Semrush Free Trial & How to Maximize It for Growth in 2025

Should you be using Semrush in 2025? 

My honest answer: If SEO is your top traffic source (or if you’re aiming to make that happen), you absolutely need Semrush to grow your search presence. 

That said, I know that Semrush is a massive tool with many components.

It’s not a straightforward decision to pay for a tool you’re unsure about. 

This is why I think the Semrush free trial is the perfect solution.

Because no matter what I or anyone tells you, the best way to make this decision for yourself is by giving it a trial run on a real project.

My goal for this article is to help you get started and make sure you’re getting the best out of the free trial.

How the Semrush Free Trial Works

To get started, navigate to the Semrush free trial page. Create an account using either the Google login or your email and a password.

You’ll receive a verification code by email.

Next, you’ll be asked a few questions about your experience with SEO. This helps Semrush personalize your free trial experience.

Then you’ll choose which plan you want to try.

Which Semrush Plan Types Can You Try?

With your free Semrush trial, you can experience what’s available in either the Pro or Guru plans.

Both plans include 55+ tools. The Guru plan offers more than Pro, including a Content Marketing platform, historical data, and multitargeting.

How Long Does the Semrush Free Trial Last?

The Semrush free trial lasts for 7 days.

Do You Need a Credit Card to Start a Free Trial?

Yes, you’ll need a credit or debit card to sign up for the free trial. But you can cancel before you get charged.

Maximizing Your Semrush Free Trial Period

You can start building your SEO strategy from day 1 of your Semrush free trial. 

But Semrush is a massive tool.

I recommend checking out our Semrush demo, and then focusing on these features first to put your best foot forward in SEO analysis for your site.

Semrush Trial Days 1–3: Establish Your SEO Foundation

1. Set Up Your Project: Begin by creating a project for your website in Semrush. This unlocks access to valuable tools like Site Audit, Position Tracking, and On Page SEO Checker that you’ll be using frequently for routine SEO tasks.​

2. Conduct a Site Audit: Use the Site Audit tool to crawl up to 100,000 pages (depending on your plan) and identify technical SEO issues. In my experience, crawl errors, broken links, and duplicate content are some of the most common issues most websites develop without even realizing it. Prioritize fixing high-impact errors to improve site health.​

3. Initiate Position Tracking: Use Position Tracking to your advantage to keep a pulse on your keyword ranking trends. This tool is one of the best on the market since it updates daily. Plus, it shows you featured snippet opportunities in a neat report that enables faster analysis.​

4. Perform Keyword Research: The Keyword Magic Tool is your friend for discovering high-volume, low-competition keywords relevant to your niche. Focus on keywords with commercial or transactional intent to drive conversions, and balance it out with information keywords to acquire new traffic.

Semrush Trial Days 4–6: Analyze Competitors and Optimize Content

1. Analyze Competitor Domains: Use the Domain Overview, Organic Research, and Traffic Analytics reports to study your competitors' top-performing keywords, backlink profiles, and traffic sources. It’s the fastest way to Identify gaps and opportunities in your own strategy.​

2. Explore Keyword Gaps: The Keyword Gap tool is perfect for discovering keyword opportunities driving traffic and conversions for your competitors but which you aren’t currently targeting well enough. It’s my go-to tool for expanding content strategy.​

3. Optimize Existing Content: Use the On Page SEO Checker to receive actionable recommendations for improving your existing pages. This includes suggestions for target keywords, backlink prospects, and technical enhancements.​

Semrush Free Trial Final Day: Consolidate Insights and Plan Ahead

1. Evaluate Backlink Opportunities: Identify potential backlink sources by comparing your backlink profile with competitors. Then, reach out to these sources to obtain high-quality backlinks, and boost your website authority.

2. Plan Future Content: Based on your keyword and competitor research, outline a content calendar focusing on topics with high search demand, niche relevance, and low competition. 

3. Prepare Ongoing Optimizations: SEO in an ongoing, iterative process. Consider keeping your Semrush subscription for at least a few months and reassess its value to your business based on resulting SEO ROI. 

I’ve added a more detailed overview of the essential Semrush tools and features in the next section. 

10 Tools to Test During Your Semrush Free Trial

Semrush includes many SEO and PPC tools. I’ve listed some of my favorites below, but this is just a sampling of what’s available.

1. Keyword Magic Tool for Keyword Research

The Semrush Keyword Magic Tool simplifies content planning by helping you find profitable keywords that are easy to rank for.

Enter a keyword and click search. You’ll get a generous list of keyword ideas plus numerous filters.

I typically filter my results by KD% (Keyword Difficulty) and by Intent.

Checking keyword difficulty is crucial. For new sites, I recommend targeting keywords that are labeled “Very easy” or “Easy” to rank for.

For e-commerce sites, I recommend targeting keywords with a Commercial (“C”) or Transactional (“T”) Intent label. These are keywords that signal the searcher has buying intent.

Whether you’re new to keyword research or a pro, you’ll find this Semrush tool is intuitive. 

You'll find a deeper dive in our dedicated guide: how to use Semrush for keyword research.

2. Keyword Strategy Builder: Create a Plan Quickly

Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder accelerates the creation of topic clusters.

Once logged into your free trial, click Keyword Strategy Builder in the left-hand navigation.

Then, enter up to 5 seed keywords.

Imagine you have an eco-friendly online store that’s adding portable solar energy devices to your catalog.

You want to create a series of blog posts that attract people interested in these products. And you’re looking for ideas of new products to add to this line.

You could start with these 5 seed keywords:

The Keyword Strategy Builder will generate a diagram listing possible pillar pages and “subs” (subtopic pages).

Pick some to use as seed keywords in Semrush’s Keyword Strategy Builder.

Or use the information to expand your product line.

Each trending keyword or product includes forecasted growth for the next 12 months.

3. Position Tracking: Monitor Keyword Rankings

The Position Tracking tool displays the SEO progress of your domains over time.

Toggle between:

• Average position
• Visibility
• Share of Voice
• Estimated traffic

These domains can include competitors. You can pick specific countries or regions to track. You can also track search activity across device types.

You’ll also see, per keyword, which SERP features your tracked web pages may occupy.

The Position Tracker also enables you to:

• Identify keyword cannibalization on your site: these pages compete with one another for the same keyword.
• Track changes while you’re running ad campaigns or launching new pages for clients.

Added benefit: You can schedule and automate white-label reports for internal or external clients.

4. Organic Research to Analyze Competitors

Knowing what’s working for your SEO and your competitors’ is key. This is where the Semrush Organic Research tool comes in.

This is 1 of 5 competitive research tools available to you.

Start with a domain to analyze. In our example below, we used outdoorgearlab.com.

At the top, you’ll see an overview with clickable tabs and ranking metrics.

For instance, we see the domain’s monthly organic traffic cost is $1.2M.

• Hover your mouse over items like Branded Traffic to get a comparison with the previous month.
• Scroll down to see multiple tiles for various reports, like Top Keywords and Keywords by Intent.

We can see that outdoorgearlab.com’s strategy targets keywords that signal buying intent. (In Semrush, these keywords are labeled as Commercial or Transactional.)

Simply click on a tile to get a full report.

The Organic Research Tool will also show you changes in organic listings and SERP features over time.

You’ll see who your top organic competitors are.

And you’ll get a helpful competitive positioning map.

5. Keyword Gap: Compare Your Site to the Competition

The Semrush Keyword Gap tool reveals which keywords your competition ranks for, but you don’t.

In my experience, this is a great tool for competitive analysis. It helps when creating a strategy that delivers competitive advantage and increased market share.

The breakthrough insights yielded by this tool are often surprising.

To try it out, click Keyword Gap in the left-hand navigation,

Enter your own domain and at least 1 competitor. Then click compare.

You can use this information to identify profitable keywords you haven’t targeted at all or web pages that need improvement.

The diagram at the top of the tool displays the keyword overlap between you and your competitor.

Scroll below the diagram to see a long list of keywords. You can see a few below.

Like the Keyword Magic Tool, you can sort these results in multiple ways, including by:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty (KD%)
• Intent

You can also view CPC and Competitive Density.

For example, we compared 2 digital marketing agencies and found a competitor is ranking #3 for “hyperlocal SEO,” and our example firm isn’t ranking.

This keyword has a high CPC but a low Competitive Density score and low KD%, indicating it’s easy to rank for.

Having this data can help you decide whether to create content to outrank your competitor or to choose to run a Google Ads campaign instead.

6. Backlink Audit: Monitor Your Portfolio

Backlinks are a known ranking factor, but their impact is based on the quality of the referring domain.

The Semrush Backlink Audit tool tracks new, lost, and broken backlinks.

It even checks for excessive use of money anchors or links from networks that exist solely to sell backlinks.

Paying for backlinks to boost rankings is against Google’s guidelines and can result in severe penalties. (GSC penalty alerts will also appear in the Backlink Audit tool.)

Sometimes, poorly trained marketers may deliver these types of toxic backlinks. Regardless, if you’re running link-building campaigns, this is the tool to use to monitor your portfolio.

You can connect the corresponding Google Search Console (GSC) account for each domain you monitor. And you can send a disavow file straight from Semrush to GSC.

7. Backlink Analytics to Check the Competition

Let’s return to our example of the eco-friendly store. Imagine you’re the owner, and you want to launch a new line of sustainable socks.

You know the competition is tough. But with the right insights, you’re confident your socks will trend.

The Semrush Backlinks Analytics tool allows you to enter one or more domains to analyze.

In the example below, we entered consciousstep.com, a well-known brand.

The results allow us to explore this site’s top referring domains, backlinks, anchors, and more.

There are plenty of content and link building ideas to be gleaned in this way.

First, click on Network Graph for a summary of the site’s backlink profile.

One of my favorite tactics is to check the Referring Domains tab for outreach ideas.

In our example, the Referring Domains tab shows us that impactfinds.com is the biggest linker to conscioussteps.com.

We could choose to prioritize outreach to impactfinds.com.

You can also get content ideas by discovering your competitor’s most-linked-to pages.

8. Site Audit to Identify Technical Issues

The Semrush Site Audit analyzes your site and provides improvement steps in a prioritized list.

Technical issues can frustrate users and harm your SEO.

Examples are slow loading times or pages that can’t be indexed by search engines.

Add your domain, and you’ll get a report in seconds.

Possible recommendations may include:

• Adding a sitemap
• Fixing broken links
• Speeding up page loading times
• Fixing structured data errors

Marketers with agencies can create progress reports featuring their logo.

It’s also useful to run a newly redesigned and relaunched website through Site Audit. Errors, like missing 301 redirects, can be caught and fixed before the site’s SEO is damaged.

Data from the Site Audit can also be exported to a CSV file.

9. SEO Writing Assistant and Content Template

Quality is the #1 ranking factor, and Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant can help you improve your content so it ranks higher.

Say you want to write an article on “cold weather running gear.” You plan to promote your own products in this article.

First, enter your keyword into the SEO Content Template. You’ll see a list of top-ranking articles for your keyword. This makes it convenient to check out the competition.

Scroll down further to see content recommendations based on your competition.

Next, paste your article text into the SEO Writing Assistant to get optimization tips in real time.

In the example below, we added text from an REI blog post. The post currently ranks at #10 in Google.

Notice how the checker looks at the readability, optimization, originality, and tone of voice.

Scrolling down in the sidebar, we can get specific suggestions for improvement.

Writers can add the SEO Writing Assistant extension to Google Docs for easy optimization.

10. Listing Management for Local SEO

Do you own a local business or work for an agency that provides local SEO? Semrush’s set of local SEO tools will show you what needs to be done next.

Listing Management is one of these tools. It identifies all the online directories and social media sites on which your business is listed. Errors are highlighted so you can take action.

Being listed in directories impacts local SEO. And Google Business Profile is arguably the most impactful listing.

Conveniently, Semrush offers a GBP Optimization tool along with Review Management and Map Rank Tracker tools.

The Map Rank Tracker displays a grid indicating how your site ranks across neighborhoods.

This is a great way to share wins with clients.

Reasons to Sign Up for a Semrush Free Trial

Semrush gives you the clarity and confidence needed to create a winning SEO or PPC strategy.

Plus, you’ll have proof that your strategies worked. Whether it’s higher rankings, client retention, or promotions at work, you can prove your worth.

Experts vouch for the platform. And leading brands like FedEx, Tesla, and Amazon rely on it.

Now, you can access the same data and tools they use.

Is It Easy to Cancel My Semrush Free Trial?

Yes, Semrush lets you cancel your free trial directly from your account dashboard in a few steps. 

Click on your user icon on the top-right of the Semrush toolbar to expand the menu. Then click on “Subscription info”

Find the “Active” link next to the “Recurring” status and click on it. Go ahead and click the “Contact Us” link that appears under in menu.

You’ll now have an option to view a live demo with an expert. 

If you suspect you’re unable to maximize Semrush for your goals because you’re unfamiliar with some of its features, taking the demo can be pretty helpful. 

Plus, you can always cancel later if you’re still unconvinced. 

To go ahead with the Semrush free trial cancelation, click on the “Decline and unsubscribe” button.

On the next screen, you’ll see additional Semrush tools you can try. Click on “Continue to cancel” to proceed to ending your free trial.

Semrush will now ask you to specify why you want to cancel. Select a reason that matches your thoughts and click the “Continue” button.

The Semrush cancelation form will ask you a few additional follow-up questions. Answer the questions, and you’ll be taken to the final step. 

In some cases, Semrush might give you an additional discount for your first month at this point. You can either claim the discount or proceed to cancelation.

If you’re ready to cancel, click the checkbox to agree that the Semrush projects saved in your account will be deleted. Then, click “Cancel Subscription”

You’ll be taken to a confirmation screen instructing you to check your mailbox. 

Open the email and click on the “Cancel subscription” button. 

As soon as you click the button, you’ll be redirected to a page confirming your Semrush free trial has been canceled. 

Sign Up for a Free Trial of Semrush

I’ve found Semrush’s competitive insights to be remarkable. And that’s just one reason it’s my primary SEO tool.

Semrush will help you move colleagues or clients from endless “what if” discussions to data-based strategies.

So, why not try the Semrush free trial? You can thank me later.