SEMrush

I’m starting with SEMrush because it is one of the most complete SEO software available. I’m also telling you about it first because it’s easier for me to start the article by describing an SEO tool that I use on a daily basis. It’s simple, SEMrush is used for everything. With this tool, it is possible to analyse your own backlinks, but also to analyse the links of your competitors. What’s more, this online software automatically suggests sites that are relevant to our market/niche to which we could link. The analyses show the usual data such as the number of domains, their IP addresses, the anchors used, but the tool goes further by evaluating the value of each backlink, by assigning a toxicity score to these backlinks (according to the domain, the anchor, the spam of the site…) and by allowing us to send the bad links to the Google disavowal file with a simple click.

SEMrush allows me to check my backlinks, those of my competitors, but also to evaluate the quality of a site before going to beg for a backlink from them. This has allowed me to avoid the worst in some cases. I remember almost doing a sponsored article on a blog that seemed extremely interesting in these metrics, but which, after analysis with SEMrush, ended up being in chaos with Google starting to dereferencing quite a few of its pages (the site seemed to have abused PBNs…).

On a daily basis, I also use SEMrush for my position tracking. This aspect is available directly in our dashboard for the whole site. But for a more detailed follow-up, I mainly use their “Positions Tracking” tool. This allows you to select keywords (up to 500 with the basic package) which will be updated daily. Still on keywords, it is also possible to obtain details of the keywords on each page of a site, the volume of traffic brought to the page by each keyword, the history of positions, cannibalisation between pages, etc… in short, tons of data, each more useful than the last (or not). Being a fan of figures, I love SEMrush. I use it mainly for its accuracy in SEO analysis, for backlink evaluation and for the construction of my articles.

Indeed SEMrush offers a very powerful and comprehensive keyword tool. Again, just this feature would deserve an article on its own. So I’ll try to keep it short and sweet. On a specific keyword, it is possible to have an overview of organic and paid search, trends, associated or matching keywords, competing sites, difficulty and many other data. Using the Keyword Magic Tool, you get some pretty amazing data that you can’t find with your competitors. If the associated and corresponding keywords are indeed there with their own metrics, the analysis also offers us the questions asked in relation to these keywords, the relative keywords, the exact match, and a whole bunch of data that allows us to write a perfectly SEO optimised article. For example, here are the results of the tool with the keyword «affiliation».

SEMrush is not only a backlink analysis and position tracking tool, it is also a complete SEO tool with so many possibilities that it is difficult to describe them all in this topic. I realize that I’ve talked too much about SEMrush when I still have more than a dozen other SEO tools to present to you.

SEMrush is free, but it is only possible to do about ten queries per day. This is very limited (and limiting). However, you can test it for free for 7 days. This is already good, but it gives you just enough time to see what this software can do for you.

Advantages

• The most complete. Has all the necessary SEO features
• Unlimited competitive analysis possible
• Excellent data accuracy
• Localized database
• Differentiated organic and paid search
• Daily updates
• Google Analytics and Search Console integration

Disadvantages

• Requires time to adapt due to the amount of data present
• Free SEMrush is very limited
• More complete, but more expensive than its competitors.
• Makes you quickly addicted to SEO metrics!