Navigating Semrush: Toolkits, Sidebar, and Dashboard Tour

The Semrush interface is organized around toolkits — SEO, Content, Advertising, Social, Local — each holding the tools for one marketing discipline. The left sidebar is your map: it lists the toolkits, lets you search for any tool by name, and leads to the Projects dashboard where your site’s campaigns live. Learn this layout once.

HowToSemrush is an independent guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Semrush.

Open Semrush for the first time and you’ll feel what every beginner feels: there is a lot on screen. The instinct is to start clicking — and twenty minutes later you’ve seen twelve screens and learned nothing. This guide replaces that with a deliberate tour: the lobby, where your team sits, the supply closet. Thirty minutes now saves hours of wandering later.

One framing note: Semrush updates its interface — if a label moved, search Semrush’s help center for the current name. This tour teaches the mental model (what lives where and why), not pixel positions, so it stays useful through redesigns.

Key takeaways

Toolkits are the organizing idea. Dozens of tools are grouped by discipline — SEO, Content, Advertising, Social, Local — so you navigate by job, not by memorizing tool names.
The sidebar is your map. It holds the toolkit navigation, a search box to find any tool by name, and the route to your Projects.
The Projects dashboard is mission control for your sites. Recurring campaigns (Site Audit, Position Tracking) live there, one Project per website.
Search beats browsing. When you know a tool’s name, the search box gets you there faster than drilling through toolkit menus.
Learn five locations and you’re oriented: the sidebar, the toolkit groups, tool search, the Projects dashboard, and your account/settings area.

Start here: the three zones of the interface

Every Semrush screen belongs to one of three zones. Tell them apart and the product stops feeling random.

Zone 1 — Navigation (the sidebar). The persistent left sidebar is where you find things: toolkit menus, tool search, the path to Projects. You’ll touch this zone in every session.

Zone 2 — Projects dashboard. Mission control for your websites: the recurring campaigns watching your sites over time. Visit to check status, read trends, manage campaigns. If you’ve followed our Project setup guide, you already have one Project here.

Zone 3 — Inside a tool. Opening any individual tool — Keyword Magic Tool, Domain Overview, Site Audit — puts you in a working screen with inputs, reports, filters, and exports. This is where the work happens, and each tool’s screen follows similar conventions (covered below).

Beginner confusion usually comes from mixing up the zones: hunting toolkit menus for something in a Project, or looking in Projects for a one-off research tool. Keep them separate — find in the sidebar, monitor in Projects, work inside tools — and navigation gets dramatically simpler.

Zone 1: the sidebar and toolkit groupings

The sidebar is the spine of the product. Here’s what lives on it.

The toolkit groupings. Tools are organized into broad toolkits by discipline — SEO, Content, Advertising, Social, and Local. Each is a family of tools for one kind of work:

SEO toolkit: keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, rank tracking, backlink tools, on-page checkers. Most beginners spend most of their time here.
Content toolkit: topic ideation, content briefs, writing-assistant style tools.
Advertising toolkit: PPC research — competitor ad keywords, ad copy history, product listing ads.
Social toolkit: social media management and analytics.
Local toolkit: local listings management and local rank tracking.

You don’t need to memorize which tool lives where. The habit is: navigate by job. “I want keyword ideas” → SEO toolkit → Keyword Magic Tool. Later tutorials always name the tool directly — the toolkit is the neighborhood, not the address.

Recent and favorite tools. The interface typically surfaces recently used tools for quick return visits. Once you settle into a routine, you’ll stop navigating and just return to the familiar.

Account and settings. Usually at the sidebar’s edge or the top bar: subscription, user management, notifications. Visit once to confirm your plan and notification settings, then mostly forget it.

Practical tip: if your work is entirely search-focused, mentally shrink Semrush to the SEO toolkit plus Projects and ignore the rest for months. That’s focus, not missing out. Our beginner’s guide to what Semrush is maps the five main jobs to their toolkits.

Zone 2: the Projects dashboard

The Projects dashboard is where your websites live inside Semrush. Each Project appears with a status summary of its campaigns.

What you’ll typically see per Project:

Campaign cards or rows — Site Audit with its latest health overview, Position Tracking with recent visibility trends. Each is a doorway to the full report.
Status indicators — whether campaigns are active, when they last ran, whether anything needs attention.
Controls to add campaigns, adjust schedules, or edit settings.

The dashboard answers one question at a glance: are my sites okay, and is anything getting better or worse? It’s a morning-check screen, not a work screen.

Two habits make it useful. First, set it up before you need it — campaigns build history, so a Project created today is far more informative in a month. Second, don’t check compulsively. Weekly is plenty; daily rank-checking is a well-known productivity trap (rankings wobble daily — trends over weeks are the signal).

Zone 3: inside a tool — reports, filters, and exports

Open any tool and you’ll find the same general anatomy — learning one teaches you the shape of all of them.

The input area. Most research tools start with a single input: a keyword, a domain, a URL. Type it, run, get a report. Campaign tools show configuration and status instead.

The report. Tables of keywords, lists of issues, charts of traffic estimates. Every report on this site is taught the same way — what to look at first, what each column means, how to interpret it — because reading reports well is the actual skill.

Filters and sorting. Nearly every report table can be filtered and sorted: by volume, difficulty, issue severity, date. Learning to filter is learning to think — “show me only keywords with difficulty under 40” is a strategy expressed as a filter. The Keyword Magic Tool walkthrough shows filtering in action.

Tabs and views. Bigger tools split reports across tabs — different angles on the same data. You rarely need all of them; tutorials point at the two or three that matter.

Export and save. Reports can be exported (spreadsheets, PDFs) or saved into lists inside Semrush — for content calendars, client reports, developer fix lists.

The “everything is estimated” reminder. Inside research tools, most numbers are Semrush’s estimates from its databases — useful for comparing options, not exact counts. Your connected Google Analytics and Search Console data (see the Project setup guide) is the first-party counterweight. Knowing which is which keeps you honest.

The fastest way around: search for tools by name

Here’s the power-user move beginners discover too late: don’t browse for tools — search for them. The sidebar’s search box (or a global search feature) jumps you straight to any tool by name.

This matters because Semrush has dozens of similarly-named tools and long toolkit menus. “Keyword Magic Tool” vs. “Keyword Overview” vs. “Keyword Gap” — three tools, three jobs, and menu-drilling wastes minutes each time. Searching the name from a tutorial is instant.

Build this habit now: every time a guide names a tool, open it via search. Within a week you’ll navigate by name — faster, and proof you’re learning the vocabulary.

One caution: tool names occasionally change (hence our standing caveat). If a search comes up empty, try a shorter fragment or check the help center for the current label — also the right move when a tutorial’s screenshots don’t match your screen.

Settings, account, and help: the unglamorous corners

Three areas nobody tours but everybody eventually needs:

Account and subscription. Plan, billing, usage — the only place with authoritative numbers about your account’s limits.

Notification and alert settings. Position Tracking and Site Audit can email you about changes. Configure deliberately: alerts for genuinely important events, silence for the rest. Defaults tend toward chatty; tune before alert fatigue sets in.

Help and support. Semrush’s help center documents every tool — the authoritative reference when a label moves or a metric needs defining. Our guides teach workflow and judgment; the help center is the dictionary for exact current labels.

A 20-minute orientation exercise

Reading about navigation isn’t navigating. Do this now, with Semrush open:

Minutes 0–5: Expand each toolkit grouping in the sidebar. Don’t click into tools — just read the names and notice which family each belongs to.
Minutes 5–10: Use the search box to find “Keyword Magic Tool,” “Site Audit,” and “Position Tracking” by name. Notice how much faster this is than menu browsing.
Minutes 10–15: Open your Projects dashboard (create your first Project first if you haven’t). Click into one campaign and identify the report, the filters, and the export option.
Minutes 15–20: Open the help center, search for one tool you just visited, and skim its documentation page. This is your safety net for every future “where did that button go?” moment.

Done — you now know the interface’s shape better than most long-time account holders, because you learned the map instead of wandering.

Frequently asked questions

Where do I find a specific tool in Semrush?
Use the search box in the sidebar and type the tool’s name — it’s the fastest route. Alternatively, browse the toolkit groupings (SEO, Content, Advertising, Social, Local) and look inside the toolkit matching your job. Tool names occasionally change, so if a search comes up empty, try a shorter fragment or check Semrush’s help center for the current label. Every tutorial on this site names the exact tool to open, so you’ll rarely need to hunt.

What’s the difference between the dashboard and a Project?
The main dashboard is the product’s home base — navigation, toolkits, account areas. A Project dashboard is specific to one website: it holds that site’s recurring campaigns (Site Audit, Position Tracking) and their history. Think of it as the difference between the office building (main dashboard) and your team’s room (Project). One-off research tools don’t need a Project; ongoing monitoring does.

Do I need to learn all the toolkits?
No. Learn the toolkit that matches your job and ignore the rest until you need them. A blogger focused on search traffic can live in the SEO toolkit for months. The toolkits are organized by discipline precisely so you don’t have to care about the ones outside yours. Expanding later — into Content tools when you systematize writing, or Advertising tools when you get PPC-curious — is natural and easy.

Why does my Semrush look different from tutorial screenshots?
Because Semrush updates its interface over time — layouts shift, labels get renamed, menus reorganize. This is normal for actively developed software. When it happens, navigate by concept (which tool, which report, which column) rather than by pixel position, and use Semrush’s help center to find the current label. Our guides are written at the general workflow level specifically to survive these changes.

How do I keep up with new tools Semrush adds?
You mostly don’t need to — new tools rarely change the fundamentals, and chasing every launch is a distraction from doing the work. A practical rhythm: skim Semrush’s official blog occasionally (semrush.com/blog) for major announcements, and adopt a new tool only when you have a specific job it does better than your current workflow. The core toolkit — keyword research, audits, tracking — has been stable for years.

Your concrete next step

Open Semrush and do the 20-minute orientation exercise above — sidebar tour, tool search, one Project campaign, one help-center lookup. Then pick your first real job: keyword research continues in our Keyword Magic Tool walkthrough; product scope in what Semrush is; and if you haven’t created one yet, set up your first Project so campaigns start building history today.

HowToSemrush publishes educational guides only. Semrush updates its features and pricing over time — verify current details on semrush.com before relying on them.