Semrush

The Keyword Magic Tool is where I start every project. Drop in a seed term like "vegan protein powder" and within seconds you have 1,200 related keywords sorted by volume, trend, and difficulty. I export the long-tail suggestions below 30 difficulty and build a content plan around them. That single step used to take me two hours scraping Google Keyword Planner; now it takes ten minutes.

The Site Audit module is the second thing I set up. Connect your domain, configure the crawl settings, and let it run. It flags missing alt tags, slow-loading URLs, and broken internal links, then orders everything by severity. Last month it found 14 broken links on a client's archive pages that I had missed during manual checks. I've changed my mind about this feature – I used to ignore it because of false positives, but now I filter by warnings and errors only and it saves me a full day of QA.

For competitive research, the Organic Research report gives you a domain's top keywords, estimated traffic, and position changes. I use it to find gaps: if a competitor ranks for "best vegan protein powder" but their content is thin, I know I can outrank them with a detailed guide. The tool also shows which keywords they lost, which is a quick way to spot opportunities they abandoned.

Finally, the client reporting module. I automate a monthly PDF that includes ranking changes, site health scores, and backlink growth. It keeps clients informed without me having to write a bespoke update. I admit I used to think this was fluff, but now it's how I justify my retainer.

The backlink index is the feature that frustrates me most. I ran a comparison for a small e‑commerce site: Semrush reported 340 referring domains while Ahrefs found 480. The missing links were from niche blogs and forums – exactly the kind of links a growing site depends on. If backlink analysis is your primary task, Semrush will leave you with gaps. I switched to Ahrefs for link building work after that discovery.

The user interface suffers from report overload. There are so many dashboards, custom reports, and sub‑tools that I often spend 30 seconds hunting for a specific graph. The "Competitive Positioning Map" is buried under four menus. I only found it because a colleague pointed it out. Semrush could do with a cleaner navigation that surfaces the core reports – keyword overview, domain overview, site audit – and hides the advanced visualisations until you need them.

Pricing is the obvious pain point. The basic plan at £95 (roughly $119) per month only allows 500 keywords for Position Tracking and 5,000 results per export. If you manage more than one small site, you hit those limits quickly. SE Ranking, by contrast, tracks 3,000 keywords on its lowest paid tier for a similar price. I downgraded my Semrush plan and added SE Ranking for rank tracking because the cost per keyword was too high.

Mobile app functionality is basic. You can check rankings and see alerts, but you cannot run a new report or edit a project. For a tool that markets itself as an all‑in‑one suite, the mobile experience feels like an afterthought.

If backlink analysis is your priority, choose [Ahrefs](/ahrefs/). Its index is deeper and updates more frequently. I keep Ahrefs for link prospecting and disavow file generation; Semrush stays for everything else.

For rank tracking on a budget, [SE Ranking](/se-ranking/) offers 3,000 keywords on its cheapest plan versus Semrush's 500. I use SE Ranking for daily position checks across multiple clients and export the data into a Google Sheet. The interface is simpler, which is a plus when you're juggling several projects.

[Ubersuggest](/ubersuggest/) is a decent free starting point for beginners. The keyword volume data is less accurate – I compared it with Semrush for a local bakery and saw 40% discrepancies – but it's good enough to generate content ideas when you have zero budget.

[Google Trends](/google-trends/) sits alongside any paid tool. I check seasonal patterns there before committing keywords into Semrush projects. For example, "Christmas presents for runners" spikes in November; knowing that means I schedule content creation in October.

If you need honest, heatmap-style behaviour data, neither Semrush nor Ahrefs offers that. I paired Semrush with [Hotjar](/hotjar/) for on‑page user recordings during a conversion audit. The combination gave me both the search data and the real user behaviour that drove click changes.