The right SEO tool will give you an edge in building traffic to your website and growing your business. If you are looking for the best SEO tools, Ahrefs vs SEMrush must have crossed your mind.
With SEO becoming more competitive especially with the emergence of generative AI, having the right SEO tools for gaining traffic and dominating profitable keywords in your niche cannot be overemphasized.
Having your websites rank low for profitable keywords in your niche can be the reason for failure. Hence, it is never a bad idea to invest in a good keyword research tool that helps you enhance your website’s SEO performance.
It is essential to choose the right SEO and keyword research tools when optimizing your site. Believe it or not, a site with the perfect keyword or phrase can save a lot of money. So, the question is, how can you find the ideal and profitable keywords for your site or blog?
Here we introduce you to the SEMrush and Ahrefs, the two best SEO tools that will satisfy your need to find the right answer. We will be looking at their similarities, differences, pros, and cons.
Semrush and Ahrefs are two leading SEO tools that have dominated the respective market. These tools can help you optimize your site, blogs, or pages for higher search engine results.
Review of Ahrefs Vs Semrush
Ahrefs and SemRush are the industry-best SEO tools available in the market that will help you determine your site’s performance and optimize your site and pages in many ways. However, the prime objective of both tools is to provide information that will enable you to carry out the following tasks:
- Prepare content that will get more organic search traffic for your website
- Improve the performance of your website through changing the technical aspects (Technical SEO)
Both SEO tools can be used to get keyword suggestions based on the text you enter in the query box. Once you get the suggestions of the high-ranked keywords, you can use them in your blog or website content to get a higher rank in search results.
In addition to that, these tools can help you determine the difficulty in ranking a particular keyword or phrase.
Besides, both Ahrefs and Semrush can help you carry out SEO audits for your website so you can make technical improvements if needed which help you get a higher rank in search results.
In this article, we will consider some interesting facts about these SEO tools and compare them based on their Ranking tracking, Keyword research, Unique features, Competitor research, and backlinks.
Comparison Table of Ahrefs Vs Semrush
| Parameter | Semrush | Ahrefs |
| Number of keywords for Google | It has a database of over 22 billion keywords. | It provides more than 7 billion keywords. |
| Mobile SERP Ranking | Features available to offer domain analytics for mobile SERP ranking | Does not have this feature |
| Search Engines | Supports only Google Search Engine | Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo |
| SMM Tools | Offer a social media toolkit for managing all your social media profiles | Does not offer any SMM tools |
| Outgoing Links | Does not support outgoing links | Provides outbound links |
| Ability to discover high-ranked content | This feature is not available | Content explorer available that helps you analyse high-performing content |
| Pros |
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| Cons |
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| Price | Starting Price: Free - Advertisement -
 Pro: $139.95/month Guru: $249.95/month Business: $499.95/month Offers custom plan Offers Enterprise Solution |
Starting Price: Free
Starter: $29/month Lite: $99/month Standard: $249/month Advanced: $449/month Enterprise: $1,499/month |
| Free Trial | Available | Available (Webmaster Tools Account) |
Comparison Based on Rank Tracking
The rank tracking method is used to determine whether your SEO is going to succeed or not. One of the most essential KPIs of an SEO campaign tells how it is impacting a website’s visibility.
| Semrush | Ahrefs |
| The rank tracking tool of Semrush helps you monitor daily progress and review changes in the ranking of your website | The rank tracker tool helps you improve your business SEO campaign |
| Semrush tracks the daily search engine rankings and analyses changes in keyword rankings | Competitors tabs help you compare the progression of your site with your competitors |
| Review target keyword search engine volatility | Pages tabs allow you to group tracked keywords by their corresponding pages |
| Keeps track of keyword rankings in multiple devices, languages, and geographical locations | Metric tab helps you measure keyword performance |
| Compile ranking report in PDF format | The grossing tab helps you review how your tracked keywords are performing over a week, month, 90 days |
Bottom Line: Ahrefs rank tracker has a slight edge over Semrush as it enables you to track everything within the common dashboard. In addition to that, it offers deeper insights than the Semrush rank tracker tool.
Comparison Based on Keyword Research
You need to consider three important factors mentioned below when it comes to keyword Research. Information related to the following factors can be identified using both Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Three Important factors:
- Determining the number of users searching for a particular keyword
- Determining the difficulty in ranking for the specific keyword
- Obtaining suggestions for other keywords
| Semrush | Ahrefs |
| Semrush uses a percentage score to determine keyword difficulty. A higher percentage implies more difficulty for keywords to rank | Ahrefs gives a score out of 100 to show keyword difficulty. A higher score implies more difficulty for the keyword to be ranked |
| Semrush uses a decimal number to show a difficulty score. This gives you detailed information on keyword difficulty | Ahrefs difficulty score is displayed in a whole number |
| Keyword manager is available by which you can create keyword lists, and use them later | A Keyword List feature is available that helps you create a keyword list that can be used anytime |
Bottom Line: Overall, both SEO tools are similar when it comes to keyword research. However, Ahrefs wins the race since it not only indicates difficulty ranks but also suggests to you the number of backlinks you need to rank on the first page of search results.
Comparison Based on Unique Features
Both Ahrefs and Semrush are popular SEO tools and offer distinctive features that are not usually seen in other SEO tools available in the market.
| Semrush | Ahrefs |
| The content analyzer offers the most important content-related metrics so that you can easily review the value of your content. | Domain comparison tool lets you compare five relevant domains |
| Domain vs Domain comparison tool lets you compare two different domains which will be helpful to analyze your competitors’ websites. | Batch Analysis helps you obtain comprehensive reports that compare multiple URLs |
| The Backlinks audit tool helps you check the type of the backlinks (frame, image, text, form) | The Link Intersect feature lets you find potential opportunities for link-building
The SEO toolbar indicates your domain ratings and backlink stats Ahrefs API allows you to use the database if Ahrefs |
Bottom Line: Both Ahrefs and Semrush provide unique features that can help analyze a site’s performance. Here, no one is the winner since both the SEO tools work best as per the requirement.
Comparison Based on Technical SEO Site Audit Feature
Both Ahrefs and Semrush offer site auditing features that can be used to determine the performance of your website in terms of on-page SEO and technical SEO perspectives. When you perform an SEO site audit, both tools will display issues that can affect your site ranking.
Issues After a Site Audit Include:
- Plagiarized content
- Overuse of keywords
- Slow-loading content
- Crawl errors
- SSL issues
- Missing headers
Bottom Line: Both Semrush and Ahrefs provide a lot of suggestions after a site audit is done. However, compared to Ahrefs, Semrush’s audit tool is very straightforward to use since it provides you with a simple to-do list to follow. On the other hand, while using Ahrefs, you need to manually check the audit report.
Comparison Based on Competitor Research
When it comes to SEO, you must know all about your competitors. Hence, you need to use a competitor research tool that indicates the overall SEO strategy and is helpful for link acquisition as well as content-related strategies, like content distribution, etc.
| Semrush | Ahrefs |
| The competitive Research section is available within the Semrush platform | Competitor tool is provided on the left side of the domain view. |
Five tools available in Competitive research are as follows:
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The competitor analysis tool contains the following tools:
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Bottom Line: Semrush has the edge over Ahrefs when it comes to competitive analyses as it offers tools that provide more valuable and detailed information about the competitors than Ahrefs.
Comparison Based on Analysing Backlinks
If you want to determine a site’s performance, you should always consider the number of backlinks that a site has. To find out the backlinks of the site, all you need to do is enter the domain name on the SEO tool you use.
| Semrush | Ahrefs |
| Offers a bigger domain database compared to Ahrefs
More than 729 million domains are available |
Ahrefs offers 165 million domains |
Semrus provides valuable information with regard to backlinks such as:
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Ahrefs provides valuable details about the backlinks such as:
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Bottom Line: Semrush is a widely preferred SEO tool when it comes to analyzing backlinks since it beats Ahrefs in three key domains which are, backlink database size, backlink auditing & building, and backlink reports and tools.
Conclusion
We hope this article will help you identify the key differences between Semrush and Ahrefs. We have also mentioned which SEO tool is better based on their functionalities, you can see that part in the bottom line section. Tell us what you think about this article, do share your views in the comment section below.
Author Bio:
Name: Jigar Agrawal
Jigar Agrawal is Digital Marketing Manager at eSparkBiz @SaaS Development Company. He is passionate about anything related to Digital Marketing. Wants to unlock the world of technology and Social Media where every day there is a chance for new possibilities as well as innovation.
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