Does SEMRUSH Really Help Websites Get to the Top? Detailed Review of Pros and Cons Before Making a Decision

1. About SEMRUSH

SEMRush is a leading SaaS (Software as a Service) platform that provides comprehensive solutions for SEO and Marketing. With SEMRush, you can easily find potential keywords, determine their difficulty, average search volume, and trends over time. In addition, this tool also allows you to compare your website's SEO performance with your competitors, thereby making necessary adjustments to improve your position on the rankings. In addition, SEMRush also provides features such as tracking keyword rankings over time, analyzing traffic, optimizing Google Ads, and even supporting content strategy building.

2. How does SEMRUSH help websites get to the top?

2.1. Keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO campaign, and SEMRush provides a powerful set of tools to help you do this effectively. With SEMRush, you can easily discover thousands of potential keywords in your field, analyze monthly search volume in detail to know the level of user interest. In particular, SEMRush also helps you evaluate keyword difficulty, indicating the level of competition and the ability to rank for that keyword. This feature allows you to focus on keywords that are likely to bring the highest efficiency. In addition, SEMRush also supports identifying long-tail keywords - longer and more specific keyword phrases, often with lower competition but targeting potential customers, thereby increasing the chance of your website appearing at the top of search results.

2.2. Competitor analysis

SEMRush offers a number of powerful tools for comprehensive competitor analysis. With the “Organic Research” tool, you can enter a competitor’s domain name and see a list of all the keywords they’re ranking for, along with metrics like ranking position, search volume, and estimated traffic. The “Traffic Analytics” tool allows you to analyze your competitor’s traffic, identify traffic sources, and user behavior on their website. To analyze your backlink strategy, you can use the “Backlink Analytics” tool to view your competitor’s backlink list, analyze the quality of each backlink, and find opportunities to build similar backlinks. By analyzing your competitor’s popular content, you can find potential topics to create competitive content.

2.3. Check backlinks & link building

Checking and building effective backlinks is a key factor to improve website rankings. SEMRush helps you do this easily and effectively. With SEMRush, you can analyze your website's backlink profile in detail, identify quality links, and find new link building opportunities from reputable sources. In particular, SEMRush also helps you monitor and detect bad, toxic backlinks, thereby promptly disavowing to avoid penalties from Google. Effective backlink management with SEMRush helps your website have a solid SEO foundation and achieve high rankings in search results.

2.4. Site Audit & Technical Optimization

Site Audit is one of the important features of SEMRush, which helps you check the overall health of your website in terms of technical SEO. This tool automatically scans your entire website and detects common technical errors, including broken links, slow page loading speed, meta tag issues, suboptimal site structure, indexing errors, and many more. After scanning, SEMRush provides a detailed report of the errors found, classified by severity, and with specific recommendations on how to fix them. Regularly using Site Audit and fixing technical errors makes your website more search engine friendly, improves user experience, and thereby improves search engine rankings.

2.5. Keyword ranking tracking

SEMRush makes it easy to track keyword rankings. With the Position Tracking tool , you can:

Enter a list of target keywords.
Select the geographic location you want to track (country, region, city).
Select device (desktop, mobile, tablet).
Set monitoring frequency (daily, weekly, monthly).
SEMRush automatically collects data and displays detailed reports on keyword rankings over time. You can view charts of ranking fluctuations, compare them to competitors, and get alerts on important changes. Based on this data, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO strategy and make timely adjustments to optimize results.

3. Advantages of SEMRush

SEMRush is a powerful SEO and online marketing toolkit, trusted by many experts and businesses around the world. Possessing many outstanding features, SEMRush brings great benefits in optimizing websites, building effective marketing strategies and outperforming competitors. Some outstanding advantages of SEMRush include:

Friendly, easy-to-use interface : SEMRush is designed with an intuitive and user-friendly interface. The features are arranged logically and clearly, helping users easily manipulate and make the most of the tool's functions, even for beginners. Charts and data tables are presented in a scientific, easy-to-understand manner, helping users quickly grasp information and make accurate analysis.
Rich data, updated regularly: SEMRush owns a huge database of keywords, backlinks, competitors and many other important information. This data is constantly updated, ensuring accuracy and timeliness, helping users always grasp market trends and make decisions based on the latest data. In particular, the ability to analyze data across many countries and languages ​​is also a strong point of SEMRush.
Integrating many features : SEMRush is not only a keyword research tool but a multi-purpose toolkit, integrating many important features for SEO and online marketing as SaDesign has analyzed in detail in section 2.
Powerful Competitor Comparison Tools: SEMRush offers powerful tools to compare your website with your competitors. You can compare keywords, backlinks, traffic, and many other factors. This helps you better understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, thereby creating effective competitive strategies.

4. Disadvantages of SEMRush

Although SEMRush is a powerful SEO and online marketing toolkit with many outstanding advantages, it is undeniable that it also has some disadvantages that users need to consider before deciding to use it. Understanding these limitations helps users use the tool more effectively and make appropriate investment decisions. Some of the main disadvantages of SEMRush include:

Quite expensive compared to regular SEO tools: This is probably the biggest and most mentioned drawback. Compared to single SEO tools or basic plugins, SEMRush is significantly more expensive, especially for the Pro and Guru packages, which offer more advanced features. This cost can be a barrier for individuals, freelancers, small businesses or startups with limited marketing budgets.
Some international data (outside major markets) may not be 100% accurate : Although SEMRush has a huge and constantly updated database, the accuracy of the data may vary depending on the market. Data in large and competitive markets such as the US, UK, Australia is often collected and analyzed more thoroughly, so the accuracy is higher. Meanwhile, in smaller markets or less popular languages, the data may be more limited and the accuracy may not be absolute. Therefore, when using SEMRush for niche or international markets, users should combine it with other data sources, such as Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends or data from local tools for a more comprehensive and accurate view.
Takes time to get used to: With a wide range of powerful features and tools, SEMRush’s interface can be quite complex for beginners. Learning and mastering all of SEMRush’s functions requires users to spend time learning, exploring, and practicing.

5. Does SEMRush really help websites get to the top?

SEMRush is an incredibly useful tool that provides in-depth data and strategic recommendations for SEO optimization, but it doesn’t “automatically” get your website to the top. Ranking high on search engines is a complex process that depends on many factors, and SEMRush is a great help. It provides detailed information about keywords, competitors, backlinks, website audits, and helps you build an effective SEO strategy. However, your ultimate success depends on the quality of the content you create, your SEO skills (on-page, off-page, technical SEO), and your ability to execute that strategy consistently. SEMRush helps you stay on track, saving you time and effort, but it cannot replace your own efforts and expertise.

6. Advice before deciding to invest in SEMRush

SEMRush is a powerful SEO tool, but investing in it should be carefully considered to ensure it fits your needs and budget. Before you spend your money, consider the following tips:

Determine your needs: The most important thing is to clearly define your needs. Ask yourself: Do you need in-depth competitor data, detailed backlink analysis, a comprehensive website audit, and regular keyword ranking tracking, or do you simply need to check a few basic keywords? If you only need basic functionality, there are probably free or lower-cost tools that will suit you. SEMRush really comes into its own when you need a comprehensive toolkit for complex, professional SEO campaigns.
Consider your budget : SEMRush has a variety of pricing plans, from Pro to Guru and Business. Carefully consider how much you can spend on your SEO tool on a monthly or annual basis. Compare the pricing of the plans with the features they offer to choose the plan that best fits the scale of your SEO project. If you are an individual or a small business with a limited budget, the Pro plan may be a good choice. If you are an agency or a large enterprise with multiple projects and in-depth analytics needs, the Guru or Business plan may be more suitable.
Try it : SEMRush regularly offers free trials, which allow you to try out most of the tool’s features for a limited period of time. This is a great opportunity to get familiar with the interface, explore the features, and evaluate whether SEMRush really meets your needs.
​Upgrade to genuine SEMRUSH account 

7. Conclusion

SEMRush is rightfully considered one of the top SEO tools today, providing valuable information and strong support for SEO professionals and marketers. However, it is important to understand that SEMRush is just a tool, and ultimate success depends on your ability to use it effectively. If you have a clear strategy, good SEO skills and the ability to execute consistently, SEMRush will be a great assistant to help your website reach the top quickly and sustainably. Don’t expect instant results, but focus on building a solid foundation for your website, combining data from SEMRush with quality content and an optimal user experience.