Semrush and Ahrefs are two of the most loved SEO toolkits by professional marketers and experts.
Both platforms offer a huge range of tools for optimizing on-page elements, tracking keywords, analyzing keywords, and building links. Basically, both tools have a lot of similarities with a vast database.
So, it can be difficult for new users to pick between these two tools.
In this article, I will compare both Semrush and Ahrefs side by side and help you pick the right toolkit for your specific optimization and ranking needs.
Key Differences Between Semrush And Ahrefs (2024)
For our busy readers, here’s a quick comparison of both tools.
| Features | Semrush | Ahrefs |
| Keyword Database | Larger database, more variety in keyword data | Slightly smaller database but known for accuracy in KD metrics |
| Backlink Database | Larger database, but some concerns about freshness | Extensive database, considered the best in terms of updating frequency and accuracy |
| Site Audit | Site audit with a broader range of checks | Robust site audits, but slightly less thorough than Semrush |
| Competitor Research | Strong competitor analysis tools for both SEO and PPC | Detailed competitor analysis |
| Rank Tracking | Detailed and customizable rank tracking in over 170+ countries | Accurate rank tracking and position overview |
| Pricing | Starts at $129.95/month | Starts at $99/month |
| Free Trial | Exclusive 14-day free trial | No free trial |
| Best For | Marketers needing all-in-one marketing solutions (SEO, content, PPC), larger businesses | Agencies and SEOs focused heavily on link-building and in-depth technical analysis |
Semrush vs Ahrefs: An Overview
Semrush is not your ordinary SEO tool. It can help you create content plans and strategies to start a website from scratch. Not only that, the built-in tools will help your pages rank better on SERPs (multiple search engines) and improve visibility on social media platforms. Users can start with Semrush free trial, which is exclusively available for 14 days for our readers.
Who Is Semrush Best For?
- Marketing teams and agencies managing multiple marketing channels
- Businesses running PPC and shopping ads along with SEO
- Analyzing competitors across marketing channels
- Expert marketers looking for advanced functionality
Ahrefs is focused specifically on SEO, with an emphasis on backlink analysis. It has an easy-to-use interface optimized for SEO professionals. The tool offers powerful SEO capabilities but a narrower range of marketing features compared to Semrush. It offers an SEO toolkit focused specifically on on-page optimization, off-page SEO, rank tracking, and site audits.
Who Is Ahrefs Best For?
- SEO specialists and agencies
- Technical SEO evaluation and optimization
- Backlink analysis and link building
- Tracking website rankings over time
Which One Offers The Best Keyword Research Tools?
Keyword discovery and research represent one of the initial entry points for executing an SEO strategy using either Semrush or Ahrefs. Let’s examine how each platform approaches keyword analytics.
Semrush Keyword Research
Semrush offers robust organizational and volume statistics through its Keyword Magic Tool. For any given keyword or related term, it provides:
- Search volume over time
- Competition metrics
- Number of results
- Ad competition
- Related queries and topic clusters
- Search intent classification
When I searched for “yoga teacher salary,” it showed data visualizations around monthly search volume trends, along with groupings of other relevant keywords.
The related keywords list pulls topics people typically search for in conjunction with that phrase – like “yoga instructor income” and “how much do yoga teachers make.” These provide fertile expansion ideas.
Most valuably, Semrush assesses the overall search intent bucket for a term. It assigns each to one of three intent types:
- Informational – seeking knowledge
- Commercial – comparison shopping
- Navigational – trying to reach a site
This context helps marketers appropriately match content tone and structure to satisfy need states during keyword targeting.
On the downside, Semrush’s wealth of filters and visuals can increase complexity. For more simple keyword research and affordable tools, you can check out top Semrush alternatives.
Ahrefs Keyword Research
Alternatively, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer reveals concise volume, competition, and performance potential metrics under its narrower SEO focus:
- Search volume
- CPC rates
- Keyword difficulty score
- Potential traffic value
The difficulty and potential traffic figures aim to improve reliability over raw volume, factoring in ranking challenges and click likelihoods. This accounts for how features like ‘People Also Ask” boxes may divert clicks from organic snippets.
Another perk is the keyword suggestion list ordered by difficulty variance – indicating where a site could gain ground faster due to lower competition. The interface is also clean and simple to parse rather than busy charts.
However, Ahrefs misses the contextual and intent analysis Semrush offers around keywords. There are also no paid keyword or search trends insights. Competitors can only be checked individually in other reports rather than viewed alongside like Semrush.
Ahrefs’s Keyword Explorer tables information is crystal clear for straightforward monthly volume and competitive indexing.
Which Tool Is The Best For Rank Tracking?
Like other rank-tracking tools, Semrush regularly checks the ranking of pages on a daily basis. Not many tools offer daily updates and position changes. Luckily, Semrush makes rank tracking very easy.
Semrush Rank Tracking
All you need is to give a list of keywords for a specific domain, and it will show you the exact ranking fluctuations over time. The Landscape report shows the tracking of keywords within minutes.
The “visibility” score is the main key factor that Semrush rankings update daily, providing faster insight into impacts from Google algorithm shifts compared to Ahrefs. This level of quickness means detecting early warnings or opportunities sooner.
Downsides are minimal here other than a 10,000-keyword tracking limit unless upgrading to higher Semrush tiers. For monitoring site health comprehensively across both mobile and desktop, Semrush has all the required capabilities.
Ahrefs Rank Tracking
The Ahrefs Rank Tracker does well presenting key positional reporting like:
- Current keyword ranks
- Historical graphs
- Rank change notifiers
- Traffic score estimates
The main dashboard displays a snapshot of rankings velocity over days, weeks, or months. Trendline visualizations make it easy to pinpoint major changes. For analyzing performance, users can apply filters similar to Semrush, such as location, search engine scope, URLs, and assigned tags. Side-by-side competitor tracking helps benchmark external site progress.
Unfortunately, Ahrefs refreshes its rank data only once weekly for lower-tier users rather than daily. This hampers rapid insights if Google tweaks its algorithm. The tool also maxes out at tracking 5,000 keywords per account. For more in-depth rank tracking and analysis, take a look at these top Ahrefs alternatives.
Which Tool Excels At Competitor Research?
Evaluating competitors’ strategies represents critical input when crafting an SEO game plan. How well do Ahrefs and Semrush support competitor benchmarking? Let’s see how they stack up.
Semrush Competitor Research
Semrush enables expansive multi-domain competitive intelligence tracking key elements like:
- Ranking keywords
- Paid keywords and conversion rates
- Referring sites and anchor text ratios
- Backlink intersections
- Website traffic estimates
- Social media following growth
Users can easily compare metrics across 100+ domains (with Bulk option) simultaneously with flexible custom reporting. The spotlight visualization below displays a site’s visibility flux by device and locale too.
Unique from Ahrefs, Semrush builds multi-faceted competitor frameworks. Beyond organic insights, its PPC, content marketing, and social media analysis paint an information-rich market landscape.
This approach is perfect for enterprises with large teams and budgets. Although for users focused strictly on core SEO, it qualifies as potential data overload.
Ahrefs Competitor Research
The Ahrefs toolkit tailors competitive visibility tracking narrowly to key organic KPIs:
- Ranking keywords and movement
- Total organic traffic metrics
- Total backlinks and referring domains
- Top linking pages and anchor ratios
- New vs lost links
Data exports nicely into CSV/Excel formats for offline digestion. The quick overview checklist simplifies grasping where rivals outrank your properties or have built more authority through backlinks.
Social and paid dimensions are also absent on Ahrefs. It remains locked onto core organic dimensions rather than supplying 360-degree visibility like its rival.
Yet for users mainly needing an SEO-focused window into competitors rather than irrelevant analytics, Ahrefs still satisfies well. Its reporting efficiently answers necessary questions on rivals’ positions, links, and traffic.
Which Tool is Best for Technical SEO and Site Audit?
Configuring correct technical foundations and identifying issues hindering site health are necessary SEO responsibilities. Here, Semrush and Ahrefs each offer domain diagnostic solutions.
Semrush Site Audit
The robust Semrush Site Audit tool evaluates parameters like:
- Indexing directives
- Duplicate content
- Page speed optimizations
- HTML tag usage
- Broken links and images
- Security weaknesses like vulnerabilities
From its scans, it assigns an overall site health percentage and enumerates problems into severity buckets needing High, Medium, or Low-priority fixes.
Unique from Ahrefs, Semrush provides immense technical configuration depth exposing problems for developer-level enhancements. It also estimates traffic loss potential from the flaws discovered.
The main shortcoming is audit reports border information overload, listing almost too many incremental factors to address. Some vital details get buried inside extensive line items.
Ahrefs Site Audit
The Ahrefs Site Audit alternatively focuses on visibility obstacles like:
- Indexing failures
- Duplicate content issues
- Slow page speed diagnoses
- Broken links or images
It similarly assigns an overall site health score. However, it avoids the long count of incremental technical bugs. Instead, Ahrefs concentrates on digestible SEO recommendations having direct improvement impacts.
The tool better explains each problem in beginner-friendly language rather than overly technical terminology. Recommendations include quick-win fixes along with snippets of any coding tweaks needed for developers.
But condensed guidance comes at the cost of a limited diagnostic range. Ahrefs misses more advanced insights like site security checks, page authority flow, or HTML hierarchy analysis provided by Semrush.
So, for accessible high-level SEO troubleshooting, Ahrefs adds value. Semrush has superior intensity despite steep analysis curves to reveal granular site issues exhaustively.
Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which One Is More Accurate?
Neither Semrush nor Ahrefs pull data directly from Google’s databases. Both use self-developed crawlers to gather intelligence. Therefore, certain data points will diverge from first-party search engine numbers.
Semrush Accuracy
Semrush supplements metrics gathered by its bot with additional information from over a dozen external providers. Multiple reference sources allow better triangulation and validation to derive more accurate estimates.
Moreover, Semrush averages position tracking across some 500 million keywords daily rather than waiting weeks. This enhances the timeliness of identifying changes.
However, no third-party platform matches completely with Google itself, and all figures should be considered directional rather than absolute. Depending on sampling, traffic volumes, rank changes, and even backlink counts can shift mildly from the truth.
Tests suggest Semrush comes near precision, but users should layer on common sense checks using live searches, confirmed subjective experiences, and trends data.
Ahrefs Accuracy
By contrast, Ahrefs does not incorporate outside providers. The Ahrefs bot lone crawler fuels its database for rankings, keywords, and backlinks.
This solitary supply method means additional verification is lacking compared to Semrush’s composite inputs. So, gaps between indexes covering 43 trillion links and Google itself may show more variance.
The infrequent rank updates – weekly or every few days – also slow the immediate identification of new enhancements or regressions.
However, Ahrefs ingests pages in over 10 languages beyond English, providing intrinsic international visibility. This facilitates global agency clients where multilingual search demands importance.
Despite more limited backups, Ahrefs delivers generally sound directional estimates that are useful for SEO. But users should again manually test random samplings through live searches to catch potential data drift.
Semrush vs Ahrefs: The Pricing Comparison
Semrush pricing features three different plans, costing $129.95 to $499.95 per month. There are no usage limits, and add-on packages can expand projects and user seats.
Ahrefs pricing works differently with credits-based packaging. Plans span $99 to $999 monthly, with 500 to 750 credits allocated depending on tier. Certain reports consume these credits, forcing higher-volume users to purchase more to avoid overages. Also, there is no free trial available on Ahrefs.
By comparison, Semrush’s straightforward approach makes it easier to budget for. For clarity and consistency around monthly costs, Semrush has the upper hand. But Ahrefs offers more flexibility to scale specific usage types up or down as needed.
Customer Testimonials
Here are some customer reviews of using the Semrush and Ahrefs platforms.
Semrush User Review
“I have been using SEMRush for going on 10 years. I use it several times a week to audit websites, build search strategies, optimize content and evaluate performance data. It’s a user-friendly tool with a short learning curve. It’s easy enough for new team members to adopt quickly without a lot of training or oversight but has the depth to support deep analysis. I especially like being able to integrate GA4 data. While it’s primarily an SEO/SEM tool, its site audit feature provides insights into user experience, technical setup, content quality, readability and more.”
(Source: G2)
Ahrefs User Review
“The best thing about Ahrefs is it’s own search engine capability and how accurate data it gives on Google search. The way it provides us the ranking, keywords, competitor’s website performance, backlink profile, advertising analysis, and so on is commendable. We’ve been using this tool for over 5 years and couldn’t be happier than ever. Ahrefs has made our marketing efforts a lot easier than ever. It requires a little bit of initial setup and implementation.”
(Source: G2)
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Conclusion: We Choose Semrush as The Kingpin Of SEO Tools!
I have personally used Semrush and Ahrefs for my websites, and I am still using them. But if you ask me to pick between one of them, I will go for Semrush without a doubt.
Ahrefs is also better in some aspects. But its credit system is something I don’t like. You have to use a credit every time you conduct research or see historical data. On the other hand, Semrush is unlimited to use, and the depth of data is equal to Ahrefs at a lower price point.
However, it’s your call to pick one of them. If the budget is not your concern, you can rank and optimize your website on priority with Ahrefs. If you are handling multiple websites, Semrush provides more all-in-one value.
So, which one do you choose? Let me know in the comments.
