Semrush is a popular SEO and marketing tool suite that specializes in keyword research, competitor analysis, LLM visibility analysis, and Google Ad campaign optimization.
But it is MUCH more than that:
Semrush is a platform that can help you formulate, maintain, and improve your digital marketing campaigns.
Through its 55+ tools and reports, Semrush helps you optimize your website to reach the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs). And it gives your brand tools and insights to help you show up in AI responses.
This guide covers all of Semrush’s key features and functions. For my personal insights and final thoughts on Semrush, check out my detailed Semrush Review.
Semrush can be used for everything in SEO and digital marketing.
From identifying target keywords and analyzing your competitor’s backlink profile to monitoring your social media presence, Semrush does it all.
Semrush should not be viewed as a singular tool.
The software boasts a range of toolkits, each of which contains unique features that can be used to tweak, monitor, and improve your SEO and digital marketing campaigns.
The toolkits cover:
SEO
AI visibility
Traffic and marketing
Local SEO
Content marketing
Social media marketing
Paid advertising
It sounds like a lot (and it is), but the toolkit system means you only need to sign up for the ones that are most important to your business.
To help you out, I’ve devised this ultimate guide to bring clarity to the many facets of Semrush’s various tools. I won’t go through every tool in this guide, but I will go over the main ones in each toolkit.
Along the way, I’ll show you how you can use Semrush to improve your website’s online visibility. And I’ll explain how to use Semrush to perform keyword research, conduct site audits, compare your domain to your competitors, and more.
SEO Dashboard
The SEO Dashboard breaks down all the features of the SEO Toolkit into one neat interface.
You can use it to get a brief overview of your website’s online presence.
The top banner shows your website’s AI search and organic search performance.
How many organic and paid keywords your site is ranking for
Your referring domains and backlinks
Other sections of the SEO Dashboard include:
Position Tracking
Site Audit
On-Page SEO Checker
Backlink Audit
Traffic Analytics
To put it simply—the SEO Dashboard allows you to view key metrics quickly.
You can access the individual sections by clicking on any of the widgets for a deeper dive. (You can also choose which widgets display on this dashboard.)
Competitive Research
Semrush offers various competitive research tools to help you:
Find competitors
Track their performance
Identify opportunities to beat them in search results
Get ideas for link building
Let’s take a closer look at what you can do each of these tools:
Domain Overview
When it comes to competitive analysis, few tools give you a head start quite like Domain Overview.
This feature provides you with a full breakdown of how a domain is performing.
By identifying your site’s strengths and weaknesses compared to your competitors, you’ll gain insights into what you need to do to outperform them.
The Overview report provides a thorough breakdown of a domain’s performance. At the top, you’ll see two key panels: an AI Search panel showing your visibility in tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, and an SEO panel with your authority score, organic and paid search traffic, and backlinks. (Like you saw for your own site on your SEO Dashboard.)
Clicking on one of these widgets, such as “Backlinks,” will take you to a more in-depth analysis in a corresponding tool (like Backlink Analytics — more on that soon).
Further down the page, there are a ton of other useful insights you can find, like:
Organic and paid traffic distribution by country, and changes in this over time
Top paid and organic keywords and organic position distribution
Keywords by intent
Your main competitors (organic and paid)
Referring domains
Indexed pages
Branded traffic trends
Backlinks, including information on the type (text, image, etc) and whether it’s tagged as nofollow
Jumping to the Compare domains tab, you can size your domain up against up to four of your top competitors.
The Growth report lets you see changes in a domain’s paid traffic, organic traffic, keywords, and backlink profile over a specific period.
Finally, the Compare by countries tab lets you compare up to five countries at a time.
This gives you an insight into how well your website is doing in each location.
Pretty neat, right?
Organic Research
The “Organic Research” feature put Semrush on the map.
And it still works GREAT.
Here’s how to use it:
On the Overview tab, you’ll see lots of useful metrics about the website you enter into the tool, including:
How many keywords they rank for
An estimate of their monthly traffic
How much that traffic would cost if they used paid ads to get it instead of organic search engine optimization
How much branded and non-branded traffic they get
On the Positions tab, you’ll see all the keywords a domain ranks for (and where they rank).
After all, if your competitor ranks for these keywords, so can you. At least, with a solid SEO strategy.
By default, Semrush shows you how much traffic was driven to the website via the chosen keyword for the chosen time period. And all the keywords for which the site ranks in the top 100.
But with the positions filter, you can narrow this down to those ranking #1, in the top 3, top 10, and more:
Other filtering options include filtering by SERP features (like local packs and video carousels). This lets you understand where your rivals are appearing in the likes of AI Overviews.
And you can also filter for specific keywords—super handy for omitting keywords that contain your competitor’s brand name (which you’re unlikely to rank for).
Keyword Gap
The Keyword Gap tool shows you a list of keywords that up to four of your competitors rank for.
When you find a keyword that multiple competitors rank for, you know that it’s one you probably have a good shot at ranking for too.
By default, this tool shows you keywords that your competitors rank for in the top 100. Obviously, if two competitors rank between positions 40-50 for the same keywords, this isn’t super helpful because you want to rank in the top 10.
That’s why I set up the position filter to ONLY see keywords that both sites rank in the top 10 for:
And that simple filter gives me a much more helpful list of keywords to work with:
Still got a lot of keywords even after applying the Position filter?
Refine your list further by applying the volume, KD, and advanced filters.
Backlink Gap
Want to know which domains to target for backlinks?
Backlink Gap allows you to compare four competitors’ backlink profiles simultaneously. So you can find opportunities to get links to your own site.
Just enter your domain and up to four competitors (like the Keyword Gap tool above). You’ll then see a list of all the websites pointing at the domains you entered.
By default, these are organized in order of how many of the target sites have a link from that domain.
Sites that are linking to more than one of your competitors are decent candidates for your own link building campaigns.
Because if a site links to four of your competitors, there’s a high chance they might link to your site as well.
Pro tip: When comparing the linking domains, be sure to take into account their Authority Score (AS) and monthly visits. Higher is typically better in both cases.
I’ll come back to more ways you can use Semrush for link building soon. For now, let’s dive deeper into its keyword research capabilities.
Keyword Research
Semrush’s keyword database contains more than 27.5 billion search terms. And this database powers the suite of helpful tools to help you find opportunities, put a strategy in place, and monitor your results.
Keyword Overview
So far I’ve covered features that revolve around reverse engineering a competitor’s website.
There’s a good reason for that: reverse engineering is Semrush’s specialty.
That said, you can also use Semrush like a traditional keyword overview tool.
In other words:
You can pop a target keyword (or list of up to 100 keywords) into the Keyword Overview tool and get a list of keyword ideas and metrics for each one.
You can also enter your domain for personalized results.
For example, here’s what I get when I put “backlinks” into Semrush:
But what do these metrics all mean? Well, let me break it all down for you:
Volume shows the estimated monthly search volume of the keyword in a specified country
Global volume is the total number of times the keyword is featured in search queries across the globe (again, as an estimate).
Keyword difficulty is an estimate of how easily you could rank for the keyword (you’ll get a personalized one if you entered your domain along with the keywords)
Topical authority (personalized) indicates how aligned the keyword is with your domain overall
Intent tells you what kind of searches the keyword features in (i.e., informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional)
CPC (cost per click) reveals how much it would cost for a PPC ad targeting this keyword
Com. Density indicates how much competition there is between advertisers who are bidding for this particular keyword
Because I entered my domain (backlinko.com), the tool also shows some personalized metrics. Like Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD%) and Potential Traffic.
Potential Traffic analyzes my domain to predict how much traffic my site could attract if it ranked for the keywords I’m researching. To do that, it considers my domain’s PKD%, Authority Score, potential position, estimated traffic values, historical Semrush data, and the current competitors on the SERP.
And from the Keyword Overview tool, I can see estimated traffic predictions for both individual keywords and entire topics.
Spoiler: I do target this term. And I do rank in the top 10 (twice).
If you scroll down, you’ll also see some keyword ideas covering variations of the target term and related questions. You even get the option to start building a keyword strategy (more on that soon).
Below that is a SERP analysis, displaying key metrics for the pages ranking for the target term (like Authority Score, backlinks, and search traffic):
Towards the bottom, you’ll find even more data about that keyword from a PPC ad perspective. Including Product Listing Ad (PLA) copies (if relevant), standard ad copies, and a history of bidding activity for that term.
So you can use the Keyword Overview tool for both SEO and PPC campaigns.
Keyword Magic Tool
This Semrush feature does one simple thing:
It generates A LOT of keyword ideas.
For example, when I put “digital marketing” into it…
…I get a massive list of 195K related keywords:
But:
195K is a lot of keywords to sift through yourself.
Fortunately, you can sort this keyword list by search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and more. (You’ll also see similar personalized metrics as you did in the Keyword Overview tool if you enter your domain.)
First, you can sort by match type. By default, you’ll see “Broad Match” keywords. Essentially: all the keywords Semrush found that are related to your seed keyword.
For example, searching for “best running shoes for men” with this option selected could bring results like “best trail running shoes for men.”
You can narrow things down by switching to:
Phrase Match: To see keywords containing the exact keyword or phrase in various orders
Exact Match: To only see terms containing the exact keyword or phrase in that exact order
Related: To see a list of keywords that are similar to the one you entered
All Keywords: To see all of the above
Another super useful filter (especially for blogs) is the option to switch to question keywords:
This is great for finding long tail keywords with low competition.
Super cool.
But another reason the Keyword Magic Tool is so useful is that it allows you to explore different keyword groups and subgroups related to your primary keyword.
You can find these keyword groups in the menu to the left of the main table. And you can organize them by number or volume.
By clicking on one of the groups, you can examine suggested topic clusters related to the main keyword.
For example, when searching for “Paleo Diet,” one of the main topics that Semrush identifies is “Weight.” This then shows you all the relevant subtopics of “Paleo Diet” and “Weight.”
This is great for building topic clusters. Which is a useful way to boost your site’s authority.
Speaking of topic clusters…
Keyword Strategy Builder
The Keyword Strategy Builder (previously Keyword Manager) is an advanced tool that helps you stay on top of your keywords and seamlessly turn your keyword research into topic research.
This makes it easy to put together content ideas that can bring you more traffic.
You simply enter your target keywords into the tool and it’ll create a map of pillar pages and cluster pages. You can then use these to create authoritative content for your website covering your core topics.
Pro tip: You can also add keywords to lists through other tools in the Semrush suite, like Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Overview, and Organic Research.
Scroll down to see a list of pillar pages and cluster pages along with key metrics for each one. Like intent, keyword difficulty, and search volume.
The Keyword Strategy Builder can therefore save you A LOT of time when it comes to planning new content.
Position Tracking
This is Semrush’s built-in rank-tracking tool.
You can use it to find out how your website is ranking for specific keywords geographically and on what devices.
The main statistics the Position Tracking report provides are visibility, estimated traffic, and average position.
You can also use it to track your local SEO efforts and create featured snippet reports.
It’s a super handy way to keep track of where you rank for important keywords. And the tool will show you position changes over time.
This makes it easy to find pages to update that have seen significant drops. And capitalize on areas where you’ve made big gains.
Organic Traffic Insights
Finally, we have Organic Traffic Insights.
This tool pulls together organic search traffic data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Semrush.
The Organic Traffic dashboard then displays your top 50 landing pages organized by session count.
This is pretty cool in itself, but that’s not all this tool provides you with.
With Organic Traffic Insights, you gain valuable pre-click data, such as where you rank and how many impressions you get, thanks to the GSC integration.
You also gain insightful post-click data, such as goal completion on landing pages and bounce rate—pretty neat!
Importantly, you also get to see which keywords your pages rank for. Both those tracked by Google Search Console (GSC):
And those that Semrush finds you ranking for:
This helps you uncover keywords marked “not provided” in Google Analytics.
So you get a full picture of how your content is performing. And which terms are driving you traffic.
Link Building
Semrush’s link building features let you analyze a site’s backlink profile, anchor text usage, prevalence of nofollow links, overall link authority, and more.
Let’s take a look at how Semrush’s tools can help with your next link building campaign.
Backlink Analytics
When you enter a domain into Backlink Analytics, you receive a full breakdown of the site’s backlink profile.
The Overview tab provides you with mini-reports. This is really helpful if you’re in a rush. The reports allow you to assess the site’s overall backlink profile and also identify broken links.
You can use the Backlinks tab to get a full list of all the links pointing to that domain:
And the Referring Domains tab shows a similar report. This time listing all the unique websites linking to the target domain.
This makes it a powerful tool for understanding your competitors’ backlink profiles. And to potentially find link building opportunities for your own site.
Backlink Audit
Link building campaigns can appear spammy if they aren’t done properly. That’s why I love using Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to monitor new backlinks pointing to my site.
You can make sure your backlink profile appears natural (i.e., the opposite of spammy) by disavowing toxic links as and when you attain them.
Put your domain into this tool and get an in-depth report on all the links that lead to your site — the good, the bad, and the downright toxic.
The “Overall Toxicity Score” grades the overall health of your backlink profile.
It breaks this score into three sections: non-toxic, potentially toxic, and toxic.
Ideally, you should have the “non-toxic” percentage in the high 90s and the “toxic” bar at 0%.
But every site naturally picks up some dud links, and you don’t always need to worry about the ones marked toxic.
But if you do see any number indicating toxic backlinks, click on it to get a breakdown of the suspicious domains to check them out for yourself.
If you think the link is toxic, you can select it and click the “Disavow” button.
You can download this list as a .txt file which you can then submit to Google Search Console.
Important: Tread carefully with disavow files. They’re not usually needed, as Google can often spot toxic links and ignore them. If you use Google’s disavow tool incorrectly, it can harm your site’s performance.
Link Building Tool
Semrush’s link building tool is a streamlined service that helps you find and engage with external sites for potential link building opportunities.
Using data gathered from the target keywords and competitors you enter, the tool seeks out authoritative sites that could provide you with a backlink.
Here’s how it works:
First, you enter keywords that you want to rank for:
Next, add your competitors’ websites:
The tool then analyzes your competitors’ backlink profiles to determine the kind of backlinks you need to compete.
Then it collates all the link building opportunities it deems suitable for your website. You’ll see an overview of the data, but you can head to the Prospects tab to see more detail.
Any backlink opportunities you like the look of, you can add to the “In progress” list.
You can connect with these backlink opportunities through the outreach module. Here, you can use the message templates to construct an effective message addressed to the target domain’s owner.
Finally, it helps you keep track of the backlinks you get. Once you’ve acquired some backlinks, you can monitor them to ensure they stay live.
On Page & Tech SEO
You can use Semrush’s on page and technical SEO tools to give your website a health check.
Below, I take a closer look at how you can use these tools to boost your website’s performance.
Site Audit
SEO site audits should be a regular part of your digital marketing strategy. And Semrush’s Site Audit tool makes this super easy to do.
Use the Site Audit tool to identify serious errors that can impact your on-page and technical SEO.
What’s really cool about the Site Audit tool is that you can compare crawls to understand how your site’s health is changing over time.
But my favorite part of Semrush’s SEO audits is that they run automatically.
You don’t need to remember to run an audit every month. The tool does it for you. So you can stay on top of technical issues that could be harming your site’s performance.
On Page SEO Checker
The On Page SEO Checker analyzes your content for traditional on-page SEO opportunities (like optimizing your title tags and H1 tags).
But it also lets you know about semantically-related terms that you should include in your content.
And sites that you should try to get backlinks from.
It works as a checklist of things you can do to improve your overall SEO strategy.
Log File Analyzer
Semrush’s Log File Analyzer determines how Google’s crawler interacts with your website.
For a new webpage to get indexed and start ranking, Googlebot first needs to crawl it.
When crawling a domain, search engines have a limited “crawl budget” to spend.
The Log File Analyzer can show you how search engine bots (like Googlebot) are spending this crawl budget.
It highlights your most crawled webpages and how bot activity differs on the desktop and mobile versions of your site.
There are many ways to make the best use of your site’s crawl budget. You can improve your website’s architecture, improve site speed, and strategically use internal links.
But how do you know where to begin?
The Log File Analyzer can help you identify the weakest parts of your website structure. It highlights navigational issues that are preventing Google from finding and crawling your important pages.
To use the Log File Analyzer, you need to get the log file for your domain. You can get your log files using an FTP client.
You’ll find them in your /access_log or /logs folder.
Pro tip: Ensure that this file is in the access.log file format and is unarchived.
You also need to make sure that your log file size is below 1 GB, as the Analyzer won’t accept anything bigger than this.
Once uploaded, you can review Googlebot activity on your pages over a chosen period of days.
And you can see data like how many hits each page receives, crawl frequency, and when the page was last crawled.
This lets you identify site errors and find the pages that aren’t getting much attention from Googlebot.
You can then update your pages or fix site errors to improve your crawlability—and potentially your site’s performance.
AI SEO
Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit is designed to make it easier to monitor, understand, and improve your visibility in AI tools like ChatGPT, and in AI search interfaces like Perplexity and Google AI Overviews/AI Mode.
It’s a pretty expansive toolkit already, but it’s likely to evolve over time and get even better. With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of the toolkit’s main features.
Deep Dive: If you want a comprehensive guide on how to get the most out of the AI Visibility Toolkit (with examples), check out Backlinko’s video tutorial.
Visibility Overview
The Visibility Overview tab gives you exactly what you’d expect: an overview of your brand’s (or your rival’s) visibility in AI search.
This data will populate over time, and you’ll be able to track how your brand’s overall AI visibility is growing as you perform AI optimization.
But toward the bottom of this tab, you’ll also get an overview of any site’s visibility at the topic and prompt levels.
This can help you understand where your or your competitor’s site is currently being mentioned. And you can use it to identify topic opportunities and where you could be cited as a source.
Competitor Research
The Competitor Research tab lets you drill down into prompt visibility for multiple sites at a time.
Click the “Missing” filter and you’ll see which topics or prompts your rivals are appearing in that you’re not.
You can also click the “Monitor” button to track this prompt over time in the “Prompt Tracking” tool.
This lets you understand how your visibility changes for key prompts and topics as you optimize for them.
Brand Performance
The Brand Performance dashboard is where you can set up a project for your domain to get even more AI visibility insights.
Here, you’ll get tailored recommendations to improve your visibility in AI tools along with insights into your share of voice versus your competitors.
You can also choose which AI tools to monitor this for, including:
ChatGPT (with and without search enabled)
Google AI Mode
Gemini
Perplexity
Perception
The Perception tab is where you’ll find useful information about how the AI tools actually perceive your brand — not just where you show up.
It’ll show you whether your brand has favorable overall sentiment in these tools, and how your sentiment score has changed over time compared to your rivals.
You’ll also get recommendations on where you could improve your sentiment.
These improvements can shape how AI tools represent your business to users. And over time, better brand sentiment means better chances of earning clicks and conversions from these platforms.
Questions
Finally, the Questions tab shows you examples of questions real users are asking about your industry.
Answering these questions could improve your AI visibility by giving your target audience the answers they need.
This can lead to more mentions and citations, increased brand awareness, and, again, more potential clicks and conversions.
Local SEO
Semrush’s Local Toolkit offers a few different ways to optimize your local SEO presence. From Google Business Profile optimization to local rank tracking.
These allow you to effectively manage your online business reputation on a local level. Let’s take a closer look.
GBP Optimization
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is one of the most important aspects of your overall local SEO strategy.
And there are many ways to optimize your profile to boost your visibility.
Semrush’s GBP optimization tool makes it a breeze. Here’s how:
Just connect your GBP to your Semrush account and fill out some basic information about your business.
And you’ll then get access to useful insights about your profile:
But the next tool is where Semrush’s local SEO toolkit really comes in handy.
Listing Management
Listing Management helps establish and maintain your local listings.
If you’re yet to submit your business data to directories, Listing Management can do it for you.
Through Listing Management, you can register your business with over 70 directories in the US and 40+ international ones. This includes major platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google, Bing, and Apple.
By editing your business data in one place, you avoid discrepancies in NAP data (Name, Address, and Phone number) that are common when submitting data to multiple directories.
It also makes updating and editing your listings easy as your business grows and expands to new locations, streamlining your local SEO efforts.
On top of that, the tool provides an easy way to monitor your existing listings.
So you can quickly and easily see which directories you’re listed in. And if any have any issues you need to fix.
Map Rank Tracker
The Map Rank Tracker is Semrush’s powerful tool for understanding how you’re currently performing in local search results.
It shows you a heatmap of your current rankings for target keywords in a certain area.
So you can quickly understand how your site ranks down to the street level. And compare it to previous scans to see where you’ve lost and gained rankings.
You can also select one of your competitors to see how their rankings have changed over time.
You can head to the Competitors tab for a quick share of voice comparison with your top rivals in the area.
The Map Rank Tracker is ideal if you’re a local business that wants to monitor the results of your local SEO campaigns.
Review Management
Finally, the Review Management tool collects all of your business directory reviews. So you can assess and manage your online reputation.
First, there’s a graph to show your overall star rating:
Then, you can read and respond to all the reviews—without leaving the tool.
Semrush’s Advertising Toolkit can help get your Google Ads campaign up and running. Or it can help you optimize your existing campaigns for better results.
Let’s take a closer look at the key paid ads tools on offer:
Ads Launch Assistant
The Ads Launch Assistant is a tool that can help you get more out of your Google Ads campaigns.
It’ll provide keyword suggestions based on your URL, language, and location:
And it’ll even use AI to help you generate high-converting copy:
Once your campaign is live, you can monitor its results within the app through a simple visual report:
Advertising Research
Many people use Semrush strictly for SEO campaigns. But it’s actually a REALLY good PPC tool.
Specifically, with the Advertising Research tool, you can see which keywords your competition bids on most often:
In this case, you can see that Nike bids on a ton of branded terms.
But they also bid on targeted non-branded queries.
Even better, you can see the exact ads that they’re running on those terms:
And if you find an ad that’s been running for months or years, you KNOW that it’s probably driving results for that competitor.
So you can gain insights from these successful ads to use in your own Google Ads campaigns.
You can also get an estimate of how much your competition spends to run ads, based on CPC data from Google Ads itself.
You can even get an idea of how these bidding habits change throughout the year, using the Ads History section.
This could help you time your own campaign to take advantage of months when the competition promotes their product less.
Combine that with the Position Changes report, which shows you how the domain’s ad positions have improved or declined over time.
In the Competitors tab, you’ll find the Competitive Positioning Map.
This captures the spending habits of all the leading sites in your niche, which gives you a clear idea of how to budget your own PPC campaigns.
On the Ads Copies tab, you can review the competitor’s ads that are currently live.
With this data, you can learn how to word and structure your own PPC campaigns.
Ads History
Ads History allows you to review your competitors’ advertising campaigns based on a specific keyword.
Once you enter the keyword that will serve as the basis of your ad campaign, you can view other domains that have used this keyword in their own ads.
You can also review how much traffic each competitor pulls in from these ads, how much it costs, and how they ranked over the past 12 months.
Why is this useful for your own Google Ads campaign?
Because analyzing past ads can help you ace your own campaigns.
Study high-traffic campaigns for keyword inspiration, timing insights, and copy structure tips.
And then use low-traffic campaigns to learn what you should avoid.
PLA Research
Before you launch a Google Shopping ad campaign, you can gain a sneak peek into your competitors’ efforts via the PLA Research tool.
The PLA (Product Listing Ad) tool analyzes a domain’s Google Shopping ads.
This tool will gather data on target keywords used, and shopping ad positioning:
And even their product prices:
The tool condenses this helpful data into an easily digestible report, helping you better strategize your own Google Shopping ad campaigns.
AdClarity
The Semrush AdClarity app is part of the App Center (which I’ll discuss in more detail later on).
With the AdClarity app, you can get useful insights into competitor ad campaigns across multiple platforms—not just Google.
You’ll get an overview of the competitor’s ad spend and where they’re spending it:
Then you’ll see the ad creatives they use. Along with key metrics for each one, like spend, and the number of impressions it received:
You can even see a breakdown of their individual campaigns, how long they ran each one for, and how much they spent:
This all makes AdClarity an incredibly powerful competitive analysis tool for a wide range of campaigns.
Social Media
Semrush’s Social Toolkit offers a range of features designed specifically to audit and help improve your business’s social media presence.
It provides all the tools to schedule posts, analyze performance, and monitor your messages.
The Social Dashboard gives you a quick overview of your social media statistics. Once you connect all your social media accounts, you’ll be able to check your total audience and engagement levels.
But here’s everything else the Social Toolkit includes:
Social Poster
Maintaining a social media presence can be difficult.
If you’re a small business and don’t have a dedicated social media manager, it’s easy to forget to update your various accounts regularly.
Social Poster ensures you never miss a beat with its scheduling calendar, which allows you to schedule posts weeks in advance.
Once posted, you can monitor individual post performance using Social Poster’s analytical data.
You can do this for accounts including:
Instagram
Facebook
TikTok
LinkedIn
X (Twitter)
Google Business Profile
Pinterest
You can use the Social Poster to deliver posts at specified times to catch your target audience (more on that shortly).
Social Tracker
Social Tracker is Semrush’s social media competitor analysis tool. It also works well as a performance indicator, mapping the success of your social media posts and engagement levels.
The main aim of the Social Tracker is to identify what’s working for your social media channels – and where you need to improve.
Social Tracker is compatible with:
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Instagram
YouTube
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Social Tracker shows you what, when, and how often your competitors are posting. So you can understand what’s working for them and use that to guide your own strategy.
Social Tracker shows you what, when, and how often your competitors are posting. So you can understand what’s working for them and use that to guide your own strategy.
Social Content Insights
Semrush’s Social Content Insights tool makes it simple and digestible to monitor and analyze social media content.
Helping you keep track of key engagement metrics across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn.
The tool lets you tag individual posts too. So you can monitor different parts of your social presence with greater ease and accuracy.
For example, you could tag all of your recipe posts across multiple platforms to understand how that content resonates with your audience compared to your cookware guides.
By easily monitoring the posts’ performance over time and analyzing various engagement metrics.
Social Analytics
Social Analytics gives you a more in-depth look at your social media performance.
The Overview tab lets you compare your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok audiences.
This main section uses graphs to highlight new followers, post reach, post engagement, and engagement rate.
There are also focus tabs for each of your social media accounts. Here, you can view a more in-depth breakdown of the performance level of each of your socials.
You can review everything from link clicks to reactions here.
You’ll also gain powerful insights about your audience, including when they’re online.
This makes it easy to understand when the best times to post are. And you can use these insights to schedule posts with the Social Poster well in advance.
Social Content AI
Semrush’s Social Content AI tool offers an easy way to boost your social media presence with the power of artificial intelligence.
The tool analyzes your website URL and/or brand description to provide you with 100+ new post ideas each day.
All sorted by topic:
You can generate social posts for platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn.
And you can provide a tone of voice—even the type of post you’d like to create.
Once the tool generates a draft, you can regenerate, rephrase, shorten, or expand it to suit your specific brand’s needs. You can even add visuals.
The Social Content AI tool allows time-limited business owners to maintain a consistent social posting schedule.
Influencer Analytics
The final component of Semrush’s social media toolkit is designed to help you find the right influencers to work with to grow your brand presence.
Influencer Analytics is on the Semrush App Center, and it helps you understand who would be a good fit for your business. And how much it might cost to work with them.
Choose the perfect match based on insights like audience size, cost, and engagement rate.
And even get insights into the best days and times to post with that influencer.
Plus, you can even track how your competitors are advertising through influencers.
This data can be incredibly useful for forming lucrative influencer marketing strategies.
Content Marketing
Semrush’s Content Toolkit helps you overcome creative blocks in your content marketing campaigns. It lets you create content that is optimized for both users and search engines with ease.
Let’s take a closer look at the tools on offer:
Topic Finder
The Topic Finder tool finds content ideas for you, complete with data about the number of keywords for that topic, the total search volume, and how difficult it would be to rank for.
Once you find a topic that’s relevant to your site, click the “Start writing” button to send it to the next stage.
SEO Brief Generator
The SEO Brief Generator can create a full content brief based on the topic you chose in the Topic Finder, or for a completely new seed keyword.
It’ll automatically add:
Competitor articles to analyze
Secondary keywords to target
A structure to follow
Meta data to add to the post
You can edit the brief right within the tool, which is super handy. Then, when you’re done, you can send it to the AI Article Generator to start the writing process.
AI Article Generator
The AI Article Generator can take your content brief or start from scratch to generate a first draft for your article.
This is great for getting words on the page and is ideal when you’re tight on time or facing writer’s block.
Content Optimizer
The Content Optimizer analyzes your content and recommends SEO and AI SEO improvements to boost your content’s rankings and visibility.
You can even chat with the built-in AI assistant to get new title ideas, introduction variants, and even images.
Obviously you’ll want to check and edit any AI-generated content before you publish it. But this can make content creation and optimization much easier and faster.
Traffic & Market
Semrush Traffic & Market toolkit helps you keep close tabs on your rivals and your overall market.
And you can use it to get a better understanding of your market and target audience.
Let’s take a closer look:
Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics gives you data on a site’s overall website traffic.
As in, not just estimated traffic from Google. So you can see where else a site receives traffic from. And how much.
When you first analyze a site with Traffic Analytics, you get an estimate of that site’s overall traffic numbers:
You also get to see how people interact with the site. For example, you can see a site’s average page views per visit, session duration, and bounce rate.
But the best parts of the Traffic Analytics tool in my opinion is the range of traffic channel and traffic journey widgets.
Here, you’ll see a breakdown of any site’s traffic sources and their trends over time:
You can see a map of the top sources driving traffic to your site…
…and the top destinations people go to after visiting your site:
This makes it a great way to reverse engineer what’s already working for your competitors. And use these insights to improve your own digital marketing strategy by identifying new (potentially profitable) marketing channels to explore.
Traffic Distribution
Outside of Traffic Analytics, you can also drill down into your or your competitor’s traffic distribution.
For example, you can see a breakdown of their AI traffic:
You can see similar trend data for:
Referral
Organic search
Paid search
Organic social
Paid social
Email
Display ads
Note: There’s a whole lot more you can do with the Traffic & Market Toolkit, from analyzing top pages and subfolders, to identifying regional trends.
Audience Profile
The Audience Profile tabs can help you determine the income bracket, level of education, household size, and even the employment status of your site’s users.
To make it easy for you, the statistics are broken down into four tabs:
Audience Overlap shows the other websites your target audience uses most often.
Demographics show your audience’s age, sex, and location.
Socioeconomics shows your audience’s household size, income level, employment status, and education level.
Behavior tells you about your audience’s interests, the devices they use, and their most-visited social media platforms.
When you cross-reference these four categories, you can determine the audience that’s actually going to bring you the most business. You can then form your digital marketing strategies around that data.
With Market Explorer, you can uncover insights about your target market and discover who the key players are.
You can also see what market share domains in your market have. Along with traffic trends and the distribution.
EyeOn
As its name implies, EyeOn lets you keep an “eye on” your closest competitors.
Specifically, EyeOn will keep you updated on your rival’s latest posts and activity trends.
This tool also monitors social media posts closely and will include data gathered from them in reports.
Tracking your competitors’ activity on a regular basis can inform you of any major strategy changes. Which can, in turn, inform your own digital marketing strategies.
For example, if you see that a competitor has added many new blog posts, you might want to check which keywords they’re targeting with a tool like Organic Research (which we discussed earlier).
Or if they have posted lots of social media content, it might indicate that it’s a profitable marketing channel for your niche.
Agency Partners
The Agency Partners feature aims to grow your agency — no matter if you’re just starting or already established.
This add-on is ideal for agencies looking to gain new clients and retain existing ones. But it’s quite specific to agencies obviously, and agencies have very specific marketing needs.
You can read more about the tools we recommend here at Backlinko in this guide to SEO tools for agencies.
But here’s a brief rundown of Semrush’s agency solution:
Agency Partners Platform
The Semrush Agency Partners Platform is a growing database of agency profiles.
Here, businesses can easily explore the different agency profiles offering the services they need.
And as an agency, you can create an eye-catching profile that details exactly what services you provide.
Once you set up an Agency Partners Platform profile, there’s little else you have to do. Potential clients will reach out to you on this directory via the contact button.
And you can manage your leads within the Semrush Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
More on that tool soon.
Lead Generation
Another active means of finding potential clients is via the Lead Generation tool.
This tool makes it easy to find leads using their location and the web technology they prefer to use. Like Google Ads, HubSpot, or WordPress.
Whenever you find a suitable lead for your agency, you can save their details to your lead list.
Determining a fitting match is made easy thanks to the wealth of information that Lead Finder provides for each business.
Firstly, Lead Finder provides you with the business’s domain name, social media profiles, and contact details.
Secondly, you can view metrics like traffic, backlink profile, and site authority.
My Reports
Do you need to create a white-label report for your client (or your own records)?
Well, you can do it through the My Reports section of the Agency Growth Kit.
This tool makes it easy to gather data from other areas of your Semrush account to create a professional-looking PDF.
Best of all: this tool is also widely compatible with external data sources. Meaning you can integrate data from Google My Business, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Facebook Ads.
If you’re in a rush, there’s a range of ready-made report templates to choose from. These templates allow you to generate a report almost automatically.
The main template options cover all your reporting needs, from monthly SEO reports to full organic research outlines.
When you click on one of these templates, all you have to do is fill out the domain information for the site you’re reporting for. In just a few clicks, you’ll have a comprehensive report ready for use.
You can also edit the templates to include relevant widgets, which you can add to the report via a simple drag-and-drop system.
Alternatively, My Reports also allows you to generate reports totally from scratch. But you can still make use of the drag-and-drop features to create your own custom reports.
Aside from the range of powerful Semrush tools, there’s also a huge library of apps on the Semrush App Center that you can take advantage of.
I’ve already touched on a few of them (like AdClarity and Influencer Analytics), but the App Center features dozens of Semrush and third-party apps for every aspect of your digital marketing strategy.
Here are a few of the most popular collections of apps:
AI Apps
Semrush has been at the forefront of implementing artificial intelligence in its range of SEO tools.
But there are various AI-powered apps available that can enhance your workflows even further.
Like AdCreative.ai, which lets you generate ad creatives, copy, and even photo shoots for your next ad campaign:
Small Business Collection
As a small business owner, these apps can help you understand your competitors and boost your online presence.
This collection includes free apps like the Email Verifier:
As this guide has hopefully made clear, you can use Semrush to develop and optimize your entire SEO strategy.
You can:
Perform competitor analysis
Run an SEO audit
Find link building opportunities
Assess and improve your AI visibility
Organize local SEO
Gain marketing insights
Review existing traffic
Semrush is for everybody, but it’s especially useful for:
SEO professionals & digital marketing agencies
Freelancers
PPC advertisers
Social media marketers
Ecommerce businesses
Enterprise businesses
Semrush Pricing Plans
Semrush’s pricing varies depending on the toolkits you choose to subscribe to.
Semrush offers a combined package for the SEO and AI Visibility Toolkits called Semrush One. Here’s a breakdown of the pricing for this package:
Starter at $199/month: 5 websites to monitor, 50 prompts and 500 keywords daily tracking
Pro+ $299/month: 15 websites, 100 prompts, and 1,500 keywords (plus historical SEO data and content optimization)
Advanced $599/month: 40 websites, 200 prompts, and 5,000 keywords (plus share of voice tracking and API data integration)
Semrush offers four main SEO Toolkit subscription tiers:
Pro plan at $139.95/month: Best for freelancers and startups
Guru plan at $249.95/month: Caters to growing businesses and small agencies
Business plan at $499.95/month: Serves larger agencies and enterprises
Enterprise plan (custom pricing): For organizations that need custom solutions
Here’s a breakdown of the pricing for Semrush’s other toolkits:
AI Visibility: $99/month
Traffic & Market: $289/month
Local: $30/month (Base) or $60/month (Pro)
Content: $60/month
Social: $250/month
Advertising: $99/month (Base) or $220/month (Pro)
(You may also have to pay more for certain add-ons for the different toolkits.)
Note: Before selecting a premium pricing plan, you can try out basic features with a free Semrush account. The free plan allows users to perform tasks like limited keyword research and a 100-page site audit.
Now It’s Your Turn to Try Semrush
I hope you found this ultimate Semrush guide useful, and now feel more confident experimenting with Semrush’s SEO and digital marketing features.
Semrush currently helps 116,000 paying customers improve their website’s performance, determine top keywords, boost organic search traffic, and much, much more.
