Semrush Free Trial (and Moz and Ahrefs): How to Do a Month of Keyword Research for Free

By Eugene Madondo, SEO specialist · Rank to Earn · Updated November 2026

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Most people waste their SEO tool free trial. They sign up on a whim, click around the dashboard for an evening, forget about it, and then a dollar charge lands on their card a week later. A trial is worth far more than that. If you walk in with a niche shortlist and a plan, a single 7-day Semrush or Moz Pro trial is enough to map out your first three months of content. Here’s exactly how I’d run it.

Current trial lengths and what’s included

In lesson 3 I compared Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz and said you only need one paid tool. This lesson is about getting real work out of them before you pay anything. Trial terms change often, so I checked each one on the day this lesson went live.

Checked 8 November 2026. Sources: Semrush’s cancellation help page and refund policy; Ahrefs’ pricing and Ahrefs Free pages; Style Factory’s Semrush guide (updated July 2026) and Moz Pro guide (updated October 2026); BloggersPassion’s Semrush (September 2026) and Moz (August 2026) guides. Moz’s own pricing page couldn’t be loaded on the day, so its trial terms come from those recent guides. Always confirm on the sign-up page before you enter a card.

A few things worth knowing before you pick:

• Semrush is the one I’d start with for a trial. Its competitor and keyword gap reports are built for exactly the sprint below, and 7 days is enough if you prepare. The 14-day versions come from partner links on review sites, so the length depends on where you sign up.
• Moz Pro is a good second trial. Its keyword data is smaller, but you can run it after your Semrush trial ends to double-check your best keywords and look at links.
• Ahrefs is my own tool of choice, but it doesn’t do free trials. Its pricing page is clear that it doesn’t run discounts either. For a beginner, its free tools are the useful part, and I cover them at the end of this lesson.

Searchers clearly want this: in Ahrefs, “semrush free trial” gets about 2,800 US searches a month, “ahrefs free trial” about 3,600 and “moz free trial” about 450. Plenty of people are hunting for a trial. Very few have a plan for it.

Before you start: shortlist, spreadsheet, reminder

The clock starts the moment you enter your card. So do all the thinking before that, and use the trial only for the data you can’t get for free.

1. Your niche shortlist

Bring the top two or three niches from lesson 1’s niche scorecard, ideally including one of the AI or SaaS sub-niches from lesson 2. For each niche, write down five seed keywords and three to five websites you already know rank in it. If you can’t name any competitors yet, Google your seed keywords and note the sites that keep showing up.

2. A spreadsheet ready to fill

Create one Google Sheet with a tab for each job: Competitors, Top pages, Keyword gap, Master keywords, SERP checks and Content plan. Add columns for keyword, volume, KD, intent and the URL that ranks. When you export from the tool, you paste straight in. The sheet is the real product of the trial; the login is temporary.

3. A cancel reminder, set first

Before you even open the sign-up page, put a reminder in your calendar for the day before the trial ends, with a second alert two hours before. If your trial ends on a Sunday, cancel on the Saturday. This matters more for South Africans: if a trial converts, you’re billed in US dollars on a rand card, and your bank may add its own foreign transaction fee on top. One missed reminder can cost you more than a month of hosting.

The trial sprint, day by day

Here’s the 6-day sprint I’d run on a 7-day Semrush trial. Day 7 is a buffer: you’ll have cancelled already. On a 14-day trial, take two days per step and go deeper. I use Semrush’s report names below, but every step works in Moz Pro too.

1. Day 1: Confirm your competitors. Put each site on your list into Semrush’s Organic Research and open the Competitors report. It shows other sites ranking for the same keywords, which is usually a better list than the one in your head. Keep five to ten competitors per niche, and favour smaller sites over giants like Forbes or Wikipedia. Those are the ones you can actually catch.
2. Day 2: Pull their top pages. For each competitor, open the Pages report in Organic Research and export the pages that bring in the most search traffic. This tells you which topics actually earn traffic in the niche. If three different small sites all get their best traffic from “best X for Y” lists, that’s your first content pattern.
3. Day 3: Run a keyword gap. Use the Keyword Gap tool to compare three to five competitors side by side and filter for keywords they rank for that none of the others cover well. When you have no site yet, every keyword is a gap, so focus on the ones two or more competitors share. Shared keywords are proven demand.
4. Day 4: Build and export a 500-keyword master list. Put your seed keywords into the Keyword Magic Tool, then combine those results with your Day 2 and Day 3 exports. Filter to keywords with low Keyword Difficulty (I aim for under 20 on a new site) and real volume, remove duplicates, and export the top 500 into your Master keywords tab. Trials can have lower limits than paid plans, so export your most important lists first.
5. Day 5: Check the SERPs by hand. Take your 50 best keywords and Google each one. Note who ranks: small sites, forums, Reddit threads or big brands. Low-authority sites and forums on page one mean a new site can compete, exactly as in lesson 1’s competition check. Mark each keyword “go”, “maybe” or “skip”.
6. Day 6: Build a 3-month content plan, then cancel. Group the “go” keywords by topic and turn them into roughly 12 to 36 article ideas, which is one to three posts a week for three months. Put the easiest buying-intent keywords first and the supporting how-to articles around them. Save a copy of the sheet somewhere safe, then cancel the trial today.

Notice what’s missing from this list: learning every feature. You don’t need to. Six reports and a spreadsheet will give you more keyword data than most beginners collect in their first year.

This is the same approach I use when I’m deciding whether to build or buy into a niche: study what already works for competitors, then copy the pattern, not the content. I wrote more about that way of working in how to run a website like a business.

How to cancel without being charged

Cancelling is easy if you know where to look. It’s the confirmation step that catches people out.

Cancelling a Semrush trial

• Log in to the account you used for the trial and open Semrush’s cancellation form (also reachable from Subscription info by clicking “Contact us” next to “Recurring: Active”).
• Choose the toolkit or plan you’re cancelling, answer the questions and submit.
• Click the confirmation link in the email Semrush sends you. Semrush’s help page says that if you don’t, the request isn’t processed and billing continues. Check your spam folder if it doesn’t arrive.
• Go back to Subscription info and check the status reads “Recurring: Inactive”. You keep a free account afterwards.

Semrush’s refund policy says the first payment is charged automatically at the end of the trial unless you cancel before, and that trials which convert to month-to-month plans aren’t covered by its 7-day money-back guarantee. That’s why I cancel a day early, not on the last day.

Cancelling a Moz Pro trial

• Log in and go to the Subscriptions page in your Moz account.
• Choose to cancel, fill in the short feedback survey and confirm.
• Recent guides say to cancel at least 24 hours before the paid subscription starts. If anything goes wrong, Moz’s team points people to [email protected] for billing problems.

Ahrefs

There’s no trial to cancel. If you ever take a paid Ahrefs plan and stop paying, your account drops back to Ahrefs Free.

Keep going with free tools

Your trial ends, but your research doesn’t. These free tools cover most of what a beginner needs until the site earns enough to pay for one paid tool.

Ahrefs Free limits, from Ahrefs’ own page on 8 November 2026: Site Audit at 5,000 crawl credits per project a month, and Site Explorer showing up to 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords at once.

Once your site is live, Search Console and Ahrefs Free become more useful than any trial, because they show what your site actually ranks for. That’s the data you’ll use to grow, and it costs nothing. I keep a list of the paid and free tools I actually use on my resources page.

When you do start paying for a tool, pay for one, and pay for it once the site is earning. For most beginners, that’s months away. Until then, a well-run trial plus free tools is plenty.

Summary: how to use an SEO tool free trial

Semrush offers a 7-day free trial as standard (14 days through some partner links), Moz Pro offers 7 days, and Ahrefs has no trial but gives you Ahrefs Free and free keyword tools. Get your niche shortlist, spreadsheet and cancel reminder ready first. Then run a 6-day sprint: confirm competitors, pull their top pages, run a keyword gap, export 500 keywords, check the SERPs by hand and build a 3-month content plan. Cancel a day early, confirm the cancellation email, and keep going with Search Console, Ahrefs Free, Keyword Planner and Google Trends. Next up is lesson 5, how to choose a domain name that fits the niche you’ve just researched.

Frequently asked questions

About Eugene Madondo

Eugene is a Cape Town-based SEO specialist and digital entrepreneur who has been earning online since 2012. He has worked in SEO at a tech startup, an agency and in-house tech roles, ran a consulting business, and has generated over $1.4 million from his own affiliate websites since 2020. He teaches website operators through Rank to Earn.

Back to the free website course overview, or see the tools I use on my resources page.