2021 Semrush Updates: Our Annual Guide

SEO

By Chris Barnhart On Dec 1, 2021

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“Much of Semrush product updates would not have happened without your feedback on how we could improve. Using your ideas and input to guide us, we made some important updates and additions to our tools, including dedicating more resources to add-ons that offer value and opportunities for our customers beyond their main subscription” — Oleg Shchegolev, CEO of Semrush

In times of unprecedented change, we’re thrilled to share all the updates to our tools that have helped you drive better leads, increase your revenues, and accelerate your marketing results.

Read below about the biggest and best improvements we’ve implemented into our platform this year, and learn how they can be used to move your business forward.

16,722 Cups of Coffee Later: Semrush Launches a Brand New Backlink Analytics Database

The Backlink Analytics Tool is a link-building tool that allows you to check and track any domain’s backlinks from your competitors to get ideas and spot opportunities for your own backlink strategy. 

Now boasting the largest and fastest backlink database, Semrush customers have access to more than 43 trillion quality backlinks, all at their fingertips.

We wanted to provide our customers with the best tools and analytics to fuel their marketing results — full stop. 

That’s why we spent 18 months and more than 30,000+ expert engineering and data scientist hours to create the fastest and largest backlink database to date. We invested in the infrastructure — adding 500+ new servers, 14,000 terabytes of storage — to create the largest and most up-to-date backlink checker on the market.

How does this update benefit you?

Not only does the sheer size and speed of our new database provide more data than any other tool on the market, but other key improvements include:

• Extended time period filters for reporting
• Ability to see outbound domains for any website
• New ability to filter by title or URL
• New subfolders view
• Cleaner data without duplicate links
• Improved algorithm for finding the most relevant content
• More unique and high-quality pages 

To learn more, read our blog on how the new backlink database works.

Now Featuring: Keyword Intent

Keyword Intent is a new metric that provides data on the four categories of keyword intent — navigational, informational, transactional, and commercial — so you can see what content users would expect to see based on these various intents.

Tired of using spreadsheets manually to try to find the most effective target keywords for your campaigns? That’s why we launched the Keyword Intent metric: the most comprehensive solution on the market for understanding keyword intent. 

That means you can better follow your customer’s journey through the marketing funnel and identify content opportunities to outrank your competitors. It also gives you an advantage in finding and building out content marketing opportunities based on what your customers are looking for with specific keyword queries.

Here’s an example looking at “exotic cars.” Note the dropdown ability to filter by the four types of keyword intent:

By identifying the keyword intent, you can understand the customer’s actual desire, and therefore, what kind of content they expect to see on the SERP. Our tool identifies the keyword intent automatically using a machine-learning algorithm, saving you time and helping you build out the most effective campaigns. 

For our example of a customer wanting to target customers with the transactional intent of renting an exotic car, you can easily see the details on specific keywords in the SERP and identify low-hanging fruit to beat out the competition.

Take the guesswork out of keyword research with the keyword intent metric that’s built into several of our SEO tools including:

• Domain Overview
• Organic Research
• Position Tracking
• Keyword Overview
• Keyword Gap
• Keyword Magic Tool
• Keyword Manager

To harness the power of this comprehensive solution, read all about it on the Semrush blog.

The New and Improved Keyword Difficulty Metric

Keyword difficulty (KD%) is an estimated metric that tells you how difficult it is to rank organically for a specific keyword or phrase using SEO efforts. It takes into consideration current websites and pages that are ranking in the top spots on Google. The closer to 100, the more difficult it is to achieve.

We are delighted to roll out an upgrade of our keyword difficulty metric now available across several tools at Semrush that will improve your organic research efforts as well as receive higher quality ranking data. Highlights and benefits include:

• More search parameters included and taken into account than ever before (plus more than 14+ SERP features)
• KD scores that are weighted by country—unlike any other tool in the market
• Color-coded KD scores so you can visually scan for quick insights
• The most accurate KD metric that scores consistently above any other solution in the industry

The best part is that we couldn’t have improved our tool without you! We spent time with our customers over the years, implementing your feedback into our upgraded formula. 

To learn more about fully leveraging the KD metric into building your next campaign, visit our blog post for a deeper dive.

Core Web Vitals Made Easy with Site Audit

The Site Audit Tool is an all-in-one solution that scans your website for more than 140+ technical factors that impact overall performance. It crawls and checks for errors such as broken links, slow loading speeds, interactivity, crawlability, and dozens of other factors that impact your online visibility.

Adding to that, Google’s latest Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, and CLS) are now ranking factors that influence your website performance as well. That’s why we rolled out a brand new, unique report in the Site Audit Tool to help you quickly identify issues, fix errors, and watch your CWV metrics improve. Unlike most tools on the market that take this data from the Chrome UX Report (CrUX), we measure these metrics on our own.