20 Best Semrush Features That Every Marketer Should Use

Semrush is a powerhouse in the digital marketing space that’s designed to streamline and optimize every aspect of your online marketing strategy.

Trusted by millions of marketers globally, Semrush is an all-in-one toolkit that offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research.

In this post, we’ll be exploring the 20 best features in the Semrush toolkit that every marketer should use to optimize their campaigns and gain deeper market insights.

So grab your coffee, fire up your Semrush dashboard, and test out these features to level up your marketing game.

Side note: If you don’t have an active Semrush account, click on the link below to activate a 2-week trial of Semrush Pro. This trial unlocks all 45+ tools in the Semrush suite, so you can apply the actionable insights from this article.

20 Best Semrush Features

1. Site Audit

If you’re keen on keeping your SEO game strong, it’s super important to regularly check up on your site’s SEO health.

And for that, Semrush‘s Site Audit tool is pretty much the gold standard in technical SEO audit tools.

One of the best features in Site Audit is the ‘Site Health Score’, which offers a quick snapshot of your website’s overall technical SEO health.

This score is a handy way to track improvements over time.

The Site Audit report categorizes issues by type and severity, helping you understand which problems are most detrimental to your site’s performance and should be addressed first.

Semrush also provides actionable recommendations to fix the most critical issues on your site and improve your overall SEO health score.

The tool also sets up automatic audits, ensuring that your website remains optimized even as new content is added or changes are made.

Recommended reading: Semrush Site Audit: 10 Best Features

2. Keyword Overview

Seeking a quick snapshot of key SEO metrics for your target keywords? The Semrush Keyword Overview report is your best bet.

Semrush’s Keyword Overview report provides a concise analysis of specific keywords for SEO.

It offers key metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and cost per click (CPC).

The report also includes trend data showing the keyword’s popularity over time, variations, related questions, and associated keywords.

Additionally, it features a SERP analysis to review the top-ranking pages for your target keywords, and backlink data, highlighting the number of referring domains and backlinks these pages have.

The Keyword Overview report is particularly helpful for understanding your target keywords’ competitive landscape and optimizing your SEO strategies accordingly.

3. Keyword Magic Tool

Want to get really granular with your keyword data? Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is exactly what you need.

With an extensive database of over 20 billion keywords, Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool allows you to dive deep into keyword research and discover new opportunities.

The tool lets you easily filter keywords by search volume, keyword difficulty, and other essential metrics to help you pick the most relevant keywords for your campaign.

It also provides valuable insights into search trends, question-based queries, and related keywords, making it easier to craft an effective SEO strategy.

Whether you’re building a content plan or optimizing your website, the Keyword Magic Tool is a must-have for unlocking the full potential of your keyword research efforts.

Recommended reading: How to Use Semrush for Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide

4. Organic Research

Organic Research is one of the most widely used features in the Semrush toolkit.

It allows you to view your competitors’ organic keyword rankings and get an estimate of organic traffic based on those rankings, alongside other competitive metrics.

The Overview report provides a top-level view of your competitor’s organic search performance.

The report also shows their top-performing organic keywords and top keywords by intent.

You can explore the Pages tab to view your competitor’s top-performing pages and reveal the primary keywords that are driving traffic to these pages.

You can use the competitive intelligence gained from the Organic Research tool to reverse-engineer competitors’ successful SEO strategies, and improve your own search rankings and online visibility.

5. Position Tracking

If you want to dominate the search rankings for prominent keywords in your niche, using a rank tracking tool is a must. Semrush’s Position Tracking tool is the leading rank tracker on the market, offering top-notch features for tracking keyword positions and giving you really detailed, tailor-made reports.

Semrush offers a thorough insight into your website’s ranking performance by tracking the presence of your keywords in the top 3, 10, 20, and 100 spots in search engine results.

Besides monitoring the search engine rankings of your own website, Semrush‘s Position Tracking tool also allows you to keep a tab on the keyword performance and ranking positions of your competitors.

By adding up to 10 competitors, you can acquire crucial information about their SEO tactics and refine your strategies based on these insights.

6. Keyword Gap

To keep your content game strong, it’s always a best practice to monitor the content of your competitors and industry big shots. By doing this, you’ll stumble upon a bunch of fresh content ideas and trends.

This is where Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool can help unlock missed keyword opportunities by comparing your website’s keyword profile with that of your competitors. It helps you uncover keywords that your competitors are ranking for but you are not.

In the Keyword Gap report, focus on “Weak” and “Missing” keywords.

“Missing” keywords are those that your competitors rank for, but you don’t, and “Weak” keywords are ones where your ranking is lower than your competitors.

You can browse through the full list of keywords, paying special attention to key SEO metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and competition level, to figure out which keywords to focus on first.

Once you’ve picked out some promising keywords, start producing content that focuses on these time-tested keywords.

7. Backlink Analytics

Keeping a tab on your site’s and your competitors’ backlink profile can offer deep insights into SEO authority and reveal potential link building opportunities for improved search performance.

With over 43 trillion backlinks and growing, Semrush’s backlink database is the largest among popular SEO tools. What sets it apart, though, is not just the vast number of links but the suite of features that allow for in-depth link analysis.

With Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool, you can keep an eye on both your own and your competitors’ backlink profiles, and even compare several domains in a side-by-side comparison.

The Backlink Analytics Overview report provides valuable insights into a domain’s most recently acquired backlinks, overall backlink profile size, alongside useful trend graphs, best pages by backlinks, top anchors, and more.

You can click on the number of referring domains to access a deeper report that generates a list of every domain that’s linking back to the queried domain.

If your competitor has a huge amount of backlinks, you can use the advanced filters and sorting options to narrow down the list of backlinks and unlock a goldmine of potential link building opportunities.

Whether you’d like to analyze your own backlink profile or monitor your competitors’ link building practices, Semrush’s Backlink Analytics is an excellent backlink checker to help you gain a competitive edge in your SEO strategy.

8. Backlink Gap

Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool is a powerful tool for identifying untapped link building opportunities by comparing your website’s backlink profile to that of your competitors.

You can compare the backlink profiles of up to 5 competing domains, and identify gaps between competitors’ link building strategies to fuel your own link building efforts.

The tool presents you with trend graphs and a table showing the comparison between competitors’ profiles.

The “Referring Domains” trend graph lets you quickly gauge which competitor is building the most backlinks.

The table below shows you all the referring domains that send backlinks to the entered domains. If you’re comparing your own domain with your competitors, you can use the Prospects for domain filter to view the backlink opportunities that you’re missing.

Pay special attention to the Authority Score and monthly visits of each referring domain to pinpoint the most authoritative backlinks.

You can sort the list of referring domains by Authority Score or use advanced filters to narrow down the list of referring domains and cherry-pick only the best backlink targets for your outreach efforts.

Recommended reading: How to Build Backlinks with Semrush: 10 Actionable Tips

9. Organic Traffic Insights

Semrush’s Organic Traffic Insights is an underrated gem in Semrush’s SEO toolkit. With this feature, you can get a complete picture of your website’s organic traffic performance.

It provides a unified view of your organic traffic data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush, allowing you to analyze your keyword rankings, click-through rates, traffic sources, and user behavior in one place.

One of the best features in this tool is that it reveals the keywords masked by Google Analytics with the “not provided” label.

These are the actual keywords driving traffic to your website, and unraveling them gives you an additional insight to outrank your competitors in Google search results.

10. Backlink Audit

If your site is linked from spammy or untrustworthy sites, it can be seen as an endorsement of these sites. This association can lead search engines to question the credibility and trustworthiness of your own site.

As such, it’s important to identify and weed out these toxic backlinks from time to time to keep your backlink profile clean.

To safeguard your site from toxic backlinks, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to perform a comprehensive check of your website’s backlink profile.

The tool identifies potentially harmful or toxic backlinks that could negatively impact your SEO performance and provides actionable steps to disavow them.

You can also integrate Backlink Audit with Google Search Console to get the most accurate and up-to-date backlink data. With this integration enabled, you’ll also be able compose a Disavow file in Semrush that can be uploaded directly to Google Disavow Tool.

An SEO best practice would be to regularly monitor your backlink profile with the Backlink Audit tool and disavow toxic backlinks as and when you find them.

11. Link Building Tool

Besides auditing your backlink profile and analyzing competitor backlinks, Semrush features a Link Building Tool that can be used for identifying potential link building opportunities and streamlining your link building efforts.

This tool makes it easy to find high-quality backlink opportunities, execute targeted outreach campaigns, and monitor your link building progress.

In the Prospects report, you’ll find a breakdown of backlink prospects for your domain. You can use the advanced filters to select the most relevant backlink prospects for your website.

Once your list of prospective backlink targets is ready, you can execute outreach campaigns within the Link Building Tool itself by connecting your Gmail account with Semrush.

12. On Page SEO Checker

On-page SEO plays a critical role in how search engines understand and rank your website.

But good on-page SEO isn’t just about optimizing your content for search engines. It also involves improving your website’s user experience.

Well-optimized pages with clear, relevant content, fast loading times, and mobile-friendliness keep users engaged and reduce bounce rates.

As such, it’s important to identify and promptly fix any on-page SEO issues you find on your site.

Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker is an invaluable tool that helps you identify and optimize on-page elements to improve your website’s search rankings and user experience.

It analyzes your web pages against a set of best practices and provides actionable recommendations to enhance your on-page SEO.

The tool shows if your content is fully optimized for your target keywords and offers actionable recommendations on how to incorporate relevant keywords naturally into your content.

Moreover, it provides insights into technical SEO aspects and user experience factors, such as page load speed, mobile optimization, and internal linking.

13. Topic Research

If you’re looking for fresh content ideas that have a high potential for engagement and relevance in your niche, Semrush’s Topic Research tool offers invaluable insights and suggestions tailored to current trends and audience interests.

The Topic Research Tool generates a long list of fresh topics for your next piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, podcast episode, or a YouTube video.

With the Topic Research tool, you can discover the most popular subtopics, headlines, questions, and related searches for a given topic.

Each subtopic card can be expanded to reveal the main headlines and common questions associated with that subtopic.

If you ever run out of fresh content ideas, just fire up the Topic Research tool to find a treasure trove of trending topics and popular queries in your niche.

14. SEO Writing Assistant

With the continued advancement of generative AI and AI content creation tools, it’s now easier than ever to create content at scale.

Powered by advanced AI and SEO capabilities, Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant is designed to not only assist in generating fresh, SEO-optimized content but also to elevate the effectiveness of your existing content.

SEO Writing Assistant lets you check the potential and originality of a blog post in real-time on WordPress, Google Docs, or directly within Semrush itself.

In addition, you can use SEO Writing Assistant to improve your post’s readability score, pick the most relevant keywords, and align your content with search intent.

You can also leverage AI with the “Rephraser” feature that lets you rephrase, simplify, expand, or summarize a piece of text.

You can use the “Rephraser” feature to optimize your copy and improve its SEO potential.

Recommended reading: How to Improve Your Content Using AI with SEO Writing Assistant

15. SEO Content Template

In order to keep your content relevant and accurate, it’s important to update and refresh your existing posts on a regular basis. Additionally, updating content can significantly improve your SEO performance.

Semrush’s SEO Content Template is the best tool you can use to update your existing content to ensure it stays relevant and competitive.

Semrush analyzes the top-ranking content for your target keywords and returns with a list of actionable suggestions. These could range from semantically related words to consider including, to readability scores and text length comparisons.

The tool also provides insights into potential backlink sources, offering a roadmap for enhancing your content’s authority. You’ll also see how your top competitors are using your target keywords in their content.

16. Advertising Research

Analyzing your paid search competitors is an important step for fine-tuning and maximizing the performance of your advertising campaigns.

In addition to learning who’s bidding on the same keywords in your niche, you can also identify gaps in your strategy by observing what competitors are doing differently or better.

Semrush’s Advertising Research allows you to monitor your competitors’ PPC activities, their ad spends, and their best-performing keywords and ad copies.

You can also view their Google Ads usage trends, uncover the different desktop and mobile keywords they are bidding on, and identify their top landing pages.

Armed with these insights, you can strategically adjust your campaigns, optimize your keyword selection, refine your ad copies, and enhance your landing pages to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

17. PPC Keyword Tool

Another standout resource for advertisers in Semrush is the PPC Keyword Tool.

This tool streamlines the process of setting up an optimized Google Ads campaign.

With this tool, you can organize keywords at the campaign and ad group level, set negative keywords, and directly import the campaign plan into your Google Ads account.

Once you set up an ad campaign with keywords and ad groups, you can leverage the PPC Keyword Tool to fine-tune your keywords and make changes to improve the structure of your campaign.

You can make use of the tool’s “Recommendations” feature to streamline your ad groups to ensure that your ads are displayed only on the most relevant search result pages.

The PPC Keyword Tool also makes it easy to add negative keywords to your campaign, an important step that’s often overlooked by PPC marketers. By adding negative keywords, you’re effectively telling Google to exclude your ads from appearing for the specified search queries.

If you’d like to improve the results of your Google Ads campaigns, Semrush’s PPC Keyword Tool is an absolute must-have in your marketing toolkit.

18. Traffic Analytics

Semrush’s Traffic Analytics is a top-tier traffic analysis tool, offering unmatched insights into your competitors’ traffic data.

Traffic Analytics is a part of Semrush .Trends, an add-on toolkit to Semrush that costs $200/month.

The Traffic Analytics Overview report provides detailed insights into the traffic performance of your competitors, tracking metrics such as total monthly visits, unique visitors, pages/visit, avg. visit duration, and bounce rate.

The tool also generates line graphs and trend graphs to help you gain a deeper understanding of the seasonal trends associated with your competitor’s website.

You can also view your competitor’s top-performing pages, subfolders, and subdomains.

The Traffic Journey chart is especially useful as it lets you see the exact sources your competitor uses to generate traffic, along with top 5 external domains that users visit after going to your competitor’s website.

By analyzing this extensive set of traffic data, you can adapt your own tactics to replicate your competitors’ strengths, uncover new growth opportunities, and better engage your target audience.

Recommended reading: The Ultimate Guide to Semrush Traffic Analytics

19. Listing Management

If you’re looking to optimize your local SEO, Semrush’s Listing Management is one of the best local SEO tools you can use to boost your local search presence.

With this tool, you can check the accuracy of your business data and distribute your business information automatically to authoritative local directories.

You can also effortlessly manage the visibility of your business by safeguarding your listings against harmful duplicates and keeping an eye on customer reviews.

With Semrush’s in-depth reporting, you can see how your listings are performing and follow the recommendations by Semrush to optimize your local search results.

20. Semrush EyeOn

Tracking competitor activities online helps in setting benchmarks for your own content’s performance and provides valuable insights into audience engagement.

With Semrush’s EyeOn tool, you can automate the task of monitoring competitor activities across the web.

Just like Traffic Analytics, EyeOn is a part of Semrush .Trends, an add-on competitive toolkit to Semrush that costs $200/month.

EyeOn monitors your competitors’ actions and delivers weekly updates on their latest blog posts and pages, new Google Ads campaigns, and recent activity on social media.

The “Traffic Channels” widget lets you compare your competitors’ activity with the actual traffic they’ve generated within a specified timeframe.

Recommended reading: How to Use Semrush .Trends to Deconstruct Competitor Strategies

Final Thoughts

Semrush offers an impressive selection of features tailored for marketers, and these carefully hand-picked top 20 Semrush features are essential for anyone aiming to significantly level up their online marketing game.

Whether you’re looking to refine your SEO approach, revamp your content strategy, or optimize your paid advertising campaigns, Semrush has the capabilities to help you achieve your marketing goals.

To test out all the features outlined in this article, sign up for a free 2-week trial of Semrush Pro by clicking the link below.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on December 27, 2023 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

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