Semrush Pro vs Guru: Which is the Best Plan for Your Small Business?

You know that online marketing and SEO are essential to your success, and you may be considering Semrush as a tool that can give you insights on how to improve your SEO.

But which pricing plan of Semrush is the best? With so many options available, it can be tough to decide which ones are right for you.

In this blog post, I will compare the plans, especially Semrush Pro vs Guru because that is the most relevant for small businesses.

Semrush Overview

Semrush is a powerful all-in-one marketing platform that is loved by businesses and marketers I know.

It provides you with everything you need to get your website noticed, improve your search engine positioning, and drive more traffic to your website. Semrush is packed with features that provide detailed insights into your website’s traffic and keywords, as well as your competitors’ websites.

It also lets you track your SEO progress over time and helps you find and build quality backlinks.

Summary of Semrush pricing plans – Semrush Pro vs Guru vs Business

Here’s a quick summary of the Semrush plans and whom they could be best for.

Semrush Pro

Semrush Pro is the entry-level plan of Semrush, and it provides all the essential tools you need to conduct keyword research for content creation, spy on your competitors, and optimize your website for organic traffic.

Semrush Pro starts at $99.95 per month and is perfect for small businesses, bloggers, content writers, and freelance SEO specialists.

Get a 30-day free trial of Semrush Pro (exclusive link for extended trial) and check it out!

Semrush Guru

Semrush Guru is the intermediate plan, which includes all the features that Pro does, but with more data per feature.

Additionally, it also offers more features, especially for content marketing.

Semrush Guru starts at $191.62 per month and is best for bigger small businesses that have dedicated marketing teams or at least a marketing manager plus freelancers, SEO agencies, and established bloggers and content writers.

Try out Semrush Guru for 30 days for free (exclusive link for extended trial).

Semrush Business

Semrush Business is the top-tier plan, which provides access to all Semrush features and data, including multi-user management, custom reports, and product ads.

Semrush Business starts at $374.95 per month and is best suited for big SEO agencies that service multiple big clients or big corporations with dedicated SEO teams, and need very advanced SEO features and tools.

Semrush Pro vs Guru vs Business – Details of Semrush plans and pricing

Note that while I mention above whom a plan is best for, you may not fall into any certain category, and may have a business that works differently from other similar businesses.

So you have to consider the features and pricing of each plan to decide the best one for you.

Here are the details of each Semrush plan, followed by a comparison of Semrush Pro vs Guru based on my experience.

• Semrush Pro: Pro is the starter plan of Semrush, and the pricing starts at $99.95 per month
• Semrush Guru: Guru is the intermediate plan of Semrush, and the pricing starts at $191.95 per month. It includes all the features of Semrush, but with higher limits. It also includes additional SEO features not offered by the Semrush Pro plan
• Semrush Business: Semrush Business is the top-end pricing plan of Semrush, and includes much higher limits on the features offered by Semrush Pro and Guru. It also includes features like the share of voice, API access, and PLA analytics, needed usually by large-scale businesses.

Semrush Pro – Features, Data, and Pricing

Semrush Pro offers a comprehensive suite of features to help you improve your SEO. It offers 4 different toolkits within SEO:

Keyword Research Toolkit

One of the most basic SEO tasks is keyword research. With SEMrush Pro, you’ll get access to detailed keyword data that will help you identify the best keywords for your business.

With it, you can find a ton of low-competition keywords, high-intent keywords, and semantic keywords to target for your website or blog.

You can also see how your keywords are ranking in search engines over time by setting up keyword tracking and getting insights into how you are performing vs your competitors.

Competitor Research Toolkit

Semrush Pro provides you with detailed information about your competition.

Because in SEO and content marketing, it’s not enough just knowing about keywords. You need to know which website or blog is ranking higher than you, so you can adjust your customized SEO strategy and can stay one step ahead.

The Competitor Research Toolkit gives you an in-depth look at your competition’s keywords, backlinks, and ad campaigns. It also allows you to track their rankings and see how they are performing over time.

Link-Building Toolkit

The Semrush Link-Building Toolkit helps you to easily find, track, and manage your link-building efforts.

You can quickly and easily find the best linking opportunities, analyze and track your backlinks, and even do your link outreach, all through your Semrush account.

On-page & Tech SEO Toolkit

The Semrush On-page and Technical SEO toolkit includes a Site Audit tool that can help you identify and fix common technical SEO issues on your site.

It also includes an On-page Checker that provides you recommendations on how to improve the on-page SEO of each of your website pages.

Social Media Toolkit

Semrush also offers a Social Media Toolkit that gives you four tools to help with your social media posts. You can schedule your posts on different social media platforms, analyze your performance, compare your progress to competitors, and also create ads.

If you post on social media, you may be using a scheduler already, like Hootsuite or Buffer.

Then the Social Media toolkit of Semrush may not be very useful, but it can help you analyze the performance of your social media posts from a different perspective than the one your social scheduler provides.

Details of the Semrush Pro features:

While above we see a summary of the key toolkits provided by Semrush, to really analyze Semrush Pro vs Guru, we need to take a closer look at the detailed features of the Semrush plans.

These are the metrics provided by Semrush Pro.

1. Add up to 5 projects (websites) for SEO monitoring

Of course, besides setting up your own website for regular monitoring, you can add those of your competitors as well.

Because to understand your performance in the market, you have to compare it with your competitors.

2. Set up 500 keywords for tracking per project, and get daily reports

For a relatively new website, 500 keywords should be enough to track.

If you have more than 500 keywords you rank for, you can prioritize and select only 500, because you don’t have to set up ALL keywords for tracking. Or you can upgrade to the Guru plan for more keyword tracking.

3. Get 3000 reports per day

A Semrush report is basically a request for data.

If you type in a domain in Domain Overview that’s a report, and if you want to know the details of the keywords it ranks for that’s also a report.

3000 reports in a day are honestly enough for a business unless you are a large business with a large website.

4. Get 10,000 results per report

In Semrush Pro, for each report that you request, you can get 10,000 rows of data.

Needless to say, that’s very extensive data, and you need the skills and knowledge to even analyze that much. Put simply, 10,000 results is a lot!

5. Refresh up to 250 keyword metrics per month

Though Semrush crawls data very frequently, when you research a keyword, the data that you get may be a few days or weeks old.

You can see next to each keyword when it was last updated. You can refresh it to get the latest data. I find this feature extremely helpful, honestly.

6. Crawl up to 100,000 pages per month in a site audit

When you run a site audit in Semrush, it checks each URL in your website for errors. In Semrush Pro, the Site Audit tool will crawl up to 100,000 pages a month divided across projects.

That would be an average of 20,000 pages per website, which is usually enough if you have a small business website.

Note that if your competitors have bigger websites than yours, the site audit limit may not cover crawling every page of their website, so you may get limited data on them.

Or you have to audit them one by one. Delete some projects, audit one, download it, delete it, and crawl the second one.

But it may not come to that, as again, 100,000 pages is a lot.

7. Add up to 50 social media profiles in the Social Media Toolkit

The Semrush Social Media toolkit lets you connect up to 50 social profiles across Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

You can post to these profiles and analyze the performance of your posts.

8. Get 5 scheduled PDF reports

You can set up 5 PDF reports to be generated each month, on a certain date, and shared with multiple email addresses.

This is also helpful if you are a small business working with contractors like SEO specialists and content writers.

Semrush Pro Pricing

For a monthly payment plan, Semrush Pro is priced at just $119.95 per month.

If you sign up for their annual plan, you get a 17% lifetime discount, making the monthly plan $99.95, which is great value for small businesses and solopreneurs. You save $240 per year, every year, forever.

Semrush Pro Free Trial

Normally, you can get a Semrush Pro trial for 7 days. But only for you, i.e., readers of my blog, there is a special offer. You can try out Semrush Pro for 30 days for free!

This means that you use Semrush for one month, but without paying the monthly fee of $119.95.

Semrush Guru –  Features, Data, and Pricing

Semrush Guru includes all the Semrush Pro toolkits with higher limits on the four essential toolkits than the Pro plan:

• Track 1500 keywords instead of 500
• Set up 15 projects instead of 5
• Get 30,000 results per report instead of 10,000
• Get 5000 reports per day instead of 3000
• Crawl 300,000 pages per month instead of 100,000
• Refresh metrics for 1000 keywords instead of 250
• Connect up to 100 social profiles instead of 50

Plus, you get additional features like the Content Marketing Toolkit, Historical Data, Google Data Studio Integration, Keyword Cannibalization Report, and more.

Content Marketing Toolkit

The Semrush Content Marketing toolkit includes tools and resources to help plan, create, optimize, and measure your content marketing efforts.

The three major features in this toolkit are:

• Topic Research: Help you find content topics to blog about.
• SEO Content Template: Get recommendations to improve your content and on-page SEO
• SEO Writing Assistant: Get recommendations on improving your content and text in real-time, while you’re writing your content
• Content Audit: Track the performance of all content and update them as required.

Historical Data

The Semrush Historical Data tool allows users to see how a website or keyword has performed over time, since January 2012.

It includes data on impressions, clicks, CTR, and position history. It also includes data on organic traffic and paid traffic.

Google Data Studio Integration

You can connect your Semrush Guru account to Google Data Studio, to create custom reports and dashboards in Data Studio using your Semrush data. The integration gives you access to all of the data in your account, including keyword rankings, traffic, backlink data, and more.

Here’s an example of what it looks like.

Image Source

You can use this data directly from your Google Data Studio to track your SEO progress, identify areas of opportunity, and report on your results.

The Semrush Guru Google Data Studio Integration feature makes it easier and faster to create reports. Not only does this save time, but it also allows you to create more accurate, custom, and comprehensive reports.

The integration is very helpful if:

• You are working in a marketing team and you need to share your reports with colleagues or your managers easily and quickly
• You are an agency and you need to share specific reports with your clients

It is not extra data as such, it is just a different dashboard and presentation of data, and better connected with Google.

As it is more a presentation tool than analytics, the value of this feature depends really on a business’s way of working.

Keyword Cannibalization Report

The Semrush Keyword Cannibalization report included in Semrush Guru does exactly what it says: tell you which pages on your website, if any, are competing for the same keyword.

It shows how often a given keyword is used on a website, how many different pages are ranking for that keyword, and how much search traffic is generated by each page. You can then change your website and digital content strategy accordingly.

Multitargeting

Multitargeting lets you track the performance of keywords for your website across multiple devices, locations, and languages.

In Semrush Pro, you can track the performance of your keywords for specific countries. But with Semrush Guru, you can even track keywords at a city level, which is helpful for local SEO.

Semrush Guru Pricing

If you sign up for an annual plan, you pay $191.62 per month, and if you want to pay monthly, the plan would cost $229.95 per month.

Semrush Guru Free Trial

The Semrush free trial for the Guru plan is also for 7 days.

But because you are a reader of my blog, you can get a 30-day free trial for Guru, worth $229.95! Read more details in my full post on Semrush Guru 30-day trial, or just activate your free trial by clicking on the button below.

Semrush Business – Features, Data, and Pricing

Besides having much, much higher limits on the basic features, the Semrush Business plan also comes with a whole suite of additional features.

Here is a summary of the higher limits on the basic data:

• Track 5000 keywords
• Set up a maximum of 40 projects
• Get 50,000 results per report
• Crawl 1,000,000 pages per month
• Refresh metrics for 5000 keywords instead of 250
• Connect up to 300 social profiles for monitoring

The key tools that you can get from Semrush Business are:

API Access

The Semrush Business tool gives you API access, which means you can integrate the Semrush features and data within your company’s custom dashboards and interface.

Product Listing Ads

Semrush’s PLA (Product Listing Ads) research helps you analyze an advertiser’s Google Shopping ad campaigns so you can determine how well your own ads are doing against other competitors’ listings or brands.

Share of Voice

The Semrush Share of Voice metric helps you understand much brand awareness you have in your market, by the percentage of traffic you receive out of the total volume of the keywords you are tracking.

Multiple user management

A regular Semrush Pro or Guru plan will let only one user with one email address be logged in to Semrush at one time. With Semrush Business, more users can have access to the accounts simultaneously.

For a large business, this will anyway be needed.

Semrush Business Pricing

Semrush Business is priced at just $374.5 per month for annual payments and $449.95 for monthly payments.

Semrush Business Free Trial

Semrush does not offer a free trial for its Business plan.

Semrush Pro vs Guru Comparison – Which is the best one for you?

In order to analyze Semrush Pro vs Guru, and decide which one would serve you best, we need to do a cost/ benefit analysis of both. I will analyze each benefit in terms of whether it’s really important to have.

Let’s see a recap of what they both offer and if it is worth paying more for Guru.

Here’s my take based on my extensive use of Semrush.

As a small business owner, I honestly have never looked at even 10,000 results per report or generated more than 3000 reports per day in Semrush Pro.

So if you have a relatively small business, these may not be the most useful Semrush Guru features.

But if you are a growing business and writing lots of content, fast, you might need the higher limits of Semrush Guru.

Especially as your blog and website grow, you may do more SEO work and need to gather more data.

But the extra data per feature is not reason enough to pay $100 more per month, in my opinion.

So let’s see the other Semrush Guru features.

• Where Semrush Guru really brings in value compared to Semrush Pro is with the Content Marketing Toolkit, Historical Data, and Keyword Cannibalization Report
• The Content Marketing Toolkit is incredibly helpful to get content ideas and create SEO-friendly content
• The Historical Data helps you in taking content decisions, like which keywords to try to rank high for
• The Keyword Cannibalization Report helps you optimize and organize your current content to get better gains in SEO

Depending on how many reports you need to create, how often, and how many people you need to discuss them with, the Google Data Studio Integration feature may come in handy or not.

If you need to see your position tracking across multiple countries and devices, the Multitargeting feature will be very useful.

I use Semrush Pro for my business.

I am a small business owner, and while I would love to have the above extra features of Guru, so far by using Semrush Pro, I have been able to boost SEO.

That being said, I am a marketing consultant and a relatively small business.

You may be a bigger business than mine, have more team members, or have an agency that works on SEO.

Even then Semrush Pro might be enough, but having Semrush Guru might actually make your work faster, more effective, and easier.

And give you a high ROI.

How to use Semrush?

Here is my big pearl of wisdom: The best way to use Semrush is to, well, use it.

Get started for free, play around with it, and see what value you get from it. You can see my detailed Semrush tutorial to go through each tool and feature step-by-step.

But before that, you need to sign up for a free trial.

Semrush gives you 7 days to use the tool for free. Semrush has so much to offer, that 7 days is simply not enough to decide.

With my affiliate links below, you can try out both Semrush Pro and Semrush Guru for 30 days. That will give you a lot more time to try out all the features and get comfortable.

This is the landing page for the Semrush Pro 30-day trial.

See the step-by-step process on how to sign up in this post on Semrush trial.

Plus, you save the monthly fee of $119.95 for Semrush Pro and $229.95 for Semrush Guru.

Semrush Pro vs Guru – Conclusion

Semrush is one of the best, and also one of the most expensive SEO tools.

Even Semrush Pro, the lowest-tier plan is priced much higher than the more advanced plans of newer tools like SE Ranking. You can read my detailed review of SE Ranking vs Semrush and of SEO PowerSuite vs Semrush to see how they compare.

Semrush Guru offers much more than Semrush Pro, and if you are a growing business that is creating lots of content, Semrush Guru is worth it and is definite value for money.

Besides, Semrush sometimes offers huge savings on the Guru plan in their Semrush Black Friday offers.

At other times, you can always avail of the Semrush lifetime deal and save 17% on the plans, every year, forever.

If you have a very limited budget as is very common with small businesses and you are also not working on your content regularly, you can start with a Semrush Pro plan. You can upgrade to a Semrush Guru account later if you need it.