Semrush

What SEO software actually does, in plain words

That's a strange way to open a review of a product, but it's the most useful sentence in this article, so it goes first. Semrush is professional SEO software: a giant database of what people type into Google, what ranks for it, and who links to whom. Agencies and content teams live inside it. It's genuinely good at what it does, and it costs $139 a month at the entry tier, per Semrush's pricing page. If your business is in its first year and you can still name your customers from memory, that $139 will do more for you almost anywhere else.

What a first-year business needs from Google is much cheaper: a Google Business Profile, which is free, and a steady trickle of real reviews from happy customers. Ten happy customers who each leave a review will move you up local search results in a way no keyword database can. The suite comes later, if at all. This article is about knowing when. It's part of our resources directory, where we review the tools our members ask about.

One naming note first: Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026, per Adobe's announcement. You'll now see "Semrush, an Adobe Company" on its review listings, and an Adobe logo in semrush.com's footer. Same product, new owner. And, as we'll get to, new plan names.

Strip away the dashboards and every SEO tool does three jobs:

It shows you what people search for. Type "mobile detailing" into a keyword tool and it tells you roughly how many people search that each month, what related phrases they use ("mobile detailing near me," "how much does mobile detailing cost"), and how hard each phrase would be to rank for. Useful once you're writing pages meant to be found. It tells you to title the page the way people search, not the way you talk.

It shows you what competitors rank for. Point it at a competitor's website and it lists the search phrases sending them traffic and the pages doing the earning. If a rival shop's "how much does junk removal cost in Chicago" page pulls in visitors every month, that's a to-do list, not espionage.

It finds what's broken on your site. A crawler visits every page like Google does and flags problems: pages that don't load, missing titles, broken links, pages Google can't reach. On a five-page website there is very little to break. On a five-hundred-page website, this is the tool that notices what no human will.

Notice what all three jobs have in common: they only pay off if you have a website with real content on it and the time (or budget) to act on what the data says. Data about work you're not going to do is the most expensive kind of nothing.

Before you spend a dollar on SEO tools

Two free things come first, and they're not optional. They're the actual foundation the paid tools sit on top of.

A Google Business Profile. For a local service business, most "SEO" is really this: the map listing that appears when someone searches "electrician near me." Creating one is free. Google says so plainly on the Business Profile page, and getting it verified and filled out properly matters more than anything a paid tool can tell you. We've written up how the profile works and how verification goes, including what to do when Google wants a video walkthrough of your business address.

Google Search Console. This is Google's own reporting tool for your website, and it's "a free service offered by Google," in Google's own words. Connect your site at search.google.com/search-console and it shows you the exact phrases people searched before clicking to your site, which pages Google has indexed, and any problems Google found while crawling. Free, forever, and worth setting up this week whether or not Semrush ever enters the picture. A big chunk of what beginners buy SEO tools for, the "what am I ranking for?" question, Search Console answers free, straight from the source.

Do those two, get ten customers, ask each for a review. That's a complete first-year SEO strategy, at zero dollars.

Who genuinely needs Semrush

Some businesses should absolutely pay for this, and it's worth being precise about which:

• Content-led businesses. If your growth plan is publishing, a blog that brings in customers, comparison pages, city-by-city service pages, then keyword data turns your weekly what-to-write decisions from guesses into choices. This is the core Semrush customer.

• Agencies and freelancers doing SEO for clients. Competitor research, rank tracking, and reports across many client sites. The tool was built for you, and $139 a month is a line item, not a leap.

• Anyone already spending real money on organic. If you're paying a writer, a marketer, or an agency, the tool is a small percentage on top that makes the expensive part more accurate. It amplifies effort; it doesn't replace it.

• E-commerce and multi-hundred-page sites, where the site-audit crawler earns its keep because no one can check that many pages by hand.

If you read that list and didn't see yourself, that's the answer, and it's a happy one. You just saved $1,668 a year.

A note from Lobi Space management

People in business communities, ours included, ask each other the same question constantly: what do you use? What's good? Then they sign up for whatever the neighbor or the colleague recommended. We've watched this for twenty-plus years, and the problem is simple: not every business is designed to be the same. The tool that earns its keep for the agency down the hall can be dead weight for you.

Shopping for software takes a long time, and switching later is painful, so you want to make the right decision the first time. Start with a plan, not a subscription. Write down every single process your business needs in order to succeed, and let that list tell you whether a $139-a-month keyword database is on it. For most first-year businesses, it isn't yet. Strategy before subscriptions. That rule applies to every tool in this directory, this one included.

What it costs now (and why old articles will confuse you)

Everything here is from Semrush's pricing page and its subscriptions help page, checked September 2026. Two warnings: prices change, so click through before relying on any number, and the plan names changed this year.

For roughly a decade Semrush sold three plans called Pro, Guru, and Business, and the internet is wallpapered with reviews of them. Those names are gone from the pricing page. The current lineup:

• Free: $0. One demo project and 10 reports per day across the main tools. More on this below.

• SEO: $139/month billed monthly, or $117.33/month billed annually (about $1,408 for the year; Semrush advertises the annual discount as up to 17%). It replaces the old Pro tier, which was $139.95. Effectively the same price, renamed.

• Starter: $199/month monthly or $165.17/month annually. From here up, plans carry the "SEO + AI Search" label, meaning the same toolkit plus tracking of how AI assistants and AI search results mention you.

• Pro+: $299/month monthly or $248.17/month annually.

• Advanced: $549/month monthly or $455.67/month annually.

• Enterprise: custom pricing, sales call required.

For a small business that needs Semrush at all, the SEO plan at $139 is the honest starting point. The higher tiers exist for agencies, teams, and the new AI-visibility tracking. If you don't know you need those, you don't.

There's also a 7-day free trial ("Try Semrush free for seven days. Cancel anytime," per the pricing page). Mechanically: it takes a credit card up front, places a small validation charge that's immediately refunded, and converts to a paid subscription the moment the trial ends. Not unusual for software, but it's the mechanism behind many of the angry reviews below, so calendar the cancel-by date the minute you sign up.

The free account: what you actually get

The free plan is real and permanent, not a trial. Semrush's own wording is telling, though: you get "1 demo project" and "10 reports per day across all vital tools," per the pricing page. Ten lookups a day means you can check a keyword's volume, peek at a competitor's top pages, and run a small site audit. Then you're done until tomorrow.

For an occasional-use founder, that's honestly not bad. Deciding between two names for a service page costs two lookups; a monthly peek at what a rival ranks for costs one. The curiosity tier of SEO is covered, free.

What it won't support is ongoing work: research for one article can burn ten lookups in twenty minutes, and the single "demo" project can't properly track your site and a competitor's. That's by design. It's a permanent demo, built to show you the wall so you'll pay to get past it. Treat it as a reference, not a plan.

About those one-star reviews

Honesty here means holding two facts at once. Where software users review the product, Semrush scores high: 4.5/5 across 3,311 reviews on G2, 4.6/5 across 2,326 on Capterra, and 8.6/10 across 777 on TrustRadius. On Trustpilot, where the listing is now titled "Semrush, an Adobe Company," it scores 1.7/5 across 1,380 reviews. All four figures are from our September 2026 check.

A 4.5 and a 1.7 for the same product is a common subscription-software pattern: product-review platforms collect opinions about the tool, while Trustpilot collects complaints about the company. Semrush's Trustpilot page is dominated by billing and cancellation complaints rather than product reviews. People describe trials that converted before they cancelled, annual renewals they didn't see coming, and refund requests that went nowhere. The product is well-liked; the billing experience is where the wreckage piles up.

You don't have to guess at the rules underneath those complaints, because they're written down. Semrush's refund policy offers a money-back window of 7 calendar days from the initial purchase, on a written request, and it applies to annual subscriptions only. Month-to-month plans are explicitly excluded from refunds (you can cancel anytime to stop the next charge, but the month you just paid for is spent). Renewals aren't covered either. The window applies to the initial purchase, once.

So the practical playbook, given all of the above:

1. Start monthly, not annual. Yes, annual is about 17% cheaper. But the worst case on monthly is one $139 charge you didn't want; on annual it's $1,408, with a 7-day escape hatch you've probably missed by the time you notice. Confirm you open the tool every week for two or three months, then consider the annual rate. 2. Calendar the trial end. It converts automatically; set the reminder for day five, not day seven. 3. If you do go annual, mark day seven. That's the whole refund window, and it needs a written request, not just a cancelled account.

None of this makes Semrush a scam. It's a subscription company with standard-issue mechanics and a below-average record of goodwill when they bite. Go in with your eyes open and the 1.7 never has to be your story.

The cheaper ways to do each job

Every job Semrush does has a cheaper or free version that's plenty at small scale. Fair descriptions of each:

Google Search Console: free, and not optional. Covered above, but it belongs here too: it shows the real queries bringing people to your site, from Google's own data rather than estimates. What it can't do is show you anyone else's site. No competitor research, no volumes for phrases you don't rank for yet. Set it up regardless of what else you buy.

Keywords Everywhere: keyword data for under $100 a year. A browser extension that displays search volume, cost-per-click, and trend data right inside Google as you search. It runs on prepaid credits: the Bronze plan is $84 billed annually and includes 100,000 credits, where one credit buys the data for one keyword. Two catches, stated plainly: plans are annual-only (no monthly option), and unused credits expire after a year. It's the honest budget pick. 100,000 keyword lookups is more than a small business will use.

Ahrefs: the direct rival. Ahrefs is the other name you'll hear whenever Semrush comes up, a genuine peer with a particularly strong backlink database. Its Lite plan is $129/month, the same league as Semrush. Two things make it interesting at your stage, though. First, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is free for websites you own and verify: a technical site audit plus a view of which pages and keywords bring you traffic and who links to you. Second, there's a cut-down Starter plan at $29/month, a real middle step between free tools and a $139 suite that Semrush simply doesn't offer. If you've outgrown free but wince at three figures a month, that's a fair place to land.

The honest comparison, then, isn't "Semrush vs. nothing." It's a ladder: Search Console and a Business Profile at $0, Keywords Everywhere at $84 a year, Ahrefs Starter at $29 a month, and the full suites at $129 to $139 a month. Climb it only as far as your actual workload justifies.

When to graduate to Semrush

Signals that it's genuinely time, rather than time to feel guilty about not having it:

• You (or someone you pay) publish search-targeted content at least weekly, and you're choosing topics by instinct.

• You've caught yourself doing competitor research the manual way, googling your services in an incognito window and noting who ranks, more than once a month.

• Search Console shows real traffic arriving, and you want to find more phrases like the ones already working.

• Your site has grown past the size where you'd notice a broken page yourself.

• An agency or freelancer is charging you for reports you'd like to sanity-check.

Two or more of those, and $139 a month stops being a gadget and starts being leverage. Take the trial, work it hard for seven days on your real site, pay monthly, and cancel without guilt if a month goes by where you didn't open it.

The short version

First year, first customers: skip it. Set up your free Google Business Profile and Google Search Console, get ten happy customers, ask for reviews. That's the SEO that moves the needle at your size. Keep a free Semrush account for occasional lookups (10 reports a day, one demo project). When content becomes a real channel, step up the ladder: Keywords Everywhere at $84 a year, Ahrefs Starter at $29 a month, then Semrush's SEO plan at $139 a month. Pay monthly at first, despite the annual discount: the Trustpilot record is 1,380 reviews averaging 1.7, and the complaints are overwhelmingly about billing, not the product. The tool is good. Just make sure you're the customer it's good for before your card meets it.

And one closing thought from the Lobi Space team, because it's the theme of this whole review. Software like this is great at its job. But without a road map, a goal, and a plan for your business, a subscription is just an expensive way to shoot in the dark. Write the plan first. The right tools will name themselves.

How this article came together: the research and every price check are our team's work, and we used AI to help organize what to cover. The judgments and the advice are ours.

Blunt questions, straight answers

I have a cleaning business with 12 customers. Will Semrush get me more? Almost certainly not. Your customers search "cleaning service near me" and pick from the map results. That's a Google Business Profile contest, decided by reviews, photos, and a verified listing, all free. Semrush is for winning Google's article-and-webpage layer, which isn't where your next customer is looking.

Is the free Semrush account actually useful, or just bait? Both. Ten reports a day is enough for real occasional use, checking a keyword before you name a page, peeking at a competitor, and it's also unmistakably built to show you the paywall. Use it and feel no obligation.

Why is it 1.7 stars on Trustpilot if it's supposedly the industry standard? Because different platforms collect different complaints. Software reviewers on G2 and Capterra rate the tool 4.5 to 4.6; Trustpilot mostly collects billing stories: trials that auto-converted, annual renewals people missed, refused refunds. Treat the billing pattern as a reason to pay monthly, not necessarily a reason to walk away.

If I forget to cancel the trial, am I just out $139? If you were on the monthly plan, probably yes. Semrush's refund policy excludes month-to-month subscriptions, though cancelling stops future charges. If you'd picked annual billing, you have 7 calendar days from purchase to request a refund in writing. The reliable fix is a calendar reminder on day five of the trial.

Semrush or Ahrefs? At full price they're peers, $139 vs. $129 a month, and either is more tool than a first-year business needs. The practical difference at your stage: Ahrefs has a free tier for auditing your own site and a $29 Starter plan, so it offers a gentler ramp. If you're at the point of choosing between full suites, you're past needing our advice on it.

What happened to the Semrush Pro plan every article mentions? Renamed. In 2026, after the Adobe acquisition closed, Pro/Guru/Business were replaced. The entry tier is now just called "SEO" at $139 a month, and the tiers above it (Starter, Pro+, Advanced) bundle in AI-search tracking. Reviews discussing Pro pricing describe the old menu.

Can I do SEO with no tools at all? For a local service business, mostly yes: a verified Business Profile, real reviews, a simple website that says what you do and where, and Search Console to watch it work. Write pages that answer the questions customers actually ask you on the phone. Tools make that machine faster once it exists; they can't build it for you.

Why it made our list

• You can see exactly what your Chicago competitors already rank for instead of guessing at keywords.
• It tells you whether the content you paid for is actually moving, which is the only way to judge an agency.
• It only pays for itself once you have a content plan — skip it until then and spend the money on Google Business Profile.