If you are into an online business or an online marketer, then SEO is the most important tool that you should use. It is simply impossible to think about an online website without SEO. Search Engine Optimization helps any online website to get better rankings and search results when someone searches on search engines with specific phrases and words.
It also helps an online website to improve lead generation process, sales, bring quality traffic, and increase it’s online presence to manifolds. With the growing importance of SEO for online websites, one can easily find multiple SEO tools in the market. However, the two most leading SEO tools currently in the online space are SEMrush and Ahrefs. Both are the most sought-after tools among online marketers and SEO experts.
However, these tools don’t offer free services or features. One needs to spend some money to buy the special packages offered by both these tools. But what if you have to pick only one out of the two tools? Before jumping onto the comparison, let’s briefly know about both the tools.
It was started by a group of SEO and IT specialists’ way back in 2008. The team of experts had put all their expertise to bring a comprehensive research service for online marketing. In merely a decade, it gained a lot of popularity in the world of SEO and online marketing with it’s exclusive toolkits and packages. It now acts as a one-stop platform for all SEO related services and features to help online businesses to reach new heights by leaving their competitors behind.
Ahrefs
It came into existence in 2010 as a backlink analysis tool. Slowly and gradually, the platform has turned into a go-to platform for overall SEO analysis tool. It helps online businesses with site audit, content marketing, keyword research etc.
Let’s now check-out a detailed comparison between the two tools. It will surely help you to decide which one is more suitable for your SEO requirements
.Which one is better in keyword research?
SEO is incomplete without keyword research. It is used to get a better understanding and behavior of one’s targeted audience. If you get successful in knowing your target audience, their search patterns and behavior, then you can create an apt content and marketing strategies for search engines as well as your customer base. Although both platforms offer incredible keyword research features, but SEMrush is particularly known for it’s keyword research features. It is more popular in this particular aspect. It offers two major tools to perform the keyword research, Topic Research and Keyword Magic Tool.
Whereas, Ahrefs offers Keywords Explorer Tool for keyword research to produce hundreds of keyword suggestions for your main topic or keyword, come to about keyword metrics, including keyword difficulty, search volume, CPC, new keywords etc.
But, SEMrush outshines Ahrefs in every manner. It offers better features and in-depth keyword research metric.
- Which is better in In-depth backlink analysis?
No doubt, link building is an essential aspect of SEO. It brings fruitful results for your online website. The analysis of backlink of your domain as well as your competitor’s domain will surely help you to rank at top on search engines. However, a couple of years back Ahrefs was leading the ground in this particular features, but SEMRush now creating waves in the market with a lot of upgrades and improvements in the backlink analysis features.
SEMRush came with a bang in 2019 with a lot of improvements in the backlink database. With it’s Backlink Analytics tool, it offers an in-depth data on your as well as your competitor’s backlink profiles so that you can create a result-oriented and better SEO strategy to increase traffic and rankings. However, Ahrefs has a Site Explorer tool which offers a good amount of helpful search data which eventually helps you to get elaborated analysis of your website as well as competitor’s website. It also offers Referring domains report along with link index feature followed by accuracy and user interface. Thus, one can use the Site Explorer tool of Ahref’s not only to review the backlink profile of a website, but also review the link profile of exclusive URLs.
Thus, when it comes to final report, Ahrefs has an edge over SEMRush when it comes to backlink analysis. Despite introducing new features, SEMRush, it lags behind Ahrefs.
- Which tool is better in Technical SEO?
It is also an important feature which audits the entire process of optimizing the indexing, crawling and rendering phase of any website in order to attain top search rankings. Thus, it’s very important for any SEO expert to periodically to run the Technical SEO audit to rectify all SEO related issues going on the website.
SEMRush does it with it’s unique tool called Site Audit Tool which helps you to audit the entire site’s SEO, and gives you an overall health update on this particular feature. It gives you a detailed list of all the SEO based issues and essential suggestions to fix them up in order to improve your rankings in SERPs. Whereas, Ahrefs’ Site Audit Tool helps you to review your website for over 100 pre-laid SEO issues by crawling all the pages of your website. It also offers an SEO health score along with charts.
However, SEMRush SEO tool is a clear winner due to it’s faster SEO audit report along with extra features such as crawl comparison, historic charts, followed by complete accuracy.
- Which tool is better in Position tracking?
The result of your SEO reflects by tracking the positions of all the main keywords in search engine results pages. The keywords that you are targeting on search engines for your site play a great role in generating traffic at your website. Thus, this tool helps in knowing the performance of your keywords as well as your competitor’s. Well, both tools offer Position Tracking Tool. But which is better, lets check-out.
SEMRush’s tool gives you an opportunity to track all the target keywords, add keywords to know the rankings, and to track the positions for multiple locations and devices. Once the report is generated, you can find out 3 metrics for keywords that you searched for, Positions, Visibility and Estimated Traffic.
Ahrefs has the Rank Tracker tool which helps you to keep an eye on all the targeted keywords for multiple locations. You can track main keywords for various locations and devices. It also gives you a progress report for a particular keyword through it’s special position history chart.
So, when it comes to the verdict, both tools perform well in tracking positions of targeted keywords, and give good results.
- Pricing & Packages
One can’t find much difference between the pricing and plans of both tools. The basic plans for both tools start at $99 per month. However, SEMRush SEO tool offers flexible basic plans without imposing much restrictions.
Final Thoughts
Overall, SEMRush SEO tool has more features, and very flexible in nature. The SEMRush features are very comprehensive. It offers comprehensive data which is more helpful to plan SEO strategies and plans. It offers better keyword research, technical SEO, content marketing, and elaborated SEO reports than Ahrefs.
