Ahrefs vs SEMrush

Ahrefs vs SEMrush is the main topic of this article.

SEMrush and Ahrefs have been two of the best SEO tools for:

• Discovery of new keywords i.e. keyword suggestions for your specific niche/industry.
• Evaluation of your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) work through a complete SEO audit.
• Monitoring of your website’s SEO keyword rankings (or positions) in the Google SERP.
• Analysis of backlinks for your website and your major competitors’ websites.

Below is the comparison between Ahrefs and SEMrush as major SEO tools.

• Backlink Analytics
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Rank Tracking
• Website SEO Audit
• New Content Ideas
• Google AdWords or PPC Data
• The Results

Ahrefs

• Basic backlink analytics includes finding all the backlinks with their referring domains for your website and competitors’ sites.
• Additional information includes reporting of broken links and recently lost backlinks.
• The user interface reporting all the data of backlinks is simple to navigate.

SEMrush

• SEMrush lets you get your website’s backlinks and your competitors’ backlinks so you can perform analysis on backlinks.

Which SEO tool wins on Backlink Analytics?

• Ahrefs wins.

Ahrefs

• With Ahrefs, enter a domain (into Site Explorer) and you will get all the keywords that the domain (or website) are ranking organically on Google’s SERP.
• Or enter a keyword (into Keyword Explorer) and you will be shown a list keyword variations that is based on your entered keyword.

SEMrush

• With SEMrush, enter a domain (into Organic Research Tool) and you will get all the keywords that the domain (or website) are ranking organically on Google’s SERP.
• Or enter a keyword (into Keyword Magic Tool) and you will be shown a list keyword variations that is based on your entered keyword.

Which SEO tool wins on Keyword Research?

• Ahrefs & SEMrush have tied.

Ahrefs

• Add a website domain to a new project, and add all the target keywords to the project, so Ahrefs can start tracking the Google SERP positions of the keywords. SERP features, volume, (estimated) Google SEO traffic, keyword difficulty, and CPC per keyword are reported.
• You can set up in a single project to track keyword rankings with multiple locations (i.e. Hong Kong, United States, etc.
• However, Ahrefs reports the keyword ranking data only once every few days.

SEMrush

• SEMrush tracks the Google SERP positions of the target keywords and reports SERP features, volume, (estimated) Google SEO traffic, keyword difficulty, and CPC per keyword per location.
• SEMrush can track and report the keyword positions everyday which gives SEMrush an edge over Ahrefs.

Which SEO tool wins on Keyword Research?

• SEMrush wins.

Ahrefs

• Ahrefs breaks down all the pages by error types, and provides suggestions on how you can fix each error. Not only showing the errors that are compulsory to fix, Ahrefs also shows the warnings and others.

SEMrush

• SEMrush breaks down all the pages by error types, and provides suggestions on how you can fix each errors. Not only showing the errors that are compulsory to fix, SEMrush also shows the warnings and others.

Which SEO tool wins on Keyword Research?

• Ahrefs & SEMrush have tied.

Ahrefs

• Ahrefs Content Explorer reports on which blog articles (i.e. page URLs) are recently popular in social media including Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Like the data you can get from Buzzsumo. This data gives Ahrefs an edge over SEMrush.

SEMrush

• Semrush has Topic Research Tool, but can only shows the number of Facebook engagements (as a metric) for your new content creation’s consideration.

Which SEO tool wins on Keyword Research?

• Ahrefs wins.

Ahrefs

• Not much Google AdWords data you can get from Ahrefs. Ahrefs is not exactly designed to report on PPC data.

SEMrush

• With SEMrush, you can track competitors’ Google Ads i.e. ad copies, etc. If your business involves in SEO and PPC (especially Google Ads), SEMrush will be more useful.

Which SEO tool wins on Keyword Research?

• SEMrush wins.

Who Wins?

SEMrush and Ahrefs have scored 2 wins each with 2 ties.

What’s next?

We are to go through both SEMrush and Ahrefs in more details with focus especially on search engine optimization, with the the tutorials.

• SEMrush Tutorial
• Ahrefs Tutorial

More SEO tools:

• Google Keyword Planner Tutorial
• Google Search Console Tutorial
• Bing Webmaster Tools Tutorial
• Rank Math Tutorial
• Yoast SEO Tutorial
• KeywordTool.io Guide
• SimilarWeb Tutorial

Regarding Ahrefs SEO tool, I have written an article in Chinese version.