Ahrefs VS Semrush

Let’s have a detailed comparison of Ahrefs vs Semrush to find out which one is better. Let’s discover some of the essential factors that you must consider and decide whether Ahrefs or Semrush fits your business.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: An Overview

SEO is one of the most critical elements for ranking your website on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Therefore, investing in powerful SEO tools is a smart investment. Semrush and Ahrefs are the two pack leaders of this domain, and both of these tools provide comprehensive resources to optimize your websites content and improve your overall positioning on web browsers. There is a gamut of features and benefits offered by both these platforms, hence sometimes it gets difficult to choose between them. Here is the detailed comparison, which is based on numerous factors like pros & cons, site auditing & domain analysis ability, ease of use and more.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Difference in Terms of Key Features

Both Ahrefs and Semrush have some very useful and unique attributes that are missing in all the other platforms. But in Semrush new features are introduced regularly and in general, it has more attributes than Ahrefs. Therefore, professional digital marketers might find it more useful and worth their money than Ahrefs.

Let's compare Ahrefs and Semrush in detail.

• Outbound links: In Ahrefs, you can check the 'Linked Domains Report' to examine the issues with the outbound links. Meanwhile, In Semrush you can find out the potential problems in your website's outbound links by using the 'site audit tool'. You just have to type in your domain name to see a list of all the outgoing links with 'no follow' attribute.
• Analysis of organic traffic: Both platforms give detailed insights about organic traffic and depict the data as per keywords, countries, traffic, value, and many other aspects. However, the data analysis by Semrush is more accurate than Ahrefs. Moreover, Ahrefs has faster crawling, so it updates the changes more quickly than Semrush.
• Mobile SERP ranking: With Semrush you get domain analytics reports for mobile SERP rankings and on the contrary Ahrefs doesn't support this attribute.
• Content Explorer: This feature of Ahrefs allows you to discover and analyze the most relevant and currently popular content for each topic. Semrush does not have this facility yet.
• Customer Support: On Semrush you get to contact customer support via numerous ways such as chat, phone, or email, while Ahrefs only offers a 'chat support' feature to its users.
• Keyword difficulty score: Semrush examines numerous aspects when calculating this score such as number of backlinks pointing to the best ranking websites, keyword word count, search volume and the keyword quality. In contrast, Ahrefs, concentrates only on the number of backlinks pointing to high-ranking websites for keywords.

Semrush and Ahrefs: Pros and Cons

• Semrush has a huge database with more than 24.6 billion keywords, 20 million ideas for single keyword, 43 trillion backlinks, 1.6 billion referring domains and 80.1 million mobile keywords. This entire database is far superior to the database offered by Ahrefs.
• Ahrefs offers more detailed backlink analysis than Semrush.
• Semrush comes with a 7-day free trial period, which helps you in testing its functionalities and feature before purchasing the subscription. On the other hand, Ahrefs no longer offers this facility.
• Semrush's backlink database and analysis are not as extensive as Ahrefs.
• Ahrefs is more beginner friendly than Semrush
• In Semrush online marketing and competitor research add-ons are very expensive as compared to that in Ahrefs
• In terms of rank tracking, Semrush is much better than Ahrefs. Both platforms accurately track your keywords, but Semrush has more robust attributes and updates more frequently.
• When we talk about technical SEO analysis, Semrush wins the race here. Its website audit features are far more useful and robust than Ahrefs. It does a much better job of informing you about which aspect you need to work on first.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Domain analysis

One of the highly beneficial things you can do with Semrush and Ahrefs is comprehensive domain analysis. You can perform a domain analysis, either on your website or on your competitor's website carrying out this process is a straightforward task on both platforms. You just need to enter the domain name and the tools will give you a detailed analysis in a dashboard format.

On both these tools, the metrics include 'domain rating' or 'authority score', an estimation of the total number of visitors on the website per month, external links and the total number of unique keywords your website ranks for. You also get the info about competing domains and anchor texts used in the links to your website.

Although the process is of top-notch quality on both platforms, Ahrefs is slightly more user-friendly in terms of ease of access to the important stats. In Semrush you have to navigate around a bit to get desired metrics.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Backlink analysis

Despite adding numerous link building features to their repertoire, Ahrefs is still better than Semrush in backlink analysis. Semrush offers a much bigger link index, but Ahrefs’ ease of use to obtain data makes it a clear-cut winner in this comparison.

From the beginning, backlink analysis has been one of the primary strengths of Ahrefs and it has been a weaker attribute for Semrush. Thanks to Ahrefs’ expertise and experience in this domain, they can innovate much more quickly and provide a simple user experience that gives in-depth backlink information.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Competitor analysis

Semrush provides SEO and backlink data in its SEO section and the competition analysis section gives you detailed information about your competitors. This feature helps you in analyzing your competitors as per SEO, content, social media, PR and social media. It lets you identify the gaps in backlinks and keywords so that you can create your strategy to beat the competitors quickly.

Recently, Semrush has added two new attributes to its tool which are market explorer and traffic analytics. Traffic analytics offers traffic journeys, audience insights, geo-distribution, bulk analysis, subdomains and top-page analysis on their platform. The market explorer feature covers six organic metrics of your competitors which are market traffic, audience interests, gender age and geo-distribution.

On the other hand, Ahrefs has features like domain comparison, link intersects and site explorer. The domain comparison allows you to check your website's backlink data with four different competitors simultaneously, and Link Intersect examines the sites that link to competitors' websites but not yours. The site explorer works in the same way as competition analysis and website analysis.

Verdict: Ahrefs is better than Semrush for SEO-based competition analysis as it allows you to do a more thorough competitive analysis for both on-page as well as off-page SEO.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Keyword research

If your keyword research is flawed, you'll focus on the wrong keywords and, even if you do succeed in driving traffic, it won't convert. Therefore, it's crucial to use keyword research tools that offer accurate keyword research along with its properties.

By using Ahrefs and Semrush, you can get strong insights into the keywords you want to optimize your site for. When you search for keywords for a specific topic, Semrush provides a wide range of results, but Ahrefs offers more useful filters to remove irrelevant or non-essential keywords.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush let you do keyword gap analysis and can simultaneously compare your site with websites that rank above yours in the SERP. Both these tools give you the same results by listing all the keywords that your competitors are better optimized for and get higher ranking. Some features are only available in one of these tools, like in Semrush you get detailed data about keyword trends, which you don't get in Ahrefs.

The data allows you to check the keywords rankings that are on the rise and which ones are descending in popularity. You can also get the data of keywords that are popular during a particular time of year. However, Ahrefs also has a click estimation attribute, which estimates the total number of clicks you'll get for each keyword.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Broken link analysis

Building a broken link is a critical SEO tactic that enables you to create new backlinks for your content. The more backlinks point to your site, the better it is for your content. To ensure the success of this process, Semrush and Ahrefs provide useful features to make it easy for users to find broken links. Here, you just have to enter a domain name in the 'site explorer' section and then click on the 'broken backlink' section to get a list of all the broken inbound links and the websites to which these links link to.

On the contrary, Semrush's broken link building is a bit difficult to use as first you have to run the backlink analytics report for which you need to go to the 'indexed pages' option, Then you need to click on 'broken pages' to export the results/report to CSV file or Excel file. You must filter or sort this document to find broken links (404 errors). This process is slightly complicated and can be time-consuming.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Rank tracking

Rank tracking also known as position tracking is the procedure where you can monitor your website's performance for a specific keyword over time. Ahrefs and Semrush have rank trackers that allow you to examine the shifting of your rank for particular keywords. These tools show your website's overall average score of all the keywords you're tracking. Moreover, both these platforms empower you to compare your website with your competitors.

At first glance, you might find both the tools similar, but Semrush has a slight advantage as you simply have to enter your domain name and targeted keywords. It gives you a report depicting how your site is performing for those keywords and you can also track this metric on a country basis. Moreover, you can also subscribe to the email notification feature for rank tracking. You get the option to subscribe to a weekly summary or get an automated email when something critical happens with your keyword or website ranking.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Site auditing

When compared with Ahrefs, Semrush is better due to its robust site audit feature that gives you an overall report of your website’s health score. You get to know various issues on your websites like crawl errors, broken links, HTTP status code errors and problems with robots.txt. Semrush also gives you a report on 'internal link distribution' which breaks down the entire setup of your internal links for SEO and how well they are performing. Moreover, you can also check whether your website's link authority is going in the direction or not.

You can run a site audit on Ahrefs to uncover the on-page and technical SEO issues. Site audit meticulously examines your website for more than 140+ pre-defined aspects that include social tags, content quality, slow pages, incoming & outgoing links, external pages, technical & on-page SEO issues and so on. The entire process is cloud based and you can also set up daily, weekly, or monthly audits for your projects. Lastly, you also get an option to crawl the mobile version of your website.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Pricing and Value for money

Both the tools have gone through some changes recently. Ahrefs launched their new plans during May 2022 and Semrush also announced some changes in their plans last year. Prior to this, both tools have somewhat similar pricing plans. However, currently Ahrefs’ basic plan starts at $99, but the company has introduced new limits to its usage. If you are a power user, you can now only consume 500 credits per month and if you go beyond this limit then you'll be charged an extra amount for it.

On the other hand, you've to pay $119.95 for Semrush's pro plan which also comes with 7-day trial period and keep in mind that there is no trial period in Ahrefs. However, depending on the number of users, Semrush can be a better deal because of its extra functionalities and features.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Ease of use

Semrush and Ahrefs have the same type of dashboards and offer comprehensive reports and analytics features. However, in Ahrefs you've to go through a configuration process. In this tool, you need to list all the domains, your competitors and desired keywords for tracking. On the contrary, on Semrush you can immediately begin your search by using its intuitive dashboard. This dashboard is packed with useful tools, and you can contact the customer support team for your queries, complaints or technical support.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Support

You can easily get in touch with customer support for both Ahrefs and Semrush. When you're logged in on Ahrefs you'll be able to see the chart support icon located at the bottom right corner of the dashboard, whereas in Semrush you'll find the customer support number, listed at the bottom of the screen.

Both platforms are quick and solid in providing support when required. However, the only drawback is that Ahrefs only provide a chat feature, whereas in Semrush you have multiple options for support such as email, phone and chat.

Ahrefs Vs Semrush: Techjockey's Verdict

No matter which platform you choose, you can't go wrong with any of them. Both are excellent solutions that keep adding new functions and features to their repertoire all the time. You can use Ahrefs if you are more interested in getting data on keyword clicks rather than keyword volume. Moreover, Ahrefs is recommended if you want to dig deeper into your competition and do content analysis

On the other hand, Semrush can be used for getting faster data delivery and robust performance and if you want more guidance on how you can enhance the technical aspect of your site that is provided as well. Additionally, Semrush can also help you in developing robust organic and PPC campaigns.