Is Your SEO Game First Class or Economy Class?

While the digital marketing landscape is currently a huge Hydra, not with nine heads, but with (at least) one hundred, some trustworthy tools can help you beat the monster and make your life and business better by providing the right instruments to do this.

I guess it isn't easy to get through SEO & Digital marketing these days without knowing about Semrush!

Semrush was just an ordinary SEO software back in 2008, with only two analysing tools designed to make the online competition fair for everyone. Sort of Economy Class. Yet, 12 years later, it has become a go-to and top-of-mind effective tool, allowing ordinary users, advertisers and expert bloggers worldwide to improve their web exposure and increase their audiences by using their research services and almost 50 different advanced instruments. To be exact: 48. First Class, for sure!

I was aware Semush constantly perfected its existing tools and introduced new products that facilitate every marketer’s life. However, one of the biggest internet marketing software makeovers has occurred in the last year. Meet Semrush's latest look, features and updates:

New Semrush Logo

The Semrush brand now has a new shape, new colors, new fonts and excellent new features!

A few months back, the original logo was replaced with a cool new logo. Now the logo has been updated and I feel like it is even more energetic. Let me know what you think!

The latest logo version follows the same principle, but the new colors are more lightweight and welcoming. The shades of Semrush's key brand logo are light orange and dark indigo.

The fire's emblem has been the brand's vital key from Day 1. It's the spark and the amber that ignites the marketing experts and bloggers' desire to achieve marketing goals faster.

New Semrush Pricing 2021

Keep in mind that the price rise would impact those people who sign up for the 2021 plan, but we will all get new advantages and features for current users at its previous pricing.

The key variations between the three packages are:

• Pro Plan (119.95 dollars a month): Suitable for small enterprises, startups, writers.
• Guru Plan (229.95 dollars a month): Great option for small agencies, digital advertisers, and mid-size firms.
• Business Plan (449.95 dollars a month). Perfect for big SEO firms, large corporations, and e-commerce.

Of course, they have a yearly plan with a discount included. Here is the screenshot I took on its official pricing page, of the 1 year subscriptions billed annually:

It was good to find out that the latest Pro Plan has expanded functionalities. Now, you can set up to 5 projects (formerly just 3), share PDF files, and read-only projects.

The Guru Pricing plan can now connect with Google Data Studio (which is SUCH A RELEASE for me!), has the opportunity to host 15 active projects, up to 1500 keywords tracking, and access historical data and Semrush's robust content marketing tool (you’ll find out more about this later). Finally, the Business Pricing Plan can now host up to 40 active projects.

If you have an annual subscription – like I do, you will save 16 percent. There is also a free trial you can take HERE.

Overview

Semrush keyword databases have expanded from 17.6 billion to 20 billion this year, making it the market's leading keyword database. In 2018, only 2 billion keywords were included - expect it to grow tenfold in only two years from now!

The new SEO Toolkit includes more than 20 resources and reports for any level of SEO you can imagine. The most extensive keyword database on the market is available here (as I said, over 20 billion keywords in 142 countries). The backlink management tools, page rank monitoring, SEO review, and a technical evaluation SEO tool are all improved.

More Powerful Content Marketing Toolkit

Maybe the most significant tool for the digital marketers is Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit. This is a premium tool for creating and implementing an efficient content strategy.

What you can do with this instrument?

• Explore a great deal of suggestions and ideas for your next blog topic.
• Build a content plan focused on visibility and set up the team's content marketing schedule.
• Gather more SEO values for high-quality, SEO-friendly posts.
• Identify possible backlinks.
• Analyse the success of your content with its keyword ranks, social shares, backlinks, and approximate search volume.

What’s the biggest challenge of your digital marketing team? For me, it is to create content that attracts, engages and converts. One of the most spectacular tools from the Content Marketing Toolkitmust be the new standalone product for content marketing teams - ImpactHero. This tool based on Artificial Intelligence will allow you to analyse your website’s content from each stage of the buyer's journey. The tool can also identify your website’s high-performing assets at every stage of this journey and will offer improvement ideas for the rest of the content.

If you ever get stuck with your content (or if you’re a one man show, like many of us), please have a deep look at the recently-introduced Content Marketplace, a Semrush platform where you can order high-quality SEO-driven content from professional and thoroughly tested copywriters.

Better Competitor Analysis Features

Before the update, you had to choose a specific country to study your competitor's website's primary metrics. Now, you can get a global rundown.

Furthermore, you are not restricted to domain-level research, as Semrush newly created subdomain, subfolder, and URL analysis. This feature is useful if you need to look at a particular part on your competitor's website.

You can also examine up to 5 competitors in the latest comparisons simultaneously, allowing you to unveil some typical trends in your online competitors' success and marketing strategies.

You can click "SEO Toolbox" from the drop-down list in the top left menu to display all the resources in their SEO toolbox.

Better 3rd Party Integration

Now, you can integrate Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, Google Search Console, and Google My Business at once.

Semrush can examine the entire spectrum of backlinks in real-time if you include your Google Search Console data with a backlink audit method and use its toxic backlink identification feature to guarantee that you reject them immediately (disavow backlink).

Free Semrush Account

I can’t fully review Semrush without mentioning their free account option. When you first sign up for Semrush, you get the option of having a 7 days trial of either a Pro or Guru subscription.

This trial allows you to test out each of Semrush tools and reports to help you understand how and if Semrush fits your needs and which subscription: Pro or Guru would be better for you. If you are an agency, stop reading right here and go buy a Business subscription now!

However, if your trial ends and you wish to continue using this amazing set of tools for free (well, not really-really ALL of them), you can downgrade the account to a free Semrush subscription, which has its own (not-so-few) limitations.

So, you’ll ask me, what can I do with a free account? Well, a lot, and if you’ve already asked me, even I warmly recommend the paid versions of Semrush, here is what I can tell you from the top of my mind:

Domain and Keyword Analytics

Searches

You can perform 10 searches a day in the Domain Analytics and Keyword Analytics databases; but keep in mind that this means you are only able to use the Semrush search bar to pull a report 10 times before your daily limit is reached.

If you are only testing out the software, it may make sense that you only need to perform 10 searches a day. However, it is important to note that the next level of paid subscriptions will allow way more searches.

• Pro users - 3,000 searches
• Guru users - 5,000 searches
• Business users have access to an insane amount of 10,000 searches

Requests

Just like your daily search limit, the maximum number of requests made to the Analytics reports per day is limited to only 10. For example, if you go into the Organic Positions report and query www.cameliavasile.com.au (that’s ME), you would only be able to examine the first 10 keywords listed in that domain’s Organic Positions Report.

The 10 results per search limit will be the same in all other analytics reports as well; this includes Backlinks reports, Advertising Research reports, and Keyword reports. In contrast, the paid subscriptions allow for so much more results per search.

• Pro - 10,000 results
• Guru - 30,000 results
• Business - 50,000 results

Keyword Magic Tool

As a free user, you are unable to save any of your recent searches in the Keyword Magic Tool. Search history is how the Keyword Magic Tool keeps a history of your keyword research.

When you upgrade to a paid user, you will be able to keep up to 350 of your recent requests!

When you enter your first seed keyword in the Keyword Magic Tool as a paid Semrush user, it will be saved into your search history with the other seed keywords you have queried. This lets you go back at any time to reference keyword research you started in the past.

Site Audit

The SEO Site Audit will provide you with an overall health score of your website as well as a list of issues found with the given website. As a free user, your Site Audit is limited to only 100 crawled pages; this includes crawls of given a domain, subdomain or subfolder.

This data may suffice for certain websites. However, most websites have over 100 pages, so it may be something to consider when thinking about what level of account works best for you.

Final Thoughts

I have been working with the tool for three years, purely earning money by setting up SEO processes for people. It is sometimes difficult to figure out where a useful function or filter that I need is located.

But it suits even on my very rogue rate for tracking positions in Google. The keyword search feature is generally top-ranked on the Internet. I also use it to monitor technical errors on some websites.

There are no errors I have found in their recent updates. It is possible to evaluate competitors' positions by keywords and view the cost of a click, competitors, traffic, and user-friendly interface. There is one drawback, though - it works only with Google. The tool does not provide information from other search engines.

Overall, the latest update helps you to:

• Find out where to find an audience interested in your website and continuously receive targeted traffic to the site.
• Think over an internet marketing strategy and make the right decision to bypass competing sites.
• Launch targeted and contextual advertising, create a multi-page website, optimise an existing one, and much more!

There you have it! Now, it's time for you to try Semrush yourself. Good luck!

P.S. As you might imagine, the above links are my affiliate links, and if you sign up for a paid Semrush account after your free trial, I make a commission as a Semrush Partner. Thank you for that, I highly appreciate it! I have three children to feed, and this commission goes directly into the grocery account (after paying the taxes, of course!).

I only ever recommend products that I know, love, and use personally to this day. Semrush is 100% that.