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SEMRush is an advanced and an independent keyword and competitor research tool that runs on its own database. It's been around for several years which means its database is well-established.
Key Features:
See (and compare!) your competitor's organic search rankings;
See which words your competitors are spending money on;
Define your organic and paid search competitors by your main keyword;
Investigate your competitor's (or your own) backlinks;
Research your competitor's Facebook advertising tactics (This one is quite a unique feature)
This is just a brief look at the features. Apart from that, you'll see lots of various ways to play with the results (i.e. various useful sorting options, export features, visualization methods to take a deep look into)
SEMRush has a great free FireFox addon called SEOquake.
To learn more about SEMRush and what it has to offer, please click here.
What is your experience with the tool and what are the best ways to utilize it?
I use semrush fairly regularly. It is really good for pulling up position data for high value stuff you may rank for but is not high enough in rankings to be bringing your traffic yet or because keyword data may be hidden behind not provided. Also, tool will give you data for the ppc side of things, to get an idea of what keyword competitors are bidding on. Although the data is not 100% fresh, which is typical for these type of tools, I find the data to be better than almost all of the other tools on there...and there are no weird bugs like where keywords get cut off, etc
