Ahrefs vs Semrush: Which SEO Tool is Better in 2023

With over 2 decades spent as a digital marketing specialist, I often receive questions about the best SEO tools available in the market. Two of the most popular and highly recommended tools are Semrush and Ahrefs. But when it boils down to Semrush vs. Ahrefs, which one is the right fit for you?

Whether you're a small business owner, freelancer, or marketing professional, this article will provide you with all the information you need to make an informed decision. So, without further ado, let's explore the world of Semrush vs Ahrefs.

What is Semrush?

Semrush is a powerful SEO tool that offers in-depth analysis of websites and helps businesses with their search engine optimization efforts. 

It provides detailed insights into competitor analysis, keyword research, backlinks, organic traffic, and more. With Semrush, companies can easily track their progress and make informed decisions to improve their online presence and drive more traffic to their website. 

The user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it an ideal choice for small and large businesses alike.

 

 

 

 

 

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Semrush Cons

• Some features of the platform can be harder to navigate, use, and understand.
• Higher learning curve than Ahrefs.
• Customer support is only available to call on weekdays at indicated times. Otherwise, you’ll have to email support.

Semrush Pros

• Has a limited, but useful, free version.
• Industry-leading SEO API.
• Offers other bonus tools such as PageImprove, and their own AI ImpactHero (content marketing platform).
• Straightforward pricing tiers.
• Local SEO – Provides you with a platform that is able to offer keywords that help boost your local SEO, as well as offers insights to your competitors in that area.
• Social Media Toolkit – This tool provides insights to your social media performance
• PageImprove – Allows you to improve on-page SEO from the Chrome browser.

For an in-depth analysis of Semrush and all its features, click here

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is a powerful tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing. It provides data on backlinks, keyword rankings, and other key metrics for websites and individual pages. 

Ahrefs also offers comprehensive competitor analysis and research capabilities, helping users to identify and analyze their competitors' strengths and weaknesses. 

With a vast database of indexed websites and a user-friendly interface, Ahrefs is a must-have tool for any professional in the digital marketing industry.

Ahrefs Cons

• There is no free trial or free plan
• The pricing tier system is easy to understand, but the credit system makes things complicated
• Google integration is only for advanced tiers and higher

Ahrefs Pros

• Easier to use UI than Semrush
• Excellent customer support, with 24/5 support
• Largest backlink database of all platforms
• Track SERPs on other search engines such as Bing
• Constantly growing database of educational videos, even on their social media accounts
• Constantly updating their platform, with updated release notes posted on social media accounts

For an in-depth review of Ahrefs, click here.

Comparison Table of Semrush and Ahrefs

Semrush vs Ahrefs – In-Depth Feature Guide and Comparison

Now that I’ve given a brief comparison of both Semrush and Ahrefs, it’s time we take a deeper dive into the inner workings of both tools, how well each one does, and how they compare.

Rank Tracking Comparison

Rank tracking is an important feature of SEO tools, and both Semrush and Ahrefs have a rank tracker. Let’s take a look at what each has to offer.

Semrush

When it comes to position tracking, Semrush makes things absolutely simple. Its position tracking tool lets you select your target keywords and then tracks them for you.

Every day, the keyword rankings are updated so that you know how your keywords are performing.

The position tracking tool also shows you local-level volume data for all users.

The rank tracking tool also shows you the percentage of search features that you rank for, along with their types. They also introduced a new metric — Share of Voice (SoV) in 2020 to show the true impact of your SEO efforts (only available in the business tier).

You’ll know which are your top keywords and how you fare against your competitors. The tool also helps you discover your competitors based on the SERPs so that you can accordingly optimize your strategy.

Lastly, you can see how you’re performing on different devices and for featured snippets as well.

Ahrefs

The Ahrefs Rank Tracker helps you track your rankings from 170 countries. It also lets you see where you stand in comparison to your competitors.

Ahrefs does have the upper hand here when it comes to the number of search engines it’s able to offer rankings of. Semrush is based on Google’s search engine, but using Ahrefs you can track your SERPs on other search engines such as Bing and Amazon.

On its intuitive dashboard, it gives an overview of the visibility, average position, and traffic.

You can even see the ranking history for each of your keywords along with the SERP feature. It also shows you the top 100 Google search results for each keyword.

You can also compare your keyword rankings against those competitors. It shows you the common keywords and how you fare in those against your competitors. This can help you improve your rankings.

Overall winner – Semrush.

Unlike other tools in the market, these rank-tracking statistics are updated every day, and these tracking abilities are available to all users of Semrush. This sets it apart from Ahrefs, which updates weekly for standard packages, and is the reason why it’s the overall winner in this category.

If you’re looking for the best rank tracking tools, then check out this list of the 15 best rank tracking tools.

Keyword Research Comparison

Each of these keyword research tools provides in-depth information about the keywords you choose to target on search engines.

So, how do the keyword research tools fare for Ahrefs vs Semrush?

Semrush

When it comes to keyword research features, Semrush has a host of keyword research tools that you can use to your advantage, including

• Keyword Overview
• Keyword Magic Tool
• Keyword Manager
• Keyword Difficulty
• Organic Traffic Insights

Keyword Overview

The Keyword Overview tool lets you dive deep into your target keyword and provides detailed insights to help you figure out if you should target it.

To use this keyword tool, all you need to do is enter your target keyword and select the country.

The keyword research tool will show you the search volume, keyword ranking difficulty, cost per click (CPC), global volume, and trends on search engines.

Additionally, the SEO tool provides in-depth insights into the top 100 search engine ranking websites for that keyword along with the keyword ad history.

But what really makes this SEO tool stand out in the battle of Ahrefs vs Semrush is that Semrush updates its search volume data regularly.

Armed with this up-to-date data, you can select the right keywords for your brand. This can help you perform keyword research well.

Keyword Magic Tool

The Keyword Magic Tool lets you discover new keywords. All you need to do to use this keyword research tool is, enter your seed keyword and the tool will do all the heavy lifting for you.

With a database of over 20 billion keywords, Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool has the biggest keyword database in the market.

One unique feature of the Keyword Magic Tool is keyword clustering. Using it, you can see a cluster of keywords on the left sidebar.

These clusters allow you to dig deeper into the related keywords so that you can discover the best keywords for your content with ease.

For each keyword in your keyword research, you’ll be able to see the volume, trend, keyword difficulty, CPC, competition, and even SERP features.

As a result, you’ll be able to select the keyword which is best suited for your brand.

Keyword Manager

The Keyword Manager lets you collect all your favorite keywords from across Semrush so that you can have them all under one roof.

Using this tool, you can list all of your essential keywords along with their metrics, and you can also export them to other Semrush tools or as XLSX and CSV files.

To add keywords to the Keyword Manager, you just need to tap on the “+” symbol when you’re using the keyword magic tool.

Keyword Difficulty

The keyword difficulty tool lets you figure out how difficult it may be to rank for a particular keyword. Along with the difficulty, you get to see the volume, results, trend, and SERP sources.

This tool also shows you all the domains that it has analyzed to come up with the difficulty score. As a result, you’ll know who your online marketing competitors for that particular keyword are as well.

You can also export all the keyword difficulty data as XLSX or CSV files. What makes this SEO tool even more useful is that you can search for 10 keywords at once.

Organic Traffic Insights

This feature of Semrush lets you dive deep into your organic traffic. It combines information from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, and Semrush, all in a single dashboard.

This user interface can help you monitor your organic performance on search engines well.

If you want to know more about Semrush’s keyword database, and how it works, check out the full analysis of Semrush’s keyword database right here.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs keyword tools offer fewer features, as the keyword research tool consists of two main features:

• Keyword Explorer
• Organic Keywords

Compared to Semrush’s keyword tool, Ahrefs lacks the more complex tools and insights, and isn’t as accurate as Semrush. Let’s take a deeper look at each feature.

Keyword Explorer

Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is fairly similar to all the major keyword research tools out there. All you need to do is select a search engine and enter a primary keyword, and the tool will bring up a list of keyword ideas.

For the keyword that you’ve selected, it shows you the ranking difficulty and also mentions how many backlinks you’ll need to rank in the top 10 for that keyword.

You also get to see the search volume and the percentage of clicks out of that. It’s possible to dive deep into the analytics to see monthly search volumes, too.

It also shows you the percentage of clicks going to organic results vs paid results.

Along with this, you can see parent keywords that you can write about. The Keyword Explorer also shows the potential number of clicks you might get if you rank for a particular keyword.

One key thing Ahrefs does have over Semrush, is that keyword rankings aren’t just from Google, but you can find keywords for 10 other search engines including YouTube, Amazon, and Bing.

Organic Keywords

The Organic Keywords feature offered by Ahrefs is a competitor analysis tool that lets you figure out the keywords that your competitors rank for.

To find these keywords, all you have to do is enter your competitor’s domain name in the search box.

The tool will show you the various keywords that the website ranks for across different countries. You’ll also be able to find out the keyword search volumes, keyword difficulty, CPC, traffic, and the top-ranking websites in the SERP.

In a recent update, they’ve also added some long-needed features to the keyword finder:

• Keyword metrics for a single keyword or a list of keywords
• Search volume history for a single keyword
• Search volume by the country for a single keyword

Overall winner – Semrush

Technical SEO Site Audit Comparison Semrush Vs Ahrefs

Semrush

To start things off, Semrush is the overall winner in this category, because of its more in-depth analysis of a site, and the recommendations offered to fix issues are much more accurate than that of Ahrefs.

Using the Site Audit feature, your website’s health score will be shown (out of 100) along with errors, warnings, and notices.

This auditing feature also lets you deep dive into specific online marketing issues. As a result, you’ll be better placed to improve your website’s technical SEO.

You’ll also get to see which pages it has crawled and how crawlable your website is. The site audit tool will point out issues so that you can rectify them and build your website.

You’ll be able to see which markups are implemented, the crawl depth, HTTP status code, canonicalization, incoming internal links, and AMP links.

Ahrefs

As far as the Site Audit feature is concerned, Ahrefs fares well. You’ll be able to get a detailed analysis of your website including your SEO score, key issues, and recommendations. The recommendations, compared to Semrush, just weren’t as in-depth as I’d liked.

It scans your website for 100+ pre-defined search engine optimization issues and accordingly finds out the problems with your website.

The best part about this tool is that you have the option of looking into specific issues as well.

You can look into performance, HTML tags, social tags, content quality, and more.

What makes the tool even more interesting is that you can apply numerous filters to find the exact data that you want to see to improve your website.

Overall winner – Semrush

SEO site auditing tools crawl a website and report any technical SEO issues a site might have. It will rank a website's overall SEO health, and even offer solutions and recommendations on fixing some of the issues.

Competitor Research Comparison

Semrush’s competitive research is split into

• Domain overview
• Traffic analysis
• Organic Research
• Keyword Gap
• Backlink Gap

Keyword Gap Tool

The Keyword Gap tool is, by far, one of the most useful features packed in Semrush’s competitor research toolbox and is what sets it apart from Ahrefs. Although Ahrefs has its content gap tool, Semrush’s keyword gap tool offers a better analysis.

Ahrefs Content Gap Tool

Both tools allow you to compare your site’s keywords, to those of 5 other different domains. 

That’s where the similarities end.

This will bring up a keyword overlap graph, as well as offer weak keywords that aren’t ranking well against your competitors.

Semrush’s intuitive ven-diagram offers a quick insight into your competitors, and which keywords are overlapping. Ahrefs offers a list of keywords and some metrics.

On Semrush you’ll also get some basics like keyword volume, and keywords your competitors are using that you haven’t yet.

You will see a detailed list of keywords, along with each domain's rank for each keyword, and keyword performance metrics as shown in the image below.

Overall winner: Semrush

Semrush’s competitor analysis tools provide more information than those of Ahrefs. Semrush has a dedicated section for competitive research with more tools than Ahrefs.

Click here if you’d like a more comprehensive list of competitor research tools.

Backlink Analysis Comparison

Backlinks are a great way to increase your website’s authority. It’s important to know which sites are linking back to you, in case toxic websites are linking to your website.

It can also be used to help you identify potential backlinking opportunities. In the case of Semrush vs. Ahrefs, Semrush’s backlink tools are more substantial, and after updates in 2022, are the fastest (able to crawl 25 billion pages a day.)

Semrush

Semrush is the industry leader in backlink software. There are a lot of tools, and it can become a bit complicated with all the information available, but the UI is still comprehensible after some use.

The backlink tools offered by Semrush are:

• Backlink Analytics
• Backlink Audit
• Backlink Gap
• Link Building Tool
• Bulk Analysis

Let’s take a look at them to understand why Semrush is better.

Backlink Analytics

This is a handy tool that can help you discover the backlink profiles of every website on the internet. All you need to do is enter the domain or URL in the box and search for it.

The tool will provide detailed information about the backlink profile of the website.

It’ll show you the website’s traffic, referring domains, backlinks, categories, and even the anchor text used.

You can dive in further to discover authority scores, countries, follow, no-follow links, and more to help improve your SEO.

Backlink Audit

This particular tool lets you look into your website’s backlinks. You can get an in-depth look into your backlink profile and can audit, remove, and disavow backlinks based on their toxic score.

Semrush comes up with a toxic score based on numerous toxic markers. You can analyze the toxicity of each link by checking these markers.

There are over 50 such toxic markers that Semrush considers while giving you the toxic score.

And they’ve made these markers even more accurate in 2020.

You can then remove the links based on your backlink analysis to avoid Google penalties. You can see lost and found backlinks and target pages too.

Backlink Gap

Semrush also helps you find new link-building opportunities through its Backlink Gap tool. Using it, you can compare your domain with up to 4 other domains to find new backlink opportunities.

The tool helps you find websites from which your competitors have acquired backlinks. You can then approach these websites to get backlinks.

Link Building Tool

The Link Building Tool, as the name suggests, helps you build backlinks for your website.

You need to enter your target keywords and based on them, the tool will come up with a list of potential websites that you can approach for the backlinks.

You can see the URL type, domain score, and trust score. Based on these factors, you can decide if you want to go ahead with the process of asking for a backlink from them or not.

You can also track all the websites that you’ve contacted, and the tool will then let you monitor the backlinks once you’ve got them.

Bulk Analysis

If you want to get a brief overview of the backlink data of multiple websites at once, you should opt for the bulk backlink analysis tool.

Using it, you can compare the backlinks of up to 200 domains, subdomains, subfolders, and URLs at a time.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs gives you the opportunity to find backlinks through its two main tools. 

While they aren’t solely designed for backlinks, you can use them to find backlinks. They are:

• Site explorer
• Content explorer
• Batch Analysis

Site Explorer

Through the Site Explorer, you can find out who’s linking to different pages of your competitor’s website.

For this, all you have to do is search for a domain in the tool and tap on “Backlinks.”

This will bring up a report of all the referring domains, and you can see their DR (Domain Rating), UR (URL Rating), inbound and outbound links, and keywords. It also shows the anchor text and snippet used for the backlink.

You can also see the amount of monthly organic traffic that the page is getting. This can help you figure out which backlink might be driving the most traffic to your competitor.

As a result, you’ll be able to determine which website you need to reach out to first.

Content Explorer

The Ahrefs Content Explorer can be used for a variety of purposes, such as finding quality content topics to write and even building backlinks.

It has powerful filters that you can use to find pages that have loads of backlinks. You can further filter these pages based on their publishing date.

From these, you can find out if there’s a common topic that they’ve been writing about. These are the topics that you should consider writing to attract natural backlinks.

Content Explorer also helps you find opportunities for broken link building. You can use the filters to identify pages with broken links and narrow down your search further by selecting only those pages that have numerous backlinks.

These are the topics you can write about and get backlinks.

Batch Analysis

Ahrefs’ batch analysis tool allows you to enter up to 200 URLs at once, and pull backlink metrics of all of them in one go.

It doesn’t offer a deep analysis of each one but offers a domain rating, the number of backlinks, social metrics, as well as the number of referring domains. If you’re looking to get an idea of the backlinks your competitors have, then this is a quick way to do it.

Ahrefs Free Backlink Checker

Apart from the actual tools in the paid version, Ahrefs does offer a free backlink checker, although it only provides your authority score, and the number of backlinks the given domain has.

Overall winner: Semrush

Free Trials Comparison

Semrush

Semrush offers many different free trials, depending on where you sign up. They have promo codes and links that plenty of affiliates use.

Currently, they offer their pro plan free for 30 days.

If you’re interested in checking out Semrush, here’s a 30-day free trial of their pro plan.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs used to offer a 7-day trial, but sadly they have removed that. There are currently no free trials or paid trials. The only way to try Ahrefs is to sign up for a monthly subscription, which luckily you can cancel if you don’t like it.

Overall winner: Semrush

Pricing Plans Comparison

Semrush has 3 pricing tiers:

• Pro Plan: $119.95/month
• Guru Plan: $229.95/month
• Business Plan: $449.95/month

Semrush’s pricing is fairly standard, and what you pay for is what you get. For all tiers, most tools are available, apart from the content marketing platform that’s only available on Guru and Business tiers.

The rest of the plans are sequential in the way they work. For example, the pro plan offers tracking of up to 5 domains, the guru plans offers 20, and the business plan offers 50.

This works the same for all other features.

Ahrefs has 4 pricing tiers:

• Lite Plan: $99/month
• Standard Plan: $199/month
• Advanced Plan:$399/month
• Enterprise Plan: $999/month

Ahrefs pricing is a bit more complicated, as a lot of their tools work on a points-based system. The only two tools that do not consume credits are the rank tracker and site audit tools.

When you register a domain and pay for a plan, that user is the power user, who will be granted 500 credits per month.

Whenever this user requests additional data, opens a report, or applies filters to a search, it consumes 1 credit.

The power user also has the option to invite users. The “invited users” are allowed 5 free credits monthly. Once those 5 credits are used up, you’ll be charged extra that month according to the table below.

Ahrefs does offer some free tools if you sign up for the Webmaster Tools, but it is very limited, even compared to Semrush’s free version. It offers a basic site audit, with a health score, and critical issues shown. You also get keyword research (although they have a free keyword research tool without any registration needed), and backlink analysis.

This is still not enough to make them win this section, with Semrush’s 30-day free pro trial, as well as free version, still reigning supreme.

Overall winner: Semrush

Support Comparison

Semrush

Semrush provides customer support online and by telephone. However, there’s no option for live support. You can reach out to them by filling out the online form or emailing them as well.

However, if you require immediate support, you can reach out to one of their call centers located around the world. But you can only call them from Monday to Friday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM (EST/EDT).

Ahrefs

Ahrefs gives priority customer support and has a support option directly integrated into every page. All you have to do is tap the icon and reach out to their customer support team.

Their team is available 24/5 (excluding Saturday and Sunday). As a result, they can respond to your queries in minutes.

Overall winner: Ahrefs

Bonus Features Comparison

Both Semrush and Ahrefs have some extra tools, that set them apart from one another. Here’s a comparison table of the extra tools and features of both.

Which is Right for You?

As you can clearly see, the winner is Semrush. That doesn’t mean Ahrefs is bad, and that you shouldn’t consider it.

Both tools have their strengths, but when it comes to evaluating the full package, including pricing, the free trial, and overall functionality, Semrush offers more for less.

It also makes it hard to recommend Ahrefs without any sort of trial, or money-back guarantee, which means you’ll need to get at least a month's subscription just to test it out, which sets you back a minimum of $99.

Semrush also feels more scalable. Sure, there are some extra features and tools some users might never use, but as your business grows, some of these extra features might become useful.

Overall, Semrush offers the best feature set, for the best value.

FAQs

Final Verdict

Semrush and Ahrefs are both powerful SEO tools, and each has its own set of features that make it unique for content marketing and keyword research. I’ve personally used both tools and find them helpful.

They both come loaded with a bunch of features that can help you optimize your website’s visibility and traffic. Both of the SEO tools complement each other, and it’s really challenging to select one over the other.

However, given the size of the databases and the number of features that it offers, Semrush is the choice for me. But regardless of whichever tool you choose to go with between Ahrefs vs Semrush, I’m sure you won’t go wrong.