Is Semrush Worth It? How to Get the Most Out of Your SEO and GEO Strategy

Semrush has been a trusted tool for marketers, and SEO's for decades, but recently has really been making a buzz online. You may be wondering if it's a tool worth checking out. Think of it as your super-smart marketing sidekick that helps you find the best keywords, spy on the competition (in a non-creepy way of course), and see how your website is actually performing on platforms like Google. It's a great tool that helps get businesses noticed online by providing valuable marketing insights to provide direction to your SEO strategies, content marketing, and even pay-per-click advertising.

Here at Northern, it's a platform of choice for our SEO team, and we're going to walk you through some of our favourite features:

Keyword Magic Tool

• Determine relevant keywords, fast.
• Receive valuable information about those keywords, including search volume, what kind of intent the searcher has (just browsing vs. ready to buy), and how difficult it may be to rank based on the competitive landscape.
• Great for finding long-tail keywords that are typically easier to rank for (especially helpful if you're targeting a niche market).

Site Audit Tool

• Automatically scan a website for technical SEO problems such as broken links, slow loading pages, or errors that may stop engines from crawling your site properly.
• It not only tells you what's wrong, but gives clear advice on how to fix those issues.
• Any issues flagged are prioritized by importance to highlight critical problems, but also to suggest opportunities to improve organic visibility.
• Helps keep your site healthy, loading faster, and offering a better experience for visitors (key when trying to climb in search rankings!).

Backlink Audit Tool

• Analyze backlinks and referring domains pointing to a website to analyze the quantity, quality, and relevance of the external links to determine strengths and weaknesses (such as spammy links).
• A "referring domain" is another website that links to yours, acting as a "vote of confidence" to signal your website's authority and trustworthiness. (And referring domains are critical when it comes to ranking in search results.)

Position Tracking Tool

• Receive daily updates to understand how your website ranks in search results for the keywords you care about.
• Easily monitor your positions in the search engine results page (SERP) to quickly determine what's working, or what needs improvement.
• As a bonus, it enables you to track your rankings on both desktop and mobile, which is key as people search differently on each.

Competitive Analysis Tool

• By allowing you to keep tabs on your competition, you can quickly identify both threats and opportunities in the market.
• Learn key aspects about your competition, including ranking performance, backlink sources, top-performing content, and more.
• Develop more effective SEO strategies by monitoring industry leaders and competitor sites.

Now, before we get into the final feature, let's take a quick step back, because search is evolving fast, and understanding these terms is important. What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

AI Visibility Toolkit

• With those acronyms in mind, the new AI Visibility toolkit in Semrush provides additional insights for AEO and GEO opportunities to take your traditional SEO strategies to the next level.
• Semrush also allows you to tap into the largest U.S. and ChatGPT prompt databases so that instead of just getting raw numbers, you're getting highly contextualized insights that reflect real market behaviour.

So, what does all of this mean for you?

By leveraging Semrush, you don't have to guess what's driving your online visibility within large language models. Instead, you get detailed insights and tracking into your mentions, their sources, and even your brand's sentiment. This might be your brand as a whole, specific markets, cities, or even individual products.

See how AI is shaping your presence.
Pinpoint which AI prompts are affecting your visibility, monitor where your brand is being talked about, and understand how customers feel about you.

Stay one step ahead of the competition.
Semrush lets you monitor your competitors' moves in real-time. Get visibility into new content, keyword strategies, or campaigns your competition appears to enable you to react quickly, and stay ahead of the game.

Get the full picture.
Since Semrush tracks data from both traditional search engines, and newer AI platforms, you get a 360-degree view of your online reputation, and visibility.

Take what you learn and run with it.
Once you understand your competitive landscape and how AI sees your brand, the next step is using those insights to create content that truly matters to your audience. You're not just creating content for your website...you're building trust, driving engagement, and ultimately turning prospects into loyal customers.

Not sure where to start? Let's connect.