A project in Semrush is a workspace that you set up for a particular domain or subdomain. This space includes 9 different tools that allow you to analyze all aspects of a business's online visibility: SEO, PPC, Content Marketing and Social Networks. As you complete your work, you can track progress with email reports and graphs in each Project tool.
While Domain Analytics and Keyword Analytics let you use the search bar to conduct research in our databases, projects let you gather marketing data from outside of the Semrush database by setting up tools.
Project sharing is also available to make collaboration between teams and agencies easy.
To create a new project, start by going to the Projects section. If you already have existing projects, you will see the list of them here. To create a new project, click on the blue create project button.
It’s recommended that you enter your root domain and not the www-version of your site in this step (for example, ebay.com instead of www.ebay.com) so that the project will be able to crawl your entire site and not just a www subdomain.
Once you create a Project, you will be able to set up each tool one by one. Each Project tool has its own configuration steps and parameters when setting up.
Please note that there are two dashboards related to your account's Projects:
- Your Projects dashboard—with all of the Projects under your account.
- A dashboard for each Project—with all of the tools set up in that Project.
You can organize and filter your projects with the help of tags. For example, if you are running several projects for the same customer, you just tag them with their company name and the name of the target department. Hit the “Add tag” button and type your tag in the input form. The button appears when you hover over the project.
You can mark one project with up to 3 tags. This will allow you to arrange them by various parameters (e.g. price, deadline, etc.).
To have specific projects displayed, use the tags filter or enter the project name/domain into the search bar at the top menu.
From the Projects dashboard, you will be able to see all of the Projects under your account.
Here you have a number of controls to customize your screen:
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Switch between viewing all Projects (All), just the Projects you’ve created (My own), Projects shared with you (Shared with me), or Projects of the other members of your team (My Team’s),—if you are an Admin and have additional users on your account, you will see all of their Projects there.
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Mark a project as "Favorite”
, so that it always appears at the top of the list. -
Sort by a preview widget’s metric (Site health, for example) to look at your highest and lowest-performing Projects. The sorting icon appears when you hover over the name of the column.
- Site Audit: (Site Audit) The health score of your Project’s latest audit
- Visibility: (Position Tracking) The visibility % that your main domain has for the target keywords in your Project
- Ideas to do: (On Page SEO Checker) The number of suggestions gathered by On Page SEO checker that can be implemented to help improve your landing pages to rank for the keywords in your Project.
- Audience: (Social Tracker) Your main Project domain’s audience size on the respective social media platform.
- Scheduled posts: (Social Poster) How many posts are scheduled in your queue.
- Toxic domains: (Backlink Audit) This is the number of toxic domains sending backlinks to your domain.
- Link building prospects: (Link Building Tool) How many domains Semrush has found that could be targets of a link building campaign for your site.
- PPC campaigns / Keywords: (PPC Keyword Tool) The number of campaigns (blue number) and keywords (green number) that are in your PPC Keyword Tool campaign.
- Organic sessions: (Organic Traffic Insights) The number of sessions that occurred on your Project domain over the past month according to Google Analytics.
Here’s how a dashboard of a brand-new Project with no tools set up will look:
Once your tools are running, the Project's dashboard will display previews of each tool's main metrics.
Please note: Individual Project tool campaigns cannot be deleted once they've been created without deleting the entire Project. If you delete a Project, you will delete all campaigns set up.
Keep in mind that you don’t need to set up every Project tool. You can create a Project to run just a single tool, like Site Audit or Position Tracking. Once a Project is created, you can return to it in the Project dashboard and set up a new tool at any given time.
You may see a discrepancy between the numbers shown in the preview metric on the Project dashboard and in the Project tool’s interface. This is because the widgets in the dashboard do not reflect any filters that are applied within a tool, while the metrics in a tool (such as visibility % in Position Tracking or Organic Sessions in Organic Traffic Insights) are influenced by filters applied within the tool.
To quickly check your project limits, hit the “Limits” button, and you’ll see how many limits you have remaining.
The number of Projects that you are allowed to have at once depends solely on the type of subscription you have with Semrush.
- Free subscriptions can manage 1 Project
- Pro subscriptions can manage 5 Projects
- Guru subscriptions can manage 15 Projects
- Business subscriptions can manage 40 Projects
Each subscription level also has varying limits for using the functions within each Project tool (such as the number of pages that can be crawled in a Site Audit).
To review and change all your account limits, go to your subscription info page in the profile menu.
Select Edit name to update the name of your Project. Please note that it is only possible to change the name of the Project. There is no option to edit the domain that the Project was set up for. For example, if the website URL has changed, you would need to create another Project specifically for the new domain URL.
Sharing allows you to provide Editor or Viewer access to your Projects. This makes it easy to create transparency within your team or client relationship.
To share multiple Projects with another user, select the Share button next to Limits. Then, select Projects that you want to share and enter the email addresses of the users that you’d like to share your Project with.
It’s important to note that sharing with Editor and Viewer access is available to all paid users, but Free users cannot share a project and view shared projects with Editor access (if a project with Editor access is shared with a free user, they will still see it in Viewer mode).
To delete a Project, share a Project, or change the name of a Project, use the settings gear button under the Project name in your dashboard. If a Project has been shared with you, you can “leave” the Project from here as well.
DELETING PROJECTS: When you delete a project, you are deleting all of the tools set up in the Project. For example, if you want to delete a Site Audit campaign, you will also be deleting the Position Tracking campaign, Social Tracker, Backlinks Audit, etc of that are in the same project. Projects cannot be recovered once deleted, so please be careful when deleting a project.
Configuring each project tool usually takes a few minutes to set up desired parameters and settings. For a step-by-step walkthrough on how to configure each tool, read the configuring chapters of the user manuals below.