SEMrush Is One of the SEO Tools I Use Every Day
Semrush, and the four things I actually use it for
Semrush does roughly fifty things. I use four of them, most weeks, across two sites — one a twenty-year-old domain with the traffic history to match, the other a marketplace catalogue still being built out.
This page is about those four, and about what the subscription is genuinely worth against what it costs, which is not a small number. Sixteen years of SEO work behind that assessment, most of it before tools like this existed in a usable form.
Why I use it
The single most valuable thing it has done for me was answer a question I could not otherwise have answered: why traffic to an established site was falling when its rankings had barely moved. Search Console shows you what happened. It does not tell you why. Semrush let me line up ranking positions against AI Overview coverage on the same terms over the same period, and the answer was legible in about an hour.
That is the actual case for a paid SEO platform. Not the keyword lists, which are pleasant but rarely decisive. It is being able to test an explanation for something happening to your business, rather than guessing at it and acting on the guess.
The second most valuable is unglamorous: before I write anything substantial, I check whether the term has real volume, whether the difficulty is plausible for the site in question, and whether I am about to compete with a page I already own. That check takes five minutes and has stopped a great deal of pointless work.
What I use it for
Deciding what to build next
Volume and difficulty across a cluster of related terms, before committing to a page or a tool. I have shelved builds on the strength of this and been glad of it. The number that matters is not the biggest volume, it is the best ratio of volume to difficulty for a site with your authority.
Watching pages lose ground
Position tracking matters less for the wins than for the quiet slides. A page drifting from four to nine costs real traffic and nothing announces it. Catching that early is most of what rank tracking is for.
Site audits
Duplicate meta descriptions, broken internal links, structured data errors, redirect chains. Tedious, genuinely worth fixing, and effectively invisible without a crawler telling you where to look.
Seeing what a competitor actually ranks for
Useful less for copying and more for calibration. It shows you which of your assumptions about your market are wrong, and occasionally that a term you have been chasing is being won by somebody with fifty times your authority.
What I would flag before you subscribe
Check which country database you are looking at
This one caught me properly. A reading that combines every country's database will show you a total that bears no relation to your actual market, and it looks entirely plausible until you check the components. I once spent an afternoon pleased about a traffic figure that turned out to be an implausible number from a country I do not sell in. Set the database to your market and confirm it is still set every time you open a report.
The traffic numbers are estimates
Every third-party SEO tool models traffic rather than measuring it. The estimates are useful for comparing two sites or watching a trend, and unreliable as absolute figures. Your own analytics is the truth about your site; Semrush is the only view you get of everybody else's.
It is expensive, and the entry tier is tighter than it looks
This is a serious monthly commitment, and the cheapest plan caps tracked keywords, projects and rows per report, with additional user seats charged on top. Work out what you need before comparing prices. If you would open it twice a month, the free tier or a cheaper tool will serve you better.
Data does not do the work
The most expensive way to use a tool like this is to read the dashboards, feel informed, and change nothing. If you are not going to act on what an audit finds, the audit is entertainment. Judge the subscription against what you actually fixed last quarter.
Who it suits
- ✓Sites where organic search is a meaningful share of revenue
- ✓Anyone publishing regularly who wants to know a topic is worth the effort first
- ✓E-commerce catalogues large enough that technical issues hide in the volume
- ✓Agencies and consultants who need to show clients evidence rather than opinion
- ✓Anyone trying to work out what AI results are doing to their search traffic
Getting started
There is a free tier with daily limits, which is enough to run your own domain through and see whether the reports tell you anything you did not already know. Do that before paying for anything.
Visit SemrushAffiliate link. I may earn a commission if you subscribe through it, at no cost to you. I pay for my own Semrush subscription, and nobody there has reviewed or approved this page.
What to do with the data
Knowing a term has volume is the easy half. Writing something that earns the position, in a search environment where an AI answer sits above every result, is the part worth thinking about properly.
SEO & creator tools