There is no doubt that ahrefs has the best database for the website data after Google in 2020, but semrush is not lacking behind. Semrush comes with a bundle of features like content writing helper, project manager, backlink extractor. In this article, we will see ahrefs vs. semrush in detail.
So, first of all, let’s take a look at the detailed review of Semrush, and then we will move toward ahrefs.
- What is SEMrush?
- SEMrush Functionalities
- What is ahrefs?
- ahrefs Functionalities
- Advantages and disadvantages of Ahrefs
What is SEMrush?
SEMrush is one of the best-known SEO tools. Which is of course completely justified if you know what the tool can do, what people have achieved with it and how many users the tool has. Did you know that
- SEMrush has over 3 million users?
- Contains more than 9.4 million keywords?
- SEMrush is used by eBay and Booking.com, among others?
Actually, it is nothing but software that measures all your performance in the field of search engine optimization, search engine advertising, social media and much more. This data is then compared with the data of your competitors so that you can do everything to become even easier to find.
Experience it yourself and try SEMrush now below by entering a domain, keyword or URL and then clicking on the magnifying glass.
Benefits of SEMrush
The biggest advantage of SEMrush is that it contains everything in the field of SEO. So think of technology, content, and authority. And if you didn’t already know, those are the 3 SEO pillars.
When you fully use SEMrush, you no longer need another SEO program as an entrepreneur. The next advantage of the software is that it is all very clear and logical. Over the years, SEMrush has added many features, but miraculously the dashboard of your project is still clear.
It works with tiles that immediately show the most important information. You don’t have to go through difficult menus or spend hours looking for that one handy functionality. Watch!
SEMrush has many more benefits, but I’m going to highlight one more. In recent years, the SEO tool has not only expanded in terms of functionalities, possibilities, and information. But SEMrush’s design, stability, and reporting have also all been improved. Very nice when a program is not idle and its product continues to improve.
Tip: The unique thing about SEMrush is that you can always try the tool for free for 7 days. You do not need to enter credit card information. Only your email address needs to be confirmed.
All functionalities at a glance
SEMrush consists of 5 ‘toolkits’:
- SEO Toolkit
- Advertising Toolkit
- Social media Toolkit
- Content Marketing Toolkit
- Competitive research Toolkit.
In this blog, I will only go deeper into the SEO Toolkit. Within the SEO Toolkit you have 5 parts:
In turn, these 5 parts also have 3 to 5 tools. At first, glance that seems a bit confusing, but there is actually a very clear structure.
1. Competition analysis (competitive research)
The competition analysis of SEMrush, as the name suggests, provides all important SEO information from and about the competitors. With the first tool from this section, called ‘Domain Overview’, you get a complete SEO overview of the competitors entered. Think of:
- Organic traffic
- Backlinks
- Keywords
- Competitors
- Anchor lyrics
- Referring domains
- Indexed pages
- Content gap (Content that your competitor has and you don’t)
- Backlink gap (Links that your competitors have and you don’t)
You can use this very well if you want some more general SEO information about your competitors (or about your own website) and want to know exactly how good or bad they are doing.
2. Keyword Research
Part 2 of the SEO toolkit is the part ‘keyword research’. In this section, you can really learn everything about the different keywords, the volumes and you can even try the new ‘Keyword Magic Tool’ from Semrush. Perfect to start your SEO campaign because you will find everything you need here. For example, you will discover here:
- Keywords
- Volumes
- Related keywords
- CPC distribution
- The trend
- The SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages)
- Ad Copies (The ads currently showing on the chosen keyword)
- Difficulty of a keyword
- And much more!
You can compare this part within SEMrush with a KWFinder or the Keyword Explorer from MOZ.
3. Link building
Link building is still one of the most important parts of SEO. That is why SEMrush also has four tools that can support you in link building:
- Backlink Analytics
- Backlink Audit
- Link Building Tool
- Bulk Analysis
With these four tools you can do everything to take up link building for your website. Think about finding links from competitors, investigating whether links are of good quality, removing bad links, viewing the anchors, the IPs, lost links, new links, follow, no-follow, TLD, country and much more.
In other words, everything your link building heart desires!
4. Rank tracking
I’m guessing you’ve heard of it: rank tracking. Rank tracking is keeping track of your current positions in the search results of the keywords on which you score or want to score. The purpose of rank tracking is that you can see increases and decreases and then immediately respond to them. So very important for your SEO.
After all, it’s all about your positions in Google. Within the rank tracker of SEMrush you can see the following statistics:
- Your visibility in percentages
- Expected traffic
- Average position
- Keywords and their positions (including country and device)
- Position distribution
- Highest scoring keywords
- Increases
- Drops
- Top competitors
- SERP information
- Landing pages
- Featured snippets
Unfortunately, I have to warn you about the rank tracker: it can be very addictive! Higher positions mean more visitors and more visitors mean new customers. If you’re as crazy about SEO as I am, this is something you will keep up with on a daily basis.
5. On-Page and technical SEO
Actually quite strange… Within SEO you will always have to start with the technique and technical optimization. Because don’t you build a house without a good foundation? A good SEO strategy is no different. Yet SEMrush On-Page and technical SEO do not put it at the top of the list, but at the bottom. Despite that, the tools SEMrush offers you are very good.
With the Site audit, you can do a complete technical check of your website with which you can see exactly what is good and what needs to be improved. Picking up the points is then up to you. Another tool that SEMrush offers is the ‘On-Page SEO Checker’.
This is a tool, as the name says, that checks all 0n Page SEO elements! Also very handy! Because with that you know exactly what you have to adjust within the website/page to rank higher in Google.
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO and online marketing tool to increase the number of visitors to your website, monitoring your niche, and beating your competitors. And yes, that is partly the title they use on their website (but it just happens to say precisely what it says on the page). The possibilities within Ahrefs are enormous, and because I think you should know them before using the tool, I will now briefly explain them to you.
Ahrefs Functionalities
About 70% of the time I spend on Ahrefs, I spend on the ‘Site Explorer’. I personally think that is the best function of Ahrefs. But there’s more! So I will now list all the functionalities for you, so that you can determine the best function yourself.
Dashboard
In the Ahrefs dashboard you can see all the projects you have added. You do not see much specific data here, but you mainly see the most important figures. Think of the Ahrefs rank, your domain authority, the number of backlinks, organic traffic and the number of organic keywords.
Alerts
I’m guessing you’re already familiar with Google Alerts . Then you will receive an email when you are mentioned online. Ahrefs also has this function! Ahrefs’ alerts function can give you three types of alerts:
- When you get a new backlink
- when you are found on a new search term
- when your company name is mentioned (without link) You can set the alerts per day, per week or per month. So you never miss updates, mentions or new backlinks.
Site Explorer
I apologize because the Site Explorer might cause me to lose some of my enthusiasm. But seriously, this part is fantastic. Why? Because with a few simple clicks:
- Can see all your backlinks
- Can see all your lost backlinks
- Can see all internal links
- Can find out all search terms you are found on (including shifts)
- Can find out the best pages of a website
- Competitive domains can show
- Find out search terms where your competitors are found and you don’t
- Figure out best-scoring pages based on backlinks
- The used anchor texts can find out
- Find out all about the outgoing links
- Can easily export all the above information
- And much more
You can view all this per website, per page or per subdomain. In other words, with the Site Explorer alone you can find out how to beat your competitors. If Ahrefs only consist of the Site Explorer, it would still be my favorite tool.
Content Explorer
I don’t use the Ahrefs content explorer very much, I use KWFinder in particular for this in combination with the SERP Checker . The Content Explorer gives you information from the search results of a certain keyword. For example, you can see exactly which parties use your keyword on their website. In the title or for example in the URL.
You can filter this by language, date when the article was posted, date when the article was modified, social shares, domain authority and much more. The results of the information you have entered can then look like this: This allows you to see exactly what your competitors say about a keyword and how well they score online.
Keyword Explorer
Ahrefs ‘Keyword explorer is Ahrefs’ keyword analysis tool. Similar to the Google Keyword Planner, but much better. The Keyword explorer is mainly used to find out how often a keyword is searched, how the competition is on that keyword and what other relevant keywords are. It looks like this:
You will then also see the SERP data of the keyword and see how the positions of all parties have changed in recent times. That looks like this: What can you do with all this information? Determine if a keyword is interesting, find out why your competitors score better, and it can help you figure out even more keywords to use.
Rank Tracker
Rank Tracker is a general term for a program that can keep track of your positions in Google with regard to a pre-filled keyword. And the Ahrefs tool does that too. You can therefore, compare Ahrefs ‘ Rank Tracker with Accuranker or SEO Powersuite ‘s Rank Tracker.
Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker actually contains everything you need. You will see all important information such as average position, your positions, expected traffic, URL, location and much more. This will look something like this!
Site Audit
I don’t use Ahrefs’ Site audit very often. It is a tool that tells you everything about the technical condition of your website. But to be honest, if I compare this with the Site audit of other parties, I find those pieces better and more user-friendly. That’s why I can’t tell you much more about it 🙂
More
In addition to the previously mentioned functionalities, Ahrefs has even more. These are understood under the heading ‘More’ in the menu. For each tool I will briefly mention what you can do with it:
- Ahrefs Rank (see the rankings of the Ahrefs Rank)
- Domain comparer (compare 5 domains simultaneously based on all kinds of important SEO information)
- Fast Batch Analysis (similar to the domain comparator, but only specifically in the field of link building)
- Link Intersect (find out which parties link to your competitors, for example, but not to you)
- Ahrefs SEO Toolbar (more information about the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar)
- Ahrefs API (more information if you want to link Ahrefs data to, for example, your own system)
- Ahrefs Data in SEO Tools (list of tools that use Ahrefs data).
Advantages and disadvantages of Ahrefs
Since it is very nice in advance to be served a number of advantages and disadvantages of a tool, I will also do that for you for Ahrefs. Actually, Ahrefs has only two disadvantages:
- If you take the right account, Ahrefs is quite expensive.
- In the field of technical analysis, other tools score better.
I can live with both disadvantages. For the technical analysis, I use other tools and because I use it so much, Ahrefs saves me money/time. On to the benefits:
- Ahrefs has the largest database of all SEO tools.
- Compared to other all in one SEO tools, Ahrefs works by far the easiest.
- Ahrefs has functionalities that its competitors do not have (or that of the competitors, work many times worse).
- During the 1.5 years that I have been using Ahrefs, I have never had any problems with it.
- Ahrefs data has always been correct at that time.
Now that I’ve listed the pros and cons, it’s time to move on to the different packages Ahrefs offers.
Conclusion
So it is clear that Ahrefs is better than Semrush in data accuracy and SEO analysis. But Semrush has a vast number of features at much less price that you can use to start your SEO carrier. In a nutshell, I would say that, if you are starting to learn SEO, then semrush is the great tool to play. But if you are handling big sites and want to maintain big businesses with accuracy, it is better to invest in ahrefs. Which has the best data accuracy according to you? Let us know in the comments.