How to make the most of your 7-day Semrush free trial

A Semrush free trial gives you enough time to uncover real SEO and AI insights that you can apply to your site. The trial packs in a lot, so it helps to know which tools to start with. A simple plan turns a few hours in the tool into takeaways you'll keep using long after your trial ends.

This guide covers the six best steps to take during your Semrush free trial, in the order that gets you the most value fastest.

You can complete all six in just a few short hours and end up with something concrete: a ranking baseline, a list of content gaps, a backlog of technical issues, and a snapshot of how your brand appears in AI search.

Does Semrush have a free trial?

Yes, Semrush has a free trial that gives you access to its SEO and AI visibility tools from the moment you sign up — no sales or demo call required. Simply sign up and you're in the dashboard immediately.

From there, follow the six steps below to get the most out of your free trial.

Step 1: Check your search rankings

Check your search rankings with the Organic Rankings tool to see which keywords your domain ranks for, which pages are ranking, and how those rankings are trending. This gives you a baseline of how your site is currently performing in Google Search.

First, enter your domain into the Organic Rankings tool.

You'll see:

• How many keywords you rank for and the overall trend
• How much estimated traffic comes from those rankings
• Branded vs. non-branded traffic

Next, check the Top Pages report to see:

• Which pages generate the majority of traffic
• Where the largest positive or negative traffic changes appear
• Whether key commercial or category pages are trending up or down

This information from Top Pages helps you quickly identify which parts of a site contribute most to its organic visibility. For example, the "Traffic" column above shows some of the top pages on allbirds.com include collection pages, product pages, and informational pages on topics like shoe care.

Both reports give a pulse check on any website's SEO, so run them for your own site and for competitors to see what's working for them.

Step 2: Set up a Position Tracking campaign

Setting up a Position Tracking campaign lets you monitor your daily rankings for a specific set of target keywords.

Use it to track visibility in Google Search, Bing, and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Mode.

Because Position Tracking updates daily, the sooner you set it up, the more data you'll collect during your free trial.

To start a Position Tracking campaign, create an SEO project and add your domain, target keywords, and target location.

Once tracking begins, look at the "Landscape" report for a high-level snapshot of how your keyword set is performing. Review:

• Visibility: How visible your site is across the keywords you're tracking
• Estimated Traffic: Approximated traffic based on current rankings
• Average Position: The average ranking across your keyword set

These metrics give you a quick view of whether your visibility is improving or declining for your specified keywords. Reviewing this report during your trial helps you stay on top of major ranking changes and fluctuations.

Step 3: Perform a content gap analysis

Performing a content gap analysis shows you where competitors are getting visibility and you're not. Using your free trial, you can find gaps on two fronts: search rankings (Keyword Gap) and AI search visibility (Competitor Research).

Keyword Gap compares your search engine rankings against competitors and reveals keywords they rank for that you don't. It's a fast way to uncover new content opportunities.

Open the Keyword Gap tool and enter your domain along with up to four competitor domains, then run the comparison.

In the "Top Opportunities" widget, look for these filters:

• Missing: Keywords competitors rank for that your site doesn't
• Weak: Keywords where you rank, but competitors rank higher than you

Scroll down to the "All keyword details for:" table to see how each competitor performs for the same keyword. This helps you prioritize opportunities where multiple competitors already rank well.

For example, the "Weak" filter shows that each of allbirds.com's competitors ranks higher for relevant terms like "purple flats," "ladies slip on sneakers," and "mule sneakers womens."

In the AI Visibility Toolkit, Competitor Research reveals your gaps in AI visibility.

The top of the report benchmarks your metrics against competitors. The bottom shows your gaps — topics where competitors are mentioned by AI more than you. These are your opportunities to create content and catch up.

Use both tools together to build a gap analysis that spans Google Search and AI search. Then, plan how you'll target the topics where your brand is missing or weak.

Step 4: Run a Site Audit

Running a Site Audit scans your website for technical issues that could affect search performance and organizes them into clear priorities.

To run your audit, open the Site Audit tool and choose how many pages to crawl (and how often).

Once the crawl completes, review the "Overview" report for:

• Site Health: An overall measure of how technically sound your site is relative to others
• Errors: Issues of the highest severity detected during the audit
• Warnings: Issues of medium severity detected during the audit

For example, the site in the screenshot above has a Site Health score of 61%, with 1,421 errors and 1,439 warnings. The audit also flagged invalid structured data items across 11 pages. These are worth fixing quickly, since structured data issues can prevent search engines from showing rich snippets like review stars and images.

Further reading: How to Perform a Complete SEO Audit in 20 Steps

Step 5: Compare your backlinks to competitors'

Comparing your backlinks to competitors' shows which sites link to you, how your authority stacks up in your niche, and which sites might be worth reaching out to for new links.

Analyze your backlink profile with the Backlinks tool, which draws from Semrush's backlink database of more than 43 trillion links.

Enter your domain into Backlinks and review the "Overview" report for the following:

• Authority Score: Semrush's estimate of a domain's overall quality based on its backlinks, organic traffic, and spam signals
• Referring Domains: The number of unique domains linking to you
• Backlinks: The total number of links pointing to your site

The Backlinks tool also lets you add competitor domains using the drop-downs at the top of the report. So you can quickly see how strong your backlink profile is compared to competitors.

In the screenshot above, allbirds.com has 15.8K referring domains, 170K backlinks, and an Authority Score of 54. These metrics all fall behind competitors.

Step 6: Check your AI visibility

Checking your AI visibility (a measure of how you're mentioned, cited, or referenced in AI responses) helps you understand how you're performing in AI search and identify new opportunities to better compete.

Go to Visibility Overview and enter your domain to analyze how often your site appears in AI-generated answers. In the Visibility Overview report, review the following:

• AI Visibility Score: An overall measure of how frequently your domain appears in AI-generated responses relative to competitors
• Mentions: How many times your brand is referenced in AI answers
• Citations: The number of times AI answers cite your domain as a source
• Cited Pages: The number of your pages that appear in AI citations

For example, allbirds.com has an AI Visibility Score of 42/100, 13.6K mentions, 1.1K citations, and 999 cited pages. The brand appears regularly in AI responses but still has room to improve its presence.

Scroll down to the "Topics & Sources" section and click the "Topic Opportunities" tab to see topics where your rivals have mentions but you don’t. 

The patterns you see in the "Topics & Sources" table can reveal new topics worth covering.

Further reading: How to Run a Free AI Visibility Audit with Semrush

FAQs about Semrush’s free trial

How long is Semrush’s free trial? 

Semrush's free trial is seven days, giving you plenty of time to get insights you can act on right away and use to inform your strategy after your trial ends.

Can you cancel Semrush’s free trial? 

Yes, you can cancel Semrush's free trial before it ends and you will not be charged. Read more on canceling your Semrush free trial for the exact steps you need to take. 

Can I get a free 30-day trial of Semrush? 

Semrush's trial runs for seven days, and most users find that's enough time to pull the data and insights they need. You can also export much of what you find during your trial, so those insights stick around even after the trial ends. 

Turn your Semrush free trial into an action plan

By the end of your trial, you'll have a clear baseline for your search performance and a set of tasks to act on to start seeing improvements.

Here are some things you can continue doing once your Semrush free trial ends:

• Track your top keywords going forward in Google Search Console
• Create content for any AI visibility gaps you found, starting with the topics competitors own and you don't
• Fix the technical issues from your Site Audit export, starting with the highest-severity errors
• Reach out to the backlink prospects you identified — sites linking to competitors but not you
• Brief new content around the "Missing" and "Weak" keywords from your gap analysis
• Revisit your top-performing pages and update them based on what's driving (or losing) traffic

Want to get a start on all of the above (and more)?