SEMrush vs Ahrefs: An Honest Review After 5+ Years of Use 

Keyword research is the most basic of SEO tasks—and arguably the most important. Choose the right keywords and you can make a lot of money. Choose poorly and you can waste a lot of time and money.

Both keyword research tools perform equally. My favorite keyword research method is the content gap analysis, which both tools have. So let's pit them together - Ahrefs vs SEMrush!

For the sake of consistency, we'll use https://www.thewanderingrv.com/ as the primary domain and gorving.com as the competitor.

In the first corner, we have Ahrefs, with 1,188 keywords found:

In the second corner, we have SEMrush, with 17,830 keywords found:

SEMrush is the obvious winner here. You may need to do more filtering, as Ahrefs' built-in filters get rid of a lot of crap keywords, but overall SEMrush wins.

Now let's compare SEMrush's Keyword Magic tool to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. 

We'll use the keyword "weighted blanket" to find ideas (my wife wants one so it's on my mind!).

If we compare broad match with all potential keyword ideas, we get 20,787 keywords from Ahrefs.

SEMrush, on the other hand, brings us 12,129 keywords.

This time it seems Ahrefs is the winner. I also really like Ahrefs' categories to break down the keywords by "Newly Discovered", "Questions", "Phrase match", etc. 

There are other methods of keyword research you can do with each of the tools, but in all my years as an SEO I've barely used them, so I'll leave the comparison as-is.

Next we have another crucial SEO task: Analyzing competitor backlinks.

Backlink analysis helps you find link building opportunities, catch bad links to disavow, and see which of your pages has the highest authority for internal linking, among other things.

Here's Ahrefs backlink report for our page https://www.thewanderingrv.com/rv-accessories/. It returns 137 backlinks from 40 referring domains.

I know this is accurate because I personally built the majority of these links. Typically, after building a link to one of my pages, I would see it in Ahrefs within a few days to a week or so depending on the linking site's domain authority and crawl budget.

Now let's compare this to SEMrush:

SEMrush picked up 161 backlinks but only 17 referring domains. From what I can tell, SEMrush didn't pick up very low-authority sites like getcouponnow.com. But they also didn't pick up the highest authority site on the list—bigcommerce.com—with a domain authority (DA) of 91. Very odd, and I'm not sure why.

I checked a few other pages as well to test this theory. Some pages Ahrefs told me I had over 10 links, yet SEMrush didn't pick up a single one—even from sites like sumo.com with a DA of 83!

When it comes to topic research, I prefer to brainstorm keywords first, topics second. That way I know every page on my site has a target keyword it can rank for.

However, sometimes you need to create content strictly for link-building purposes or as social media fodder. In those cases, Ahrefs Content Explorer tool (and SEMrush's equivalent Topic Research tool) really come in handy.

Ahrefs recently unveiled Content Explorer 2.0, with a bunch of upgrades to their former 1.0 version. Specifically, Sam Oh says you can use this tool for:

• Trends data
• Data-driven content research
• Broken link building

The broken link building feature, in particular, is unique to Ahrefs and it's awesome. But rather than comparing results or explaining how these work, here's a video from Sam Oh who explains it much better than I could:

But what about SEMrush's Topic Research tool? Well, it may not be quite as robust as Ahrefs, but there are still plenty of great uses.

Below is a video by SEMrush sharing how to use their tool. It's not nearly as clean or concise as Ahrefs, unfortunately, but if you want to learn it's worth watching.

Let's be real—neither of these tools was built to be a technical auditing tool. They have the feature, but it's only a basic audit. For deep technical SEO audits, you're better off using a tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl.

But since they both offer it, let's compare!

Running Ahrefs site audit on https://www.thewanderingrv.com/ I get these results:

The tool gave our site an 89% health score out of 2,657 crawled URLs. It says 164 internal URLs have errors. Here are some of those errors:

These errors range from "information" (the orange "i" icons) like 3XX redirects to warnings (the red "!" icons) like missing meta descriptions.

If you click on one of these items, it will often have an explanation of what it is and how to fix it.

Overall, Ahrefs site auditing tool is easy to understand and use. It provides enough basic information to see glaring technical errors and even teaches newbie SEOs how to fix them, which is a plus!

Now, here are the results from the same site's SEO audit using SEMrush:

It shows a similar "Health Score" at 86%. But the first thing I notice (and really like) is that the dashboard shows you the errors and warning right away. If you click the red or orange numbers, it will take you straight to what's wrong with the site

Compared to Ahrefs, this is easier to navigate, in my opinion.

Similar to Ahrefs, you can click on the issue to figure out what it is and how to fix it. Here's an example:

And here's an overview of some of the warnings SEMrush gave me:

One of my favorite features of any SEO tool is rank tracking! Few things are as exciting as watching your keyword rankings go up from your efforts. (Or maybe that's just me being an SEO nerd?)

Ahrefs Rank Tracker tool allows you to add a "Project" and track rankings for specific keywords on specific websites.

You can also keep an eye on competitor's rankings, as well as see rankings only in certain locations or on certain devices, your average position across all tracker keywords, how much traffic you get, and more.

Overall, this is a feature I use often, especially with clients, to see how well my efforts are paying off and to warn me of sudden ranking drops. Then I can check to see if it's a technical issue, Google penalty, or a competitor stealing the rankings.

It's not 100% accurate, of course, but it's pretty damn close.

SEMrush's data is about the same; it shows roughly the same positions as the Ahrefs' rank tracking tool across my tracked keywords. It has many of the same features, including competitor tracking and location- or device-based rankings.

Both Ahrefs and SEMrush have browser extensions that help you quickly evaluate a website's domain authority, estimated backlinks, and other basic data.

The big difference is that SEOquake (SEMrush's browser extension) is free, which Ahrefs SEO Toolbar only works with a paid account.

Here's what the SEOquake bar looks like:

Sorry if it's hard to see. Basically, it shows the number of pages on Google's index for that site, the number of backlinks pointing to that particular page, and the site's Alexa rank and age.

Honestly, most of this information isn't that useful. I don't even use Alexa rank and I think most SEOs don't these days (remember, this is a toolbar that started in 2007 before the Penguin update when SEO was all about link spam).

Let's compare that to Ahrefs toolbar:

Their browser extension shows page-level stats (# of backlinks & referring domains, estimates search traffic, estimated # of keywords it ranks for, and the URL rating) as well as domain-level stats (same things but domain-level) and the Ahrefs rank, which is Ahrefs own way of calculating how strong a domain is.

At a glance, these stats are much more useful to me. If you click any of them, they open in Ahrefs and you can see more detailed information.

Of course, both tools have a lot of other functions, like seeing stats on the SERP page, but I won't get into too much detail there as I honestly don't use it enough. (Not to say it's a bad feature, but I just use Keywords Everywhere, a free browser extension that gives similar information.)

Conclusion

SEMrush's toolbar just seems dated and not that useful. Ahrefs is the winner for me. (Though you do have to pay for it!)

User interface is important to me. I like when my tools look as good as they work, and it makes my life easier seeing crucial information in easy-to-digest charts and graphs at a glance.

Ahrefs' UI is fantastic. Other than their site audit tool, all of their other SEO tools present information in a really easy-to-understand way and their features are intuitive and easy to use.

Here are a few pictures of their different tools and UIs:

Dashboard

Site Explorer

Keywords Explorer

SEMrush, on the other hand, is a bit dated. And because they have so many features, it can be hard to learn the tool and know everything it does. It's all over the place.

Here are some similar images of the various SEO tools SEMrush has:

Dashboard

Domain Overview

Keyword Magic Tool

Alright, so what's all this gonna cost?

First up we have Ahrefs, with four plans you can choose from:

I currently subscribe to their "Standard" plan at $179. I used to have their Advanced plan, but couldn't justify the cost once we started taking on fewer clients.

Their Lite plan is not enough, in my opinion. It limits you pretty heavily. Mainly, you can only see the keyword positions up to position 20 and you can't see the recent or historical index, so you can see keyword position movements over time.

There are other limitations as well, but I won't get into all that here. Just know the Standard plan is the way to go.

Note: Annual billing saves you 20%. This changes the prices to $82, $149, $332, and $832 per month, respectively.

Now let's look at SEMrush's pricing:

The SEMrush Pro level plan doesn't feel as limited as Ahref's Lite plan. The only big limitations are seeing historical keyword data and comparing rankings by location or device (i.e. mobile vs desktop).

Note: Paying annually reduces these costs to $83, $166, and $333 per month, respectively.

Conclusion

Both tools charge very similar prices, with SEMrush being slightly more expensive. However, the Lite version of Ahrefs is a bit more limited than the corresponding Pro version of SEMrush.