Are you looking for the best SEO software, website auditing tool, keyword research tool, or backlink analysis tool? If that’s the case, you’ve probably heard about two of the most popular tools: Semrush and Ahrefs.
Both have outstanding features and capabilities that can assist you in optimizing your website for search engine results. But the question is: which one is most suited to your requirements?
Well, to answer this question, I have used both tools extensively for my website and compared both of them on various metrics, and here I am sharing my experience with both of these tools.
In the end, you will be able to make an informed decision about choosing the one between these two. So, without further ado, let’s get into the details.
Semrush vs Ahrefs: Quick Comparison (2024)
Here is a comparison table between Semrush and Ahrefs, two leading SEO tools:
| Feature | Semrush | Ahrefs |
| Keyword research | Keyword difficulty, volume, CPC, search trends | Keyword difficulty, volume, CPC, search trends |
| Backlink analysis | Backlink count, anchor text, linking domains | Backlink count, anchor text, referring domains |
| Site audit | Checks for errors, security, SEO optimization | Site audit for errors, SEO issues |
| Rank tracking | Track website rankings for target keywords | Track keyword rankings for websites |
| Competitor research | Analyze competitors’ organic traffic, keywords, backlinks | Analyze competitors’ keywords, traffic, backlinks |
| Link building | Find link-building opportunities | Discover link-building opportunities |
| Local SEO | Local ranking and monitoring options | Limited local SEO analysis |
| UI/UX | Simple and easy to use | Steeper learning curve but a powerful |
| Free Trial | Exclusive 14-day free trial on Pro and Guru plans | No free trial available |
| Pricing | Starts at $129.95/month | Starts at $99/month |
An Introduction To Semrush
Semrush is a digital marketing software that assists businesses in managing online marketing strategies like SEO campaigns. With the help of this all-in-one tool, you can manage campaigns for PPC (pay-per-click), SEO, social media, and content marketing.
Furthermore, this tool will help you spot trends in your business niche, audit your on-page SEO, and assist you in optimizing your web pages. This will help you better understand your website and improve it for SEO to increase lead generation.
Apart from this, Semrush also assists you in uncovering profitable keywords for your content. You will discover the search engine rankings of your competitor’s websites and the keywords they use. Overall, it provides you with a wealth of information on how you can outperform your competitors.
Moreover, this software is recommended for those who require help with their digital marketing campaigns. Semrush is a very user-friendly tool that makes it easy to understand and apply SEO techniques, even if you have little knowledge or expertise.
An Introduction To Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps businesses or individuals with the search engine optimization of their websites. It is currently one of the most well-known SEO tools on the market, and millions of businesses use it, including big names like eBay, Shopify, LinkedIn, Adobe, Uber, and Facebook.
With the biggest backlink index in the world, Ahrefs offers you the most distinctive features. Moreover, Ahrefs will help in discovering targeted keywords and generating organic search engine traffic.
In addition to keyword research, it offers tools for rank tracking, site auditing, and backlink analysis. They provide users with information on how to increase their traffic organically.
Overall, Ahrefs is best suited for marketing professionals, content writers, and web publishers.
Feature Comparison: Semrush vs Ahrefs
In this section, we will compare the key features of both SEO tools to help you determine which is the best option for you.
1. Site Audit
The site auditing feature allows you to evaluate how well your website is performing in terms of technical SEO and on-page SEO. Both Semrush and Ahrefs offer this feature.
Semrush Site Audit
You can perform a complete SEO audit and measure the SEO health of your site using Semrush’s Site Audit tool. It will provide you with a list of issues with your website. In addition, issues are categorized according to priority and page number. Further, you will also get suggestions on how to fix specific issues in order to improve your SERP rankings.
In addition, Semrush identifies more than 130 SEO issues, including, meta descriptions, title tags, h1 tags, and technical problems like conflicts in page source code and sitemap.xml format errors.
Ahrefs Site Audit
The Site Audit tool from Ahrefs scans each page on your website for 100+ SEO issues. You will then receive a list of all potential SEO issues, an SEO health score, charts with key data, and suggestions for resolving them.
2. Keyword Explorer
It’s a keyword research r tool that helps you to find keywords that are easy to rank.
Semrush Keyword Explorer
The Keyword Magic tool from Semrush offers filterable data on each keyword with results that are easy to understand, even for new users. You’ll notice “search intent” indicators next to each result. These include informational, commercial, transactional, and navigational purposes.
Its Keyword Analytics feature provides information on search traffic trends, and Keyword Magic bases its statistics on the domains’ authority in the search results to calculate the percentage of keyword difficulty.
Unlike Ahrefs, Semrush does not offer click metrics. It provides statistics and data for pay-per-click advertising campaigns instead.
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
The keyword explorer feature of Ahrefs is excellent. It is not limited to only Google searches; it integrates with sites like YouTube, Amazon, and international search engines like Yandex, Baidu, and others.
Using this feature, you can extract keywords from sites like YouTube, Amazon, and all of the major search engines, such as Google, Baidu, Bing, and Yandex. When you enter a search term, you will get a detailed summary of keyword metrics like Keyword Difficulty, CPC, Search volume, Clicks, global volume, etc.
3. Rank Tracking
Semrush and Ahrefs both work incredibly well as position-tracking tools.
Semrush Rank Tracking
The Rank Monitoring tool of Semrush keeps track of the daily average position for your keywords. Semrush lets you quickly get any information about your keyword position and any changes it has undergone over time. Semrush offers historical data, enabling you to view this over an extremely long timeframe compared to your current performance.
Also, you can add any competitor’s website into the tool to compare your performance to theirs for the keywords you both are targeting. Furthermore, Semrush lets you set up alerts so that if your rankings change, an automated email will be sent to you to notify you.
Ahrefs Rank Tracking
You can track your ranks with Ahrefs’ rank tracker tool. Also, we would like to highlight that you may only monitor the ranking of websites added as projects. The pricing plan to which you are subscribed determines how many projects you are allowed to add. This might be a little restrictive, especially if you have a lot of sites to manage in terms of SEO.
4. Backlink Analysis
A site’s backlink count is a significant factor in its performance. Both Ahrefs and Semrush allow you to enter a website’s domain name and provide a list of all the backlinks pointing to it.
Semrush Backlink Analysis
Using Semrush’s backlink analytics tool, you can determine which domains are linking to you, the nature of the links, and how they impact the domain authority. Although its backlink tool isn’t as strong as Ahrefs’, it still does the job and is fairly excellent.
Ahrefs Backlink Analysis
Ahrefs has the world’s largest backlink index and the best backlink checker. It highlights the Referring domain, Dofollow, and Nofollow links in red color. Its bot crawls 54 billion active web pages in real time, and its index is updated every 15 minutes with the latest data.
Which Tool Has The Best Customer Support?
Customer support service is often a crucial factor for users because SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can be complicated to use.
Semrush Customer Support
You can email support requests or submit a form with your request if you need assistance. A response is typically sent within one business day. There is also a chatbot available that you can use to get prompt responses from their customer service agent. To use this channel, you will need to log in to your Semrush account.
Semrush also provides a knowledge base that covers a wide range of topics and offers solutions to many questions you might have about getting started or utilizing any of their services.
Ahrefs Customer Support
When you enter the Ahrefs dashboard, you will see a speech bubble at the bottom of the page that leads directly to their help page.
Here you will find various help guides that contain instructions on how to start, details on account access and billing, and instructions on how to use each of their features or tools. It is quite detailed and will answer the majority of common queries. Email and live chat are other ways to get in touch with their support agents.
Semrush vs Ahrefs: Pricing Plans
Semrush and Ahrefs are quite pricey in comparison to other kinds of SaaS tools. But it makes sense since you’re not just paying for features but also paying for access to a ton of data, including a lot of crucial competitor information.
Semrush Pricing Plans
Semrush has three pricing options for businesses of all sizes.
Pro: This plan is ideal for small teams and individuals. It will cost you $129.95 per month. With this plan, you can handle five projects, track 500 keywords, and take advantage of all SEO, PPC, and social tools.
Guru: You can get this plan for $249.95 per month. This plan is well-suited for mid-size businesses and agencies. In this plan, you can handle 15 projects, track 1500 keywords, and take advantage of all pro features, plus the Content Marketing Toolkit, multi-location and device tracking, and many more.
Business: This plan is suitable for large agencies and businesses and costs $499.95 per month. In this plan, you can handle 40 projects, track 5000 keywords, and get access to advanced features like PLA analytics, API access, free migration from third-party applications, and more.
Ahrefs Pricing Plans
Ahrefs offers four pricing plans for every business, no matter the size.
Lite: It will cost you $99 per month. This plan is ideal for small businesses or teams.
Standard: It is suitable for SEO marketing consultants and freelancers. You can get this plan for $199 per month.
Advanced: You can purchase this plan for $399 per month. It allows you to track 5,000 keywords, along with other premium features.
Enterprise: The enterprise plan is well-suited to large agencies and businesses. Its pricing starts at $999 per month.
Ease Of Use: Semrush vs Ahrefs
Compared to Semrush, Ahrefs is the most user-friendly SEO tool, with a clear and easy-to-navigate user interface. It delivers sufficient key information without being overwhelming, and it allows users to delve deeper into certain metrics.
On the other hand, Semrush also has an excellent user experience; however, it takes some time to get used to due to the volume of data provided and the platform’s structure.
In a nutshell, Semrush is not as user-friendly as Ahrefs, and users will need to spend some time understanding the platform before they can begin to take advantage of it.
Semrush vs Ahrefs: Pros & Cons
Here are the benefits & drawbacks of using Semrush and Ahrefs.
Pros of Semrush
- Semrush offers marketing tools to help you analyze and track your competitors’ marketing strategies.
- Using the Site Audit tool of Semrush, you can get all the information of any website.
- With Semrush’s keyword research tool, you can find profitable keywords for your business.
- It comes with an advertising tool that you can use to track and manage your ad campaigns.
- We have partnered with Semrush to offer an exclusive 14-day free trial on the Pro and Guru plans.
Cons of Semrush
- The pricing of Semrush starts from $129.95/month, which can be expensive for beginners.
- Semrush offers a lot of data metrics, which can be confusing for marketers.
Pros of Ahrefs
- The backlink database of Ahrefs is huge, and it can help you find backlink opportunities for your websites.
- Ahrefs has a content explorer tool that allows you to find the popular topics for your content calendar.
- Ahrefs gives you access to a Facebook community where you can discuss with fellow marketers and SEO professionals.
- From the Ahrefs YouTube channel, you can get access to the latest SEO tactics and news.
- You can connect with Ahrefs customer support via email and live chat.
Cons of Ahrefs
- Ahrefs recently added a credit system to all their plans, and now the usage of its tools is very limited, which doesn’t justify its pricing.
- There is no free trial available on Ahrefs.
Free Trials: Semrush vs Ahrefs
Semrush offers a free trial for 7 days, whereas Ahrefs currently does not provide a free trial. Semrush is, therefore a better choice than Ahrefs if you want to test an SEO tool before investing in it.
Difference Between Semrush and Ahrefs
Semrush and Ahrefs differ mostly in the metrics they focus on. For example, Semrush is the best option if your top priorities are performing keyword research and analyzing technical SEO aspects (like website health).
But, if you are someone who invests more time in link building and looking for backlink opportunities, you would benefit more from Ahrefs.
More Semrush Comparison:
Final Verdict: Semrush is Better Than Ahrefs For Beginners
In the end, deciding between Semrush and Ahrefs depends on personal needs; each tool has advantages and disadvantages. Ahrefs is well-suited for bloggers and marketers due to its robust backlink analysis, keyword research, and SEO audit capabilities. Meanwhile, Semrush offers a more comprehensive range of features, including PPC data, keyword intent, and Social media toolkit. In addition, Semrush provides a free trial so users can test the software before purchasing it.
FAQs
Both Ahrefs and Semrush are highly regarded in the SEO community, and each has its own strengths. Semrush is known for its comprehensive keyword research and competitive analysis features, while Ahrefs is often praised for its backlink analysis and content research capabilities.
Both Ahrefs and Semrush invest heavily in their data and algorithms to ensure high accuracy. They both claim to have extensive databases for backlinks, keyword rankings, and other SEO metrics. Users might find that one tool has fresher data or more accurate results in certain areas, but this can be subjective and fluctuate over time.
You can create a free account on Semrush and use it for however long you want; you can also sign up for an exclusive 14-day free trial of Semrush Pro and Guru Plans, whereas Ahrefs doesn’t offer any free trial or free account.
In terms of affordability, the pricing of Ahrefs starts from $99/month, and the pricing of Semrush starts from $129.95/month, making it clear that Ahrefs is affordable compared to Semrush.
Some of the alternatives of Semrush and Ahrefs are Moz, SpyFu, SE Ranking, SEO Powersuite, Ubersuggest, and so on.
