SEMrush Review: Top 5 Features (2021)

Being arguably the biggest all-in-one digital marketing tool on the market, it’s about time that I share my top 5 SEMrush features.

Note that there are over 40 different tools within the software, so I couldn’t feature every single one on this list.

If you’d prefer to watch my video review of SEMrush, you can watch it below:

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is a marketing SaaS platform that helps marketers with their SEO, PPC, social media, and content strategy. Boasting over 40 different features, SEMrush is constantly being updated with new tools that allow marketers to better manage their online visibility.

SEMrush is a paid subscription tool with three main tiers: Pro, Guru, and Business.

However, if you want to try out these features for yourself, you can have a free 14-day SEMrush trial, courtesy of yours truly 🙂

Let’s dive in with a detailed analysis of the 5 best SEMrush features.

5. Site Audit

The site audit tool can quickly and accurately audit any website and provide an overview of its health, as well as any critical issues to fix.

It’s very useful that any potential issues are split up into three categories: Errors, Warnings, and Notices. This provides you with a clearer idea of priorities when it comes to implementing fixes.

With detailed reports into important SEO aspects, such as crawlability, site performance, and internal linking, the site audit tool is very intuitive to use in terms of displaying issues and providing recommendations on how to solve them.

There are six tabs to navigate through within this feature – all of which are super handy when it comes to looking at a site’s technical SEO.

I personally love the Crawled Pages tab, as it lets me see individual URLs with their respective unique pageviews, status codes, crawl depth, and issues (if any).

The Statistics tab is also great because you can choose between a list or graph view of various stats about your website’s markup, status codes, canonicalisation, and more.

SEMrush also keeps track of your progress over time, so you can see how effective your fixes have been in the Progress tab.

My rating: 4/5

Whilst the Site Audit tool is great at what it does, it can be overwhelming to see lots of warnings and issues come up – sometimes when they’re not too critical for your website.

4. Keyword Gap

This nifty tool allows you to spot keyword opportunities based on up to four different competitors.

You can see exactly which keywords overlap in terms of your competition ranking for them, as well as identifying keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t.

You’re given the top opportunities for keywords to rank, and you can also see individual keywords with the positions for yourself and competitors – as well as standard metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC.

Another awesome feature of this tool is that you can filter between keywords that you’re ranking weakly for, uniquely for, or straight up missing completely compared with your competition.

Filtering through these almost acts as keyword research anyway, just more targeted in terms of how your competition are performing.

Knowing all of this information is helpful when it comes to optimising your pages, but most importantly, you have opportunities of new content pieces to write about (so that you can target the keywords that you’re currently missing out on).

My rating: 4.2/5

It’s easily one of the best features in SEMrush, but the Keyword Gap tool is only available to Guru memberships (which is why I couldn’t give it a higher rating).

3. SEO Content Template

Assuming you’ve just used the Keyword Gap tool to find ideas for new content pieces but you don’t know where to begin…

The SEO Content Template tool is one of the most underrated SEMrush features because not only does it provide you with ideas of specific words you should include in your content and link building opportunities, but it also gives a readability score and a recommended text length for your content.

For any keyword you put in, it will scrape important data from the top 10 ranking pages of that query.

You think that’s all there is to this tool?

Think again.

The golden nugget is within the Real-time Content Check tab, which lets you paste in the content you’re writing, and it provides you with lots of information regarding the tone of voice, originality, SEO, and readability of your content.

And yet when you thought things couldn’t get much better, this tab also provides you with more detailed suggestions when you’re writing your content, such as if your paragraphs are too long and specific words to include within your content to improve your SEO.

My rating: 4.5/5

There is so much to do with this tool, but I didn’t give it a higher rating simply because I don’t use this tool as much as others on this list. I also find that not many people are using the Real-time Content Check tab (which they definitely should).

2. Position Tracking

What would any great SEO tool be without a daily organic position tracker?

This is definitely one of the best features within SEMrush, specifically because it breaks down your organic keyword rankings each day and splits it within top 3, top 10, top 20, and top 100 rankings.

You also get some cool overview metrics of your visibility, estimated traffic, and average position.

There are eight, yes, EIGHT tabs within the Position Tracking tool, so you can do a lot of digging regarding your organic rankings.

The Overview tab is were I spend most of my time as I can see a nice Visibility Trend chart so I can see if my recent SEO efforts have been working or not.

I can also see exactly which keywords I’m ranking for, their important metrics, as well as the destination URL.

Another awesome feat is that I get daily emails that inform me about any significant changes in my rankings.

My rating: 4.7/5

The accuracy and metrics you get are extremely good, however, there have been occasions where I’d manually check my rankings for a keyword after the daily update but it wasn’t there. For the most part, this tool is amazing!

1. Keyword Magic Tool

You already knew that the number one SEMrush feature would be magical.

The Keyword Magic Tool provides accurate metrics regarding keyword research, and it even shows a Trend tab so you can spot opportunities of which keywords are becoming more popular.

Keywords can be selected and added to the keyword manager so you can track them with the Position Tracking tool.

On the left side of this keyword research tool, you can look for keyword clusters that contain specific keywords – which I use a LOT.

You can also choose to see question-based keywords (which are handy for compiling FAQs).

Export data is very simple to do, allowing you to show clients/your in-house teams of all the great keyword opportunities that are available to target.

I’ve tried many different keyword research tools, and SEMrush really does make life simple by automating a lot of the process.

My rating: 5/5

There’s absolutely nothing that I dislike about this tool. For keyword research purposes, you cannot go wrong with the Keyword Magic Tool.

Overall rating: 4.9/5

SEMrush really does care about what customers have to say, and tools are always being upgraded/developed.

For anyone that’s looking for an all-in-one digital marketing tool, you can’t go wrong with this one.

Again, if you want to try these features out for yourselves, get your 14-day free trial of SEMrush and let me know your thoughts of the SaaS tool in the comments below.