SEM Rush Review – Keyword Research & Competitive Analysis

Please note the following SEM Rush review to follow is geared-up for SEO’s using SEM Rush for understanding keyword volumes and competitiveness and value, but doesn’t really cover the PPC value in too much detail.  Paid Search guys can also take advantage of the PPC facets that look pretty handy.  Although I work with PPC guys a fair bit now, I can apply the SEO applications of this tool much more easily to how SEO’s like to work and so I’ve made that the focus of this review.

So what is SEM Rush?

SEM Rush has a database which tracks the visibility of websites via a huge set of keywords.  As a keyword suggestion tool, SEM Rush performs very well, but as a keyword value, volume and cost estimator it can work even better. SEM Rush has Firefox addon that can be pretty cool for at-you- finger-tips-access.

Regarding the depth of their keyword database, the following keywords should give you an idea of the number of keywords can be mined and tracked for that particular vertical:

• Credit Card, USA database: 17,000+ keywords
• Sunglasses, USA database: 3,000+ keywords
• Car, USA database: 24,000+ keywords

…these terms have been semantically generated and extracted from domains competing in that space, but number don’t mean anything if the quality of the suggested keywords are lousy.  The best way to see the quality of the keywords is to test for yourself, in your own niche, but from my queries I exported the SEM Rush keyword to excel and then sorted alphabetically to start the process of sorting the keywords by  and I saw a good level of quality and relevancy in their to be perfectly satisfied.

This is a good way of seeing which domains rank organically for the any given keyword query, but then you can see what terms they find most important by seeing what terms they are bidding on in AdWords.

USA, Holland, French and Russian Results Only

It would be truly great is SEM Rush extended its tools to consider the UK market.  Maybe after getting a few more public mentions in the UK they might see it as a feasible option.

I work with the Outrider guys in Holland and the States, so this might be more useful for them, but as many of my clients’ websites aren’t restrained by geographic borders then it could still potentially add value.

35 million keywords

SEM Rush goes to the effort of analysis what’s going on organically around 35 million keywords.  Now that’s some pretty impressive tracking data.

I’d certainly like to hear their perspective of key shifts or trends across competitive niches.  Would certainly add value to USA, Dutch, French and Russian clients – maybe there’s a high-level service they could provide!

For the 35 million keywords that they are tracking, these are taken from multiple volume driving verticals, but if you’re unsure whether they are able to serve all your needs, then give them a go.  Even with their free service you can see the potential keywords available.

SEM Rush Competitor Analysis

The best thing it offers from my perspective is that SEM Rush helps to highlight who is competing for the same keywords you are.  This is could be very helpful.  On a keyword-by-keyword basis, it’s naturally easy enough to see who is competing in your organic space for that keyword.  SEM Rush also allows you to then mine the keywords that they are targeting via Adwords or organically too.  It could provide a few more target sites for gaining links too of course.

It’s important to realise that data can be up to one month old.  It’s a huge data set of 35 million terms so it’s going to take some time to refresh.  This does mean that some of the rankings are misplaced.   Also because of the ad serving platforms redirecting through their own URLs, sometimes you might see results such as dartsearch.com or advertising.com, but it’s probably just best to disregard these as competitors as it’s just a bug in the way that the results are scraped.

SEMRush User Interface

SEM Rush enables access via the web interface and through excel docs, so data can be moulded and merged to suit your needs. Click on the image to see for yourself…

They also encourage you to get in touch if you want to plug and play with their data, maybe as part of another tool – so really helpful if you like to build your own SEO tools.

Reporting

The reporting interface is clear and easy to understand. I think they could provide better examples of ways that SEM Rush could be used in order to splice the data that it serves. After all, it’s not the data that’s important but the information that you pull from it.

Speed of Search

It can run a bit slow at times.  Most of the time when I was testing it was over the weekend so I would expect there to be much demand then on their servers but maybe they were doing some maintenance at low demand time, who knows.   Then again, I’ve been pretty busy lately so maybe I’m just getting less patient with old age!

35m keywords analysed – and digging through this kind of volume is a pretty big ask, but from my perspective it’s worth the wait for a healthy list of terms or competing domains.

Is SEM Rush for big websites?

Running SEM Rush on my website it showed me who I was competing again from keywords that are extracted from your website, although I’d personally disagree that I am competing with the likes of Wikipedia and Google.com for terms like SEO consultant. 

This makes me think that SEMRush is probably best suited for bigger websites where the data can be more accurate as a sample, but then again this could be the UK-skew again.

SEM Rush Price

SEMRush is priced very low compared to other keyword and vertical competition analysis tools, like Compete.com and Spyfu, but none of these can be compared like-for-like.  Each has their own specialities.

Conclusion

This tool is most likely to be most helpful for those working with big companies, with clearly defined websites and in big markets.

SEM Rush is good at what it does definitely, and I look forward seeing what else it has in store for us in the future!

Don’t take my word for it – if you like what you’re reading and want to know more, make sure you read Aaron Wall’s review too. If you want to trial SEM Rush give it a go by clicking here…

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