SEMRush Metrics
SEMRush is one of those companies that even experienced SEOs like ourselves stand in awe of. The amount of data they are able to collect, analyze, interpret, and then collate into a single platform is mind boggling. It took a few years for them to find their proper niche in the world of SEO tools, but these days they are a force to be reckoned with. If you are not using their services (free or paid) then you are probably leaving money on the table.
We're going to look at a few of the most important (and most valuable) features of SEMRush and answer some common questions below. Let's get started!
What Is SEMRush Rank?
SEMRush rank is an unusual metric compared to some of the more famous site metrics like DA/PA/TF/CF. SEMRush rank doesn't care about your SEO, your links, your domain authority, its age, or anything like that at all. What SEMRush rank cares about is the amount of organic traffic a domain receives from Google's search results. The more keywords you have, the lower your rank will be (lower is better, the #1 site at the moment is Wikipedia).
SEMRush goes further than that by analyzing the position a website is in for each keyword and comparing it to the keywords monthly search volume. The more traffic you get from a keyword, the better your rank will be. The more inquisitive readers among you will already be wondering something along the lines of: "How on earth does SEMRush know what keywords every single website in the world is ranking for..."
And that's a good question. You can dive right in now and use our tool to check your URLs through SEMRush's data, or scroll down and find out more.
Check SEMRush rank, ranked keywords, traffic amount and traffic costs for up to 30 urls now
Metric Results
Url:The url in question
Rank:SEMRush Rank - the rank of this domain by traffic. Lower is better.
Keywords:The number of keywords tracked by SEMRush that this domain ranks for.
Traffic:SEMRush's estimation of the amount of traffic this domain gets
Costs:Estimation of how much money the traffic would cost in paid placements.
PPV:Price Per Visitor - Our own metric, Costs divided by Traffic, giving an indication of the cost of each visitor.
Download Data
You can choose to download the data in the table above as either a CSV file or an XLSX file by clicking on the icons below.
How Does SEMRush Discover What Keywords A Website Ranks For?
This bit is going to be a little hard to believe, but you are going to have to take our word for it - because it's true. SEMrush has a superpower sized army of scrapers at their disposal. They scrape Google's search results. All of them (almost).
That's a lot of data, that requires a lot of scraping, processing and analyzing to be transformed into something useful for the average professional SEO. It's super impressive that they manage to do this. Sometimes SEMrush will not have data on a keyword. If a user searches for a keyword that has no data associated with it, SEMRush adds it to their list and within a few weeks - it's in their database.
What Other Information Does SEMRush Provide?
Determining a websites SEMRush rank is in our opinion nothing more than an added bonus of the massive amount of scraping they do. It's a nice vanity tool, and a great progress indicator - but you can easily live without it if you need to. The most impressive thing about SEMrush is the other ways they use their scraped data.
There is so much to talk about here we are going to bullet point list some of the key features to give you an idea of what to look out for:
• Related keywords - When looking for LSI and related long tail keywords you are able to see what other keywords the websites in the top spots are ranking for. This can vastly increase your traffic potential.
• Traffic Cost - SEMRush has scraped most of Google's AdWords data (their paid advertising platform). They know how much advertisers are paying per click for almost every keyword. From this, they can tell you how much the organic traffic of any keyword, page, or website is worth.
• Traffic Estimates - Again SEMRush have used the search volume data from AdWords to provide information on how much traffic they estimate a keyword receives each month. (Note: there are disagreements within the SEO community about how accurate these stats are, do your own research)
• Competitor Analysis - This is one of the best ways to use SEMrush in our opinion. It makes keyword research into an entirely different process. Type in a competitor's domain and get an instant look at every single keyword they are ranking for. If you're not targeting them yet, you know what to do.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEMRush. It's a super powerful tool that can be used in all manner of creative ways to help your SEO game improve. It's not a cheap service (you need the paid version to get the full benefits), but if you are serious about your SEO - it's worth every cent.