Most businesses seek a good SEO tool to help them quickly boost their traffic and sales. Ahrefs and SEMrush are considered to be one of the many popular SEO tools used by businesses, big and small.

 

 

In this article, we’ll compare SEMrush vs Ahrefs to better help you decide which tool will fit your business needs most. They are beneficial tools for the online business particularly for e-commerce stores.

 

 

 

 

Overview Of Ahrefs Vs. SEMrush

 

 

 

Ahrefs is simply a digital marketing SEO analysis tool. With this said, it can be used to prepare audit reports, back-link analysis, URL rankings, competitive analysis and much more.

 

On the other hand, SEMrush is an all in one SEO platform tool that provides users with the ability to conduct keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your rivals, runs a site audit of your blog, checks for back-linking opportunities and much more.

 

 

So as you can see, both tools are unique in their own ways. Now that you have an idea of what each tool is all about. Next, let’s compare the features and tools offered and see which one is better. Let’s get started.

 

 

 

Features Of Ahrefs Vs Features Of SEMrush

 

 

 

Before we start comparing the features of Ahrefs Vs. SEMrush. Please note that from personal experience with both platforms, SEMrush and Ahrefs main dashboard are easy to use. As long as you know what you are searching for, you can easily become comfortable using the platforms. They are pretty straight forward.

 

 

Ahrefs has 5 main tools which you can utilize from the main dashboard. They are as follows:

 

 

 

Site Explorer 

 

 

With the site explorer tool at Ahrefs , you will get in an in-depth look at the organic search traffic, paid search and and back-link profile of your website or any website or URL. With this said, there are 3 SEO tools available for you to utilize in the site explorer:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Organic traffic research

 

 

In the organic traffic research tab , you will be able to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which pages bring the most search engine traffic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back-link Checker 

 

 

Ahrefs has the back-link checker which will simply give you which websites link to your competitors’ sites and measure the quality of their back-link profiles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you want to conduct a back link checker at SEMrush, you will need to utilize the Back-Link Analytics Tool. You will easily be able to discover back-links of any website in the world. The tool is so easy to use. Pretty straight forward.

 

 

You simply enter any domain URL in the Back-link Analytics Tool. And you will get tons of useful information such as:

• Total number of links.
• Referring domains.
• Referring IPs.
• Authority score.
• New and lost back-links.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paid Traffic Research

 

 

In the paid search tab at Ahrefs, you will be able to see the exact keywords your rivals bid on. Moreover, you are also able to get their ad copy and landing page URLs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again, you can get that same metrics if you use the SEMrush Advertising Research Feature. You will get a list of metrics pertaining to a competitors domain, the number of common keywords, estimations on paid traffic, and online rivals’ ad spending and much more. So again here, SEMRush and Ahrefs are in a tie.

 

 

 

 

Keyword Explorer

 

 

The keyword explorer is a tool used for keyword research at Ahrefs. Again, the keyword explorer is so easy to use. Pretty straight forward. With this said, when you enter a keyword, you will get the following data:

 

 

• Keyword difficulty (KD) score (Under each KD score, you’ll see the estimated number of links from different sites you need to rank on the first page for that particular keyword).
• Search volume (you can also see global volume which includes searches from all countries).
• Organic Clicks that are getting for that particular keyword.
• CPC value of the keyword.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Furthermore, if you want more keyword ideas that are related to your primary keyword. You will find different keyword ideas reports which you can choose from. Please see below what they are.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Phrase match – Which are basically phrases that contain the keyword you are targeting.
• Having same terms. These are basically a list of ideas that contain all the terms in your target keyword.
• Also rank for are simply keywords for which the top-ranking pages also rank for.
• Search suggestions are queries that are suggested via ‘autocomplete’ when searching for your target keyword.
• Newly discovered are search queries that were recently added to the database.
• And lastly, Questions. These are queries that are phrased as a question.

 

 

Furthermore, when you use the keyword explorer at Ahrefs, you will get keyword ideas for ten different search engines, including YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and much more (please see below for a full list). So it’s not just Google.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover, you can also use the Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool to get advanced metrics such as:

 

 

• Clicks. This shows you the average monthly number of clicks on the search results for your target keyword.
• The Clicks Per Search (CPS)  will show you how many different search results people click, on average, after searching for a certain  keyword.
• And the % of Clicks basically show you what percentage of searches for a given keyword result in clicks on the search results.
• The % of Paid Clicks vs Organic Clicks will show you how clicks on the search results are distributed between paid and organic results.
• And lastly, the Return Rate  will simply compare which keyword gets more repeat searches using a relative scale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In essence, the Ahrefs keyword explorer is a great tool for keyword research. As you can see, it is great for organic keyword research.

 

 

On the other hand, the SEMrush keyword research offers more features when it comes to keyword research such as:

• Keyword magic tool.
• Keyword manager.
• Keyword difficulty.
• Organic traffic insights

 

 

And so if you use the regular SEMrush keyword research tool, you get data such as:

 

• Monthly search volume.
• Total number of results (organic).
• Paid search data including CPC and competition.
• CPC distribution (which is really helpful for paid advertisers).
• Trend for the keyword.
• Keyword suggestions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So as you can see both Ahrefs and SEMrush provide you with tons of great data when it comes to keyword research.  However, from personal experience, Ahrefs is best fit for when you want to do organic keyword research. While SEMrush is great for when you want to conduct organic and paid search results.

 

 

 

Not to mention, when you enroll in the PRO SEMrush plan, you will get 3000 reports per day. While you only get 25 reports per day with the Lite plan at Ahrefs (for $99 per month). So here I prefer SEMrush over Ahrefs. You will get your monies worth with SEMrush. Furthermore, SEMrush has a free keyword research course which you can enroll in for free to learn about keyword research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover, According to the Stats provided on the websites of SEMrush and Ahrefs. You can see that SEMrush is by far the best when it comes to keyword research. SEMrush currently provides more keywords than Ahrefs. See below for more information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t feel disappointed about the keyword research tool at Ahrefs. It’s great, but let’s be honest, it’s not as great as the keyword research provided at SEMrush.

 

 

 

 

Site Audit

 

 

In the site audit tab at Ahrefs, you are able to see the performance of your website’s on-page SEO. In other words, you will know why your website is not ranking and what issues causing your website to struggle.

 

 

With all that said, In the Site Audit section, you will be able to crawl all the pages on your website. After which, you will get an overall SEO health score. You can get that information in charts. Not to mention, the site audit will flag all possible SEO issues and provide recommendations on how to fix them.

 

 

You are able to check for issues relating to :

• Performance. So if you have slow pages, too-large CSS or HTML.
• HTML tags such as missing, duplicate or non-optimal length of title tags, meta descriptions and H1 tags.
• Social tags are basically incomplete or missing Open Graph tags and Twitter cards.
• Content quality: low word counts, unconsolidated duplicate pages.
• Localization: all issues with Hreflang.
• Incoming links: detecting orphan pages, issues with no-follow links.
• Outgoing links: detecting links to redirects, broken pages.
• Resources: issues with images, JavaScript, CSS.
• External pages. And much more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the other hand, When you utilize SEMrush’s Site Audit tool, you are able to run an analysis of your websites health. Moreover, the Site audit tool will give you a list of issues informing you where your website may be struggling. This is an important tool to have access to because when you know where your website is struggling the most and actually fixing these issues, will help boost the SEO of a website.

 

 

 

Again, the Site Audit Tool at SEMrush is very straight forward and is easy to use. Not to mention it is super fast to get results. The high-speed crawler will process all your pages in minutes. In order to set up a Site Audit, you first need to create a Project for the domain that you want to have a site audit for. Once you have your new project, select the “Set up” button in the Site Audit block of your Project interface and you are all set.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover, the site audit tool at SEMrush gives you over 120 on-page and technical SEO checks such as duplicate content and broken links, Crawl-ability and Architecture, On page SEO, Technical SEO, International SEO, Performance, Internal Linking, in-depth analysis of AMPs, HTTPS implementation, correct usage of the hreflang attribute, crawl-ability and index-ability and much more.

 

 

 

What you will love about the Site Audit tool at SEMrush is you are able to include/exclude specific pages and audit the desktop or mobile version of a site. Furthermore, you can even do an on -demand crawling and get scheduled auto re-crawls on a daily or weekly basis.

 

 

 

So with all that said, the site audit features at Ahrefs and SEMrush are both unique in their own ways and provide useful information to users wanting to run a site audit on a website. They are pretty similar. But the winner is SEMrush because with SEMrush you are able to crawl more pages per month with the lowest plan available.

 

 

 

If you are enrolled in the PRO plan at SEmrush, you are able to crawl 100,000 pages per month. With the Guru Plan, you are able to crawl 300,000 pages per month. Lastly, if you are enrolled in the business plan, you are able to crawl 1,000,000 pages per month. Don’t forget to test drive the SEMrush tool for free, simply click here to get started.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the other hand, if you are enrolled in the Lite Plan with Ahrefs, you are able to only crawl 10,000 per month. And as you upgrade to the higher paying plans, you are able to crawl more pages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rank Tracker

 

 

With the rank tracker tool at Ahrefs, you are simply able to monitor your Google rankings on desktop and mobile across 170 countries. It is so easy to set up. Simply, input or import a list of keywords, add multiple countries per keyword and enter your competitors’ URLs. Ahrefs will start tracking data and will send you regular updates to your inbox.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The visibility section tells you what percentage of clicks come from Organic search that land on your website.

 

 

The average position and traffic gives you the average position for all tracked keywords over time, and the amount of search traffic they send to your website.

 

 

Lastly, the position distribution distributes keywords into groups by position and tracking your progress over time.

 

 

On the other hand, you can track rankings when you use the SEMrush Position Tracking Tool. With the position tracking tool you can track day to day progress and rankings changes of an SEO campaign or website. The rank tracker features at SEMrush and Ahrefs are very similar and provide pretty much the same metrics. From personal experience, they are both great tools at SEMrush and Ahrefs.

 

 

 

 

Content Explorer

 

 

The content explorer tool at Ahrefs will help you discover and analyze top-performing content in your niche. You can find the most popular articles on any topic. Furthermore, you can even use the filter to see which data you want to seek more insight on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are also able to do that with SEMrush using SEMrush market explorer tool. And again, both tools are great at providing useful data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we have compared the features of SEMrush and Ahrefs. Let’s compare the pricing of each tool and see how they differ from one another.

 

 

 

 

 

Pricing Of SEMrush VS Ahrefs

 

 

 

SEMrush  currently offers 3 pricing plans.They are:

 

• The Pro Plan which starts at $99.95 per month and is ideal for  starters.
• The Guru plan which starts at  $199.95 per month and is best suited for small businesses.
• And the Business Plan which starts at $399.95 per month and is ideal for agencies.

 

 

Moreover, SEMrush has the Enterprise plan which is a custom plan. You need to contact SEMrush for further information.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please note that if you enroll as an annual member with SEMrush with any plan of your choice, you will save more money (save 16%). And all SEMrush plans offer you a 7 day money-back guarantee. You can upgrade/downgrade or cancel your account whenever you want. Not to mention, you can try the PRO and the Guru plans for free. You can click here to test drive SEMrush tool today for free for 7 days.

 

 

 

 

On the other hand, Ahrefs currently offers 4 pricing plans. They are:

 

• The Lite plan which costs $99 per month, and is great for starters.
• The Standard plan which costs $179 per month, and is  great for bloggers.
• And the Advanced plan which is for $399 per month, and is great for SEOs.
• The Agency plan which is $999 per month, and is suitable for agencies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For your monthly subscription on Ahrefs plans, you have 48 hours to ask for a refund.

 

 

 

When it comes to pricing, SEMrush is a clear winner as they offer free trials to its users. You can click here for your free test drive of SEMrush. As mentioned earlier, Ahrefs does not offer a free trial. They offer a 7 day trial for $7. And they only offer that 7 day trial for $7 for the Lite plan and the Standard plan only. You can use this link to try Ahrefs for 7 day trial by paying $7.

 

 

 

 

 

Which Is Better: Ahrefs vs. SEMRrush?

 

 

 

Although there’s not a major difference between SEMrush and Ahrefs. I have been using SEMrush for a while now, and I must say, I love it and it provides me with everything I need to run my business. It’s an all in one platform. It is easy to use and get around. Below you will read why I personally recommend using SEMrush over any other tool.

 

 

• SEMrush is always updating the tool to better suit the users needs.
• They add new features to make the tool better.
• Not to mention, SEMrush has a great knowledge base to use their tools.

 

 

And so with all this said. If you’re looking to find better keywords for both organic and paid search results, SEMrush is the best option for you.

 

 

 

On the other hand, if you are looking for a tool for back-link analysis and find lots of link building opportunities, Ahrefs maybe a better choice over SEMrush. But SEMrush is also a great tool to use for back link analysis.

 

 

 

If you are a blogger, SEO or an agency who is looking for an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you with both organic and PPC campaigns, SEMrush is the recommended tool. You can start your free test drive with SEMrush today, simply click here to get started.

 

 

 

In essence, when it comes to pricing, both these tools have similar pricing plans. They both start at $99. However, the most expensive plan at Ahrefs costs $999 per month, while the most expensive plan at SEMrush costs you only $395.95 per month.

 

 

 

In the end, it is up to you to decide which is better for you, it really will depend on what you are looking for in a tool for your business. If you are interested in trying SEMrush for free today, you can click here to test drive SEMrush for free today.

 

 

 

Which one do you think is the best among SEMrush and Ahrefs? Please don`t forget to share in the comment section below your thoughts and experience with the tools. And don’t forget to share with your entrepreneur friends if you found this review helpful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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