backlink databases, including Ahrefs.
As I am actively building links every day, I use SEMRush link building reports to make sure my links are added to the right websites and they have the “dofollow” label in the HTML code.
When I check these reports, I always feel they are 100% accurate with updates going on every day.
In an industry like SEO where plently of people delete your links for whatever reason, being able to monitor in real time is very helpful.
Rank tracking
Rank tracking is a feature in SEMrush that offers you critical information against the site performance over time on google for any specific keyword.
SEMrush also supports the same feature in your competitors’ case and allows you to compare your ranking performance with your competitor’s performance over specific keywords.
The feature is listed as the Position tracker in SEMrush that supports this comparison. You will also get an email about the rank tracking feature over time.
Writing Assistant
SEMrush offers you a set of content management tools that allow you to find new keywords, check for your current content from the search engine optimization view and other Keywords for the ranking sites.
SEMrush also supports the writing assistant feature, which reviews your content and offers suggestions.
You can write with SEMrush writing assistant and avail their real-time assistance as well.
Site auditing
SEMrush’s awesome site auditing feature lets you audit your site to find out the potential issues contributing negatively to the site ranking.
SEMrush’s site auditing feature audits your website. It results in constructive recommendations for your site, including plagiarized content, Secure socket layer issues, Empty headings, keyword stuffing problems, and low-speed loading.
SEMrush also offers the proper reasoning behind these recommendations to help you improve your site SEO. SEMrush site auditing feature is superb and makes it an exceptional tool against its competitors.
Domain analysis
Every Search Engine Optimization project begins from the fundamental domain evaluation.
Domain evaluation or analysis means taking a basic overview of domain quality for search engine optimization.
There are two ways to perform domain analysis, the domain analysis of our website to find out the modifications to be made for a good SEO or the domain evaluation for a competitor’s website to judge how difficult it is to de-rank them?
Domain analysis is also helpful to find out the high-quality websites as these High-quality websites can boost third party site-performance in the engine with the help of backlinks.
Authority scores provide excellent and quick knowledge about the site-quality.
Semrush measures the authority scores by calculating the complete backlink data of a site, the website’s traffic details, and the number of organic searches against the site’s content.
Is SEMRush a good investment?
My short answer is “Yes, SEMRush is worth it”.
However, you might want to consider other SEO tools affordable alternatives if your budget doesn’t allow it.
The main thing I would say is that SEMRush has lots and lots of tools that you probably won’t use, if you only do SEO.
At the moment, SEMrush is currently offering three of its paid membership plans for its users, starting prices from $99 USDs to $399 USDs for a single month.
SEMrush also provides annual payment discounts; the current deal is about 16% of the total costs.
For instance, if you are looking for a PRO membership for $99.95 USD per month, SEMrush offers a $190 USDs discount upon annual payment. Also, it provides a free seven-day SEMrush trial period for its users.
