Top 2 SEMrush Alternatives: How It Compares With Famous SEO Tools Like Ahrefs & Moz
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SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market. With its amazing features, even a technically disinclined person can become a marketing whiz within days. From keyword research and topic analysis to content evaluation, content writing, and promotion services, you get quite a lot with this tool.
But is it better than other SEMrush alternative SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Moz? Can it give them a tough time? In this article, we will look at:
- SEMrush features and why you should love them
- SEMrush Alternatives: How SEMrush is Better than Moz, Ahrefs, and Other SEO Tools
- SEMrush vs Moz: A Thorough Comparison
- SEMrush vs Ahrefs: A Thorough Comparison
Whether you set up your website with Best web hosting providers for fun or for profit, you will need a quality tool that can help you scale your website faster. Many free tools exist to help you research keywords, but most of them have incorrect keyword volume or difficulty. Writing content for such keywords will waste both time and money.
Let’s get started with our comparison.
What is SEMrush?
Investing in a good SEO tool can save you from such problems and let you profit from the beginning. SEMrush is great for researching keywords, evaluating competitors, and making Google Ad campaign optimizations. It will help you dig deeper into your website(s) and rectify errors, if any, for climbing the SERPs faster.
9 Killing Features of SEMrush
SEMrush offers plenty of features to keep its users more than satisfied.
No. | Features | Description |
1 | SEO Toolkit | SEO toolkit offers nearly everything about SEO; competitor research, keyword research, suggestions about topics that rank higher, etc. |
2 | Content Marketing Toolkit | Find topics through keywords and get suggestions about their length, the number of keywords to add, and the overall gap analysis. |
3 | Social Media Toolkit | Find how your social media platforms are doing. Explore multiple possibilities for growth and suggestions for improvement. |
4 | Advertising Toolkit | Rank for the right keywords in PPC campaigns through competitor research. |
5 | Competitive Research Toolkit | Get SEMrush help to create content and promote it to the right audience. |
6 | Most Accurate Keyword Tool | SEMrush constantly updates its databases and offers 20 billion keywords to search from for your website ranking. it’s the largest keyword database on the |
7 | Accurate Position Tracking | Daily updates for Google ranking algorithm in your dashboard with no additional payments or add-ons needed. |
8 | Spam Score Tool | Remove toxic links from your website so that it doesn’t hurt your site rankings. |
9 | SEO Reporting | You can create visually appealing custom |
Keyword Research
Above: A search result for the keywords “best punching bags.”
Of course, this is just one option. You can rank higher by searching other rank holders and using their main keywords to create your own keyword list.
Domain Overview
Likewise, you can search for the domain and find all the keywords it is ranking for. You can also search its traffic and pattern to see when it started to build keywords, and how the traffic has increased. Use a similar strategy to rank your website higher on a search engine.
Above: We searched a random website menshealth.com with SEMrush domain overview tool. The pattern it shows can help you find relevant websites that belong to your niche.
You can also see their indexed URLs and the number of keywords for which these URLs rank.
Organic Research
Next, we have organic research for keywords. These organic keywords show the number of keywords a website ranks for. Here, the website above ranks for 1.9M keywords. SEMrush is especially relevant for analyzing competitors and copying the keywords of your competitors in the market.
Backlink Analysis
As creating backlinks for your website(s) is crucial, with the backlink analysis tool you can find all the backlinks that a website has made. You can search your competitors and check how quickly they build backlinks, and the different domains they use to do so. SEMrush offers its own authority score for each domain. The authority score indicates the power of that website to rank for higher difficulty keywords.
Advertising Research
The advertising research feature of SEMrush points out the number of PPC keywords that a website is ranking for. You can check the budget, the CPC of each keyword, and the amount of traffic that the website gets from those keywords. Advertising research is beneficial for both SEOs and PPC experts as they can find new keyword opportunities easily.
Benchmarking or Traffic Analysis
Another great feature of SEMrush is benchmarking. Benchmarking shows how websites are ranked according to the traffic they receive. The benchmarking tool gives information about country, keywords, traffic volume, etc.
Content Marketing Tool Kit
With the Content Marketing Tool kit, SEMrush offers you the chance to easily create content that resonates with your target audience. Simply type a keyword to find topics that people are writing about.
Lead Generation Widget
If you don’t have a lead generation plugin available on your website, you can use the SEMrush form to get leads. These leads will be automatically emailed to you. This is a free way to get leads instead of purchasing a $100 software like Active Campaigns or HubSpot.
Content Creation Service
You can also delegate your tasks directly to SEMrush. Instead of creating your own content, the SEMrush team will do it for you. If you don’t have the budget to hire more resources, get leads faster through SEMrush’s holistic service. It will ask you for the price, CPC, and keywords, and provide you leads that you can contact.
Off-Page Activity Service
SEMrush can also place your content in local directories in the US or any other country. This is one of the best ways to perform local SEO for your website. The service is perfect for businesses having a presence on the ground, such as clinics, mechanics, home décor services, and local shops.
SEMrush Alternative: SEMrush vs Moz
Let us look at SEMrush alternatives like Moz and check how it compares against SEMrush. We will first discuss Moz in-depth and give an overview of its features.
Moz
Moz is the product of Rand Fishkin. The tool was initially developed as a keyword finding tool because Google Adwords had stopped showing keyword volume to the user. Moz developed its own metrics for ranking websites called ‘Domain Authority’ and ‘Page Authority’. These are still used by many SEO experts to find relevant domains and their potential to rank for higher volume keywords.
Features of Moz
Let’s take a look at some of the features that Moz offers to its users.
Keyword Research Tool
We will run the same search queries with Moz that we ran with SEMrush. The search results are shown below.
We have a free version of Moz so only 10 queries are available.
There is a drastic difference in keyword volume and Moz doesn’t give as many details as SEMrush.
Site Analysis
We ran an analysis of a website with Moz and you can see how much information it offered.
In comparison with SEMrush, Moz does not give certain specifics, such as indexed pages, their SERP rankings, backlinks, and the traffic that the website gets. In this aspect, SEMrush clearly beats Moz.
Link Audit
The site link audit tool is very comprehensive. You can check the different linking domains that are linked to the website as well as the number of inbound backlinks and the keywords for which the website ranks. The tool also offers the number of links you get from each DA.
Moz is a great alternative to SEMrush, but it has limited functionality. The complete site audit that is possible with SEMrush is simply not possible with Moz. The price of both tools is, however, the same. Moz is a lot better at finding keyword opportunities, but performs poorly when comparing websites. Moreover, you can’t do a backlink analysis or site audit with this SEO Tool.
SEMrush vs Moz – Table Comparison in Detail
Features | SEMrush | MOZ | Description |
Keyword Research | Yes | Yes | Find relevant keywords to rank your website. |
Site Audit | Yes | Yes, but not comprehensive | Complete site audit including its spam score, errors checking, and much more. |
Backlink Analysis | Yes | Yes, but not comprehensive | Number of backlinks and their authority score. |
URL Analysis | Yes | Yes, but not comprehensive | Links, the volume of keywords, CPC of keywords of a single URL. |
Gap Analysis | Yes | No | Find a gap in keywords of two or more websites. |
Traffic Analysis | Yes | No | Compare the traffic of your own website(s) with that of competitors. |
Content Structure | Yes | No | Create content structure by looking at other ranked topics. |
Content Topics | Yes | No | Create content topics of your choice by looking at audience needs |
Content Template | Yes | No | The content length, word count, and keyword suggestions offered by SEMRush. |
Lead Generation | Yes | No | Get leads from SEMRush through set bidding targets. |
Off-Page Activity | Yes | No | Off-page link building delegation offered by SEMRush. |
Social Media Analysis | Yes | No | Social media analysis and optimization tips. |
Project Audit | Yes | No | Create a site project to monitor daily ranking and health activities. |
In our comparison of SEMrush and Moz as alternatives, SEMrush comes out as a much more sophisticated SEO software that you can use for your website. It has more tools that can help a website rank higher and provide a project audit report – a major feature missing in Moz.
SEMrush Alternative: SEMrush vs Ahrefs
The second SEMrush alternative we’ll discuss is Ahrefs which is considered the king of keyword research. Ahrefs is an intelligent tool to find opportunities to rank for relevant keywords. But can we use Ahrefs as an alternative to SEMrush? Let’s find out.
Below, we look at how Ahrefs compares against SEMrush.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs offers a comprehensive suite of SEO tools to rank a website. It is used by SEO experts for keyword audit, backlink audit, and site analysis. Ahrefs has its own metrics for site ranking called Domain Rating (DR) and Page Rating (PR). Many SEO experts use this score to find the keywords they can rank for. DR is a mixture of backlinks and on-page activities.
Features of Ahrefs
Ahrefs’ plethora of features make it one of the most sought SEO tools in the market.
Keyword Research
Ahrefs offers UR and DR for every website it finds. In a similar way, it offers keyword difficulty for each keyword available. As it may be difficult to find the right keyword, it also offers URLs that rank for a keyword and similar keywords through SERP.
Competitor Research
Finding competitor keywords and the URLs that rank for those keywords is no longer a challenge with Ahrefs’ site explorer tool. You can enter any website’s URL and it will start the process.
Link Audit
Another great reason to get the Ahrefs SEO tool is to search backlinks that target your website or a specific URL. You can check 100 backlinks for free without using Ahrefs’ paid version. Of course, with the paid version, you will get access to more options.
Site Audit
You can also do a complete site audit with Ahrefs. Site audit will give details about the type of keywords your website ranks on, the total backlinks it has, and the spam score of those keywords. You can also find referring domains and competitors as well as recommendations for your website so that you can rank higher for relevant queries and get quality traffic to your website.
Content Gap
With Ahrefs, you can easily find content topics for your website. These are the competitors’ posts that rank for a keyword of your choice. You can get their referring domains, their social content score, and the organic traffic they receive for each URL the site has available.
SEMrush vs Ahrefs: Complete Table Comparison
Features | SEMrush | Ahrefs | Description |
Keyword Research | Yes | Yes, much more comprehensive | Find relevant keywords to rank your website. |
Site Audit | Yes | Yes | Complete site audit including its spam score, errors checking, and much more. |
Backlink Analysis | Yes | Yes | Number of backlinks and their authority score. |
URL Analysis | Yes | Yes | links, the volume of keywords, CPC of keywords of a single url. |
Gap Analysis | Yes | Yes, but not comprehensive | Find gap in keywords of two or more websites. |
Traffic Analysis | Yes | Yes | The traffic of your own website and how it compares with competitors |
Content Structure | Yes | No | Create content structure by looking at other ranking topics. |
Content Topics | Yes | Yes, but not comprehensive | Create content topics of your choice by looking at audience needs. |
Content Template | Yes | No | The content length, word count, keywords suggestions offered by SEMrush. |
Lead Generation | Yes | No | Get leads from SEMRush through set bidding targets. |
Off-Page Activity | Yes | No | Off-page link building delegation offered by SEMRush. |
Social Media Analysis | Yes | No | Social media analysis and optimization tips. |
Project Audit | Yes | No | Create a site project to monitor daily ranking and health activities. |
While SEMrush and Ahrefs are closely related to SEO plugins, the only features that Ahrefs lacks are off-page activity focus, project audit, and social media analysis.
SEMrush vs Moz vs Ahrefs: Should You Really Choose a SEMrush Alternative?
SEMrush offers far more features to its users than Moz and Ahrefs, and this is because SEMrush focuses on both on-page and off-page activities. While Moz solely focuses on on-page activities, Ahrefs only includes backlinks in its off-page activity focus.
Although Ahrefs brings strong keyword research skills to the table, SEMrush stands its ground. With its high-quality 9 killing features in this article, SEMrush is, obviously, a clear choice.
SEMrush
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