Search Engine Marketing Tool Review: SEM Rush

Many internet marketers are familiar with the SEOQuake plugin for Firefox which helps you find out the demographics of various keywords, and domains. This information is VERY useful if you are working to find websites with high page rank where you can put comments in order to develop strong backlinks for your money sites.

The plugin also gives you lots of information regarding the sites of your competition as well. Website plugins are great, but when you’re on the go, you need to be able to access this kind of information from wherever you are. SEMRush.com, from the makers of SEOQuake, is a website that can give you some amazing website analytic information in regards to the top keywords on Google, and how they relate to a website.

SEMRush.com is a keyword research tool that goes well beyond just providing a list of keywords to target for an online marketing campaign. This website gives information, and statistics about the most sought after keywords on Google . Even if you use the free version you can get some great information in regards to which keywords a site ranks for, and for what position in the Google search results, although the PRO version gives you access to even more info (please note – if the keyword you are interested in does not supply a high level of searches in Google, you won’t find any statistical information regarding it on SEMRush.com).

The interface for this site is very simple to use. Once on the SEMRush.com website, at the very top there is a red toolbar with the words “Enter domain, keyword, or url” where you can do just that. I first wanted to test out what would happen if I entered a url. I decided to type in a website address belonging to a business associate. To my surprise, I found out that his site ranked for eleven different keywords in Google which put his website on Google’s first page, but ironically his website did not rank for a keyword that he uses in the description tags on almost every page of his site. This is one of the things that really makes the SEMRush.com website useful – it can let you know, almost instantly, the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

Another thing that is useful about the information tables this website generates is that if you move your cursor to the heading on each column of info a question mark inside of a circle appears. When you move your cursor over that icon, you get an explanation of what the information in that column relates to. You can even get Google SERP results for variations of Google from various countries (if SERP info is available). Something else that I also really liked about the url results was that I could see, at a glance, what percentage of traffic each keyword had in the Google results. From this you can tell for which keywords a site dominates the Google search engine results, and to what extent.

I next decided to test the keyword “make money online”. This gave me a vertical table summary showing the CPC, competition level, average search volume, and number of page results in Google for this search term (on the free version you get ten results, but the PRO version has well over a thousand results). As I scrolled down, I was able to see a phrase match report which showed variations on this keyword (ex: how to make money online, making money online, ways to make money online, etc.), with the same info that was given for my original keyword search, but this time with the information running horizontally. I was very impressed to see this additional information because it showed me how making a slight change on the original keyword could yield other keywords that would be easier to compete for in the Google search rankings. One of my main complaints is that you are not able to have the information ordered by category. For example, if I wanted to order the list by CPC in order to figure out which keywords would be best for an Adsense site, I would not be able to do that with the current set up – and this is true for the free version as well as the PRO version. On the plus side, you can export these analytics in a table, or CSV format if you have access to the PRO version of the site.

As I continued to scroll down, I found a listing of related keywords, which are perfect for SEO purposes when writing a blog post, an article, or setting up a money site. Keyword stuffing is greatly frowned upon by Google, so its best to use one or two main keywords along with other related keywords in your writing, and website creation efforts. Scrolling down further gave me something that could be termed “worth its weight in gold” – the top organic results for the keyword that I was researching. Normally, even if you use the Google Adwords keyword external tool, you can get the other information that I’ve mentioned, but not a list of the domains that rank on the first page of Google organically for that keyword. Having all this information on one page is extremely convenient, and makes keyword research so much easier.

SEMRush.com is absolutely amazing for the kind of information that it provides – analytics for the top results for urls and domain names in the Google search results. Long story short, if you need to find out which keywords that have a high search volume in Google then this website is perfect for that. On the other hand, if the keywords that the majority of people are using to find your site are not amongst the most searched for in the Google search engine rankings, then you won’t get any information for those keywords using this site. Overall, this site is probably best used by those seeking to find out what top Google keywords their site (and their competition’s site) ranks for. However, if you need an analysis tool to find those “hidden gem” keywords that few know about, you may want to use something else. But for what it does, SEMRush.com is an excellent resource in regards to finding out the keyword, and domain analytics behind the top Google search engine results.