SEMrush Review: Is This the Best SEO Tool?

Looking for a SEMrush review? Look no further. This in-depth review of SEMrush SEO toolkit covers the pros and cons, along with the unique features you’ll find, so you can decide if it’s worth signing up for a plan.

Driving traffic to your website is hard work. When you’re just getting your blog off the ground it can seem like an impossible task.

You publish post after post. Create high-quality content and promote on social media. You do reach out for backlinks.

The traffic needle seems to be moving, but not fast enough.

Here’s a little secret. You can grow your traffic much faster by doing in-depth competition analysis and seeing what’s working for them.

Then, you can mimic their success and find holes that you can take advantage of with your website and content strategy.

Doing all this without a tool will be hard work (if not impossible).

Which brings us to one powerful tool that every blogger, website owner, and SEO needs in their arsenal–SEMrush.

SEMrush is an SEO tool that’ll help you create successful SEO campaigns, deeply research your competitors, and much more.

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about SEMrush in this in-depth SEMrush review. By the end of this post, you’ll know if SEMrush is the right tool to help your website get more traffic and dominate the search engines.

In this unbiased and in-depth SEMrush review, we will cover the all information you need to know about SEMrush. So, keep reading our review of SEMrush all-in-one SEO toolkit.

Our Verdict: The Best All-in-one Marketing Toolkit

SEMrush is an SEO competitive research tool that can help you do competitive analysis and manage all aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

Looking for something specific? Read our thorough SEMrush review and find answers.

Pros:

• Best competitive research and SEO tools on the market
• Can manage your entire digital marketing strategy.

Cons:

• Tools can be confusing to use for beginners
• Can be expensive for those with a small budget.

Best for:

Intermediate website owners who want to scale up their traffic and dominate their competition in the search engines.

Are There Any Coupons Or Discounts?

Yes – Woblogger readers can currently try SEMrush Pro for 30 days with this exclusive coupon. In order to get this SEMrush 30-day free trial, sign up using the link below.

Click here to Claim 30-day Pro Trial

This is 100% risk free and you can cancel your subscription any time.

What is SEMrush?

SEMrush is a versatile digital marketing tool. Its core focus is being an all-in-one SEO solution, but depending on your needs, it can be very flexible and help you accomplish much more.

It’s an entire suite of digital marketing tools wrapped into you, you can manage and create SEO, social media, and paid advertising campaigns with ease.

The tool can be configured to meet your unique digital marketing needs. The core focus of this post will be on the very cost-effective SEO solution, but I’ll dive into the other features of the tool as well.

SEMrush is equipped with 5 different toolkits:

1. SEO Toolkit. This collection of tools will help you with keyword research, on-site optimization, finding broken links, content optimization, link building, and analyzing your competitor’s SEO strategies.
2. Advertising Toolkit. This helps you with your paid advertising campaigns and will assist you in finding keywords that will help you get traffic without spending too much of your budget. 
3. Social Media Toolkit. This will help you schedule, track, and plan your social media campaigns. Most SEO tools lack this feature, but it’s great to study the overlap between SEO and social media.
4. Content Marketing Toolkit. This will help you create the right kind of content, along with tips on how you can fully optimize your content to improve your search engine rankings.
5. Competitive Research Toolkit. This will give you access to in-depth data about your competitors, including a domain overview, traffic breakdown, link analysis and data, and organic search data.

Each of these individual toolkits can provide you with a ton of valuable data and actionable insights. In this review of SEMrush, I’ll dive deeper into each of these toolkits below.

Who is SEMrush for?

SEMrush can be a beneficial tool for virtually every website owner that wants to increase website traffic and grow their authority.

If you’ve been struggling to grow your traffic, then this could be the tool you’ve been looking for. Especially, if you’ve had difficulty building backlinks (one of the most important aspects of ranking your site online).

Trying to grow your website’s traffic can mean a lot of guesswork. So, if you want to grow your traffic and digital empire with confidence, then this tool can help you do just that.

However, keep in mind that this isn’t the best tool for total beginners. Since it is so feature-rich it can be easy to get lost in the features. It’s a better fit for website owners who are truly serious about growing their site’s traffic and are willing to spend time learning the ins and outs of the tool.

There are much simpler tools if you just want to do things like track rankings or perform keyword research.

You can think of SEMrush as an exponential growth tool. There are other SEO tools that can be used to perform basic keyword research and competitive analysis.

But, if you want high-level data, then SEMrush is going to be the tool for you. If your site is starting to see an increase in traffic and you want your traffic graph to shoot up exponentially, then this tool is going to be worth the investment.

Why Choose a Specialized SEO Toolkit Like SEMrush?

Here are a few more reasons that growing websites should consider investing in SEMrush.

First, if you’ve been relying on free tools to get your website off the ground, then you’re missing out on a ton of data. The data provided by SEMrush is substantial, to say the least, plus you’ll have all this data in one place, which makes it easier to see what’s working and create an actionable SEO plan.

Plus, all of this data syncs up with both Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Webmaster Tools, so you can see how accurate your data is.

The versatility of this tool extends beyond website owners as well. For example, full-time SEOs and those who are running agencies and managing websites for clients will also find a ton of value in this tool.

If your website is getting to the point where you need a competitive advantage over other websites in your niche, then this is a tool worth trying.

Plus, nearly all of the SEMrush user reviews online only have good things to say about the tool, so you’ll be in good company.

SEMrush Review: Features & Services

Every website, online business, and eCommerce store has different needs and unique strategies must be crafted to increase traffic, improve your search engine rankings, and much more. The SEMrush team understands this and has created a tool that’s so feature rich it can be used to improve every part of your digital marketing strategy.

Here are a few things you can accomplish with SEMrush:

• Analyze your backlink profile and the backlink profile of your competitor’s
• Uncover phrase match keywords, along with hyperlinked keywords
• Track your keyword positions over time to see if your search engine optimization strategy is working
• Create in-depth competitive research reports, so you can find holes in your competitor’s strategy
• Get access to real-time data, so you can adjust your SEO and digital marketing strategies for faster success

I dive more into all of these features below, but it’s worth mentioning a few of the most valuable features you can use to dominate the search engines.

If you want to get started right away, then make sure you take advantage of the 30-day free trial that’s available for all Woblogger readers.

Click here to take advantage of our exclusive 30-day free trial.

SEMrush Toolkit Breakdown

If you couldn’t guess by now, SEMrush is one feature-rich tool. Depending on your needs, you may only need to use one of the toolkits highlighted below.

Below I dive deep into the SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Content Marketing, and Competitive Research toolkits.

These toolkits are where the bulk of the features lie. When you sign up for an SEMrush subscription you don’t actually have to purchase all the toolkits (you’ll learn more in the pricing section).

Here’s a detailed breakdown of all the SEMrush toolkits:

1. SEO Toolkit

The SEO Toolkit is the toolkit you’ll probably get the most mileage out of. All of the tools here will help you create, manage, and grow your SEO strategy.

You’ll get access to several tools that’ll help you manage your backlinks, track your rankings, break down your on-page SEO, and even do an in-depth audit on your site.

In total there are 15 different SEO tools you can use to create an actionable SEO campaign. Which might make it the best SEO tool. SEO is fairly complex, however, with all these tools you can create an SEO strategy that works, with real-time data to see how your efforts are paying off.

What’s Inside?

Here’s a look at the tools included in the SEO Toolkit:

• SEO Dashboard. The SEO Dashboard is the first thing you’ll come across when you fire up the tool. Here you’ll find an overview of your site’s current SEO, including immediate SEO issues, quick SEO wins, and competitor weaknesses. From here you can dive into the more detailed SEO reports.
• Competitive Research Tools. This tool will help you generate competitive research reports on your top competitors. You’ll be able to see which keywords bring them the most traffic, along with their respective strengths and weaknesses.
• Keyword Research Tools. These tools will help you uncover the best keyword opportunities for your website. You’ll be able to find keywords that aren’t super competitive, but still, have enough search volume to drive traffic to your site.
• Link Building Tools. Link building can be difficult when you’re just getting started online. This tool simplifies the process and helps you uncover competitor backlinks, analyze your existing backlink profile, and even start an email outreach campaign directly within the tool.
• Rank Tracking Tools. Tracking keywords and rankings lets you see the success of your SEO efforts. You can track the positions of your target keywords on a daily basis, and see how your rankings are improving overall. Plus, you can track your competitors to see how your site stacks up and see how your site compares to the rest of the industry.
• On-Page SEO Tools. These tools will help you improve your onsite and technical SEO. You could have a few glaring issues that could be holding back your website and making it more difficult to rank. Even simple things like ideal keyword usage. This toolkit will allow you to perfect your onsite SEO.

2. Advertising Toolkit

The goal of the Advertising Toolkit is to help you better plan and manage a Google Ads campaign. Running ads can be notoriously difficult to get right. With Google Ads, the competition can be quite high, which means you’ll blow through your budget rather quickly if you run the wrong kind of ads or target the wrong keywords.

Luckily, this toolkit is designed to help increase your chances of success. You’ll be able to deeply research your niche, study what type of ads your competitors are running, and uncover the perfect keywords you should target with your advertising campaigns.

Getting the highest ROI possible on your ads can truly take your online brand and website to new heights.

Here are the main features of this toolkit:

Competitive Analysis

This tool will give you a detailed breakdown of how your competition is running their ad campaigns. This will help you see what’s working, so you can create similar campaigns for your site. You’ll be able to see what keywords they’re targeting, along with the ad copy they’re using for their ads. 

Keyword Research

Once you know what keywords your competitors are using you can use these to create your own set of keywords to target. The research tool will help you find the best keywords to target, so you can get the highest ROI possible on your ads.

Ad Research and Creation

These tools will let you research your competitor’s ads on a visual level. Combine this with the Competitive Analysis tool and you have the perfect picture of the kind of ads that are working for them. With this information, you can create your ads directly within the tool. Plus, if you’re already running Google Ads, you can import this data into the tool to analyze your data and improve your advertising efforts.

3. Social Media Toolkit

Running effective social media campaigns takes a lot of work. You post, you analyze and try to study your competitors to see what’s working for them. It’s a lot of work.

This toolkit puts all this information into an intuitive dashboard. You’ll be able to manage your social media posting much more effectively, plus you can see how your posts stack up against your competition with a single glance.

Here are the two big tools that comprise the Social Media Toolkit:

Social Media Poster

This tool lets you create, schedule, and even post content to your various social media platforms. When you’re running multiple different social media accounts it’s very difficult to stay on top of your posting schedule.

This tool integrates with Facebook Business Pages, Instagram business profiles, Twitter, and Pinterest.

This tool gives you an easy way to manage all of your content, all without leaving the SEMrush dashboard.

Social Media Tracker

If you’re trying to monitor competitor social media accounts the old-fashioned way, you’re wasting a lot of time that could be spent growing your website.

This tool lets you monitor the social media accounts of your competitors. This allows you to study what they’re doing, plus compare your social accounts to theirs.

With this tool you can uncover the top-performing content in your niche, so you can create something similar, or even share the content (if it fits with your brand).

By diving deep into your competitor’s social media strategies you’ll gain a deep understanding of your market as a whole, which will help you create better social media content over the long-term.

4. Content Marketing Toolkit

The goal of the Content Marketing Toolkit is to help you create search engine friendly content and get a deeper understanding of how your content strategy is working.

If you want to improve your existing content to rank better in the search engines and better serve your readers, then this tool is right up your alley.

Here are a few tasks you can accomplish with this toolkit:

• Audit your existing website content to see where it can be improved to rank higher in the search engines
• Use the SEO Content Template to create content that’s perfectly optimized for the search engines, while still being very readable and engaging
• Brand Monitoring feature to uncover places online where your brand name or relevant keywords have been mentioned
• Post Tracking feature to measure the performance of the content you’ve published, this includes backlinks, number of social shares, as well as keyword rankings
• Topic Research tool to uncover the top content in your niche, including top-performing headlines and burning questions your audience wants to be answered
• Get real-time grades of how well your content is optimized, within Google Docs, or your current WordPress site

5. Competitive Research Toolkit

The Competitive Research Toolkit gives you in-depth data about your competitors across multiple different avenues. With this much data, you’ll be able to spot holes in your competitor’s strategy that you can take advantage of, plus see where your site is succeeding in the market.

This toolkit gives you access to your competitor’s marketing strategy across many different fronts including, organic search and SEO, overall domain comparison, advertising, content and PR, plus social media.

Here’s a deeper look:

Big Picture

This tool gives you a bird’s eye view of what your competitors are doing. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Traffic Analytics. This tool gives you access to your competitor’s overall website traffic as well as how engaged visitors are with their site. You can also see the sources that are sending them the most traffic. Think of this as looking into your competitor’s Google Analytics account.
• Domain Overview. This tool gives you a deep dive into the organic and paid keywords a domain is ranking for, the backlinks that are pointing towards the domain, as all as they display ads they’re running. This gives you a good idea of the overall strength of a competitor site.
• Market Explorer. This lets you dive deep into your market, so you can get a deep understanding of your industry. By better understanding your market demographics you’ll be able to create better content, products, and be better equipped to create opportunities to serve your visitors.

SEO

The SEO tools give you an in-depth dive into how your competitors are doing with organic search engine rankings. You’ll learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for, and which terms are sending them the most data.

You’ll get historical data too, so you can see how their rankings and positions have changed over time.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the included tools, beyond the ‘Organic Research’ tool just mentioned:

• Keyword Gap. With this tool, you can analyze up to five different domains to see what keywords they’re ranking for, that you aren’t. Use this to uncover valuable keywords you might have missed, that you can rank for.
• Backlink Analysis. Uncover where your competitors are getting their backlinks from. Use this to obtain backlinks from the same sources.
• Backlink Gap. Similar to Keyword Gap, this tool lets you compare five websites to see what sites are linking to them. This lets you see what sites are linking out to your competitor’s, but not your website.

Advertising

The advertising tools give you a breakdown of how your competition is spending their advertising dollars along with what keywords they’re targeting.

Here are some of the competitor research tools in the advertising toolkit:

• Advertising Research. This tool gives you in-depth information about what keywords are sending your competitor’s the most traffic, the landing pages they’re using, plus copies of the ads that are working for them.
• Display Advertising. This will show you how much your competitors are using display ads across Google Ads.
• PLA Research. This lets you analyze how much your competition is advertising products across the Google Shopping Network, perfect for websites that are selling eCommerce products.

Content and PR

This toolkit lets you spy on your competitor’s content and PR campaigns to see what’s working best for them. With this level of knowledge, you can mimic your competitor’s strategies, find new websites where you can be featured, and uncover trending topics.

Here’s a quick look at some of the tools included:

• Brand Monitoring. You can set up brand monitoring to track mentions of your competitors across the web, this helps you uncover new news sources and websites where you can be featured too.
• Topic Research. Uncover new websites that write on similar topics as you or do in-depth topic research on competitors for new topic ideas.
• Post Tracking. With this, you can monitor your competitor’s posts to see how they’re performing with backlinks, social media shares, and even track which keywords the post is ranking for.

Social Media

The social media tracker lets you track your top competitors across the big five social media networks. With these engagement metrics, you’ll be able to see what’s working across social media and what your market is responding too. This allows you to create a social media strategy that has a higher chance of success.

SEMrush Review: Pricing Plans

SEMrush offers a variety of different pricing plans to suit your needs. Currently, you’ll find three different price points, along with a high-level Enterprise solution that can be customized to your needs.

The higher the subscription level you choose, the more features you’ll get access to.

The basic plan called ‘Pro’ starts at $99.95 per month, the Guru plan is $199.95 per month, and the Business plan is $399.95 per month. While if you’re opting for Enterprise your pricing will depend on the needs of your business.

You can also lock down a cheaper monthly price if you opt to pay annually, instead of month by month.

If you can’t choose between the plans, here’s how they break down:

• Pro. This plan is best suited for individual website owners, startup businesses, and others with smaller marketing needs. You’ll get access to basic SEO, PPC, and competition research.
• Guru. This plan gives you access to historical data reports, and the in-depth content marketing tools, you can also track greater levels of data, which is a must-have for larger websites.
• Business. This plan provides you with even greater levels of data for large websites, or multiple websites. You also get access to even more advanced features like API access, white label reporting, and the Google Data Studio.

For most website owners the Pro plan will be more than enough to suit your needs. You can always upgrade your plan as your traffic and profits continue to climb.

SEMrush Tutorials

SEMrush has a ton of different features. Since it’s a full-fledged digital marketing suite there is a bit of a learning curve to getting the most out of the tool.

That’s why it’s recommended to website owners who are past the beginning stages and are serious about growing their sites.

Luckily, SEMrush has created an extensive knowledgebase to help you get the most out of the tool.

You’ll find everything from how to get started with your account, to in-depth tutorials on using the various toolkits, creating workflows to better manage your digital marketing tasks, and much more.

If you ever reach a roadblock with using the tool, you’ll be able to find tutorials and guides that can walk you through the entire process.

Beyond the knowledge base, you’ll also find a ton of different digital marketing courses to help grow your skills. These courses will take you from beginner to advanced digital marketer in record time.

You’ll find courses that’ll guide you through learning the ins and outs of the various SEMrush toolkits, show you how to do keyword research, uncover keyword difficulty, do competitive research, build links, track your rankings, and much more.

Best of all, these courses are entirely free. There’s no better way to become an expert at SEO and using SEMrush than their course library.

How to Steal Your Competitor’s Traffic with SEMrush?

One of the biggest advantages of using SEMrush is the level of competitive analysis the tool can provide; you’ll be able to find out what your competitors are doing with ease. If your competitors are dominating you in the search results, then this tool can help by keeping a watchful eye on your competitors.

If your SEO results have been lackluster, then it’s time to use this tool to your advantage.

With this tool you can easily uncover the keywords that are bringing your competitors the most traffic, then you can optimize your existing content and create new articles that target these keywords. Plus, the tool will prioritize the keywords for you, starting with the ones that’ll be easiest to rank for.

Here’s a great video from the SEMrush team that walks you through the process:

How to Find Long Tail Keywords?

If you’re new to SEO, long-tail keywords are going to be your best friend. Long-tail keywords are 4-word phrases that people type into Google. Compare these with the standard 1 to 2 two phrases.

Longer keywords will send more targeted traffic to your site, and more accurately reflect the desires and needs of your core audience. Sure, ranking for one to two work keywords might be a nice ego boost, but often these keywords won’t be as valuable to your bottom line.

The keyword research tools that SEMrush offers will give you tons of long-tail keywords you can rank for. The tool will optimize your keyword reports for keywords that are the most relevant to your site and will be the easiest to rank for.

This helps you stack up some quick wins before you move onto the keywords that have a higher level of competition and are harder to rank for.

Here’s a great video from the experts at SEMrush that walks you through the process of uncovering long-tail keywords:

How to Improve Your Onsite SEO?

Another quick SEO win is optimizing your onsite SEO. Now, doing things like building backlinks via guest posting is an incredibly important part of SEO. But you can see a quick boost in rankings, just by optimizing your site the right way. By implementing SEO best practices you’ll see your rankings increase.

On-page SEO means that the existing codebase and the content is perfectly optimized to tell the search engines the topic of your page or blog posts.

Luckily, SEMrush has an entire suite of tools that will help take your onsite SEO to new heights.

Here’s a quick video from SEMrush that shows you how to perfectly optimize your pages:

There’s a lot more that I could cover but doing these three tasks alone will help to take your current SEO strategy and rankings to new heights. By uncovering easy to rank for competitor keywords, creating content that targets long-tail keywords, and perfecting your on-page SEO you’ll be head and shoulders over your competition.

Then, once you incorporate some of the additional SEO strategies like, building backlinks, optimizing onsite metrics, making your site mobile-friendly, and improving user experience, you’ll see your rankings soar even higher. All with the built-in tools that’ll help you manage every SEO aspect of your digital marketing strategy.

Moz vs Ahrefs vs SEMrush: What’s the Best SEO Tool?

If you’ve been thinking about SEMrush, then you’ve probably come across some of the other best SEO tools in the space. The two biggest competitors you’ll be choosing between are Moz and Ahrefs. Both of these tools are very solid in their own right, but they suit different kinds of website owners and come with different feature sets.

Want to know about other leading SEO tools along with this SEMrush review? Here’s how the tools stack up to each other:

Moz

Moz is an incredibly popular SEO tool. A lot of its success is due to the popularity of its SEO blog. The main focus of this tool is providing accurate domain authority and page authority data. These two metrics will help you show you the overall strength of a domain. Usually, sites that are authority sites will be remarkably high in these two metrics.

Here are a few features that Moz includes:

• Rank tracking across 200+ different countries along with Google, Bing, and Yahoo search engines
• Link profile analysis, along with a breakdown of the most valuable links
• Site crawling that’ll uncover the 5 most important onsite fixes
• Page optimization data that shows you what metrics your competitor’s (and top-ranking content) are optimizing for

Moz shines in its commitment to delivering accurate on-page and domain analysis metrics. The backlink data isn’t the most accurate and it does have a steep learning curve. But it could be worth trying out if you’re trying to profile big authority sites in your niche.

Ahrefs

The main focus of Ahrefs is on helping you build high-quality backlinks. It has one of the most robust and in-depth backlinks indexes. This means it’ll include virtually all of the backlinks that are pointing towards your competitor’s website. There are also position tracking tools, keyword research tools, and you can use this tool to perform a technical audit on your site.

Here are a few reasons to consider Ahrefs:

• One of the best backlink analysis tools out there
• A pretty accurate rank tracker
• A keyword research tool that provides in-depth keyword results
• An outreach tool that can manage your backlink outreach campaigns

If your main focus is on building backlinks to your site, then Ahrefs might be worth checking out. However, keep in mind that it can start to get on the pricey side.

SEMrush

By now you have an in-depth understanding of SEMrush by reading our comprehensive SEMrush review, but I’ll highlight some of the core features once again, so you can see how it compares with the tools above.

SEMrush is the number one competitive research tool on the market. It’s a rock-solid SEO tool but goes way beyond SEO too by offering features to help you with PPC research, content marketing research, and much more.

Here are the main reasons to consider SEMrush:

• The best competitive research tool on the market across the entire digital marketing spectrum
• An on-page SEO tool that will help you perfectly optimize your pages and posts for your target keyword
• Use the site audit tool to generate a comprehensive error report of all the technical SEO errors currently live on your site
• Use the keyword research tool to uncover thousands of profitable keywords you can use to create content.

SEMrush truly shines as an SEO tool with its in-depth competitive research features and keyword research tools. Plus, as your rankings begin to rise you can use the other toolkits offered by SEMrush to grow your paid advertising and social media campaigns as well. 

Pros and Cons of SEMrush

In this SEMrush review, I have covered almost every tool in SEMrush toolkit with the comparison of other major SEO tools like Ahrefs and Moz. Even though SEMrush is a great SEO tool, it’s not perfect.

Here’s an honest look at the biggest pros and cons of this tool:

Pros of SEMrush:

• SEMrush provides you with one of the most in-depth keyword research tools, you’ll get access to thousands of relevant keywords, plus a breakdown of which keywords are the most profitable.
• You’ll get access to some of the most useful competitive research tools on the market, across multiple verticals, from SEO to content marketing, social media, and paid advertising.
• You can access all of your competitive research data from one place, no need to use multiple tools to track all of your digital marketing efforts.
• The on-page tools can give you a ton of quick wins you can implement to see a fast improvement in your SEO rankings and improve your website health.

Cons of SEMrush:

• Due to the sheer amount of digital marketing tools offered by SEMrush the layout can be overwhelming to get the hang of. Prepare to spend some time learning the ins and outs of this tool.
• The price can be a bit of an expensive investment for beginners who have a small budget or are just getting started online.

Luckily, Woblogger readers can take advantage of our exclusive SEMrush discount, which will give you access to SEMrush Pro for an entire 30 days. Click here to claim our exclusive SEMrush promo code.

In Closing: Is SEMrush Right for You?

If you’re searching for a best SEMrush review, a honest review of SEMrush, complete review of SEMrush or unbiased SEMrush review, you’re in the right place. In this honest and unbiased SEMrush review, we have covered almost all featured of SEMrush Toolkit.

By now you should have an in-depth understanding of SEMrush by reading our SEMrush review and a good idea of whether or not this is the right tool for you.

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The popularity of the tool across the SEO and digital marketing space is due to the overall suite of features this tool provides, it truly is an all-in-one SEO solution. Even though the bulk of this SEMrush review focused on the SEO features of this tool, it can help you manage every aspect of your digital marketing strategy.

With the in-depth competitive research tools, you’ll be able to uncover holes in your competitor’s strategy. We’ve covered a lot of ground here, and we hope that you enjoy our SEMrush review.