Semrush pricing for Marketo teams: what replacing the SEO tile really costs once you count seats

Semrush SEO is $139 a month and that is not what a Marketo team will pay. The Marketo Engage SEO tile came free with every Marketo login, so a department of eight had it on eight desks at no marginal cost. Semrush charges for additional users from $45 a month each and does not publish how many seats a plan includes, so the same access costs somewhere between $139 and $454 and the vendor's own pricing page cannot tell you which. For teams that only used the page optimization score, the honest replacement is $49 a month with no seat problem at all.

Adobe switched the Marketo Engage SEO feature off on 31 March 2026, removed the tile the next day, and pointed customers at Semrush. Every write-up of that stopped at the recommendation. None of them priced it, and pricing it is the part that decides what a B2B marketing team actually does next.

Before the arithmetic, if what you want to know is whether a page-level audit is enough to replace what you lost, point this at one of the landing pages you used to score in Marketo and see what comes back.

Page URL

Target keyword

Content type Blog post Product page Homepage Category page

No account. No card. Real output in about 20 seconds.

Audit my page

The hidden line item: the SEO tile was unlimited seats at zero cost

This is the part that catches teams out, and it is not obvious until you go shopping. Marketo bundled the SEO tool into the platform. Anyone with a Marketo Engage login could open the tile, run a page and read the score. Nobody ever counted how many people used it because it never appeared on an invoice as its own line.

That created a habit. Campaign managers, demand gen, the content writer, marketing ops and whoever was covering that week all had access to a page checker. Then it went away, and the replacement market is priced per person. Every quote you get back will be for a number of seats, and the first question the vendor asks is how many people need one. Most Marketo teams do not have an answer, because the tool that created the expectation never asked.

What eight people actually costs on each platform

Eight is roughly the size of a marketing department that runs Marketo Engage rather than a smaller automation tool. Here is what that headcount costs on the four platforms a Marketo team is realistically looking at, with every figure read off the vendor's own pricing page in the first week of September 2026.

Three findings in that table, and the first is the one worth taking to a budget meeting. Two of the four platforms cannot be priced from their own pricing pages. Semrush sells an Additional Users add-on "starting at $45/mo" and never states how many users the base plan includes, so the $454 figure above assumes one included seat and could be wrong in your favor. Moz publishes no extra-seat rate anywhere at all, which means a team of eight cannot get a number for Moz Pro Large without contacting sales.

The second is that Ahrefs is not an option for a department at the tiers people assume. Lite caps total users at 3 and Standard at 6. A team of eight is pushed to Advanced at $449 plus seven extra seats at $80, which is $1,009 a month. That is not a data decision, it is a headcount decision, and it is how a $129 plan turns into a four-figure bill.

The third is that the annual rates are real and worth having in the same conversation. Semrush SEO drops from $139 to $117.33 a month on annual billing and Pro+ from $299 to $248.17. Moz Pro Medium drops from $179 to $143. The full ladder for each is on the Semrush plan and pricing breakdown and the Moz Pro pricing page.

Adobe recommended the company Adobe was buying

Worth having on the record before anyone signs. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush in November 2025 in an all-cash deal worth about $1.9 billion at $12.00 a share, and completed it on 28 April 2026. The Marketo SEO tile was removed on 1 April 2026, four weeks earlier, with Semrush named as the replacement.

That does not make the advice bad. Semrush genuinely is the closest like-for-like for all three tabs the tile had, and if your team used the keyword rankings daily it is the sensible destination. It does mean the recommendation was not independent, and a marketing team that treats it as neutral guidance is skipping a step it would not skip for any other vendor. The commitments Adobe and Semrush have actually made, and the ones they carefully have not, are set out on our page on the Semrush Adobe acquisition and what it changes for pricing.

The practical read for a Marketo shop: buying Semrush now consolidates two of your marketing tools under one vendor, which is convenient until it is leverage. Adobe sells primarily to enterprises, and nothing published today says what the $139 tier looks like in eighteen months. Stay monthly through the first renewal cycle and read the quote.

Price the tab you used, not the tile you lost

The Marketo SEO tile had three tabs, and treating them as one product is what makes this expensive. Keywords tracked rankings, volumes and trends. Inbound Links watched who linked to your domain. Pages scored each page 1 to 100 and listed the issues holding it down. Adobe's own documentation, before it was pulled, described that score as "an overall ranking of how well your page is optimized for search, on a scale of 1 to 100," based on "dozens of best practices in SEO."

Ask around the team about which of those three anyone actually opened last quarter. In most Marketo shops the answer is the third one, and the use case is narrow and repeatable: a campaign landing page is about to go live behind paid spend or an email program, somebody runs the score, fixes the obvious problems and ships. That is a pre-flight check, not competitive research.

If that is your team, you are about to spend $454 a month replacing a workflow worth a fraction of it. The tab-by-tab mapping, with what each part honestly costs to replace on its own, is on our Marketo SEO tool alternative page. And the rest of the Marketo stack keeps doing what you bought it for regardless: the nurture logic, the scoring and the email programs are untouched by this, and teams running outbound prospecting alongside those programs generally keep it in a separate tool that writes and warms the sequences rather than trying to make an enterprise platform do it.

The part no platform in that table does

Every tool above audits a page and returns a prioritized list of defects. Title too long. Meta description missing. Headings out of order. These terms absent. They are all good at it, and the lists are close to identical after twenty years of competition. Marketo's version was the same idea with an impact rating attached.

None of them writes the fix. That is still a person, usually the one person on the team who understands both SEO and the brand voice, going through pages one at a time. Adobe said the Marketo SEO tool was deprecated for low adoption, and this is the likeliest reason why: a score with no correction attached gets checked once and then quietly ignored, because the work it points at is the work nobody has time for.

Seomake does that half. Paste a URL and the keyword it should rank for, and it reads the live page, scores it, lists what is costing the ranking, and then writes the corrected title under 60 characters with the term at the front, a meta description at the length Google renders, the heading outline and an opening paragraph. It has no keyword database and no link index, so it replaces one of the three tabs and says so. For a Marketo team whose habit was the Pages tab, that is $49 a month against $454, and it is not seat limited, so the campaign manager and the content writer can both use it. The mechanics are in how the audit and rewrite work.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Semrush cost for a Marketo team?

The plan starts at $139 a month for Semrush SEO, but that is not the number a Marketo team should budget. Semrush charges for additional users from $45 a month each and does not publish how many seats the base plan includes, so a department that had the SEO tile on every Marketo login has to ask sales before it can price the replacement at all.

How many seats does a Semrush plan include?

Semrush does not say. Its pricing page sells an Additional Users add-on starting at $45 a month and never states the base count, which was true before Adobe bought the company in April 2026 and is still true in September 2026. Moz Pro publishes its seats plainly at 1, 2 and 3 by tier, and Ahrefs publishes both the included seat and the cap.

Why did Adobe recommend Semrush to Marketo customers?

Because Semrush covers all three tabs the SEO tile had, and because Adobe was buying it. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush in November 2025 for about $1.9 billion and completed the deal on 28 April 2026, four weeks after the Marketo tile was removed. The recommendation is reasonable on the merits and it was not a neutral one.

Is there a cheaper replacement for the Marketo SEO tool?

Yes, if you only used the Pages tab and its optimization score. That job is page-level auditing, not keyword research, and it costs $49 a month rather than $139 plus seats. If your team used the Keywords or Inbound Links tabs, there is no cheap route, because a ranking fetcher and a link index are infrastructure businesses.

What does Ahrefs cost for a marketing department?

More than the headline. Every Ahrefs plan includes exactly one seat and caps the extras: Lite at $129 allows 2 more at $40 each, Standard at $249 allows 5 more at $60, Advanced at $449 allows 10 at $80. A team of eight cannot buy Lite at any price and lands on Standard at $249 plus $420 in seats, which is $669 a month.

Should we buy annual or monthly while we are still deciding?

Monthly, until the tool survives a full quarter of real use. Annual discounts in this category are genuine, with Semrush SEO dropping from $139 to $117.33 a month and Moz Pro Medium from $179 to $143, but annual plans here rarely refund mid-term. You have already had one tool taken away this year with a month of notice.

Does everyone on a marketing team need an SEO platform login?

Almost never. On most teams one or two people run research and everyone else needs the conclusion, which is the keyword a page should target and the copy to use. Buying six platform seats so six people can read a recommendation is the most common way a marketing budget gets wasted in this category, and it is the habit the free Marketo tile quietly created.

Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz Pro and Search Atlas prices were read off each vendor's own pricing page in the first week of September 2026. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this article says so rather than estimating it. Adobe's Marketo Engage deprecation dates come from the February 2026 release notes and the Page Optimization Score definition from the Internet Archive snapshot of Adobe's documentation taken 25 April 2024, since Adobe has since removed both pages. Vendors change pricing without notice, so confirm at checkout.