Ahrefs and SEMrush are two pack leaders of SEO tools. Both optimize your site, find perfect keywords, compare ranking fluctuations, generate SEO reports and improve your overall rankings.
These two dominating SEO tools offer billions of new massive keywords to attract organic search traffic and identify untapped opportunities for building links. Additionally, they allow you to perform an SEO audit to find out if your website needs any improvements so that you can swiftly achieve higher rankings.
There are many overlapping features between Ahrefs and SEMrush, making it quite tough to choose the superior option. But, if you were to look closer, you will find ample differences in detail.
What Is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs has the world’s most extensive backlink index, which offers new data every 15-30 minutes. It also has an incredible keyword index of over 10.3 billion keywords across 170 countries.
It provides some fantastic features like checking traffic estimations for all pages, discovering new keywords, auditing the ranking history of your pages for any keyword and monitoring outbound links.
Unique Features:
- Keyword research for multiple search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, Baidu, etc.
- Super-smooth easy to use user interface and at-a-glance information
- Backlinks you will need to rank higher for a particular keyword
- Overtime rankings monitor against your competitors
- Ability to discover broken links
- Scheduled report straight to your inbox
What Is SEMrush?
SEMrush is one of the leading all-purpose SEO tools that handle competitor research, social media marketing, PPC, advertisement and content marketing from one platform. SEMrush gives you access to 20 billion keywords to help improve your online visibility in days.
Unique Features:
- Unveil competitor’s marketing strategies and discover how to reach more prospects.
- Twenty billion keywords for 130 countries
- Easily create and track PPC campaigns and build the most effective social media strategies.
- Support for Google’s search engine
- Visually appealing PDF reports which give you at-a-glance information.
Comparison of Ahrefs & SEMrush
Now that you have a little bit of an understanding of Ahrefs and SEMrush, let’s put Ahrefs and SEMrush head to head to find out which of these SEO tools best meet your business needs.
Which Offers Better Domain Analysis?
Generally, Domain analysis means getting an overview of how your domain performs from an SEO perspective.
Ahrefs offers an in-depth look at organic traffic research, backlink checker and paid traffic research. Its dashboard is less cluttered than SEMrush and jumping from one tool to another is relatively simple. You can also easily view analytics from the dashboard like domain ratings, organic traffic and referring domains. Ahrefs’s Site Explorer helps to reverse engineer your strategies to overtake your competitors.
SEMrush’s Domain Overview provides you comprehensive reports to check your domain’s visibility and performance through primary metrics. Its Competitive Positioning Map feature gives you at a glance indicator of your site’s performance against your competitors.
Overall, both products are outstanding in domain analysis, with Ahrefs its easy-to-use menu and SEMrush for its competitive positioning map feature. Yet, Ahrefs has the upper hand in terms of its ease-of-use and laudable UI.
Best: Ahrefs
Which Has Keyword Research Features?
Keyword Research is one of the most decisive aspects of SEO. It provides you a deeper understanding of your target audience and how they know which particular keywords they use.
Ahrefs has a Keyword Explorer tool for keyword research. With this tool, you can discover thousands of great keywords, analyze their ranking difficulty and compare it with data for 171 countries with accurate search volume numbers. Ahrefs runs on the world’s largest third-party database of more than 10 billion keywords with up-to-date data.
Likewise, SEMrush has a Keyword Magic tool that encompasses the analysis of your keywords, gets information on market trends and provides a snapshot view of particular keyword’s value. It has a newly released Keyword Gap tool to spot your competitor’s strong or weak points and discover untapped opportunities.
Both of these tools offer splendid keyword research features. However, Ahrefs wins this feature battle by a hair. Ahrefs determines the level of difficulty of rank for a given keyword and tells you the number of backlinks you will require to appear on the first page of search results.
Best: Ahrefs
Which Does Better Backlink Analysis?
Backlink analyses determines how well a site performs in search results and helps you stay on track to rank higher in search results.
SEMrush’s Backlink Analysis has come a long way with a much more extensive domain database containing around 818 million domains which are considerably more extensive than Ahref’s 175 million. It also provides valuable information about the backlinks in attractive and easy-to-understand graphs.
Nonetheless, Ahref has high experience and expertise in this domain. Ahref’s Site Explorer tool gives you a comprehensive analysis of backlink data. It provides an excellent user interface, accuracy and valuable information about backlinks.
Ahrefs indeed has an excellent UI, which is one great strength of Ahrefs. However, SEMrush’s newly expanded backlink database, reporting tools and audit make it a preferable option to consider.
Best: SEMrush
Which Is Cheaper?
Both Ahrefs and SEMrush offer different pricing plans and you can choose a plan for your SEO needs. However, compared to other SEO tools, both are pretty heavy on the funds.
Ahrefs offers four different monthly pricing plans starting from $99 per month for Lite, $179 per month for Standard, $399 per month for Advanced and $999 per month for Agency. If you pay up-front for a year, you will also get two months free. It offers you a starting trial to access all of the plans for seven days for only $7.
Likewise, SEMrush offers three pricing plans starting with Pro Plan from $119.95 per month, Guru Plan from $229.95 per month and Business Plan from $449.95 per month. A 16% discount is available if you let them bill you annually. Over-and-above, SEMrush comes with a free version.
In terms of cost, there’s not much difference between Ahrefs and Semrush. You can choose which offers the most bang for your buck in terms of value, user count, keyword, domain analytics, keyword analytics and alerts. Also, if you want a free trial, SEMrush is a cheaper option.
Best: SEMrush
Which Has Better SEO Features?
Ahrefs has significantly improved features like unique keyword metrics, broken external and internal links finder, link prospects in Content Explorer and link-building opportunities on high-traffic pages.
SEMrush provides more than 40 tools such as an Advertising toolkit, social media toolkit, Content Management toolkit, SEO writing assistant and tons of PPC competitor analysis features for your Google Ads campaigns. SEMrush also offers an excellent reporting tool to organize your data better and streamline your reporting routine.
Beyond question, both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer winning features and tools to stand out from your competitors. You can incorporate these features above to reveal competitors’ strengths and weaknesses in any industry, tap new opportunities and gain competitive analysis.
Best: Both
Does The Platform Have Good Support?
Ahrefs offers no telephonic support. However, you can click on a chat button to connect with a support team member. It’s more visual and they get back to you in a flash.
SEMrush, by contrast, offers customer support resources directly within the dashboard via three channels — phone, chat or email. Undoubtedly, SEMrush has a slight edge in customer support.
When it comes to the customer support of Ahrefs and SEMrush, both made it easy to contact support with much experienced and versatile customer support teams. Yet, SEMrush has more support options.
Best: SEMrush
Final Takeaway
So which one is better between Ahrefs vs. SEMrush? Both are brilliant SEO tools with a fair share of pros and cons. As most of the features are much the same, it comes down to business preference and needs.
Ahrefs is better for a business that needs support from various search engines apart from Google, including help with link building and backlink analysis.
SEMeush offers more features-rich tools, PPC data, a budget-friendly trial version, more profound insights into the competitors and more support options. Taking everything into account, you should pick the one that satisfies your business necessity the best.
