How accurate in your experience are the traffic results from Semrush

[Sam-P]

Ive just started using Semrush and am really interested in the competitive traffic calculator (where they give you an idea of the kind of traffic your competitors are getting i guess through analysis of there SERP positions, refering links, PPC etc)

Ive tested the results on a site I have Google analytics access to and they were pretty similar, I was wandering has anybody done any research them selves against other sites they have GA access to, to see how close / accurate the Semrush reports are compared to the actual visits ?

[JarnoNijzing]

Sam,

personally I don't like SEMRUSH but that has more to do with the fact it's not available in Dutch. So comparing information is next to impossible. I have looked at it in the past and I know it to be a respected tool for other languages so I can only imagine that the data shown is accurate.

regards

Jarno

[DirkC]

Jarno, Semrush added figures for Belgium/ The Netherlands in Jan. 2014.

[DirkC]

Sam,

I can only tell for the European market - but for the sites I manage there is a huge difference between the organic traffic estimated by Semrush & the real organic traffic measured in Google Analytics. I did a quick check for 3 domains, spread across Europe (traffic between 500K - 2 mio visits/month). Each time actual search traffic was about 3x higher than search traffic estimated by Semrush.

Dirk

[Linda-Vassily]

I don't find the organic traffic numbers to be very accurate (off by at least two-fold) but I like it for looking at ranking keywords.

[CommT]

I've noticed the same thing.

I guess it's a good indicator if you think of it in relative terms, but I wouldn't take the estimated traffic figures as gospel.

[CommT]

Yes, I only really use it for the ranking. Though, having said that I have recently used the Audit tool, which alerted me to some errors I'd not yet discovered....

[Linda-Vassily]

It showed you issues other than what you see in the Moz crawl?

[TheeDigital]

Same as others, the traffic from Semrush is usually a lot lower than the actual traffic. They probably use exact match search terms so a lot of traffic from mis-spellings, related long tail terms, variations, etc is missing from their data.

[CommT]

Yes, I think so - TBH I use both together, so it's difficult to say what was from each crawl! I tend to amalgamate the two into my own spreadsheets. I also incorporate stuff from webmaster tools (Google and Bing) if relevant as well. Then I allocate a time-frame by which I want the tasks done and will allocate tasks to team members too if there's something I can't do myself for example if it needs coding skillz.

[JarnoNijzing]

Thnx DC, didn't know that. After contact with them in 2013 they said it would not come out within a year. Apparently it did. But thanks for the info.

[JarnoNijzing]

I would rather have Semrush return lower results then higher results. If you take into account the information from Semrush and then traffic is a lot higher I would be pleased. If it was the other way around you would have put a lot of time/effort and money into something that then just flunks.

[SearchDexSEO]

good point, I have to keep that in mind next time!

[SearchDexSEO]

I too have just noticed actual traffic is about 2x greater than what SEMRush has reported. I will be more careful using these figures now! I even segmented valid hostnames in GA to make sure spam was not in there, still much higher