Semrush Pro vs. Semrush Guru: Which Is Right for You?

If you've decided to start using Semrush, you might be trying to decide whether you should go with a Pro or Guru plan.

You've come to the right place. 

By the end of this article, you'll have a clear understanding of how the plans differ. And which is right for your needs.

Semrush Pro vs. Semrush Guru: Main Differences

The Semrush Pro plan covers the basics like keyword research, site audits, and rank tracking.

The Guru plan unlocks historical data, larger limits, and more advanced features like content tools.

Semrush Pro Overview

The Pro plan provides plenty of capabilities for smaller operations with specific needs:

• Manage up to five SEO projects: Track performance, spot issues, and optimize up to five websites at once
• Conduct keyword research:Identify valuable search terms and use AI to get access to metrics that can help you find the best terms for your specific site
• Track 500 keywords per account: Monitor your daily keyword rankings to measure where you stand compared to the competition
• Run competitive analyses: Leverage SEO tools to understand your competitors’ strategies and identify untapped opportunities in your market
• Make technical SEO improvements: Crawl and examine up to 100,000 pages each month to find issues that affect site performance and rankings. And get tips on how to fix those problems.
• Build and monitor backlinks:Get access to backlink reports and analysis tools. So you can monitor your link profile, uncover prospects worth getting backlinks from, and track new and lost links over time.
• Measure performance holistically: Connect Google Analytics through the My Reports tool to show your SEO results next to key events like purchases. 

Semrush Guru Overview

The Guru plan builds on Pro's foundation with expanded limits and exclusive tools:

• Manage up to 15 SEO projects: Monitor performance, track issues, and optimize up to 15 domains or subdomains at once. All from one dashboard.
• Track 1,500 keywords per account: Monitor keyword performance across various locations with multi-targeting capabilities. Plus, keep tabs on your visibility in ChatGPT search.
• Create search-optimized content: Unlock content marketing tools that provide suggestions for making your content high-quality and likely to rank highly in search
• Analyze historical performance: Identify seasonal trends and find year-over-year changes with historical data
• Audit complex websites or many different sites: Crawl up to 300,000 pages per month—including those with dynamic content and JavaScript—for a deeper technical analysis 

For John Lawless, UK Content & SEO Manager at Limitless Digital Group, the Guru plan has been worth it: 

"Across my team, we enjoy the SEO content template tool very much. It has helped us to achieve several featured snippets and allows us to accurately determine what changes we need to make to existing content in order for it to rank."

John Lawless

Semrush Pro vs. Semrush Guru: Content Marketing Tools

A Semrush Pro plan offers access to tools that give you a basic starting point for content analysis. 

In contrast, the Guru plan gives you access to a complete content marketing workflow. Which makes it easier to plan, write, and optimize content that’s likely to rank and deliver results.

Here’s how Guru expands your content capabilities.

Start with Topic Research to quickly find content topic ideas. Just enter your seed keyword and click “Get content ideas.”

The tool presents a variety of related topics organized into subtopics, each displayed on cards.

For instance, the example below shows that "heart rate,” “strength training,” and “resistance training” are related subtopics that are attracting significant search volume. 

This can help you prioritize content that’s more likely to attract traffic.

Once you’ve picked your topic, use the SEO Content Template to produce an optimized outline. 

This tool analyzes the top 10 Google results for your chosen term to craft detailed guidelines for you.

Then, you can start writing your content within the SEO Writing Assistant, which provides suggestions for improving your SEO, readability, originality, and tone—all in real time. 

You can even use it in Google Docs, so you can edit and optimize using your existing tools. 

Semrush Pro vs. Semrush Guru: Historical Data

A Pro plan allows you to gather current information about keywords and your competitors’ SEO performance. 

Guru takes it one step further to give you access to data as far back as January 2012. Which is useful for seeing seasonal shifts, how competitors have adapted, and more. 

Here are a few places you can access historical SEO data with a Guru plan:

• Organic Research: Analyze competitors’ organic (unpaid) traffic and keyword rankings over time
• Keyword Overview: Research how a specific keyword’s search volume, difficulty, and intent type (a reflection of what users are trying to achieve) have changed over time
• Domain Overview: Get a holistic view of a domain’s search performance, including trends for traffic, keywords, and backlinks.

Semrush Pro vs. Semrush Guru: Rank Tracking

With the Pro plan, you can track where your website ranks in Google for up to 500 keywords. You’ll see how your positions change day by day and how visible your content is in search results overall.

The Guru plan builds on this with two major upgrades:

First, when setting up Position Tracking, you can measure how your content performs in ChatGPT search. 

If your page is cited as a source in ChatGPT’s answers, Guru lets you track that appearance alongside your traditional rankings. So you can see where you’re gaining ground in AI-powered search.

Second, you can track keyword rankings in up to 10 different locations or devices from one project. To get a broad view of your performance across these areas.

Here’s how to set this up in Position Tracking:

Open the device type drop-down and select "+ Add new target.”

Complete the prompts to specify your location (down to the city level), device, and keywords.

Then, you can compare all your tracked locations and devices in the “Devices & Locations” tab.

Scroll down to see specific keyword rankings and search volumes for those terms across your tracked devices and locations:

Detailed reporting is crucial for a scaling business, and these Guru-level features make it easier.

For Stephen Brent May, CMO Chair at AMA Houston, being able to monitor rankings for multiple locations is key:

“I really love the way Semrush handles showing keyword position tracking for specific locations within the U.S. If I have a client with offices in four different cities, I can easily see their positions in each city and change the date range to see how that ranking has changed over time.” 

Steven Brent May

Semrush Pro vs. Semrush Guru: Reporting Capabilities

With the Pro plan, you can build up to three PDF reports each month using data from Semrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console to show the impact of your SEO work.

Guru subscribers can do the same and also add Semrush data to Looker Studio dashboards. Which is helpful for telling a complete story.

For example, you can pull metrics from Position Tracking that help you gauge your website's performance in search engines. 

These dynamic dashboards allow you to see information that can help you quickly adapt your marketing tactics.

Should You Choose Semrush Pro or Semrush Guru?

When deciding between Semrush Pro and Semrush Guru, consider your specific needs and the level of data analysis required for your projects.

Choose Semrush Pro when:

• You’re managing SEO for just a few websites
• You need basic rank tracking, site audit, and keyword research features
• You’re building simple reports and don’t need year-over-year comparisons
• You have a small-scale content strategy or are just getting started

Choose Semrush Guru when:

• Content creation is a major focus, and you want tools to plan and optimize with confidence
• You need to automate polished reports, compare performance over time, and track rankings across locations
• You’re managing multiple websites and want the flexibility to scale without limits
• You want ChatGPT search tracking and enhanced technical analysis abilities

The bottom line? 

Pro is great for starters. But Guru gives you room to grow.