Semrush is one of the most prominent digital marketing tools for monitoring website performance metrics and analyzing competitors across SEO, PPC, content, and social media. This guide walks through its core features to help you extract maximum value from the platform.
Starting a Project: Site Audit & On-Site SEO Issues
Adding a website as a new project marks the initial step toward measuring online visibility. Semrush enables configuration of 11 different project tools including Site Audit, Position Tracking, On Page SEO Checker, Social Media Tracker, Brand Monitoring, Backlink Audit, Link Building, PPC Keyword Tool, Organic Traffic Insights, and Content Analyzer.
Site Audit
The Site Audit tool identifies technical errors affecting website performance. It crawls websites similarly to Googlebots and prepares technical issue reports categorized as Errors (severe issues), Warnings (less severe), and Notices (improvement recommendations). The Site Health score provides an overall quality indicator. Schedule regular audits to monitor health score progression over time.
Position Tracking Tool
Position Tracker monitors target keywords through manual entry, campaigns, or analytics integration. Follow competitor rankings for identical keywords, monitor ranking changes over time, view best and worst performing keywords, and integrate with Google Data Studio for dynamic dashboard creation.
On-Page SEO Checker
This tool provides actionable steps for improving rankings on target keywords. It complements Site Audit by offering specific optimization recommendations, from technical SEO improvements to increasing high-visibility keywords and acquiring targeted backlinks.
Backlink Audit Tool
Backlink Audit reviews your domain's backlink profile to prevent Google penalties from toxic links. Features include toxic signal analysis, email outreach capabilities, disavow file generation for Google submission, and integration with Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Majestic.
Link Building Tool
The Link Building Tool compiles link-building opportunities and provides workflow management for outreach campaigns. It creates comprehensive prospect lists based on target keywords and competitors, integrates with Gmail and Search Console, and automatically retrieves contact information for outreach targets.
Organic Traffic Insights
This tool consolidates Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush data into unified dashboards. It enables identification of "not-provided" keywords hidden by Google Analytics, and provides desktop, mobile, and tablet performance analysis alongside geographic traffic data.
Finding and Analyzing Competitors
Organic Research Tool
The Organic Research tool enables discovering competitor desktop and mobile keyword rankings, viewing landing pages displayed in SERPs, measuring search term organic traffic contributions, and tracking competitive positioning changes over time.
Traffic Analytics
Traffic Analytics provides comprehensive website performance views with side-by-side competitor comparisons across visits, unique visitors, engagement, and traffic by channel (direct, referral, search, social, paid).
- Audience Insights: Visitor overlap analysis and shared vs. unique audience comparison
- Traffic Journey: Audience source identification and social platform traffic contributions
- Top Pages: Popular page identification and customer journey insights
- Bulk Web Traffic Analysis: Aggregated analysis of up to 200 websites with CSV export
- Geo Distribution: Profitable market identification with country and regional visitor analysis
Backlink Analytics
Semrush maintains the industry's largest backlink database with over 43 billion links. Features include new and lost backlink notifications, backlink data across domains, subdomains, and URLs, and anchor text with referring domain authority assessment.
Keyword Gap
Keyword Gap enables side-by-side comparison of keyword profiles across up to five competitors. Key filter categories help focus your strategy:
- Missing: Keywords competitors rank for but your site doesn't — highest priority opportunities
- Weak: Keywords where your rankings are lower than competitors — optimization targets
- Strong: Keywords where you outrank competitors — defend and expand
- Untapped: Keywords only one competitor ranks for — emerging opportunities
- Shared: Keywords all analyzed websites rank for — benchmark your competitive position
Backlink Gap
The Backlink Gap tool simultaneously compares backlink profiles of up to five domains. The Authority Score (AS) metric measures domain quality. Use it to identify referring domains that link to competitors but not to you — these are your highest-priority link building targets.
Keyword Research with Semrush
The Keyword Magic Tool enables keyword research by entering target keywords or domains to view automatically grouped results.
- Competitive Density: Advertiser competition level for specific keywords in PPC
- Keyword Difficulty: SEO effort required for top 20 Google rankings
- Search Volume: Monthly average searches indicating potential traffic opportunity
- SERP Features: Available features and page placements for tracked keywords
Long Tail Keyword Research
To find long-tail opportunities in the Keyword Magic Tool: enter your seed keyword, filter by KD% for easy-to-target terms, apply Word Count filter for keywords with four or more words, then review for relevant subtopic opportunities. Multiple long-tail keywords around a single subtopic often indicate a strong content targeting opportunity.
Content Optimization with Semrush
The SEO Content Template tool analyzes the top 10 Google search results for your target keywords, providing template recommendations for SEO-friendly content creation.
The SEO Writing Assistant integrates with Google Docs and WordPress, displaying content scores in real-time and providing optimization recommendations during the editing process. It connects directly to SEO Content Template data to guide your writing.
Semrush Interface Overview
The dashboard organizes tools into three main categories:
- Analytics Reports: Domain Analytics, Keyword Research, Backlink Analytics, Gap Analysis, and Advertising Research
- Project Tools: Site Audit, Position Tracking, Backlink Audit, and Social Media tools for specific domains
- Specialty Products: Task-specific tools for Local SEO, Advertising, Social Media, Content Marketing, and Competitive Research
Users can extract data from any tool and convert findings into client-ready reports using the Semrush PDF Builder, enabling professional report creation across all modules.