Being a good SEO specialist requires insight, knowledge, talent, and follow-through. None of that would help you if you didn’t have the right data, though.
Accurate data about keywords, your site’s SEO performance, your competitors’ sites, your backlinks, and other metrics are the cornerstones of good SEO. How do you get that data? It all comes down to the tools you use.
Without an SEO tool, you’ll have to keep spreadsheets and feed them with manually exported data from various sources, a process that is prone to errors and time-consuming.
Ahrefs VS SEMrush Comparison
- SEO Auditing
When you’re planning a trip, you can’t find the right directions if you don’t know your starting point and final destination.
The same is true for SEO. Performing an SEO audit will help you create an SEO action plan and show you the path to follow to reach your destination which is no other than higher rankings for your target keywords.
Both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer a technical SEO audit feature. They evaluate your website using a number of pre-defined rules related to technical SEO and give you a list of recommendations on what you need to fix to improve your SEO performance.
The two tools are alike in that general audit structure, and they work in similar ways. They both include helpful instructions that explain the issues they’ve found and how to fix them.
One of the differences though is that SEMrush gives you more information about your internal link distribution.
Your goal with internal linking is to help users by providing them with additional information about a topic and search engines by giving them hints as to which pages of your website are more important.
- Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most important and critical SEO processes. If you get your keyword research wrong, you’ll end up targeting the wrong keywords and even if you manage to get traffic, it won’t convert.
So, it’s important to use a tool that provides accurate information about keywords.
Both SEMrush and Ahrefs give you strong insights into the keywords you want to optimize for on your site.
SEMrush calls its tool Keyword Magic, and its Ahrefs equivalent is the Keywords Explorer.
When searching for keywords for a particular topic, SEMrush seems to provide more results but Ahrefs has more filters to get rid of irrelevant or nonsense keywords.
Both SEMrush and Ahrefs also have content gap analysis tools, which can be a great help. They let you compare your site to your competitors’ sites that are ranking above you on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Both tools produce similar results by listing the keywords that your competitor is better optimized for.
Special Keyword Features
There are some features that are specific to one tool over the other, though. For instance, SEMrush offers comprehensive data about keyword trends that Ahrefs doesn’t.
The data lets you see which keywords are on the rise and which are falling in popularity. It also tells you if a keyword is popular at a particular time of the year, for example. Then you can focus on that keyword in your content during a particular season.
For its part, Ahrefs has a handy click estimation feature. This estimates the number of clicks you’d get for each keyword if you were the top-ranked result.
- Rank Tracking
As you work towards optimizing for particular keywords, you want to be able to see your results. This is where Ahrefs and SEMrush’s rank-tracking features come in.
Both of these tools have rank trackers that show you how your ranking is shifting for specific keywords. They also show you your site’s overall average across all the keywords you’re tracking. Both tools let you compare your site to your competitors as well.
As far as accuracy goes, both tools appear to be equal. At first glance, Ahrefs appears to have an advantage because its interface is more attractive and easier to use. When you dig deeper, though, SEMrush wins in other critical areas.
SEMrush updates its rank tracking every day. This lets you watch your results in real-time and get a powerful picture of rank fluctuations.
With Ahrefs, the most frequent update schedule available is every three days. That is only the frequency for Ahref’s two most expensive plans. With their most economical plan, you only get weekly updates.
- Topic Research
Your site’s content is a vital part of your SEO. One of the top ways to produce SEO-focused content is to check out the competing content that performs well and use it as a model.
Ahrefs makes that easy with its Content Explorer tool, and SEMrush does the same with its Topic Research tool.
Both of those tools go beyond basic web stats. They tell you how each page in the search results is performing on social media. Whether you want content that will be popular on Google or on a specific social media platform, you can optimize accordingly.
Ahrefs has a slight edge in this area with its publication history. It tells you how many pages are published and updated for that topic over time.
This helps you see whether the topic is on the rise or the decline among content creators. You’ll be able to identify the topics that are in need of a fresh perspective and those with a lot of competing content.
- Identifying Link Building Opportunities
Building a network of backlinks from reputable, high-volume sites will make a world of difference for your SEO. If you’re struggling to see where to start, SEMrush and Ahrefs both have features designed to help.
Broken-link building
This is a newer feature on Ahrefs’s platform. They added it to their Content Explorer when they debuted Content Explorer 2.0 in May 2019. You can search for a particular topic and the tool identifies broken backlinks.
You can use that information by identifying pages with many backlinks that have now moved or disappeared. If you recreate the content on your site and send the link to the sites that link to the broken URL, they may swap it for your link. It’s a handy way to get new backlinks.
SEMrush’s tool is called the Link Building Tool. It does the same thing Ahrefs does by identifying broken and outdated links. It also has another feature, though.
SEMrush’s distinctive tool identifies many ways to build your backlinks. It offers a list of sites you could reach out to in order to get a backlink.
Along with that list, SEMrush gives you the contact information for as many of those sites as possible. It integrates with many email platforms so you can contact the sites directly from SEMrush. The tool tracks all that outreach so you can see the fruits of your labor.
- Link Analysis
Backlinking isn’t just a numbers game. You need your backlinks to be from credible sites. The opposite can actually harm your SEO.
Both tools let you check website backlinks and referring domains they each have. In the past, Ahrefs was the better choice for link analysis because it had a stronger database.
However, SEMrush did a major database update in 2019. Since then, the two tools are neck-and-neck for performance.
Overall, SEMrush wins out because of a crucial special feature: its backlink audit tool. This identifies potentially toxic backlinks that could be hurting your SEO. You can disavow them with Google to stop the damage.
Ahrefs doesn’t have this feature, though it does show you which of your backlinks have the lowest domain authority. From there, you could investigate each site to see if it’s a potential problem.
More SEO Tools: Which Ones Improve Your Social Media Marketing Results?
Moz Link Explorer
Another tool to aid you in your link-building campaign is Moz Link Explorer. Before reaching out to prospects, make sure that they’re trustworthy and relevant to your website. One way to do this is to do a link analysis.
With Moz Link Explorer, you’ll be able to get insight into the most relevant and impactful links you can use for your website.
The free version will give you a free link analysis. If you get the paid version, you can access other features and get data, such as link-building opportunities, the website’s spam scores, and the site’s top-performing content.
Just type the URL you want to check out and then automatically gain data about the links that are coming in and out of the site.
How to use for social media marketing:
Moz can use social media to amplify link-building activities by searching for link-likely-outreach-targets. In link building, you’re looking for the right kinds of people who will be likely to link to you if you reach out to them.
It also has MozBar, a tool that lets you analyze important search, social media, and page metrics of any site you visit right in your Chrome browser. You can use this to look for influencers to collaborate with, research new content to post, or find new keywords.
Rank Ranger
Rank Ranger is a keyword tracking tool that allows you to monitor keyword rankings accurately. You can use this for desktop rank tracking, local search rankings (to track your local SEO success), and even mobile rank tracking.
This tool lets you check your ranking and monitor the position of keywords that your website is ranking.
Tracking your keywords and whether your pages are ranking for them is crucial because it gives you information about where you stand in the market. Also, keyword ranking is one of the key performance indicators that will determine the success of your SEO campaign.
Google Search Console lets you view which keywords are ranking for your website, however, for more accurate information and keyword positions, use a dedicated keyword tracking tool like Rank Ranger.
Aside from being able to track keywords from multiple vantage points, it also comes with customer insights graphs with metrics from various data sources, like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Bing Webmaster Tools.
How to use for social media marketing:
Rank Ranger has a feature that’s built to focus on monitoring the engagement and results of all your company’s social media profiles. This tool also provides you with insights like popular content, geographical data, page views, visits, and other information you can use to maximize the results of your social media marketing campaign.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google and a favorite of Shopify SEO experts. It’s one of the most important and powerful digital marketing tools for monitoring your SEO campaigns.
GSC provides you with all the important metrics you need to check your website performance and SEO efforts. You’ll have a quick view of impressions and clicks, high-ranking pages, and discover which keywords are resulting in traffic.
Since this is part of the Google ecosystem, you can easily integrate GSC into Google Data Studio or a Google Data Studio alternative for more detailed reporting.
How to use for social media marketing:
Google Search Console Insights help you see what your best-performing pieces of content are and your site’s top trending queries on Google Search.
Content can include what kinds of products or services visitors are checking out the most. This can then help you make a data-driven decision on what to post and publish on your social media sites, as well as give you an idea of what type of content can be boosted with ads.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool. It tracks user behavior, conversions, and more. Whereas Google Search Console is used to see how well your website performs on search engines, GA focuses more on user interaction and tracking where the traffic is coming from.
You’ll see more data dealing with users, like what device they used to access your website, where they came from, and the demographics breakdown of your visitors. One feature that might be especially helpful to those that want to track the user journey would be behavior flows. Using flows, you can see what are the typical behaviors of users that visit your site, starting from your homepage. That could help you figure out if you should change any of your internal links to help users get to the pages that convert the most.
With the information that this tool provides, you can focus on SEO initiatives that deliver better results for your SEO campaign. Google Analytics allows you to compare metrics from different periods and enables you to monitor metrics in detail, allowing you to adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.
How to use for social media marketing:
Since Google Analytics mainly focus on user data, it’s helpful in gauging how effective your social media campaigns are, and how your social media accounts are being used in the whole buying process.
GA has the acquisition tab where you can group various marketing channels (organic, direct, social media, email, etc.) and check real-time data about user acquisition, behavior, and more.
The tool shows data from all of your social media accounts and the exact numbers that each of them generated. It allows you to see traffic coming from each social network which will help you determine which ones are contributing the most to your business. By manually setting the goal, you can check the acquisition, bounce rate, and even conversion rate.
Another great use for it is that you can detect high-performing website content and see where the traffic on the page comes from in detail. This will let you know which content works for what channel.
Google also has a free course that lets you learn everything you need to know about Google Analytics.
