SE Ranking and SpyFu are two of the most popular tools in the SEO marketplace. SpyFu has created a niche for itself in the competitor analysis space, while SE Ranking has quickly garnered a reputation for being a comprehensive SEO tool.

They are also two of the most economically priced tools on the market.

So which tool is better? Which tool should you buy? Let’s find out!

In this article, I’ll compare SE Ranking with SpyFu and help you decide which SEO tool you should go for.

I’ll be evaluating these tools on the following parameters:

• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• PPC analysis
• Pricing plans

Let’s get started.

Introduction to SE Ranking and SpyFu

If you’re already aware of these tools, you can skip this section and move over to the comparison of keyword research features. For those of you who are not, here’s a brief overview of SE Ranking and SpyFu.

SE Ranking: Overview

SE Ranking is a cloud-based SEO platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and online marketing professionals. Launched in 2013, SE Ranking’s headquartered in London, UK, with offices in the US, Ukraine, and Belarus.

SE Ranking offers a complete set of tools for SEO audit, keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, and much more.

While it’s relatively new compared to other SEO tools on the market, SE Ranking has quickly gained a stellar reputation in the SEO community and is currently used by over 400,000 users across the world.

SE Ranking offers 3 pricing plans and its basic plan starts at $39/month (more on this in the pricing section.) You can sign up for a 2-week free trial on any of the three plans.

I’d encourage you to sign up for a free trial as it’ll allow you to implement some of the action items discussed in this article.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

SpyFu: Overview

Founded in 2006, SpyFu is somewhat of a veteran in the marketplace of SEO tools. As you may have already guessed, SpyFu lets you spy on your competitors’ online strategies and analytics. You can use it to gather insights on your organic as well as paid competitors.

SpyFu collects its data from Google search results in the US and UK. As such, the tool won’t show you data outside of these countries, which is a major drawback of the tool.

SpyFu offers a free forever plan and two paid plans. There’s no free trial offered on any of their paid plans, but the free plan is useful in providing you with surface-level data on your competitors. So I’d urge you to sign up for their free plan to get a deeper understanding of some of the features discussed below.

SpyFu (Free Plan)

Sign up for SpyFu's free plan and get access to basic features.

Sign up for SpyFu

With that quick intro of the two tools out of the way, it’s now time to put these tools to the test.

Let’s start by reviewing their keyword research features.

Keyword Research: SE Ranking vs SpyFu

Keyword research is the most fundamental aspect of SEO. In order to have a deeper understanding of what keywords your target audience is searching for, you need to develop a keyword research framework.

A strong keyword research framework allows you to align your goals with your strategy. This is where competent SEO tools step in and empower you with the necessary data and intelligence required to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs).

In this section, we’ll compare keyword research features offered by SE Ranking and SpyFu and find out which tool is more suited for this all-important SEO task.

SE Ranking: Keyword Research Features

When you enter your seed keywords in SE Ranking, you’ll get an overview of important keyword metrics for your keywords like search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC.

But the real value of this tool is in the keyword variations it provides for your seed keywords.

You’ll find these keyword variations grouped into 3 categories — similar keywords, related keywords, and low search volume keywords.

For a deeper analysis of the keywords, you can either click the “Keyword suggestions” tab in the sidebar or hit the “View Detailed Report” button under each column.

You’ll find a complete list of keyword variations for your seed keywords, alongside important keyword metrics.

You can apply filters to arrive at the most relevant keyword ideas for your site.

In the overview report, you’ll also find the top 5 organic search results for your seed keywords, alongside traffic stats and the total number of keywords they rank for.

These are the top 5 ranking pages for your target keywords on Google. These are the pages you’ll be competing against if you decide to target these keywords (and their variations) in your campaign.

To view more organic search results, simply click on the “View Detailed Report” button. This will open up the full report and you can analyze all the top pages that are ranking for your target keywords.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

SpyFu: Keyword Research Features

There are two ways you can do keyword research on SpyFu: you can either perform traditional keyword research or do competitor-based keyword research. SpyFu is better at the latter than the former, and you’re more likely to find keywords with traffic potential by doing analysis of your competitors’ domains.

When you enter your competitor’s domain in SpyFu, you’ll get an overview report featuring your competitor’s top organic and paid keywords.

To get a complete list of keywords, hit the “View All Organic Keywords” link below the top keywords column.

Once you’ve generated a list of keywords your competitor currently ranks for, you can use the filters on top to narrow down the list and target keywords that you can realistically rank for.

You can also perform traditional keyword research by entering your seed keywords in the SpyFu search box.

SpyFu will then generate a keyword research overview report featuring keyword metrics like monthly volume and estimated clicks. You’ll also find similar keywords and question-based keywords for your seed keywords, alongside monthly search volume.

To view more keyword variations, click on the “View all” link below each of these columns. You can also hit the “Related Keywords” tab in the sidebar to land on the same report.

Which Tool is Better for Keyword Research?

SE Ranking is a far superior tool for keyword research. While SpyFu is helpful for churning out competitor-based keywords, SE Ranking provides better keyword variations and more thorough data for those keywords.

It’s also easier to do keyword research in SE Ranking and the slick UI ensures that you get the right keyword data in a quicker and more efficient manner.

Winner: SE Ranking

Competitor Analysis: SE Ranking vs SpyFu

If you’d like to stay ahead of the curve, you need to devote some time to competitor analysis. Why? Because you get to learn what keywords your main competitors are ranking for, what kind of ads they are running, and more importantly, the level of engagement their content receives.

Competitor analysis will help you uncover deep insights into what you’re doing right and what you could be doing to outrank your chief rivals in search results.

Both SE Ranking and SpyFu have nifty features when it comes to competitor analysis. Let’s quickly run through some of these features and determine which tool does it better.

SE Ranking: Competitor Analysis Features

SE Ranking has all the necessary features required to conduct competitor analysis.

Hit the “Competitor Research” tab and enter your main competitor’s domain in the search box.

SE Ranking will generate an overview report featuring data on your competitor’s organic traffic and paid traffic.

To deep dive into your competitor’s organic keywords, scroll down till you find the “Organic Keywords” column and hit “View Detailed Report.”

You’ll get a full list of keywords your competitor is currently ranking for.

Use the advanced filtering options here to get the data you’re looking for.

To see your competitor’s top-ranking pages, hit the “Pages” link in the sidebar.

This will show you pages on your competitor’s site that get the most search traffic.

You’ll see the traffic share and traffic estimations for each page. You can also view all the keywords each page ranks for.

The Top Pages report will reveal those pages and posts on your competitor’s site that receive the most search traffic. Spend some time in this report, visit these pages, analyze them in detail, and then decide for yourself whether you can reverse-engineer some of these pages, improve upon the content, and in the process, steal some of their organic traffic.

SpyFu: Competitor Analysis Features

SpyFu’s true strength resides in competitive analysis.

Enter your competitor’s domain in the search box to get a quick overview of the domain’s top organic keywords, estimated SEO clicks, paid keywords, estimated PPC clicks, and other metrics.

You’ll also see your competitor’s top pages:

These are the pages that are generating the most search traffic. Pay special attention to this section of the report as these are the pages you’d want to replicate and improve upon on your site.

You’ll also see “Top AdWords Buy Recommendations” — these are keyword recommendations based on your competitor’s success in Google Ads.

And your competitor’s advertising history.

If you run ads on Google, then this data should really help you scale up your campaigns.

Which Tool is Better for Competitor Analysis?

Competitor analysis is easier to do in SE Ranking and the reports are more accurate and relevant.

If we were doing this comparison in 2019, then SpyFu would definitely emerge as the winner. But in 2020, SE Ranking has added a host of new features and data points to present a far more comprehensive picture of your competitors’ top organic keywords, backlink profile, and best-ranking pages.

Winner: SE Ranking

PPC Analysis: SE Ranking vs SpyFu

Do you use Google Ads to drive traffic to your website? Then you probably need a reliable tool to arm you with data that can help you run effective campaigns on Google and create ads that resonate with your target audience.

Let’s take a deeper look at the PPC features offered by SE Ranking and SpyFu and find out which tool is more adept at PPC analysis.

SE Ranking: PPC Analysis

When you enter your target keywords in SE Ranking, you’ll see the estimated CPC for those keywords in the overview report.

You also get to see the paid results for your target keywords.

To view paid results for your seed keywords, hit the “Paid results” link in the sidebar.

The report will show you all the domains that are bidding for your target keywords on Google Ads.

To view the ad copies, just move your cursor over the “Ad” button against each site.

That’s the extent of SE Ranking’s PPC analysis capabilities. While you can get a decent amount of keywords to target for your PPC campaigns, the PPC intelligence that’s necessary to make informed advertising decisions is sadly lacking.

SpyFu: PPC Analysis

In contrast to SE Ranking, SpyFu has a lot more features for PPC analysis. In addition to providing you in-depth data on paid keywords and PPC ads, you also get access to features like AdWords Advisor and AdWords Templates.

To perform PPC research on SpyFu, hit the “PPC Research” tab from the top menu, and enter your competitor’s domain.

SpyFu will then generate a PPC overview report featuring that domain’s paid keywords, estimated monthly PPC clicks, monthly PPC budget, and other PPC metrics.

Below this data, you’ll find a wealth of PPC keyword data in the “Top AdWords Buy Recommendations” and “Most Successful Advertisers and Their Best Ads” sections.

Hit “See All Recommendations” below the column to view more AdWords keyword recommendations.

The other useful PPC feature in SpyFu is the AdWords Templates. These are pre-written PPC ads handcrafted by the SpyFu team to get your Google Ads campaigns up and running.

To access these templates, head over to:

PPC Research > AdWords Templates > Select Industry from the drop-down list > Continue to download

This will start the download of all ad templates for that specific industry. You can then import these templates to your Google Ads account.

Note: To access AdWords Templates, you need to upgrade to SpyFu’s basic plan ($39/mo).

Which Tool is Better for PPC Analysis?

With features like AdWords Advisor and AdWords Templates, SpyFu provides a better bang for the buck if you’re evaluating this tool purely from a PPC perspective.

SE Ranking is good for surface-level PPC data, but for deeper insights and more actionable recommendations, you’re better off signing up for SpyFu.

Winner: SpyFu

Pricing Plans: SE Ranking vs SpyFu

Both SE Ranking and SpyFu are two of the most economically priced tools in the SEO marketplace. They break away from the standard industry practice of charging close to $100 for the basic plan.

Let’s quickly examine the pricing plans offered by SE Ranking and SpyFu.

SE Ranking Pricing Plans

SE Ranking offers 3 pricing plans:

• Essential – $39/mo (250 keyword rankings, 10 websites)
• Pro – $89/mo (1000 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)
• Business – 189/mo (2500 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)

* The prices on the above plans change based on the number of keyword rankings you select. For instance, if you’d like to track 500 keyword rankings in the Optimum plan, the pricing changes to $54/mo. You can save 20% on any plan by switching to annual billing.

If you’re an SEO beginner or run a small business or blog, then the Essential plan ($39/mo) should do the trick. It includes all the features we’ve discussed above. As it’s the basic plan, there are certain limitations on the data you can access. For instance, you can only monitor up to 5,000 backlinks and run an audit for 25,000 pages.

If you’re an agency owner or part of a company that’s scaling up, then you should go with the Pro plan ($89/mo). This plan allows you to add unlimited websites, audit 100,000 pages, and monitor up to 25,000 backlinks. You also get access to advanced reporting features.

If you’re part of a large organization, then opt for the Business plan ($189/mo). With this plan, you can audit up to 250,000 pages, monitor 75,000 backlinks, and get access to SE Ranking’s API.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

SpyFu Pricing Plans

The best part about SpyFu is that you can start using it for free and perform unlimited searches. But as with any free plan, there are several restrictions. To unlock more data and access advanced features, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans.

Here’s SpyFu’s current pricing structure:

• Free for Life – $0/mo (unlimited searches, 10 search results)
• Basic – $39/mo (unlimited search results, 5k weekly tracked keyword rankings)
• Professional – $78/mo (15k weekly tracked keyword rankings, custom branded reports)

You can save $69 on the basic plan and $249 on the professional plan by opting for annual billing.

SpyFu (Free Plan)

Sign up for SpyFu's free plan and get access to basic features.

Sign up for SpyFu

Final Verdict: SE Ranking vs SpyFu

Despite competing in the same space, SE Ranking and SpyFu are vastly different SEO tools. SpyFu is a decent competitor research and PPC analysis tool. On the other hand, SE Ranking is a powerful all-purpose SEO software that includes tools for website audit, competitor research, keyword research, PPC analysis, among other things.

If you’re looking for an SEO tool that has all the essential features to help you rank higher in SERPs, then you should definitely consider SE Ranking. As explained in detail above, SE Ranking beats SpyFu on keyword research and competitor research parameters. Plus, you also get access to must-have features like Site Audit, Backlink Checker, and On-Page SEO Checker.

That said, if you’re looking for a competitor research tool with advanced PPC analysis features, then SpyFu is a better choice. SE Ranking’s PPC analysis features are simply not up to scratch.

In the end, the choice between SE Ranking and SpyFu comes down to your priority at the moment. If PPC is a higher priority than SEO for you, then go with SpyFu. But if your need of the hour is SEO, then SE Ranking gives the best overall value. And with plans starting at $39/month, it’s easy on the pockets as well.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

SpyFu (Free Plan)

Sign up for SpyFu's free plan and get access to basic features.

Sign up for SpyFu

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Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 17 September 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance, freshness, and comprehensiveness. 

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The post SE Ranking vs SpyFu: Which SEO Tool is Better? appeared first on 99signals.

Having trouble deciding between SE Ranking and Moz? Then this article is for you.

In this post, I’ll compare SE Ranking and Moz on their key features and help you decide which SEO software is worth investing in.

Both platforms have tools for keyword research, competitor research, and SEO audit. But which one is better? Let’s find out!

I’ll be comparing SE Ranking and Moz in terms of:

• Keyword research
• SEO audit
• Competitor research
• Pricing plans

Without further delay, let’s dive right in.

Editor’s note: Before we get started, make sure you sign up for free trials offered by both these tools so you can implement some of the action items discussed in this post. Since you’re on the verge of buying one of them, I’d encourage you to explore their key features before making the final call.

• Sign up for a 2-week free trial of SE Ranking
• Sign up for a 1-month free trial of Moz Pro

Introduction to SE Ranking and Moz

SE Ranking is a cloud-based SEO platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and online marketing professionals. Launched in 2013, SE Ranking’s headquartered in London, UK, with offices in USA, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.

SE Ranking comprises of a complete set of SEO tools for in-depth site audit, keyword research, keyword rank tracking, competitor analysis (both SEO and PPC), backlink checking, and much more.

While it’s relatively new compared to other cloud-based SEO tools on the market, including Moz, SE Ranking has created a niche for itself and is currently used by over 400,000 users across the world.

Moz, on the other hand, is an industry heavyweight. The company was founded by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig in 2004. Initially called SEOmoz, it was launched as an SEO blog and an online community where some of the world’s first SEO experts shared their research and ideas. It then transformed into an SEO consulting firm before finally being launched as a full-fledged SEO software. The company rebranded from SEOmoz to Moz in 2013.

Like SE Ranking, Moz is an all-in-one SEO platform that includes tools for keyword research, website audit, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and more.

Now that you’ve been introduced to both these tools, let’s kickstart the comparison, starting with keyword research.

Keyword Research: SE Ranking vs Moz

Keyword research is the most important aspect of SEO. If you’d like to create content that resonates with your audience and rank higher in search results, you need to choose the right keywords. To make this task easier, it’s always better to have a trusted SEO tool by your side.

Let’s compare SE Ranking and Moz on their keyword research features and find out which tool is better suited for keyword research.

SE Ranking: Keyword Research Features

Let’s quickly examine some of SE Ranking’s top keyword research features.

To get started with keyword research on SE Ranking, click on the “Keyword Research” tab and enter your seed keyword(s) in the search box. Select the search engine and country from the drop-down next to the search box and hit the “Analyze” button.

SE Ranking will then provide you with a quick overview report of important keyword metrics for your seed keywords, including search volume, difficulty, and CPC.

Below the keyword metrics, you’ll find different keyword ideas generated from your seed keywords, grouped into 3 categories — similar keywords, related keywords, and low search volume keywords.

While this keyword data is great for a quick analysis of your target keywords, the real value of the keyword research tool lies with the complete list of keywords.

To see the complete keyword list, click on “View Detailed Report” under any of the sections or simply click on the “Keyword Suggestions” tab on the left side menu.

Click on any of the keywords here to get information regarding search volume and difficulty on the right side of the report. You can also view the top ranking pages for the selected keywords, so you have data on who you’re competing against in organic SERPs.

If you’d like to see PPC campaign data for your target keywords, simply click the “Paid results” tab on the left side menu.

Here you’ll find a list of websites that are bidding for your target keywords on Google Ads.

You can view the ad copies by clicking on the “Ad” button against each website.

Moz: Keyword Research Features

To get started with keyword research on Moz, navigate to:

Moz Pro > Research Tools > Keyword Explorer

Type in your seed keywords in the search box, select the location, and hit “Analyze.”

Moz will then generate a Keyword Overview report with keyword metrics for your seed keywords, including monthly search volume, difficulty, organic CTR, and priority.

Below the keyword metrics, you’ll find the panels for Keyword Suggestions, SERP Analysis (top 3 pages for your target keywords), and Mentions.

To view more keyword suggestions for your target keywords, click on “See all suggestions” at the bottom of the panel.

Use the advanced filters in this report to get the most relevant keyword data for your website.

Which SEO Tool is Better for Keyword Research?

I personally find SE Ranking’s keyword research reports to be better structured and easier to understand. My only gripe with SE Ranking’s Keyword Research tool is that you can’t generate a list of question-based keywords for your seed keywords.

Moz’s Keyword Explorer, on the other hand, is a cluttered mess. Once the overview report is generated, you’ll have to sift through the keyword data manually or use the advanced filtering options to get what you’re looking for. In other words, it takes too many clicks to identify the right keywords for your campaign.

The other thing about Moz is that it provides a monthly search volume range for your keywords, as opposed to the exact monthly search volume.

While this is acceptable for high-volume keywords like “social media marketing”, the data gets really vague when you type in low-volume and long-tail keywords.

Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to see the exact search volume for the keywords I’m targeting.

And finally, SE Ranking’s keyword research tools have more PPC features than Moz’s Keyword Explorer. If you run PPC campaigns for your business or clients, Moz’s keyword research reports don’t have anything of substance.

Winner: SE Ranking

SEO Audit: SE Ranking vs Moz

If you’d like to rank on page 1 of Google consistently, you need to perform routine SEO audits on your site to identify and fix all the critical SEO errors that show up. To that end, most SEO tools have site audit features to help you fix all the common SEO issues that prevent your site from ranking higher in SERPs.

Both SE Ranking and Moz have site audit features to help you with this critical SEO task.

Let’s put these SEO audit features to the test and find out which tool is more adept in identifying, and fixing, the most troubling SEO errors.

SE Ranking: SEO Audit Features

Your site is automatically audited as soon as you add a new project on SE Ranking.

To run a fresh audit, go to:

Projects > Website Audit > Restart Site Audit

The audit will take a few seconds, or if your site has many pages, a few minutes.

You’ll then receive a sneak preview of your SEO audit report with your site’s SEO health score, important fixes, and semi-important fixes.

Below the site audit preview, you’ll find information concerning domain characteristics, SEO metrics, and index status.

Scroll down to see your complete site audit report. Important fixes are highlighted in red and semi-important fixes in yellow.

Navigate to each section of the report — Health check, Pages analysis, Meta analysis, and so on — to view important and semi-important fixes along with recommendations. Click on the link icon against each error to view all the pages with that specific error.

Pay special attention to important fixes as these are the most critical SEO errors on your site that require prompt fixes.

Moz: SEO Audit Features

To run a fresh site audit on Moz, visit your existing Site Crawl Overview report and click on the “Recrawl my site” button.

You’ll then be presented with the Site Crawl overview report. First, you’ll see a breakdown of the total pages crawled, the number of new issues, issues grouped into five categories, and the total number of issues.

Below the graphs, you’ll find the top 5 new issues discovered in the latest site crawl.

Click on any of the issues to see all the pages associated with that issue type. If you’d like to view more issues, click on “See all new issues” at the bottom of the panel.

Next, you’ll find the “All Issues” graph. Pay attention to critical issues (highlighted in red) and warnings (highlighted in yellow).

Fix all the critical issues before moving on to warnings and other issues.

And finally, you’ll find a neat little section called “Moz Recommends Fixing” where SEO experts from Moz guide you towards the best way to fix 3 key issues on your site.

Click on “Review issues of this type” under each recommendation to review all the pages that have the specific error.

Which SEO Tool is Better for SEO Audit?

As much as I like the “Moz Recommends Fixing” section of Moz’s site crawl report and have SEO expert Dr. Peter J. Meyers provide a few actionable recommendations, Moz’s site audit reports simply lack the nuance and depth that SE Ranking provides with its site audit reports.

Moz provides a very basic summary of errors on your site while SE Ranking digs deeper to find errors that you never even thought existed.

For instance, I was not aware that my site was plagued with URLs without trailing slashes:

And performance issues like these:

Furthermore, the information presented on SE Ranking is meticulously arranged as compared to the hodgepodge of data on Moz.

UI is a super critical factor for me, especially when I’m scanning through the site audit report, and SE Ranking makes it easier to identify, and fix, the critical SEO issues on your site.

So when it comes to SEO audit features, SE Ranking is much better.

Winner: SE Ranking

Competitor Research: SE Ranking vs Moz

Regardless of your industry or niche, there are bound to be other businesses that offer similar products, services, or content to yours.

So any insight you can gather on your competitors helps you gain an edge over them in SERPs. A complex task like competitor research is made easier by using the right SEO tool.

Let’s find out which tool offers better competitor research features.

SE Ranking: Competitor Research Features

To get started with competitor research on SE Ranking, click on the “Competitor Research” tab and type in your competitor’s domain in the search box. Select the country and hit the “Analyze” button.

The overview report contains a top-level view of your competitor’s organic traffic and paid traffic.

Scroll down to see your competitor’s top organic keywords and distribution of organic keyword rankings.

To view more organic keywords, hit “View Detailed Report” at the bottom of the panel to see a complete list of organic keywords.

This will open up the organic research report, which shows the estimated organic traffic, organic keywords, and a breakdown of all the keywords your competitor’s site is currently ranking for. Play around with the filters to get the most relevant data for your research.

The overview report also shows pages that get the largest volume of search traffic from Google. Click on “View Detailed Report” to view all the top organic pages.

Take note of the pages driving the highest organic traffic as you can reverse-engineer these pages to create content on topics with massive traffic potential.

Next, the overview report shows your competitor’s top 5 paid keywords. Hit “View Detailed Report” for more details.

This will open up the paid research report. Here you’ll find information on your competitor’s estimated paid traffic and the number of paid keywords, along with a complete list of paid keywords. Adjust the filters to get the information you’re looking for.

Alternatively, if you’re not sure who you’re competing with in organic search results, you can simply type in your domain in the competitor research search bar and navigate to the “Organic Competitors” section of the report.

Here you’ll find your top 5 organic competitors. These are the websites that are competing for the same keywords as your site in search result pages.

Click on the “View Detailed Report” button to see more organic competitors for your domain. Click on any of these competitors’ domains to get a thorough organic research report for their website.

You can also leverage SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker tool to check your competitors’ backlinks and replicate the best ones.

To do this, Visit the “Backlink Checker” tab and type in your competitor’s domain in the search box.

This will open up the backlink overview report containing information on the number of referring domains, backlinks, dofollow/nofollow ratio, and so on.

Click on the Referring Domains number to see a list of domains that are linking to your competitor’s site.

Play around with the advanced filtering options to get the most relevant backlink data. These are the backlinks you’d want to replicate for your own site.

Moz: Competitor Research Features

There’s no separate tool/section within the Moz toolkit for competitor research. So you’d have to use a combination of keyword research and link research features to obtain the data you need.

I’ve already explored Keyword Explorer while comparing these tools’ keyword research features. While doing competitor analysis, focus on the SERP features of the keyword overview report to view all the pages that are ranking for your target keywords. To view all the organic results on Google page 1, hit “See full analytics” at the bottom of the panel.

These are the pages your site will be competing against in organic results.

To view your competitors’ link profile, click on “Link Research” and type in your competitor’s domain in the search box.

Click on the Linking Domains number to view all the domains that are linking to your competitor’s site.

Select the arrow under Top Links to view all the top pages from that domain to your competitor’s site.

This data is extremely crucial if you’re looking to steal your competitors’ best backlinks through link building outreach campaigns.

Which Tool is Better for Competitor Research?

When it comes to competitor research, I like to look at three things:

1. The accuracy of the data.
2. The presentation of the data.
3. The ease with which you can obtain the data.

SE Ranking checks all 3 options, whereas Moz checks only 1 — the first one.

For the most part, the link research data obtained from Moz is highly accurate. But it’s just the way the data is presented and there are a whole lot of steps involved in getting the data you need. If you’re a novice SEO user, you’d be confused as to where to begin.

On the other hand, SE Ranking’s competitor analysis features are great, but I wish there was an option to analyze your competitors’ social media performance as well. I’d also have loved to see my competitor’s referring domains included in the competitor research report itself.

These minor issues aside, SE Ranking is better suited for competitor research than Moz.

Pricing Plans: SE Ranking vs Moz

Now let’s compare the pricing plans offered by both these tools.

SE Ranking: Pricing Plans

SE Ranking currently offers 3 pricing plans:

• Optimum – $39/mo (250 keyword rankings, 10 websites)
• Plus – $89/mo (1000 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)
• Enterprise – 189/mo (2500 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)

* The prices on the above plans change based on the number of keyword rankings you select. For instance, if you’d like to track 500 keyword rankings in the Optimum plan, the pricing changes to $54/mo.

The standard pricing practice in the SEO industry is to charge $99/mo for the basic plan. I’m glad SE Ranking deviates from that.

If you’re a solopreneur or run a blog-based business, the Optimum plan ($39/mo) should be sufficient for your requirements. You’ll get access to most of the features, albeit with a few limitations.

If you run an agency or have more websites and data to analyze, you should probably opt for the Plus plan ($89/mo).

You can save 20% on any plan by switching to annual billing.

If you’re not sure which SE Ranking plan is more suited for your needs, use the pricing plan calculator on their pricing page.

Moz: Pricing Plans

Here’s the pricing structure followed by Moz:

• Standard – $99/mo (3 campaigns, 300 keyword rankings)
• Medium – $179/mo (10 campaigns, 800 keyword rankings)
• Large – $249/mo (25 campaigns, 1900 keyword rankings)
• Premium – $999/mo (50 campaigns, 4500 keyword rankings)

Moz’s pricing plans start at $99/mo. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial on any of their plans.

So which tool provides more bang for your buck?

I’d have to go with SE Ranking.

SE Ranking’s basic plan is $60 cheaper than Moz’s basic plan, when billed monthly.

SE Ranking lets you add 10 projects versus 3 projects on Moz. Which means you can perform deep analysis of more websites on SE Ranking than Moz.

Furthermore, if you run an agency and need to prepare branded reports for your clients, you can get access to these features at a much lesser cost at SE Ranking.

Final Verdict: SE Ranking vs Moz

From keyword research to SEO audit to competitive analysis, SE Ranking is a far superior tool. SE Ranking’s revamped UI makes it easier to use and find the data you’re looking for. I also found SE Ranking to be more beginner-friendly.

Moz’s free tools (MozBar Chrome extension, Check My Presence Online, etc.) are incredibly useful and their blog content is outstanding. Dr Pete’s blog posts and Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday videos contain super actionable stuff and can really help you expand your SEO knowledge.

Ever since Google retired its PageRank metric to indicate a site’s importance, Moz’s domain authority metric has taken its place. The ranking score is widely accepted in the SEO community as the next best thing, used even by SE Ranking in their reports.

But as an SEO platform, Moz leaves a lot to be desired. The clunky and cluttered interface and the lack of depth in many of their reports make you wonder why you’re paying a premium price for a tool that’s simply not worth that much.

Bottom line: SE Ranking provides more bang for your buck and includes several features and reports that are lacking in Moz.

To summarize, here’s a visual breakdown of how SE Ranking compares with Moz on key parameters:

Here are the free trial links to both these tools to help you get started:

Sign up for a 2-week free trial of SE Ranking

Sign up for a 1-month free trial of Moz Pro

If you found this article useful, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 9 July 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

Related Articles

• Ahrefs vs SE Ranking: Which SEO Tool Should You Buy?
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• SEO Case Study: How I Boosted Organic Traffic to an Old Article by 146% in 30 Days

The post SE Ranking vs Moz: Which SEO Software is Better? appeared first on 99signals.

Ahrefs and SE Ranking are two of the most widely respected tools in the SEO community.

As such, it’s not easy to decide which SEO tool is worth investing in. Both tools have their strengths and unique features.

In this article, I’ll put Ahrefs and SE Ranking to the test and help you decide which SEO tool is better suited for your business.

I’ll be evaluating these tools on the following parameters:

• Keyword research
• Backlink analysis
• Technical SEO audit
• Pricing plans

Let’s get started.

Editor’s note: If you’d like to implement some of the action items in this post, I’d encourage you to sign up for free trials or plans offered by both these tools. SE Ranking is currently offering a 2-week free trial on any of their plans, while Ahrefs lets you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to get free limited access to Site Explorer and Site Audit.

Introduction to Ahrefs and SE Ranking

Headquartered in Singapore, Ahrefs was founded in 2011 by Dmitry Gerasimenko. For the first few years, Ahrefs was purely a backlink analysis tool.

Within a short period of time, Ahrefs built a sterling reputation in the SEO community and became widely regarded as one of the most accurate backlink analysis tools on the market. Since then, Ahrefs has added a plethora of features to its toolkit.

Fast forward to today, Ahrefs is a multi-purpose SEO tool that includes keyword research, site audit, rank tracker, and other essential SEO capabilities.

SE Ranking was launched in 2013 as a cloud-based SEO platform for entrepreneurs, agencies, and online marketing professionals. SE Ranking is based in London, UK, with offices in USA, Ukraine, and Belarus.

SE Ranking’s toolkit features SEO tools for keyword research, technical SEO audit, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, and more.

In just a few years, SE Ranking has established itself as a serious player in the competitive market space of cloud-based SEO tools. It’s used by over 400,000 users across the world and trusted by small and large businesses alike.

Now that you have a brief overview of both tools, let’s dive in to the comparison, starting with keyword research.

Keyword Research: Ahrefs vs SE Ranking

While most people have a broad sense of the keywords they’d like to rank for, it’s impossible to determine every search query under the sun for your topic. That’s why it pays to invest some time in keyword research to identify the exact keywords that people are using to search for your business, products, or content.

In this section, we’ll be comparing keyword research features offered by Ahrefs and SE Ranking and determine which tool is better than the other.

Ahrefs: Keyword Research Features

There was a time when Keywords Explorer was one of the least used tools in the Ahrefs toolkit. That changed in 2018 with the launch of Keywords Explorer 2.0. Ahrefs added a host of cool new features to their flagship keyword research tool and expanded their keyword database.

While Keywords Explorer is still a distant second to Site Explorer, Ahrefs’ backlink analysis tool, in terms of usage and popularity, it can still churn out a decent amount of keyword ideas with accurate data on search volume, keyword difficulty, clicks, and other SEO metrics.

To get started, head over to the “Keywords explorer” tab from your Ahrefs dashboard and enter your seed keywords in the search box.

Ahrefs will generate an overview report that’ll contain crucial keyword metrics to help you make quick, yet informed decisions about your target keywords.

There are two things that are unique about this report:

First, you get to see your target keyword’s Return Rate (RR). This metric indicates how often the same user searches for a given keyword over a 30-day period.

Second, you get to see the average number of monthly clicks on search results that users make for your target keyword. This metric should not be overlooked as high search volume does not necessarily equate to high search traffic.

For instance, the search query “new york population” has a monthly search volume of 51k searches, but fetches only 4k clicks per month (just over 7% of all searches).

It’s because search queries like “new york population” are typically answered by Google in the featured snippet section.

Which is why few users feel the need to go beyond the featured snippet to explore other search results.

Lots of platforms have since incorporated the “clicks” metric in their keyword research reports, but Ahrefs was the first one to highlight this useful metric.

While you’re still in the overview report, scroll down a bit to find keyword ideas for your seed keywords.

To expand the list of keywords, click on the “View all” button under each section to view a complete list of potential ideas for your seed keywords, alongside important SEO metrics.

You can play around with the filters in this report to obtain the most relevant keywords for your campaign.

The overview report also contains SERP overview for your seed keywords, allowing you to see all the pages that are ranking on page 1 for your parent topic.

Super useful data to learn who you’re competing against in organic SERPs.

To view this data, scroll all the way down till you find the “SERP Overview” section.

In addition to search results, you’ll also see all the high-level SEO metrics for each result that currently ranks on page 1 for your target keywords.

As you can see, Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is remarkably effective for SEO analysis. But what about PPC analysis?

Sadly, Ahrefs provides little to no PPC data. You can find basic PPC information for your seed keywords in the “Ads history” report, but that’s the extent to which Ahrefs helps you in terms of PPC analysis.

SE Ranking: Keyword Research Features

SE Ranking has a massive keyword database with over 2 billion unique search queries and search engine suggestions from Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo. This database is updated on a monthly basis.

To perform keyword research on SE Ranking, visit the “Keyword Research” tab and enter your seed keyword(s) in the search box.

SE Ranking will then generate an overview report for your seed keywords. Here you’ll find important keyword metrics for your keywords, including search volume, difficulty, and CPC.

You’ll then see a list of keyword ideas for your seed keywords, grouped into 3 categories — similar keywords, related keywords, and low search volume keywords.

You can click on any of the keyword terms here to generate a keyword research overview report for those specific keywords.

Expand the list by clicking on the “View Detailed Report” button below each column to see different keyword variations for your target keywords.

If your seed keyword is too broad, this list is particularly useful to niche down and identify keywords with the right mix of search volume and difficulty.

If you’d like more data on any of the keywords in the list, simply select the specific keyword and you’ll be able to see the top organic search results for the selected keyword on the right side of the report.

In addition to SEO keyword metrics, SE Ranking’s keyword research reports can be used to unpack a ton of PPC insights for your target keywords.

While you’re in the overview report, scroll down till you find the “Advertisers” section of the report. You’ll see the top 5 websites that are bidding for your target keywords on Google Ads.

To expand this list, click on “View Detailed Report” or simply visit the “Paid results” tab from the left side menu.

Here you’ll find all the websites that are bidding for your target keywords on Google Ads. You’ll also see the ads they are currently running or have run in the past.

To view the ad copies, click on the “Expand all” button or simply move your cursor over the ad that you’d like to see.

The paid results report will give you a fair indication of the optimal campaign budget you’ll need to overcome your PPC competition and also highlight the kind of ad copies that are performing well on Google Ads.

Ahrefs vs SE Ranking: Which Tool is Better for Keyword Research?

Both tools have excellent keyword research features. You can generate countless keyword ideas for your website and get accurate information on search volume, competition, and keyword difficulty for each keyword.

But SE Ranking has a slight edge over Ahrefs because it offers better PPC insights. PPC analysis has always been a chink in Ahrefs’ armour. I’m hoping the company introduces new features to address this issue in the near future. Until then, if you run PPC ads on Google and Bing, you’ll be disappointed with the lack of PPC features in Ahrefs.

For that reason, I’d definitely place SE Ranking higher than Ahrefs in terms of keyword research.

Winner: SE Ranking

Backlink Analysis: Ahrefs vs SE Ranking

Google considers backlinks as votes of confidence. As a result, there’s a strong correlation between authoritative backlinks and higher search traffic.

As I mentioned earlier, Ahrefs was originally launched as a backlink checker and it has built quite a reputation among SEO experts as the most reliable backlink analysis tool. Despite adding multiple new features and tools to its platform, people still buy Ahrefs for backlink analysis.

So how does SE Ranking’s backlink checker measure up against a tool that’s highly regarded for its backlink analysis capabilities?

Let’s find out.

Ahrefs: Backlink Analysis

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool is best known for providing an in-depth sneak peak at the backlink profile of any website.

You can use Site Explorer for not just auditing your site’s backlink profile, but also to spy on your competitors’ backlinks.

With this tool, you can get a deeper understanding of your competitors’ link building strategies and reverse-engineer backlinks for some of their top-performing pages. In other words, you can identify link building opportunities for your website and outperform your organic competitors in search results.

To get started, click on the “Site explorer” tab from your Ahrefs dashboard and enter the domain you’d like to analyze.

The Overview report will provide a quick glimpse of how well the website is performing in organic and paid search, alongside high-level SEO and backlink metrics.

Pay special attention to the referring domains number as this is the number of unique domains linking to your target website.

In this example, I plugged in “Buffer.com” into Site Explorer and found that it has 77.6k referring domains pointing to their website.

While this number may seem large at first glance, it’s always better to take a deeper look at the pace of link acquisition.

To that end, you can check out the interactive referring domains graph in the overview report to see the rate at which the website has acquired links over a period of time. This graph will clearly show how consistent the target website has been in terms of acquiring links.

To further contextualize this data, you can enter your competitors’ domain into Site Explorer and get insights into their link profile and the pace at which they’ve been acquiring new links.

To get deeper insights into the website’s backlink profile, click on the referring domains number. This report will contain all the unique websites pointing to your target website.

Add a “dofollow” filter to this list and sort by DR (domain rating) from high to low to view the most authoritative websites linking to your target website.

If you’d like to reverse-engineer your competitors’ best backlinks, this is a good place to start.

SE Ranking: Backlink Analysis

Now it’s time to explore SE Ranking’s backlink analysis features.

To analyze backlinks on SE Ranking, head over to the “Backlink Checker” tab and enter the domain you’d like to analyze.

The overview report will provide a sneak peek into the target website’s backlink profile. You’ll find the website’s trust score, anchors, dofollow/nofollow ratio, referring domains, and backlinks.

In the “Referring Domains” column, you’ll see the total number of links that point to the homepage vs. links to other pages.

Scroll down to find interactive graphs for referring domains, backlinks, new & lost referring domains, and new & lost backlinks.

Like with Ahrefs, clicking on the referring domains number will open the referring domains report. Here you’ll find all the unique domains that are linking to your target website.

You can add filters to the report to get the most relevant data and sort by DT (domain trust) from high to low to view all the top-authority websites linking to your target website. But there’s no option or filter to view only “dofollow” backlinks in the report.

While the overview report does show the dofollow/nofollow ratio of any website you enter, you won’t be able to view a filtered list of “dofollow” backlinks.

SE Ranking also appears to have a smaller link index than Ahrefs. Remember how I found 77.6k referring domains for “Buffer.com” on Ahrefs? With SE Ranking, the report showed only 38.1k referring domains pointing to Buffer.

Ahrefs vs SE Ranking: Which Tool is Better for Backlink Analysis

When it comes to backlink analysis, Ahrefs is better than SE Ranking.

Backlink analysis continues to be Ahrefs’ strongest feature. They have a larger link index than SE Ranking, but more importantly, it takes fewer clicks from the overview report to arrive at the data you’re looking for.

Winner: Ahrefs

Technical SEO Audit: Ahrefs vs SE Ranking

While technical SEO may not be as interesting or rewarding as keyword research and link building, it’s just as important. In the grand scheme of things, technical SEO errors pertaining to site structure, XML sitemap, SSL certificate, robots.txt, etc. can hold your site back from ranking higher on Google.

You can prevent these issues by performing regular site audits to make sure your site’s SEO health is up to speed. Luckily, most major SEO tools have built-in site audit features to help you identify and fix technical SEO issues as and when they occur on your website. Ahrefs and SE Ranking are no exception.

Let’s explore the SEO audit features offered by both these tools and find out which tool does a better job at identifying technical SEO errors on your website.

Technical SEO Audit: Ahrefs

Right off the bat, I’d like to make it clear that SEO audit is not one of Ahrefs’ strengths. While the company has made significant strides in improving this tool since its launch, it still leaves a lot to be desired.

For starters, the audit tool takes a long time to crawl your website and return with an audit report. It took well over 2 hours to crawl my site and generate a report. My site has less than 1,000 pages to crawl, so if your site has more pages, it may take even longer.

Secondly, the audit report is not comprehensive enough to make it worth the wait.

Recently, I plugged in a client’s website into Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool. This site was riddled with numerous critical SEO errors. Broken internal links, duplicate title tags, and uncompressed JavaScript and CSS files were just a few of the errors on this site.

So you can imagine my surprise when Ahrefs generated an audit report with a health score of 90%!

When I dug deeper into the report, I found that Ahrefs was able to identify just a handful of errors on my client’s website. According to Ahrefs’ analysis, this site had no broken links and zero duplicate title tags.

I got a much more accurate picture of the site’s technical SEO health on SE Ranking and a few other tools, all of which returned a much more comprehensive audit report and in each case, the SEO health score of this site was below 50%. I was surprised to see the sheer amount of SEO errors Ahrefs allowed to slip through the net.

For that reason, it’s best to use Ahrefs’ site audit tool to identify and fix only the most basic on-page SEO and indexability issues on your site.

To run a fresh site audit on Ahrefs, visit the “Site audit” tab from your dashboard, select the project, and then hit “Run crawl.”

The Overview report will show the site’s SEO health score, alongside issues and error distribution.

In the same report, scroll down to find all the top issues on your website.

These are the errors you’d have to fix in order to improve your SEO health score.

Technical SEO Audit: SE Ranking

The best part about SE Ranking’s site audit tool is that you don’t have to manually set up the audit feature. Your site gets automatically audited as soon as you add a new project on SE Ranking.

Once the audit is complete, SE Ranking will update your site’s SEO health score in the Website Audit column of your Projects section.

Just click on this score to view your full SEO audit report.

In addition to your site’s SEO health score, you’ll also see the number of important as well as semi-important fixes that you need to make in order to improve your site’s health score.

Scroll down till you find the full site audit report to get a complete picture of the errors on your website.

The site audit report is split into 5 sections:

• Health check
• Pages analysis
• Meta analysis
• Content analysis
• Links analysis

Visit each section of the report to view important and semi-important errors that are affecting your site’s SEO health. Click on the link icon next to each error to view all the pages with that specific error.

Once you’ve taken the necessary steps to fix all the important errors, run a fresh audit by clicking on “Restart audit” and see if the fixed errors reappear in the latest audit report.

Which SEO Tool is Better for SEO Audit?

SE Ranking clearly has a better site audit tool than Ahrefs.

As explained earlier, Ahrefs’ Site Audit is best used only for identifying and fixing basic SEO issues on your site. If you rely too much on Ahrefs’ audit reports, you may be misled to believe there are no technical SEO problems on your website.

On the other hand, SE Ranking does a thorough job of auditing your website and gives you a complete picture of your website’s technical SEO health. It identifies errors and warnings that you didn’t even know existed.

SE Ranking also does a better job of prioritizing the technical SEO issues, so you know exactly which errors you should focus on fixing first.

Winner: SE Ranking

Pricing Plans: Ahrefs vs SE Ranking

Now let’s compare the pricing plans offered by both these tools.

Ahrefs: Pricing Plans

Ahrefs offers 4 monthly pricing plans:

• Lite – $99/mo (5 projects, 500 tracked keywords)
• Standard – $179/mo (10 projects, 1500 tracked keywords)
• Advanced – $399/mo (25 projects, 5000 tracked keywords)
• Agency – $999/mo (100 projects, 10000 tracked keywords)

As mentioned earlier, Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial. But you can sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which offers free limited access to features like Site Audit and Site Explorer.

If you own a small business or run a blog-based business, then the Lite plan ($99/mo) should be sufficient for your needs. With the Lite plan, you can track 500 keywords in Rank Tracker and analyze 175 domains per week in Site Explorer.

If you run an agency, then you’d probably have to upgrade to the Advanced plan ($399/mo), which allows you to add 3 users and has higher limits for Rank Tracker and Site Explorer.

SE Ranking: Pricing Plans

SE Ranking currently offers 3 pricing plans:

• Optimum – $39/mo (250 keyword rankings, 10 websites)
• Plus – $89/mo (1000 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)
• Enterprise – 189/mo (2500 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)

* The prices on the above plans change based on the number of keyword rankings you select. For instance, if you’d like to track 500 keyword rankings in the Optimum plan, the pricing changes to $54/mo.

The best part about SE Ranking’s pricing structure is that it deviates from the standard pricing practice in the SEO industry. Most SEO tools charge $99/mo for their basic plan (including Ahrefs). With SE Ranking, you can get started for just $39/mo.

If you’re a small business owner or blogger, the Optimum plan ($39/mo) is probably the right fit your requirements and budget. If you run an agency, you should probably go with the Plus plan ($89/mo).

If you’re not sure which SE Ranking plan is best suited for your requirements, use the pricing plan calculator on their pricing page.

In terms of overall value, SE Ranking gets the crown. You get access to a full-fledged SEO and PPC software for less than half the price you’d pay for Ahrefs’ most basic plan.

Final Verdict: Ahrefs vs SE Ranking

Both Ahrefs and SE Ranking are formidable tools with a stellar reputation in the SEO community. But if we were to judge these tools individually on SEO and PPC features, then SE Ranking is the clear winner here because it provides you more PPC insights in your keyword research reports. Furthermore, SE Ranking’s site audit tool is better at identifying technical SEO issues on your site and providing actionable advice on how to fix them.

The other factor in SE Ranking’s favor is the price. As explained in the pricing section of this post, SE Ranking is far more affordable than Ahrefs and provides more bang for your buck.

If you’re an existing Ahrefs user who’s been rattled by the recently introduced usage-based pricing plans by Ahrefs, then SE Ranking is the one of the best Ahrefs alternatives you can opt for.

When all said and done, the decision between Ahrefs and SE Ranking comes down to your priority. If your priority is link building and price is not a concern, then Ahrefs is inarguably the best in terms of data and accuracy. On the other hand, if you value keyword research (both SEO and PPC) and site audit features over backlink analysis, and if budget is a major concern, then SE Ranking is better suited for your needs.

To summarize this post, here’s a visual representation of how Ahrefs compares with SE Ranking on key parameters:

If you liked this article, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 5 August 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

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The post Ahrefs vs SE Ranking: Which SEO Tool Should You Buy? appeared first on 99signals.

If you’re having trouble deciding between Semrush and SpyFu, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, I’ll put Semrush and SpyFu to the test and help you decide which SEO tool is better suited for competitor analysis.

If you’ve landed here, you’re probably already aware that Semrush and SpyFu are amongst the most popular competitor research tools on the market, alongside Ahrefs, Serpstat, and Mangools.

While Semrush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit with competitive intelligence capabilities, SpyFu focuses purely on competitor analysis.

So to maintain a level playing field for this comparison, I’ll be evaluating Semrush and SpyFu solely on features linked with competitor research.

I’ll be taking the following four parameters into account:

• Competitor analysis
• Keyword research
• Ease of use and accessibility
• Pricing plans

Now without further delay, let’s compare Semrush and SpyFu, and find out which SEO tool is the best in terms of competitive analysis.

Note: To get the most out of this comparison guide, I’d encourage you to create an account on Semrush and SpyFu. You can find the relevant links below. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial of Semrush Pro (worth $65) and sign up for SpyFu’s free plan. At this point in time, SpyFu is not offering a trial on any of their paid plans. But their free plan is pretty good, albeit with a few limitations. 

Key Takeaways

• Semrush excels in comprehensive SEO and competitor analysis with a vast range of tools, including social media tracking and brand monitoring.
• SpyFu specializes in competitor-based keyword research and offers valuable insights for those on a tight budget, with a focus on the US and UK markets.
• Semrush provides deeper and more accurate competitive data, making it superior for competitor analysis.
• Both platforms offer unique strengths, but Semrush‘s broader capabilities make it the preferable option for most SEO and PPC needs.

Overview of Semrush and SpyFu

Before we pit Semrush and SpyFu against each other, let’s quickly unpack what makes each tool a heavyweight contender in the SEO arena.

Semrush: A Comprehensive SEO and Marketing Toolkit

Semrush’s predecessor, SEOquake company, was first launched by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov as an SEO browser extension in 2007 before being rebranded as Semrush in 2008. It has since gone on to become one of the leading cloud-based SEO services on the market with over 5 million users across the world.

The Semrush platform features a comprehensive set of tools for site audit, keyword research, position tracking, SEO and PPC competitor analysis, on-page SEO checker, backlink analytics, and much more.

Semrush currently manages close to 20 billion keywords and 818 million domains in 142 geo databases.

SpyFu: Specialized in Competitor-Based Keyword Research

SpyFu was founded by Mike Roberts in 2006 to help businesses craft their SEO and PPC strategies. Mike’s business philosophy is to turn your rivals into your best advisors and that philosophy is at the core of SpyFu.

As the name suggests, SpyFu lets you spy on your competitors’ online strategies and analytics. You can use it to gather insights on your organic as well as paid competitors.

SpyFu’s data is collected from Google search results in the US and UK. The tool won’t show you full results outside of these countries, which just might be SpyFu’s biggest drawback.

With that introduction of the two tools out of the way, it’s now time to put these tools to the test.

Let’s start by reviewing their competitor analysis features.

Competitor Analysis Face-Off: Semrush vs SpyFu

If you want to develop a fool-proof marketing strategy for your business, you need to run a competitor analysis. By analyzing your competitors’ marketing efforts, you can evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, as well as identify gaps and opportunities for your brand in the market.

Both Semrush and SpyFu are capable of providing a comprehensive report of your competitors’ SEO and PPC strategies. But which SEO platform is more feature-rich and gives the most accurate data? Let’s find out!

Semrush: Competitor Analysis Tools

With Semrush’s Competitive Research Toolkit, you can identify your organic and paid competitors, and reverse-engineer their most successful SEO and PPC practices.

The Competitive Research Toolkit is divided into five different categories:

• SEO (includes Organic Research, Keyword Gap, Backlink Analytics, Backlink Gap)
• Advertising (includes Advertising Research, Display Advertising, PLA Research)
• Content and PR (includes Brand Monitoring, Topic Research, Post Tracking)
• Social Media (includes Social Media Tracker)
• Big Picture (4 add-on tools, including Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer)

Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer are part of Semrush .Trends, Semrush‘s competitive intelligence add-on toolkit, that costs an additional $200/month. To learn more about Semrush .Trends, check out this in-depth post on how to use .Trends for competitor analysis.

To keep things simple, we’ll just be examining the main tools in the first four categories in the Semrush Competitive Research Toolkit.

To get started with competitor analysis on Semrush, navigate to the “Competitive Research” section from the left-side menu.

Next, click on “Organic Research” and enter your competitor’s domain in the search box.

Alternatively, if you’d like Semrush to identify your organic competitors for you, you can type your own domain in the search box.

The Organic Research overview report provides a top-level view of your website’s organic keywords, organic traffic, top pages, and main organic competitors.

Visit the “Competitors” tab to see a list of all the sites that are competing with your site in search results for the same keywords.

Click on any of the organic competitors to get a detailed report on that domain’s top organic keywords, top-ranking pages, position changes, and so on.

To view your competitor’s top organic keywords, visit the “Top Organic Keywords” section in the report and click on the “View all organic keywords” button.

The list of keywords will probably be too long, so feel free to play with the filters until you get the most relevant data.

Click on any of the keywords in the report to get data on important keyword metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, competition level, and more.

You can use this data to fine-tune your content strategy.

Next, click on “Backlink Analytics” to get an overview report of your competitor’s backlinks.

Visit the “Referring Domains” tab to get a complete picture of your competitor’s backlink profile. Leverage this data in your link building outreach efforts.

Similarly, you can unravel your paid competitors’ data by navigating to:

Competitive Research > Advertising Research > Enter your competitor’s domain

The Advertising Research overview report provides details on the domain’s paid keywords, average monthly paid traffic, and traffic cost.

To view your competitors’ PPC ad copies, visit the “Ad Copies” tab.

If your competitor invests a lot in advertising, then you may find ad copies in this report too imposing. Make sure you use the advanced filters to get the most relevant information for your PPC campaigns.

In addition to the aforementioned SEO and PPC tools, Semrush also has specific competitor analysis tools for content marketing and social media marketing.

The Brand Monitoring tool is especially useful for tracking online mentions of your brand, your competitors’ brands, or any word or phrase that you wish to monitor.

To set up brand monitoring on Semrush, go to:

Competitive Research > Content and PR > Brand Monitoring > Project > Set up

You can include up to three competitor brands here and up to five keyword terms. Select the country and hit the “Start Tracking” button.

You’ll now be able to track the online brand mentions of your competitors and the main keywords in your niche.

And finally, you have the Social Media Tracker, which lets you track the social media pages of your competitors and monitor their growth and engagement levels.

To set up social media tracking, go to:

Competitive Research > Social Media > Project > Set up > Social Media Tracker > Add competitor

On the next page, enter your competitor’s brand name or domain in the search box and hit “Find Profiles.” Semrush will automatically find your competitor’s social media pages for you.

If you’ve enabled social media posting on Semrush, your social media pages will be automatically included in the Social Media Tracker. If you haven’t enabled it, you can type your domain in the search box and click “Set as your company” next to your brand name.

You can add up to 20 competitor brands and track performance of up to 100 social media pages.

Once you’ve added your competitors’ social media pages, hit the “Start tracking companies” button to get an overview report of your competitions’ social media analytics, including social audience, posts, engagement, and top content.

Scroll down to see the comparison of your social media performance against your competitors.

In addition to tracking audience growth, activity, and engagement, Semrush‘s Social Media Tracker is an invaluable tool to identify content trends and the different types of content that resonate the most with your target audience.

SpyFu: Competitor Analysis Tools

To get started with competitor analysis on SpyFu, enter your competitor’s domain in the search box and hit the search icon.

You’ll get a quick summary of the domain’s top organic keywords, estimated monthly SEO clicks, top paid keywords, estimated monthly PPC clicks, backlinks, top pages, and so on.

If you’d like SpyFu to identify your competitors, enter your domain and navigate to the “Competition” section of the report to view your organic and paid competitors.

Click on any of your organic competitors’ domains to generate an SEO overview report of that domain, containing data on that site’s organic keywords, estimated monthly SEO clicks, page 1 keywords, inbound links, and so on.

On the left side of the overview report, you’ll find links to different sections within the report. Pay special attention to the “Top Pages” section as these are your competitor’s top-ranking pages in organic search.

You can reverse-engineer these pages to find keyword ideas with traffic potential.

Similarly, you can click on any of your paid competitors’ sites to get a PPC overview report of that domain’s paid keywords, estimated monthly PPC clicks, monthly PPC budget, and other PPC metrics.

Navigate to the “AdWords Advisor” section of the report to view “Top AdWords Buy Recommendations” for your competitor’s domain.

Click on “See all recommendations” at the bottom of the report or simply visit the “AdWords Advisor” tab to get a complete list of keyword recommendations. Use these recommendations to get the most out of your PPC campaigns.

Visit the “AdWords History” section of the report to browse your competitor’s complete Google Ads campaign history, including their most trusted keywords, estimated clicks/month for those keywords, and their cost/click.

Beside each ad copy, you’ll find keywords that trigger the specific ad.

Super helpful data if you’re planning on replicating your competitors’ ad strategies.

Which Tool is Better for Competitor Analysis?

SpyFu is undeniably a great competitor analysis tool. But Semrush is better.

For starters, SpyFu lacks brand monitoring and social media tracking features which are vital components of competitor research. Your competitive analysis would have a blind spot if you didn’t analyze your competitors’ social media presence and didn’t monitor their online brand mentions.

Besides that, I also found the competitor research reports in Semrush to be much more accurate and helpful than SpyFu.

Bottom line: SpyFu’s competitive data pales in comparison to the sheer volume and depth of competitive data that you can unveil on Semrush.

Winner: Semrush

Keyword Research Features Compared: Semrush vs SpyFu

Despite countless Google algorithm updates over the years, the importance of keyword research has remained constant. While outdated keyword research practices get penalized by Google, a more nuanced approach to keyword research is often rewarded with higher Google rankings.

As a result, keyword research is at the core of any SEO or PPC campaign. It helps you get a deeper understanding of your target audience and what they are searching for online.

Both Semrush and SpyFu uncover a ton of keyword data to help you in your quest to craft the kind of content that satisfies both users and search engines.

Read on to find out which of these tools is more effective in terms of keyword research.

Semrush: Keyword Research

Semrush is predominantly known for its keyword research capabilities.

Let’s quickly examine some of its main keyword research features.

To get started with keyword research on Semrush, just type your target keyword(s) in the search box.

This will open up the Keyword Overview report, which will provide a quick summary of all major keyword metrics, including monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and competition, along with relevant keyword variations and related keywords.

Note: You can change the geo database in your Keyword Overview report and see results and keyword variations for your target keywords in your location.

For in-depth keyword analysis and to find semantically-related long-tail keyword ideas in your niche, you need to try the Keyword Magic Tool.

To use the Keyword Magic tool, head over to:

Keyword Research > Keyword Magic Tool

Enter your seed keywords in the search bar and hit the “Search” button. From your seed keywords, the tool will generate a list of keyword suggestions.

You can then sort the keywords by using keyword groups located on the left side of the table. You can either sort the groups by volume or by the number of keywords. You can even exclude a group of keywords by clicking on the eye icon next to the group.

You can also use the match modifiers on top of the table to narrow down the list of keywords.

Also pay attention to the “Questions” filter to generate a list of question-based keywords that contain your seed keywords.

Once you’ve identified all the keywords you’d like to use in your SEO or PPC campaigns, save your findings by adding the keywords to Keyword Manager.

In addition to saving your work, the Keyword Manager will gather real-time metrics for your target keywords, so that you have fresh insights when you revisit the tool.

Besides traditional keyword research tools, you can also use the Topic Research tool in Semrush’s Content Marketing toolkit. With the Topic Research tool, you can generate relevant topics, subtopics, questions, and headlines to include in your content.

To use this tool, navigate to:

Content Marketing Toolkit > Topic Research

Type in your target keywords, select your location, and hit “Get Content Ideas.”

You’ll then be presented with a list of subtopics for your target keywords.

You can switch the view from Cards to Explorer (tables), Overview (condensed version), or MindMap (visual presentation). I prefer the Overview report as it lists down the top 10 headlines by backlinks and top 10 interesting questions surrounding your target keywords.

Add any of these headlines and questions to your list of “Favorite Ideas” and use them to create new blog posts or optimize existing posts.

SpyFu: Keyword Research

SpyFu’s strength lies in competitor-based keyword research.

That’s not to say SpyFu doesn’t have good traditional keyword research options. It’s just that you’re much more likely to find the data that’s important to you by performing competitor-based keyword research.

To perform competitor-based keyword research on SpyFu, simply type in your competitor’s domain in the search box, and once you get the overview report, navigate to the “Top Keywords” section of the report and click on “View all organic keywords” at the bottom of the table.

Play with the filters on top of the table to get the most relevant competitive keyword data for your campaign.

To get started with traditional keyword research on SpyFu, visit the “Keyword Research” tab and enter your seed keyword(s).

You’ll get a quick summary of all major keyword metrics (monthly volume, estimated clicks, etc.) and a list of similar keywords and question-based keywords.

Below this data, you’ll find a wealth of PPC keyword data in the “Top AdWords Buy Recommendations” and “Most Successful Advertisers and Their Best Ads” sections.

To see the full list of SEO or PPC keywords, you can either click on the “View all” button under each section or visit the “Related Keywords” tab and select the right filters to get the most relevant data.

And finally, you have the AdWords Templates, which are pre-written PPC ads handcrafted by the SpyFu team to get your Google Ads campaigns up and running.

To access these templates, head over to:

PPC Research > AdWords Templates > Select Industry from the drop-down list > Continue to download

This will start the download of all ad templates for that specific industry. You can then import these templates to your Google Ads account.

Note: To access AdWords Templates, you need to upgrade to SpyFu’s basic plan ($39/mo).

Which Tool is Better for Keyword Research?

In terms of keyword research, Semrush absolutely crushes it. The Keyword Magic tool helps you find the most relevant keywords in your niche and provides in-depth analytics for a wide range of keyword ideas, including semantically-related long-tail keywords.

The Topic Research tool helps you identify topics and subtopics that resonate the most with your target audience, which you can then use in your blog posts, product pages, or PPC ads to increase their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).

On the other hand, SpyFu is great for discovering surface-level data for keywords, but if you’re an advanced SEO user, you’ll be disappointed with the lack of depth in SpyFu’s keyword reports.

The biggest downside of SpyFu is that its keyword data is restricted to the US and UK. If your business or target audience is based outside these countries, then SpyFu may not fetch you the most accurate keyword data.

Winner: Semrush

Related: How to Use Semrush for Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide

Ease of Use: Semrush vs SpyFu Showdown

The user interface (UI) is more than just a pretty face for software; it’s the backbone of user engagement. Consider why some users lean towards WhatsApp instead of Facebook Messenger, or why Headspace often gets the nod over other meditation apps like Calm and Buddhify. It boils down to how intuitive and user-friendly the interface is.

Similarly, some users may prefer one SEO tool over the other because of how comfortable they are with their UI. I’m not saying UI is the only factor, but it’s certainly a key factor in getting us hooked to spend more time with the tool.

When it comes to Semrush and SpyFu, each has its own UI ups and downs. Despite undergoing various redesigns over time, both have stayed true to their original color schemes, showcasing a blend of consistency and evolution in their user experience.

I’ve grown quite fond of Semrush‘s UI, finding it more organized and user-friendly, likely due to my daily interactions with it since early 2015. However, for those new to SEO, the vast array of features might seem daunting at first, possibly making navigation through the tool a bit of a challenge.

On the other hand, SpyFu’s interface strikes me as straightforward yet somewhat lackluster and dated. Its simplicity does lend itself well to ease of use, especially for beginners venturing into the world of SEO tools. However, after exploring its various features and settings for a while, there’s a lingering feeling that the tool hasn’t quite kept pace with the times, as if it’s a relic from an earlier era of SEO tools.

Sections such as “AdWords Advisor” and “AdWords Templates” simply reinforce the feeling that you’re using a product that’s not been updated in quite a while (Google retired the AdWords brand in 2018.)

Winner: Semrush

Comparing Pricing Plans: Semrush vs SpyFu

Now it’s time to examine the pricing plans offered by each tool.

Let’s start with Semrush.

Semrush Pricing Plans

Semrush’s pricing plans start at $129.95/month. You can save up to 17% by switching to annual billing.

Here’s the current pricing structure:

• Pro – $129.95/mo (ideal for startups)
• Guru – $249.95/mo (ideal for SMBs and marketing agencies)
• Business – $499.95/mo (ideal for large businesses)

Semrush’s Pro plan includes access to all 45+ tools and features within the platform, except historical data (included in Guru) and product listing ads (included in Business).

I personally use Semrush’s Guru plan ($249.95/mo) because of the higher limits.

If you’re just starting out or have a blog-based business, it’s better to get started with Semrush’s Pro plan ($129.95/mo) and then upgrade to a higher level.

If you run a marketing agency or simply have more projects and data to manage, it’s better to go with Semrush‘s Guru plan ($249.95/mo).

SpyFu Pricing Plans

Unlike most major SEO tools on the market, SpyFu has a free plan and it’s actually quite good. The best part about the free plan is that you can perform unlimited searches.

Here are SpyFu’s monthly pricing plans:

• Free for Life – $0/mo (unlimited searches, 10 search results)
• Basic – $39/mo (unlimited search results, 5k weekly tracked keyword rankings)
• Professional – $78/mo (15k weekly tracked keyword rankings, custom branded reports)

If you switch to annual billing, you can save $69 on the basic plan and save $249 on the professional plan.

I’ve been using both tools since 2015. As mentioned above, I’ve been on Semrush‘s Guru plan ($249.95/mo) since early 2016. I’ve upgraded to SpyFu’s paid plan only twice in all those years.

The Ultimate Choice: Semrush or SpyFu?

At the start of the post, I made a point about how this comparison is not a battle among equals. Semrush is an all-purpose SEO tool while SpyFu is more focused on competitor analysis.

But based on my analysis, even from a competitive intelligence perspective, Semrush is a far superior tool. As highlighted above, your competitive analysis would be incomplete without tracking your competition’s performance on social media. And that’s something SpyFu currently lacks.

The other major drawback with SpyFu is that it has just two geo databases (US and UK), as compared to Semrush‘s 142 geo databases. If you’d like to stave off your local competition and rank higher in the local SERPs, you’re better off going with Semrush.

That said, if you’re on a shoestring budget, but still need to use a decent competitive intelligence tool for your business or blog, then SpyFu is perhaps your best bet. The free plan offered by SpyFu is the best in the industry.

If your need of the hour is competitor analysis, then sign up for SpyFu’s free plan. If the data is insufficient for your needs, upgrade to the Basic plan ($39/mo).

Otherwise, Semrush is the best solution for all your SEO and PPC problems.

To summarize, here’s a visual breakdown of how Semrush compares with SpyFu on key parameters:

Here are the links to help you get started with both these tools:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is the main difference between Semrush and Spyfu?

The main difference lies in their core functionalities: Semrush offers a broader all-in-one marketing toolkit covering SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing, whereas Spyfu focuses specifically on competitor analysis for SEO and PPC.

2. Can Semrush and Spyfu track competitors’ keyword strategies?

Yes, both Semrush and Spyfu are designed to track and analyze competitors’ keyword strategies, providing insights into organic and paid search performance.

3. Which tool is better for SEO: Semrush or Spyfu?

For comprehensive SEO analysis, including keyword research, site audit, and backlink analysis, Semrush tends to be more robust. Spyfu is highly effective for detailed competitor keyword and PPC strategy analysis.

4. Are Semrush and Spyfu suitable for small businesses?

Yes, both tools offer features that can benefit small businesses. Spyfu, with its competitive pricing and focused features, can be particularly appealing for small businesses on a tight budget.

5. How accurate is the data provided by Semrush and Spyfu?

Both Semrush and Spyfu are known for providing reliable and accurate data. However, Semrush’s larger database and frequent updates may offer a slight edge in data accuracy, especially on a global scale.

6. Do Semrush and Spyfu offer free trials?

Semrush offers a 14-day free trial for new users to experience its Pro version. Spyfu offers a free version with limited features and unlimited searches, but no free trial for its paid plans.

7. Which tool offers better keyword research capabilities?

Semrush is often preferred for its comprehensive Keyword Magic Tool and extensive database, making it highly valuable for in-depth keyword research and strategy planning.

8. Can I use Semrush or Spyfu for free?

Spyfu provides a free plan with basic features and unlimited searches. Semrush offers a free plan with limited features, but also lets you sign up for a 14-day free trial of the Pro plan.

9. Which tool is more user-friendly for beginners?

Both tools have user-friendly interfaces, but Spyfu’s simpler design and focused features might be slightly more accessible for beginners compared to Semrush’s extensive and feature-rich platform.

10. How do Semrush and Spyfu help with PPC campaigns?

Both tools offer PPC analysis, with Semrush providing detailed ad strategy insights across various channels and Spyfu specializing in in-depth competitor PPC strategy tracking and analysis.

11. Is SpyFu data accurate?

SpyFu is known for delivering accurate data on SEO and PPC, making it a credible tool for marketing professionals. While it offers valuable insights, it’s important to note that the precision and comprehensiveness of its data may not quite match that of top-tier tools like Semrush or Ahrefs. Nonetheless, SpyFu remains a reliable choice for those looking to inform their digital marketing strategies.

12. Where does Semrush get its data?

Semrush acquires its data through a multifaceted approach that includes its own massive web crawlers, which scan the internet to collect information directly from websites and search engine results pages (SERPs). Additionally, Semrush integrates data from third-party providers and uses machine learning algorithms to analyze and expand its datasets.

The combination of proprietary technology and external data sources ensures that Semrush can provide users with extensive and up-to-date information for SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media analytics.

13. Where does SpyFu get its data?

SpyFu sources its data through a combination of public web searches, its own proprietary web crawlers, and various data partnerships. It meticulously analyzes search engine results pages (SERPs) to gather insights on keywords, PPC campaigns, and SEO strategies employed by websites. This approach allows SpyFu to compile a comprehensive database of digital marketing insights, including historical data, competitor analysis, and keyword research findings.

If you liked this article, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on June 29, 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance, freshness, and comprehensiveness. 

Related Articles

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• 8 Best Competitor Research Tools to Spy on Your Competition
• Semrush vs Mangools: Which SEO Tool is Better?
• 26 Best Google Chrome Extensions for SEO
• Search Intent and SEO: The Ultimate Guide

The post Semrush vs SpyFu: The Ultimate Showdown of SEO Competitor Analysis Tools appeared first on 99signals.

Manually posting and scheduling content across all major social media platforms can be an exhausting process. Which is why you need to use a social media scheduling tool to streamline this complicated and time-consuming task.

In this article, I’ll be reviewing one such social media scheduling tool — Publer. You’ll learn about its key features, ease of use, analytics, pricing plans, and customer support. By the end of this review, you’ll know whether or not Publer is the right social media scheduling tool for your needs.

Let’s get started.

Editor’s Note: To get the most out of this review, I’d highly recommend you sign up for Publer’s free plan. This will allow you to implement some of the action items discussed in this review and will help you evaluate some of Publer’s key features.

Sign up for Publer’s free plan

Publer Review and Demo [Video]

Before we begin, you can check out my video review and walkthrough of Publer. This video gives you a top-level view of Publer’s key features and scheduling options. If you’d like a deeper analysis of all the features and pricing plans, scroll down to read the full review.

What is Publer?

Publer is a social media scheduling tool that lets you post, schedule, and analyze your posts on all major social channels.

With Publer, you can post and schedule your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google My Business. You can even recycle and auto-schedule your posts to save time.

Most social media scheduling tools offer a free plan. But what sets Publer apart from the other scheduling tools on the market is that its free plan gives you access to advanced features like Auto-Schedule, link shortening, post preview, and more.

Publer’s free plan also offers higher limits. For instance, Publer’s free plan allows you to connect up to 5 social accounts, whereas tools like Buffer and Hootsuite let you connect a maximum of 3 social accounts with their free plan. But more on this in the pricing section…

How to Use Publer

The first thing you need to do after logging into your Publer account is to connect your social accounts. It’s a simple process that won’t take much of your time.

To add your social accounts to Publer, navigate to:

Accounts > Add Account 

From here, select the social account that you’d like to add to Publer. You can connect your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google My Business accounts.

With Facebook, you have the option to connect your page, location, and group to Publer. Similarly, with LinkedIn, you can add both your profile and page to Publer. Based on your plan, you can connect multiple pages under each social network.

Instagram and Pinterest can be integrated to Publer only via Zapier. You’ll soon be able to connect your YouTube and VK accounts. At the time of writing this review, these features are not live yet.

Once you’ve added your social accounts to Publer, your Accounts page will look something like this:

You can now start posting and scheduling your content via Publer. To do this, visit the “Create” tab, select the specific account, and start composing your post.

Once you’re done composing, you can draft, schedule, or post your content to the selected social account.

Publer also provides you an option to preview your posts before you decide to post or schedule them on social media, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Next, let’s explore some of Publer’s key features.

Publer Review: Key Features

Social Media Scheduling Options

Once you’ve created your post on Publer, it’s time to post or schedule it using Publer’s scheduling options.

If you’d like your post to go out instantly, just select the specific social account(s) and hit the “Post” button. Your post will be published without any delay.

On the other hand, if you’d like to schedule your post, there are 4 ways you can do it — Manually, Auto-Schedule, Recycle, and Recurring.

Let’s examine each scheduling option in detail.

You can schedule your post manually by picking a date and time for your post to go live. It’s as simple as that.

The next method is to auto-schedule your post. To select this option, you’ll need to configure a posting schedule for the specific account.

To do this, visit the “Accounts” tab and select the account for which you’d like to set up a posting schedule.

Next, click on “Posting Schedule” and hit “Create timeslot.”

Select the days and update the time slots for each day.

Alternatively, if you’d like Publer to automatically fill the time slots for you, you can click on the “Autofill” button.

When you’re done, your posting schedule should look something like this:

Once your posting schedule is set up, return to the post that you’d like to schedule and hit “AutoSchedule.”

Your post will be automatically scheduled on the selected social account in the next available time slot.

The next scheduling option is to recycle your posts. Publer gives you the option to recycle your posts every week/month/year.

A super useful scheduling option if you have a lot of evergreen content on your blog.

The next scheduling option is the recurring option. This is similar to recycling your posts, but you can set a start date and an end date and choose to repeat your post until the end date.

So these are the 4 ways you can schedule your posts on Publer.

I personally use the AutoSchedule option to schedule my posts because it saves time and effort. You just have to set up your posting schedule once for each of your social accounts and simply hit the “Schedule” button every time you need to schedule something.

Post Preview

Publer allows you to preview each post before you post or schedule it on social media.

Once you’ve composed your post, click on the “Preview” button.

Publer will then show a preview of how your post will look on the selected social account when it’s live.

You can see how your post will look on the selected social network’s feed on both desktop and mobile.

If for some reason, you’re not entirely satisfied with the way your post looks or spot an error while previewing it, you can make the necessary changes and craft it just the way you want.

Hashtag Suggestion Generator

As the name suggests, this feature generates hashtag suggestions based on the content of your post. To use it, just click “#hashtags” while composing your post and you’ll see a list of relevant hashtags that you can include in your post.

For instance, my tweet on “Facebook Marketing Tools” generated these hashtag suggestions:

Alongside each hashtag, you’ll get real-time insights into its engagement rate.

Are hashtags just as popular as they once were? Certainly not. Are they still important? Most definitely!

Case in point: In one study, Instagram posts with 9 to 12 hashtags received more engagement than posts with any other number of hashtags.

Going by the current trends, hashtags seem to be more prevalent on Instagram than on Twitter, where their significance is declining. So use them sparingly while posting on Twitter.

Publer’s Hashtag Suggestion Generator is a real time-saver as you don’t need to manually research the hashtags that you’d want to include in your posts.

Signatures and Watermarks

You have the option to add signatures and watermarks to each piece of content that you post/schedule via Publer (except posts on Twitter).

If you want to enable these options, navigate to the “Accounts” tab and click on the specific account where you’d like to add a watermark or signature.

To add a watermark, click on “Watermarks” in your profile settings and upload your logo. You can add up to 10 watermarks.

Similarly, to add a signature, click on “Signatures” and create your signature.

Publer AI Assist

Publer’s AI Assist, powered by GPT-4, is a powerful feature that can help you create engaging content, generate stunning images, and respond to comments like a pro. By utilizing advanced algorithms and functionalities, you can tap into the potential of AI to boost your social media presence.

Here are some of the things AI Assist can do:

• Brainstorm Ideas and Create – Publer’s AI Assistant not only recommends compelling content based on your input and current trends but also helps in discovering the ideal post by providing AI-generated A/B text versions.
• Tailor Content to Social – Publer’s AI automatically tailors your social media posts for each platform, prioritizing your target audience’s preferences.
• Rephrase Text – You can rephrase your text with AI for the purpose of repurposing content, or simply to improve its readability and clarity. This can save you a lot of time and effort, and it can also help you create more polished and professional content.
• AI-Generated Images – AI Assist takes the hassle out of creating visual content for social media by generating beautiful, high-resolution images that are perfectly tailored to your brand and style.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. To learn more about what you can with Publer’s AI Assist, visit this page.

Publer Review: Ease of Use

Publer is insanely easy to use. From the setup process to post scheduling to post analytics, there’s nothing overwhelming about Publer.

If you’re migrating from Buffer, your learning curve will be short and you’ll find lots of similarities between the UI of Buffer and Publer. Similarly, if you’re migrating from Hootsuite or SocialBee, both of which are slightly more complicated to use, you’ll be amazed at how quickly and effortlessly you can get the ball rolling on Publer.

That said, Publer’s UI is far from perfect. It’s a bit rough around the edges and is too similar to Buffer. So I won’t be handing out any design awards to Publer just yet. But the UI is uncluttered, easy to navigate, and in the end, gets the job done.

Bottom line: Publer combines the simplicity of Buffer and the finesse of SocialBee to offer a scheduling tool that’s just as robust as it’s easy to use.

Publer Review: Analytics

It’s not enough to maintain an active presence on social media. You also need to measure your performance from time to time to see which posts are resonating with your audience and which posts are being ignored.

By default, Publer’s analytics report shows a summary of your performance across different social media channels over the past 7 days. You’ll see an increase/decrease in followers, page likes, post reach, engagement, and so on.

You can change the default view to reflect your performance for last week, this month, or last month.

While you’re in the analytics report, scroll all the way down till you find the “Post Insights” section. Here you’ll be able to see the reach and engagement your individual posts received.

You can even decide to reschedule your posts by clicking the share icon next to the post.

If you’d like to track performance for a specific social account, simply select the social account from the left side of your screen and your analytics report will be automatically updated to reflect the analytics of that specific account.

Publer Review: Pricing Plans

Publer offers 3 pricing plans – one free plan and two paid plans. The price of the paid plans varies based on the number of accounts and team members you opt for.

For instance, if you’d like to connect 10 social accounts to Publer and add 5 additional team members, the monthly price of the Professional plan would increase to $46/month and Business plan would cost you $78/month.

This is the current pricing structure that Publer follows (assuming that you’d like to add 10 social accounts to Professional or Business plan):

• Free – $0/mo (3 social accounts, 1 user, 10 scheduled posts/mo)
• Professional – $36/mo (10 social accounts, 1 user, unlimited scheduled posts)
• Business – $63/mo (everything in Professional + AI Assist, Recycle Evergreen Content, Hashtag Suggestions)

Here’s a table that outlines features included in each plan:

Publer’s free plan is perfect for anyone who’s trying a social media scheduling tool for the first time or switching from another scheduling platform. With the free plan, you can connect up to 3 social media accounts and schedule up to 10 posts per account. You’ll even get access to useful features like Auto-Schedule, post preview, link in bio, link shortening, and more.

So before you opt for a paid plan, I’d encourage you to sign up for the free plan and test some of the essential features out.

Sign up for Publer’s free plan

Publer’s Professional plan unlocks additional features like watermarks, signatures, bulk scheduling, etc. and allows you to schedule unlimited posts. If you’d like to use Publer’s hashtag suggestion generator, you’ll need to upgrade to the Business plan.

Visit Publer’s pricing page to learn more

Publer Review: Customer Support

The true strength of a business lies in how they resolve customer complaints, challenges, and pain points. I found Publer’s customer support team to be quite responsive and their help documentation covers almost all aspects of the tool.

Publer provides customer support via chat, email, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter.

To get in touch with the support team, click on the chat icon on the lower right corner of your screen. This will open up a chat window and you can send in your questions here.

You can also contact them via FB Messenger by visiting their page on Facebook or get in touch with them on Twitter.

But before you try any of these options, check out their help documentation. It’s quite comprehensive and there are high chances you’ll get all your questions answered there.

To access Publer’s help docs, just tap on the search icon in the chatbox. This will open up Publer’s help center where you can skim through the questions or type something specific to your problem in the search bar to see if you can find a solution.

Publer Review: Publer vs Buffer vs Hootsuite vs SocialBee

Here’s the thing: There are a ton of social media scheduling tools on the market. So it’s not easy to zero in on one tool when you’re so spoilt for choice.

But quite frankly, the 3 tools that are dominating this space right now are Buffer, Hootsuite, and SocialBee. Check out any list of top social media scheduling tools, and chances are you’ll find all 3 tools featured prominently in the article.

In this section, we’ll briefly compare Publer with three of its fiercest competitors.

Functionality-wise, all of them offer basic scheduling features, but each one of them offers unique features that set them apart from the rest. For instance, Hootsuite offers social inbox, which allows you to interact with your audience across different channels by displaying private and public messages in one place.

Likewise, Buffer offers Instagram tagging, which allows you to add your location and user tags while scheduling Instagram posts on Buffer, instead of manually adding tags after the post is published.

Publer also offers features and advanced scheduling options that are unique to its platform. For instance, you can connect your Google My Business (GMB) profile to Publer and start scheduling posts to your account. Both Publer and SocialBee allow you to recycle your posts.

The table below provides a quick glimpse of how Publer compares with Buffer, Hootsuite, and SocialBee:

In terms of pricing, Publer is the most affordable of the four. Publer’s paid plans start from $12/month, where you can connect 3 social accounts and schedule unlimited posts. Moreover, you also get access to advanced features like bulk scheduling, auto-schedule, post recycling, and more. When it comes to value, Publer easily beats all three of its rivals.

And as mentioned earlier, Publer’s free plan offers more features and higher limits than the free plans offered by its counterparts.

So if you were to use and compare the free plans offered by all these tools (except SocialBee, which offers no free plan), you’d get a lot more value from Publer.

Sign up for Publer’s free plan

Publer Review: Final Verdict

Publer is an easy-to-use social media scheduling tool that provides you with multiple scheduling options, advanced features, and in-depth analytics. If you’re seeking an affordable social media scheduler that has all the essential features, you should definitely try Publer.

If you signed up for Publer’s free account at the start of this review, you’d have tried some of the aforementioned features in real-time and scheduled a few posts to see how it works. If you’re still unsure whether to invest in this tool, I’d suggest you keep using the free version until the time you’re convinced this is the right scheduling tool for your needs.

Sign up for Publer’s free plan

If you found this Publer review useful, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 11 Aug 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

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For about 8 months after launching Startup Cafe Digital (my agency business), I genuinely believed that free SEO tools were all I needed to help me crush it in both business and blogging.

To be fair, we weren’t offering SEO services back then like we do now, but we were helping our clients with content creation and content marketing.

My team and I would register for free trials with Semrush, Moz, and other premium SEO tools, and of course, rely heavily on the free Keyword Planner tool from Google Ads for keyword research and content planning.

But eventually, I hit a wall in my agency journey where just relying on Keyword Planner and trial runs of Semrush and Moz wasn’t cutting it anymore.

Having been impressed with Moz and Semrush, I finally decided to take the plunge and invest in Moz, and a few months later, Semrush for keyword and competition analysis.

Up until then, I didn’t even realize what I was missing out on.

With tools such as Semrush and Moz, you get to take your SEO game up a notch and come out with truly astounding results for your blog, business, and clients.

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably deciding whether to invest in one of these SEO tools.

You may have tried the free version of one of these or both these SEO tools and are now considering whether it’s worth upgrading to the full version.

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

Even if you’ve never tried any of these SEO tools, please read this post to learn more about their features and how you can leverage the power of these tools to improve your site’s search rankings.

In this post, I’ll compare two of the most popular SEO tools on the market and see how they compete against each other on features, ease-of-use, and pricing.

Semrush vs Moz (at a Glance)

Here’s a quick snapshot of the two tools — for an in-depth comparison, go through the whole article.

Winner and Best Overall
Semrush	Moz
Semrush isn't just a tool for me — it's my SEO sidekick! From elevating my blogs to powering our agency's client strategies, its features are game-changers. If you're looking to turbocharge your business or blogging journey, Semrush is your ticket to the top.	Since co-founder Rand Fishkin's exit from Moz, there's been a noticeable dip in the value proposition of Moz Pro. I'd suggest giving the 30-day free trial of Moz a shot and then deciding if it's worth investing in.
Product Rating: 4.8	Product Rating: 3.9
Starts at $129.95/mo	Starts at $99/mo
Extensive keyword research capabilities Detailed site audit features Competitive analysis insights Backlink tracking and analysis Content optimization recommendations Advertising and PPC data insights	Widely recognized proprietary metric for domain strength Useful for optimizing local business listings Browser extension gives instant SEO insights Moz's Q&A forum and blogs are resources for learning and support
Can be overwhelming for beginners Higher cost compared to some alternatives Access to historical data requires higher-tier plans	Expensive for the features offered Data is not as accurate or updated as Semrush Limited keyword and backlink data Cluttered UI Reporting feature lacks depth.
Start Your Semrush Pro Trial	Start Your Moz Pro Trial

Winner and Best Overall

Semrush

Semrush isn't just a tool for me — it's my SEO sidekick! From elevating my blogs to powering our agency's client strategies, its features are game-changers. If you're looking to turbocharge your business or blogging journey, Semrush is your ticket to the top.

Product Rating:

4.8

Starts at $129.95/mo

• Extensive keyword research capabilities
• Detailed site audit features
• Competitive analysis insights
• Backlink tracking and analysis
• Content optimization recommendations
• Advertising and PPC data insights

• Can be overwhelming for beginners
• Higher cost compared to some alternatives
• Access to historical data requires higher-tier plans

Start Your Semrush Pro Trial

Moz

Since co-founder Rand Fishkin's exit from Moz, there's been a noticeable dip in the value proposition of Moz Pro. I'd suggest giving the 30-day free trial of Moz a shot and then deciding if it's worth investing in.

Product Rating:

3.9

Starts at $99/mo

• Widely recognized proprietary metric for domain strength
• Useful for optimizing local business listings
• Browser extension gives instant SEO insights
• Moz's Q&A forum and blogs are resources for learning and support

• Expensive for the features offered
• Data is not as accurate or updated as Semrush
• Limited keyword and backlink data
• Cluttered UI
• Reporting feature lacks depth.

Start Your Moz Pro Trial

Key Takeaways

• Semrush stands out for comprehensive keyword research, site audits, competitive analysis, and backlink tracking, with a vast database of over 20 billion keywords.
• Moz offers strong domain and page authority metrics, valuable for optimizing local listings and providing free SEO insights through its browser extension.
• Both tools are excellent, but Semrush is recommended for its extensive features and accurate data, making it a favorite among SEO professionals and agencies.
• Pricing reflects the value, with Semrush starting at $129.95/month and Moz at $99/month. Semrush‘s higher cost is justified by its broader capabilities and more accurate data.
• Free trials are available for both tools, allowing users to explore features before committing.

What is Semrush?

Just giving a search on Google with the keywords “SEO tools” will show you exactly how complicated and crammed up the SEO world is.

There’s a tidal wave of resources out there and while most of these tools are loaded with features, they can make our lives complicated.

But most bloggers, SEO professionals, and digital marketing agencies will agree that Semrush probably provides the best bang for buck.

I use Semrush for pretty much everything I do. I use it to find new keyword opportunities, do backlink analysis, fix site issues, and to spy on competitors’ keywords.

At Startup Cafe, we use Semrush to help our clients rank better in search engines for competitive keywords and check data on how their competitors are utilizing SEO and SEM.

If you know the current state of SEO, you know just how important long-tail keywords and low-competition keywords are. And that’s exactly the kind of data Semrush provides.

In fact, Semrush has the largest keyword database in the industry (over 20 billion keywords) and you can easily obtain thousands of keyword variations for your target keywords.

Semrush is also second to none when it comes to providing the most accurate search volume data for keywords.

Whether you’re using it to improve the SEO of your posts or to bolster your Google Ads campaigns, you can rely on Semrush to present the most accurate and relevant metrics for your target keywords.

How to Use Semrush

If you’ve never tried Semrush before, then you can read this section to know how to start. Others can skip this part of the post and move on to the next section to read the rest of the article.

To get started, you’ll need an active Semrush account. If you don’t have one, you can register for a free Semrush account using the link below.

This will give you free access to Semrush‘s PRO plan for 14 days.

Once you’ve registered and logged into the Semrush dashboard, you’ll find the default search bar like the one shown below. If you’d like data on SEO traffic, navigate to Organic Research from the main navigation menu.

Next, you can type the domain name of your competitor to see the keywords they are ranking for. For this example, I plugged in the Semrush website to examine the keywords they are currently ranking for.

The results for your search should look something like this:

Scroll down till you find the Top Organic Keywords section and click “View all” to see all the organic keywords of the target domain.

The next step is to set filters to find the top 10 keywords for which your competitor is ranking for (this is just an example. You can set any parameters you deem fit for your competitive analysis).

If you’re analyzing a large website, make sure the monthly search volume for these keywords is at least 1,000+. Once you’ve applied the filters, the results page should look something like this:

Once you have the data for the top 10 keywords that your competition is ranking for, you can optimize your own keyword strategy and content to make sure your website ranks well for each of these 10 keywords.

In some cases, your competition may already be a big player in the market with several backlinks and other SEO factors to back them up.

In such cases, what you can do is chase ‘low-hanging fruits’ aka long-tail keywords with low-to-medium competition.

These are the keywords where the search volume is low, but the traffic is high since there is little to no competition.

For example, let’s say you own a meditation retreat in Singapore and you’d like to increase the search traffic to your website.

Instead of trying to optimize your site for the keywords ‘meditation retreat’, you can optimize your site for keywords ‘buddhist meditation retreat in singapore’ which is a long-tail keyword with low search volume, but good traffic.

The best part about Semrush is that you can check not just Google ranking results, but also Bing.

You can also check how your website and your competitors are ranking in over 120 countries.

With the paid version of Semrush, you get the following features:

• Site Audit – This is one of the best features that Semrush offers. You can do a site audit to find and fix the issues with your website. Semrush offers ‘health percentage’ of your site and notifies you via email whenever the health percentage of your site is at risk.

• Position Tracking – Semrush‘s position tracking tool is widely recognized as the most accurate position tracking tool on the market. With the pro version of Semrush, you can select up to 500 keywords and see how your website is ranking on search engines for these keywords. You can frequently monitor your site’s search visibility on both desktop and mobile, and take the necessary steps to optimize your rankings for critical keywords.

• Backlink Audit – With the Backlink Audit tool, you can conduct deep link analysis and identify toxic backlinks that may be hurting your site’s rankings. Semrush also sends you email alerts whenever the tool spots suspicious backlinks. Once you’ve identified all the toxic backlinks to your site, you can use Semrush to create a disavow file, which you can then submit to Google Search Console.

• SEO Reports – If you run an agency, you know the importance of sharing weekly reports with your clients to track progress towards your goals. Semrush has the best reporting features amongst all premium SEO tools. You can choose from any of the ready-made report templates the tool offers, and all reports can be exported as PDFs.

You can even schedule PDF reports to be sent to you via email at regular intervals.

Scheduled reports are available even with the most basic plan ($129.95/mo).

With the Guru plan ($249.95/mo), you can create branded reports by placing your company logo and name at the top of each report to give a personal touch to your SEO reports.

With the Business plan ($449.95), you can take it to the next level by creating white label PDF reports by customizing the look and feel of your reports.

You can do all these and more with a PRO subscription of Semrush.

My suggestion would be to first try their free 2-week trial and use all these features yourself.

I personally use Semrush‘s Guru plan ($249.95/mo) because of the higher limits and the fact that you get access to Semrush‘s Content Marketing toolkit. This toolkit includes 6 amazing content marketing tools to help level up your content and beat your organic competitors in SERPs.

To learn more about Semrush‘s Content Marketing Toolkit, refer to this in-depth guide on Semrush’s content marketing features.

Verdict: Semrush is a top-notch SEO tool, which is used and trusted by SEO gurus throughout the world. If this is the first time you’re investing in an SEO software, then Semrush is the tool you should opt for because it allows you to perform advanced SEO tasks with ease.

From keyword research to competitive analysis to technical SEO audit, you can trust Semrush to arm you with useful data to help you rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs). In other words, you’ll be improving your site’s SEO by leaps and bounds.

Is it worth paying over $100 a month? Yes, and it’s worth every penny. When used to its potential, the ROI is pretty strong with this one.

What is Moz?

Started way back in 2004 by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig, Moz first started as an SEO consulting company before they developed their first SEO tool.

Rand Fishkin is immensely popular in the SEO community, and deservedly so. His Whiteboard Friday videos are a must-watch and his brilliant book Lost and Founder should be required reading for all entrepreneurs and marketers.

Though Fishkin is no longer at Moz (he left the company in 2018 to launch SparkToro), he’s still in the board of directors and an integral part of the company and its ethos.

I’m a big fan of Rand Fishkin and his content. He’s one of the few SEO thought leaders who can be considered an influencer.

But when it comes to Moz’s flagship SEO tools, I’ve mixed feelings.

Like Semrush, Moz is an all-purpose SEO tool that you can use for site audit, backlink analysis, keyword research, and so on.

But that’s where the similarities end.

Read on to learn about my reservations about spending $100 a month on Moz.

How to Use Moz

To get started, let’s talk about some of the good things that Moz offers.

The best part about Moz is that pretty much everything good about it is FREE.

So if you’re on a shoestring budget and don’t want to invest in SEO tools yet, but still want to ensure that your site ranks well, then the free services offered by Moz are industry standard.

All of these tools below are free and you can use them to improve the search visibility of your site:

• Link Explorer – You can track your link profile and uncover link building opportunities using this free tool
• Keyword Explorer – Helps you find the best keywords in your niche
• MozBar – Perhaps the best among free tools offered by Moz, MozBar is a Google Chrome extension that offers you a glimpse into any site’s Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA), both crucial metrics, on a regular basis.

Your site’s PA and DA change on a monthly basis, so it’s important to keep a watchful eye on how your site is measured in these terms. Moreover, you can perform keyword research and link analysis of the sites you visit right from the browser bar (like shown below) without having to access the dashboard. You can get your MozBar Chrome extension for free here.

If you’re using Moz for free, then you can perform up to 3 searches per day. For the example below, I gave a search on “Moz.com” to find their DA and PA and to get a fair idea about their backlink profile.

Now to the part that isn’t that good.

Having been impressed with the free services offered by Moz, I decided to take the plunge for paid subscription and found myself a little underwhelmed.

I didn’t mind paying the $99 per month price for standard subscription as long as the tools offered were worth that sum.

Being a fan of Rand Fishkin, I so wanted to like Moz Pro, but it fell short of my expectations.

I found myself using it less and less and canceled the subscription to look for better and cheaper alternatives.

Having said that, Moz by no means is a bad SEO tool.

I still use their free tools such as Link Explorer and MozBar for SEO to keep a track of my sites’ PA and DA.

Moreover, Moz has some incredible SEO and content marketing resources that you can check out for free here.

If you’re a beginner, then Moz has some of the best resources that you can read to familiarize yourself with SEO tactics. Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO is perhaps the best SEO resource if you’d like to learn the basics of SEO.

They also have an amazing blog that I visit regularly.

Whiteboard Friday, a video series featuring started by co-founder Rand Fishkin, is something that you should tune in to every week.

But if you were to ask me if I would ever subscribe to Moz Pro again for $99/month, my answer would be No.

I’d like to emphasize that this is my personal experience with Moz.

There are people who swear by Moz and they may be able to elaborate more on the paid services offered by Moz. Perhaps they’ve been able to spend more time with the tool and used it to its full potential.

For me, everything good offered by Moz is free and if you had to invest in an SEO tool, I’d recommend Semrush.

Semrush vs Moz: Which SEO Tool Should You Buy?

If you were to compare the free tools offered by each of these platforms, both have their own strengths and limitations. But if we were to compare the features offered under paid subscriptions, then I’d highly recommend Semrush over Moz.

I use Semrush for pretty much every SEO task that I do. Not just for my own blogs, but also for my agency business where we offer SEO services to our clients.

In my opinion, Semrush is a must-have tool if you want to grow your business as well as your blogging career.

The sheer amount of data available on Semrush can be overwhelming at times, but they have excellent training materials and product guides to help you every step of the way.

Their support team is really helpful and they organize weekly webinars that you can participate in to hone your SEO skills.

Moz, on the other hand, is expensive for the features it offers.

The best thing to do would be to try the free 30-day trial of Moz and probably then decide to take a plunge if you like the product.

Like I said, your experience with the product may differ and you may find value in the paid services which they offer.

On the other hand, if you had to invest in a powerful SEO tool, then Semrush has all the features you need and more. Give it a try!

Moz vs Semrush: Pricing

In this section, we’ll briefly examine the pricing plans offered by both these tools.

Moz Pricing

These are the Moz Pro pricing plans as of August 2020:

• Standard – $99/mo (ideal for beginners)
• Medium – $179/mo (ideal for startups)
• Large – $249/mo (ideal for small businesses and agencies)
• Premium – $999/mo (ideal for large agencies and businesses)

Note: You can save 20% by switching to annual pricing.

Semrush Pricing

Semrush increased their prices in early 2023. This is Semrush‘s current pricing structure:

• Pro – $129.95/mo (ideal for startups and bloggers)
• Guru – $249.95/mo (ideal for SMBs and marketing agencies)
• Business – $499.95/mo (ideal for enterprise and large businesses)

Note: You can save up to 17% by switching to annual billing.

Final Verdict: Semrush vs Moz

I’ve had a fantastic experience using Semrush. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Having said that, I’d like you to approach these tools without any preconceived notions and form your own judgment in deciding which tool is more suited for your business and website.

Which is why I’d urge you to try these tools for at least two weeks, or maybe even a month, before forming an opinion.

Luckily, you can grab a free trial of both these tools and get access to most of their top features.

To summarize this post, here’s a visual breakdown of how Semrush compares with Moz on key parameters:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Is Semrush better than Moz?

Yes, Semrush is often considered better than Moz for its extensive keyword research capabilities, detailed site audits, competitive analysis tools, and accurate backlink tracking. Its broad database and precise data analytics offer deeper insights for optimizing SEO strategies.

2. What is the difference between Moz and Semrush?

The main difference between Moz and Semrush lies in their focus and breadth of features. Moz is known for its domain and page authority metrics, making it useful for beginners and those focused on local SEO and link building strategies. It offers a user-friendly interface and valuable educational resources.

Semrush, on the other hand, provides a more complete suite of SEO tools, including robust keyword research features, comprehensive site audits, competitive analysis, and backlink monitoring features. It also boasts a larger keyword database and offers more in-depth data analytics, making it better suited for advanced SEO professionals and agencies looking for detailed insights and actionable intelligence to enhance their SEO strategies.

3. Are there any free trials available for Semrush and Moz?

Both Semrush and Moz offer free trials, allowing users to explore their features before making a financial commitment. Semrush offers a 14-day free trial, while Moz provides a 30-day free trial.

4. How does Semrush‘s keyword database compare to Moz’s?

Semrush boasts the largest keyword database in the industry with over 20 billion keywords, offering thousands of keyword variations and detailed search volume data. Moz also provides a robust keyword research tool, but Semrush‘s database is more extensive and provides deeper insights.

5. What are the pricing plans for Semrush and Moz, and how do they compare?

Semrush’s pricing starts at $129.95/month for the Pro plan, with higher-tier plans available for advanced users. Moz’s pricing begins at $99/month for the Standard plan, with options for larger businesses and agencies. Semrush‘s higher pricing is reflective of its more comprehensive features and larger keyword database.

6. Which tool is better for backlink analysis, Semrush or Moz?

Semrush is generally considered better for backlink analysis due to its extensive backlink tracking and analysis features, along with the ability to identify and disavow toxic links. Moz also offers backlink analysis tools, but Semrush provides more detailed insights and actionable data.

7. Can Semrush and Moz help with local SEO?

Moz is particularly useful for optimizing local business listings due to its focus on local SEO tools and metrics. Semrush also offers features for local SEO, but Moz’s tools are specifically designed to improve visibility in local search results.

8. How do Semrush and Moz support content marketing efforts?

Semrush supports content marketing with its Content Marketing Toolkit, offering tools for content creation, optimization, and performance tracking. Moz provides insights into keyword opportunities and SEO optimization, but Semrush offers a more comprehensive suite of tools for content marketers.

9. Can I use Moz for free?

Yes, you can use Moz for free, especially through its MozBar tool. MozBar is a free browser extension that provides instant SEO insights about websites, including metrics like Page Authority and Domain Authority.

10. Which SEO tool is best?

Among the plethora of SEO tools available, Semrush consistently ranks as the top choice for many SEO professionals and digital marketers due to its comprehensive array of features.

Moz, once at the forefront of SEO tools, now finds itself outpaced by competitors like Ahrefs and SE Ranking. Ahrefs is renowned for its robust backlink analysis features, while SE Ranking, while SE Ranking offers a versatile, all-in-one SEO platform for detailed website audits, keyword tracking, and competitive analysis.

Google’s own suite of tools, like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, also provides essential data for SEO at no cost.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on June 3, 2016 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

If you’re an existing Semrush user, here are some resources you can check out to make the best use of your Semrush subscription:

• 10 Actionable Things You Can Do with Semrush to Boost Your Traffic
• How to Use Semrush for Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide
• Semrush Site Audit: 10 Most Overlooked Features
• How to Use Semrush to Crush Your Competition
• 15 Lesser-Known (Yet Super Effective) Semrush Hacks
• How to Use Semrush .Trends to Deconstruct Competitor Strategies
• ChatGPT + Semrush: How to Use ChatGPT with Semrush for SEO Success
• How to Use Semrush to Maximize Your Content Marketing ROI

Here are some more comparison posts featuring Semrush that you may find useful:

• SEO Tools Showdown: Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz Pro vs SpyFu
• Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which SEO Tool is Better?
• Semrush vs Mangools: Which SEO Tool is Better?
• Semrush vs SpyFu: Which Competitor Analysis Tool is Better?
• Semrush vs Ubersuggest: Which SEO Tool is Better?

The post Semrush vs Moz: Which is the Best SEO Tool? appeared first on 99signals.

When it comes to SEO tools, Semrush and Ahrefs are the reigning champions. As someone who has hands-on experience with both tools, I can confirm that these two are also my top picks.

For this reason, choosing a winner between the two is not a straightforward task, especially when compared to my post on Semrush vs Moz, where I had a clear favorite.

I use both these tools at my digital marketing agency on a daily basis and if you have the budget, I’d suggest you do the same.

But what if you had the budget for just one comprehensive SEO tool?

Let’s face it: these tools aren’t cheap. An investment in both these tools would set you back almost $200 a month. And that’s assuming you’re signing up for the most basic plan.

So what if you had the budget for just one? Which SEO tool between these two would it be? That’s the question I’ll attempt to answer in this post.

Below is an in-depth comparison between Semrush and Ahrefs to help you decide which tool is a better fit for all your SEO needs.

I’ll be comparing these two tools on the following six parameters:

• Pricing plans
• Keyword research
• Backlink analysis
• Technical SEO audit
• Position tracking
• Additional features

So without further ado, let’s compare Ahrefs and Semrush, and determine which tool emerges as the overall winner.

Side note: To get the most out of this article, you should first sign up for free trials for both Semrush and Ahrefs. You can find the links below. Just note that Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial to any of its paid plans, but it does offer free access to Ahrefs Webmasters Tools (AWT). With AWT, you get basic site audit, keyword research, and backlink analysis features.

Semrush vs Ahrefs (at a Glance)

Here’s a quick snapshot of the two tools — for an in-depth comparison, go through the whole article.

Winner and Best Overall
Semrush	Ahrefs
Semrush is truly a powerhouse for digital marketers, loaded with awesome features like top-notch keyword research, competitive analysis, and solid site audits. It's your secret weapon for outsmarting the competition and optimizing your SEO game. The keyword tool alone is gold, serving up deep insights that help you hit the mark every time.	Ahrefs excels in backlink analysis, offering unparalleled insights into link profiles which is invaluable for SEO strategies. However, its usage-based pricing model can be prohibitive for small businesses, and its site audit and keyword research features may lack the depth and user-friendliness found in Semrush.
Product Rating: 4.8	Product Rating: 4.1
Starts at $129.95/mo	Starts at $99/mo
Top-tier keyword research features Detailed competitive analysis Extensive site audit features Actionable SEO recommendations Advertising and PPC data insights Extensive reporting features Regular updates with new features	Exceptional backlink analysis capabilities User-friendly interface and visualizations Accurate tracking of rankings and SEO progress Extensive database for competitive analysis Regular updates with new features and data
The platform's extensive features may overwhelm beginners Learning curve to fully utilize all available tools	Usage limits on lower-tier plans can restrict access to full capabilities Buggy site audit tool Lack of reporting features
Sign Up for Semrush	Sign Up for Ahrefs

Winner and Best Overall

Semrush

Semrush is truly a powerhouse for digital marketers, loaded with awesome features like top-notch keyword research, competitive analysis, and solid site audits. It's your secret weapon for outsmarting the competition and optimizing your SEO game. The keyword tool alone is gold, serving up deep insights that help you hit the mark every time.

Product Rating:

4.8

Starts at $129.95/mo

• Top-tier keyword research features
• Detailed competitive analysis
• Extensive site audit features
• Actionable SEO recommendations
• Advertising and PPC data insights
• Extensive reporting features
• Regular updates with new features

• The platform's extensive features may overwhelm beginners
• Learning curve to fully utilize all available tools

Sign Up for Semrush

Ahrefs

Ahrefs excels in backlink analysis, offering unparalleled insights into link profiles which is invaluable for SEO strategies. However, its usage-based pricing model can be prohibitive for small businesses, and its site audit and keyword research features may lack the depth and user-friendliness found in Semrush.

Product Rating:

4.1

Starts at $99/mo

• Exceptional backlink analysis capabilities
• User-friendly interface and visualizations
• Accurate tracking of rankings and SEO progress
• Extensive database for competitive analysis
• Regular updates with new features and data

• Usage limits on lower-tier plans can restrict access to full capabilities
• Buggy site audit tool
• Lack of reporting features

Sign Up for Ahrefs

Introduction to Semrush

Semrush was launched in 2008 by a small group of SEO and IT specialists who combined their expertise to launch a competitive research service for online marketing. After a decade of experiments and progress, Semrush has slowly evolved into the world’s leading digital marketing toolkit, preferred by marketing experts all over the world.

From keyword research to link building and everything in between, Semrush is truly an all-purpose SEO tool that can help your site climb up Google search rankings and leave your competition in the dust.

I started using Semrush in 2015 to help my clients with their SEO requirements. At the time, I was experimenting with several tools by signing up for free trials and I didn’t have a particular preference.

To be honest, I was relying mostly on keyword data from Google Ads. That soon changed when I started logging into my Semrush account more and more to dive into the invaluable pool of keyword and competition data for my clients.

It soon became my go-to tool for all things SEO and PPC.

What started as a small experiment has turned into a fruitful investment that keeps giving returns. There’s not a day where I don’t use Semrush to get insightful data on the industry in general and for my sites in particular.

Introduction to Ahrefs

Ahrefs was launched in 2010 primarily as a backlink analysis tool. But over time, the platform has gradually evolved into an all-purpose SEO analysis tool that can help you with site audit, keyword research, content marketing, and much more.

When I started using Ahrefs in late 2016, it was still primarily known for its backlink analysis capabilities. The reason I started using Ahrefs was that I was not satisfied with the data I was obtaining from Semrush‘s backlink analysis tool (which was still in beta stage at the time).

What really drew me to Ahrefs was the super-smooth user interface and the ease with which you could obtain data. Not to mention the sheer depth of backlink data for your site as well as your competitors’ sites. There was no other tool on the market that could compete with Ahrefs in terms of backlink analysis.

As stated, Ahrefs kept introducing new features and soon developed into a full-fledged SEO tool that now helps you with more than just link building. You can use Keywords Explorer to generate hundreds of content ideas for your target keyword and use the Site Audit feature to find and fix technical SEO issues with your site.

Recently, Ahrefs announced a change to their pricing structure when they adopted usage-based pricing. Under the new pricing structure, a user has 500 monthly credits. When you exceed this limit, you’re charged extra for the additional data. We’ll explore this in detail in the pricing section of this post. (Spoiler alert: It’s controversial!)

Despite the controversial change to its pricing model, Ahrefs continues to be a popular SEO tool among online marketers. But does it have what it takes to take on an SEO heavyweight like Semrush? Let’s find out!

Now that you have a basic overview of both these tools, let’s dive deeper and do an in-depth Semrush vs Ahrefs comparison.

We’ll begin by looking at the pricing structures, since the primary difference between Semrush and Ahrefs lies in their cost, especially given the recent changes both tools made to their pricing plans.

Pricing Wars: Semrush & Ahrefs Face-Off

Typically, when it comes to comparison posts, I place the pricing section right at the end. But because both tools have gone through significant changes recently, it is best to include it at the start of the post.

Now, I’ll level with you: After Ahrefs announced their new pricing plans in May 2022, I had to repeatedly review this section.

It would be an understatement to suggest that Ahrefs’ pricing plans are confusing.

Prior to Ahrefs’ new pricing plans, Semrush and Ahrefs were similarly priced. In fact, after Semrush rolled out their new pricing structure early last year, Ahrefs was actually a tad cheaper than Semrush.

But all that changed in May 2022 with Ahrefs’ adoption of usage-based pricing. While Ahrefs’ basic plan still costs the same ($99/month), it introduced limits to the usage.

An Ahrefs power user can now only consume 500 credits a month. If you exceed this limit, you’ll be charged extra.

This understandably caused a lot of backlash within the SEO community. Just take a look at some of these posts from the Ahrefs Insider group on Facebook.

It’s not just that the limits are too low for serious SEO users, but also the way in which the credits are consumed. The credits are used whenever you open a report on Ahrefs, apply filters to your results, or request additional data.

As one Redditor explains here, you can burn through your monthly credits on Ahrefs in no time.

On a side note, it should be noted that legacy users can still follow the old pricing structure with higher usage limits. But this too comes at a cost — you’ll not have access to new Ahrefs features as and when they are introduced. You can access these features only by switching to the new usage-based pricing.

In one swift move, Ahrefs has somehow managed to isolate both new and long-time users. Needless to say, a lot of existing users are now actively searching for Ahrefs alternatives.

Usage-based pricing is a highly controversial SaaS pricing model. Ahrefs tried to justify this pricing change in this blog post by saying that they modelled it after analyzing average user data and only the heaviest 20% of users would end up paying more. But judging by the customer backlash, that number seems to be much higher.

On the other hand, Semrush offers much higher limits. You can consume up to 3,000 reports a day and display up to 10,000 results per report.

Bottom line: While Ahrefs’ basic plan costs $20 less than its counterpart, Semrush‘s tier-based pricing structure with much higher limits is more appealing to users than Ahrefs’ controversial usage-based pricing.

Here’s a glimpse of the pricing structure both these platforms follow.

Breaking Down Semrush Pricing: What’s Your Investment?

Semrush increased their prices in July 2023. This is the current Semrush pricing structure. If you switch to annual billing, you can save up to 17% on your total billing amount.

Semrush follows a more straightforward pricing structure compared to Ahrefs. Both daily limits and monthly limits are much higher (3,000 reports/day). Since Semrush follows a tier-based pricing model, you don’t have to worry about extra charges even when you reach the limits of your plan.

Ahrefs Pricing Explained: Cost vs Value

Ahrefs offers four monthly pricing plans. You can save 20% on your total bill amount by opting for annual billing:

With the new usage-based pricing structure in place, a power user can consume only up to 500 credits a month. When you open up a report on your Ahrefs dashboard or apply filters to your results, 1 credit is consumed. You’ll be automatically charged for additional data when consumption exceeds your plan’s limits.

As mentioned earlier, this has caused a huge controversy with both legacy and new users. Despite mounting pressure from the SEO community, Ahrefs is rigidly following the highly unpopular pay-as-you-go default payment option. The company’s response to the backlash has been vague and ambiguous, which is concerning to say the least.

At the time of writing this post, Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial. You can sign up for their free Webmasters tool to get limited access to some of the features outlined above.

The table below provides a quick glimpse into how Semrush‘s basic pricing plan (PRO plan) compares with Ahrefs’ pricing plan (Lite plan):

Keyword Research Clash: Semrush vs Ahrefs

Keyword research is perhaps the most important aspect of SEO.

It helps you get a deeper understanding of your target audience and how they are searching for your content or offerings.

If you nail the keyword research part of SEO, you can craft content for your website that satisfies both users and search engines.

As you’ll soon see, both Semrush and Ahrefs have commendable keyword research capabilities.

While Semrush has been a pioneer of sorts when it comes to keyword research, Ahrefs has made significant strides with Keywords Explorer, its flagship keyword research tool, in the last few years.

Read on to find out which tool is better for keyword research.

Keyword Magic with Semrush: How It Stacks Up

Semrush is primarily known for its keyword research features. Aside from offering a robust keyword research toolkit, Semrush also has a reputation for providing the most accurate data for search volume, an important metric for both SEO and PPC campaigns.

The first glimpse of Semrush‘s keyword research capabilities can be found when you type in a keyword in the search box.

The Keyword Overview report gives you a quick summary of all major keyword metrics for that keyword — monthly search volume, keyword difficultly, CPC, PPC competition, top-ranking pages, keyword ad history, ad copy, and more.

But to deep dive into Semrush‘s keyword research capabilities, you’d have to use the following tools:

• Topic Research
• Keyword Magic Tool

Let’s explore the Topic Research tool first.

Topic Research lets you generate a ton of content ideas for any given topic you give a search on. The list of subtopics include headlines, questions, related searches, and more.

To begin, navigate to Topic Research from your Semrush dashboard and type in the topic or keyword(s) into the search box. Hit the “Get content ideas” button to generate a list of subtopics for your main topic.

By default, the content ideas are shown in the form of cards with subtopics. The trending subtopics are marked with a fire icon. These are the most popular subtopics over the last 60 days across the Internet. In order to view the trending subtopics first, turn the toggle on for “Trending topics first” as shown below:

You can also sort the topic cards by volume, difficulty, or topic efficiency.

You can click on any of these cards to get more info like the top headlines, questions, and related searches surrounding the topic.

In the example above, I gave a search on “content marketing tools” and generated a list of subtopics that included trending topics such as:

• 15 Content Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without
• The 19 Best Content Marketing Tools in 2024
• 12 Time-Saving Tools for Content Marketers

… and topics with high search volume such as:

• 10 Free Google Tools All Content Marketers Should Use
• Top 15 Tools That Will Help You Create Better Content
• 8 Tools to Streamline Your Content Marketing Machine

As you can see, the Topic Research tool is an invaluable tool to generate a list of trending topics. If you’re ever in need of ideas to write blog posts on, Semrush‘s Topic Research should be your go-to tool.

The second keyword research tool you can use within the Semrush toolkit is the Keyword Magic Tool.

The tool currently supports 142 databases with over 20 billion keywords in total. With the Keyword Magic tool, you can find the right keywords to use in your articles and optimize them in a way that not just helps you rank high in organic results, but also in the coveted featured snippets section.

To use this tool, login to your Semrush dashboard and go through this sequence:

Keyword Analytics > Keyword Magic Tool

Enter your seed keyword(s) and hit “Search.”

From your seed keyword, the tool will generate a list of keywords that you can use in your post/page to help it rank higher in SERPs and improve the overall relevance of your content.

You can then use modifiers such as Broad Match, Phrase Match, Exact Match, or Related to get more specific results from your seed keyword.

You can exclude keywords that you know are not relevant to your campaign.

You’ll find keyword groups for your seed keywords on the left side of the results page and you can exclude keyword groups to further narrow down the keywords you’re targeting.

For example, I filtered out keywords that had the year 2022 in the results as it doesn’t make sense in 2023 to write about trending content marketing tools in 2022.

Once you’ve identified all the keywords, you can add these keywords directly into Keyword Manager to get more insights on the shortlisted keywords.

In summary, Semrush‘s Keyword Magic tool provides a ton of keyword data to help you create SEO-friendly content that has every chance of ranking high in search results.

Related: How to Use Semrush for Keyword Research: The Definitive Guide

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer: A Deep Dive

With Ahrefs, you’ll be using the Keywords Explorer tool for keyword research.

With this tool, you can generate thousands of keyword suggestions for your parent topic and see important keyword metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, etc. and also obtain data on subtopics such as questions, similar keywords, and newly discovered keywords.

Let me offer you a quick glimpse of how Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer works.

Visit the Keywords Explorer tab from your Ahrefs dashboard and type in your keyword(s) into the search box, choose the location you’d like to target, and hit the search icon.

You’ll then be presented with key data for the seed keyword(s) as well as a list of keyword ideas for your seed keyword(s), along with search volume for each of the keywords.

What’s really unique about Ahrefs is that in addition to showing you search volume for the target keyword, Ahrefs also shows you clicks metric, which refers to the average monthly number of clicks that people make while searching for the target keyword.

This is an important metric to track because some searches generate clicks on multiple results while others may not generate any clicks at all. For example, when we search for a certain celebrity’s age on Google.

You can view clicks metric for all the keyword ideas generated from your seed keyword. Click “View all” at the end of the list to see clicks metric as well as other keyword data for your target keywords.

Keyword Research Verdict: Semrush or Ahrefs?

If we are evaluating these tools on keyword research capabilities alone, then Semrush knocks it out of the park. That’s not to say Ahrefs is bad. It’s just that Semrush is in a whole different league when it comes to keyword research.

From keyword data perspective, Ahrefs just shows you search volume, keyword difficulty, clicks, and CPC for your seed keywords. Semrush goes beyond that by showing you other important keyword metrics such as competitive density, trend, and SERP features.

Furthermore, in terms of statistics, Semrush has the largest keyword database in the industry (20 billion keywords) — almost double the size of Ahrefs’ database (10.2 billion keywords).

Another factor in Semrush‘s favor is the accuracy of search volume data. Having used both tools to optimize keywords for my clients, I’ve seen Semrush present a far more accurate search volume data on a wide range of keywords than Ahrefs.

Winner: Semrush

[Score: 1-0 in favor of Semrush]

Backlink Analysis Showdown: Semrush vs Ahrefs

Link building is one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, aspects of SEO. Backlink analysis of your own domain and your competition helps you stay on track in the race to rank higher in search result pages.

If we were comparing these two tools on backlink analysis features a couple of years ago, Ahrefs would have won the battle hands down. But in recent years, Semrush has made a lot of upgrades and improvements to their backlink analysis features, including a newly-expanded link index.

But have they done enough to take on the backlink analysis behemoth that is Ahrefs? Let’s find out.

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics: A Closer Look

For a long time, the Backlink Analytics tool was the weakest link in Semrush‘s SEO toolkit. That changed in 2019 when Semrush did a complete overhaul and made a major improvement in the quality of their backlink data.

Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool has come a long way in providing you with important data on your backlink profile as well as your competitors’ backlink profiles.

To analyze your backlinks on Semrush, enter your domain in the search box and select “Backlinks” in the drop-down menu, and hit “Enter.”

In a few seconds, Semrush will provide you with an overview of your overall backlink profile, including the total number of backlinks and referring domains.

From here, you can get deeper insights into your link profile by clicking on the total backlinks number to go to the Backlinks report or by clicking on the referring domains number to go to the Referring Domains report.

You can also view other backlink metrics for your site such as backlink types (text, image, etc.), link attributes (dofollow, nofollow), top anchors, categories of referring domains, among others.

Similarly, you can also get crucial insights on any of your competitors’ websites and link building strategies. Just type in your competitor’s domain name in the search box and generate a Backlink Overview report to view your competitor’s overall link profile and other backlink metrics.

In the example above, I used Darren Rowse’s blog, Problogger.com. Semrush found a total of 736k backlinks and 18.4k referring domains. We’ll return to this data when we analyze the same site on Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

The other noteworthy tool in Semrush‘s link building suite is the Backlink Audit tool.

This tool does a thorough audit of your site’s backlink profile to identify toxic backlinks and helps you avoid Google penalties.

You’ll receive email alerts whenever a suspicious link is identified on your website and the tool helps you create a disavow file, which you can then submit to Google Search Console.

Disavowing toxic links is just as important as building authoritative backlinks.

Toxic backlinks can quickly undermine your link building efforts and derail your rankings. As such, it’s necessary to perform regular backlink audits to weed out suspicious backlinks and maintain a healthy link profile.

Ahrefs’ Backlink Analysis: Behind the Scenes

If you’re an Ahrefs user, a large portion of your time will be spent on Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool. The Site Explorer tool gives you a ton of useful search data, but most importantly, you can obtain a comprehensive analysis of your site’s as well as your competitors’ link profile.

Just navigate to Site Explorer from your Ahrefs dashboard and enter the domain you want to analyze to get an in-depth look at your site’s backlink profile.

The Overview report provides a top-level view of the website you’re analyzing. But since we’re evaluating Ahrefs on backlink analysis features, we’ll just be focusing on two metrics — Referring Domains and Backlinks.

You can click on the number below Referring domains or Backlinks to get deeper insights into the sites linking to your domain.

The Referring domains report is more important as it shows you all the sites that are linking to your domain and the number of times they’ve each linked. You can select “dofollow” from the link-type drop down and sort by DR to see some truly authoritative sites that are linking to your domain.

You can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to not just analyze the backlink profile of an entire website, but the link profile of specific URLs. For example, this is the data I found on one of HubSpot’s top-performing pages:

Now let’s return to Problogger.com, the example I used while analyzing backlinks on Semrush.

When I analyzed Problogger.com on Semrush, I found 736k backlinks and 18.4k referring domains.

On Ahrefs, I found 1.32 million backlinks and 33.2k referring domains for the same website.

This indicates that Ahrefs has a larger link index. But that’s not necessarily true in all cases. In some cases, I found Semrush returning a larger number for referring domains and backlinks.

Even if Semrush claims to have a larger link index, we must remember that link index is just one of the parameters we should be judging a backlink checker tool on.

Other factors such as accuracy and user interface are equally important. And these are the two factors where Ahrefs has an edge over Semrush and other backlink analysis tools on the market.

Crowning the Backlink Analysis Champion: Semrush or Ahrefs?

Despite making progress in terms of adding new link building features, Semrush is still second to Ahrefs when it comes to backlink analysis.

Semrush has a larger link index, but it’s the ease with which Ahrefs lets you obtain data that makes it a clear winner in this category.

Backlink analysis has always been Ahrefs’ strength while it was one of Semrush‘s weaker features for a long time. Ahrefs’ experience and expertise in this domain make it possible for them to innovate faster and provide users with an uncluttered UI that presents comprehensive backlink data.

Winner: Ahrefs

[Score: Tied at 1-1]

Technical SEO Audit Face-Off: Semrush vs Ahrefs

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the crawling, indexing, and rendering phase of your website to achieve higher search rankings. It’s an aspect of SEO that’s often sidelined by more interesting aspects of SEO such as keyword research and link building. But it’s equally important.

Site structure, site speed, robots.txt, SSL certificate, XML sitemap, etc. are some of the factors that can affect your site’s technical SEO health. As such, it’s important to perform a technical SEO audit from time to time to identify and fix technical SEO issues with the site and ensure that these issues are not holding your website back from ranking in SERPs.

Now let’s examine which tool does a better job at performing technical SEO audits.

Semrush’s Technical SEO Audit: Inside the Toolbox

One of the most frequently used tools within the Semrush toolkit is the Site Audit tool. The tool allows you to do a complete SEO audit of your site and analyzes the overall SEO health of your site. It provides you with a list of on-site issues that your site is currently facing and gives you recommendations to fix these issues so your site can rank higher in SERPs.

The Site Audit tool contains over 130 checks for SEO issues, ranging from common on-page issues like title tags, h1 tags, meta descriptions, and images to complex issues such as hreflang conflicts within page source code, format errors in sitemap.xml files, etc.

To run a site audit on Semrush, create a new project, and select the “Set up” button in the Site Audit block of your Project interface. Enter the details here and hit the “Start Site Audit” button.

Within a few minutes, Semrush will return with an overview report of your site’s SEO health.

The total health score of the website is based on the ratio of found issues to the number of performed checks. The issues are categorized into Errors (most severe issues), Warnings (issues of medium severity), and Notices (less severe than Warnings).

Below the errors, warnings, and notices you will see the top issues from your audit. These issues are shown based on their priority level and the number of pages with said issues. Click on one of the buttons beside the issue to see the list presented in the Issues tab. Here, you’ll find more details on all the issues and the steps you need to take in order to fix them.

After you check all of your issues and make the fixes, you can re-run the Site Audit to see if the errors and warnings are fixed for good.

Related: Semrush Site Audit: 10 Most Overlooked Features

Ahrefs’ Technical SEO Features: The Inside Scoop

The Site Audit tool from Ahrefs scans your website to uncover any technical and SEO problems that might be holding it back. The tool crawls all the pages on your website and analyzes your website for 100+ pre-defined SEO issues.

Once the audit is complete, Ahrefs provides an overall SEO health score, presents key data in charts, and shows all possible SEO issues with your site, and provides recommendations on how to fix them.

To do a site audit on Ahrefs, login to your Ahrefs account and go through this sequence:

Site audit > New project > Enter your domain > Continue

Now you just have to wait for Ahrefs to crawl your website and check for possible technical SEO errors, which brings me to my biggest gripe with the Site Audit tool. It takes way too long.

Even if your site has just a few pages, Ahrefs can take several hours to return with an audit overview report. You may as well log out of the dashboard and wait for an email alert from Ahrefs to inform you that the site audit is complete.

Who Wins at Technical SEO: Semrush or Ahrefs?

Semrush’s Site Audit tool is the clear winner here.

Though Ahrefs does a good job providing a fairly accurate picture of the errors affecting your site’s SEO, it takes a long time to scan your website and generate an audit report.

Besides, Semrush‘s Site Audit tool is easier to use, more accurate, and contains additional features such as crawl comparison, historical chart, etc.

As is the case with Ahrefs’ backlink analytics tool, Semrush has had more time perfecting its Site Audit tool and hence does a better job at identifying critical on-site errors that are hurting your site’s search visibility.

Winner: Semrush

[Score: 2-1 in favor of Semrush]

Position Tracking Tug-of-War: Semrush vs Ahrefs

How do you measure the impact of all the SEO work you’ve done? By tracking the positions in SERPs of all the keywords you’re targeting for your site.

Position tracking or rank tracking allows you to track the overall visibility of your site in search results to determine what’s working and what’s not. Furthermore, you can also track your competitors’ rankings in SERPs to see where you stand in the grand scheme of things.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush provide position tracking features. Let’s examine which tool does it better.

Semrush’s Position Tracking: What Sets It Apart

Semrush lets you track your target keywords with the Position Tracking tool. It’s considered one of the most accurate position tracking tools on the market.

What makes it even more unique is the fact that it shows you mobile and local rankings to give you a complete picture of your site’s visibility in SERPs.

This tool lets you add all the keywords you’d like to rank for and track your positions for these keywords for any location on multiple devices.

To start tracking your keywords, go through this sequence:

Project > Position Tracking > Set up 

Add your location, select the device (desktop, mobile, or tablet), add your competitors’ domains, and then finally, add a list of keywords that you want to rank for.

The Position Tracking report shows you three main metrics for each of the keywords you’ve added: Positions, Estimated Traffic, and Visibility.

You’ll also see the best performing keywords for your website, keywords with positive impact (improved rankings), and keywords with negative impact (decreased rankings).

For more in-depth information on your rankings, you can click on the Overview tab to view the position tracking report for the selected keywords in the Google top 100 and position changes over a selected time period.

Ahrefs Rank Tracker: Accuracy Examined

The Rank Tracker feature on Ahrefs helps you keep track of a list of target keywords in multiple locations (country level) both for desktop and mobile devices. The tool also lets you see how your rankings for a particular keyword progress over time through position history charts.

When you add a new project on Ahrefs, you’re also given the option to add keywords that you’d like to track for your website. You can also add up to 5 competitors in order to compare your organic search rankings against your competitors.

Once you’ve entered these details, you can monitor the performance of your keywords in SERPs and measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns. Better yet, you can monitor your competitors’ visibility in search and fine-tune your campaigns accordingly.

You can also enable Rank Tracker Notifications in Settings to receive email alerts from Ahrefs whenever your rankings improve or decline.

Semrush or Ahrefs: Who Wins the Position Tracking Standoff?

When it comes to position tracking features, Ahrefs and Semrush are tied.

Both these tools are incredibly useful in helping you track your search performance.

So it’d be unfair to have a winner here as both tools provide in-depth as well as highly accurate rank tracking data.

Winner: Tie

[Score: 2-1 in favor of Semrush]

Beyond Basics: Semrush and Ahrefs Additional Features

Both Semrush and Ahrefs keep adding cool new features from time to time and make improvements to their existing features.

Over the last two years, Ahrefs has significantly improved its keyword research capabilities by updating its keyword database and adding the “clicks” metric to provide a more comprehensive and accurate report to its users.

On the other hand, Semrush has completely revamped its link building features to provide better data to its users.

When it comes to additional features, however, Semrush provides more bang for your buck.

You don’t just get access to Semrush‘s SEO toolkit when you subscribe to Semrush. You also get access to the advertising toolkit (PPC Keyword Tool, CPC Map), social media toolkit (Social Media Planner, Social Media Poster), and competitor research toolkit (includes add-ons like Traffic Analytics and Market Explorer).

But more importantly, you get access to Semrush‘s multifaceted content marketing platform, which includes the following tools:

• Topic Research – analyzes your competitors’ content and provides ideas to outrank them in SERPs. (Refer to the “Keyword Research” section of this article for more insights on the tool)
• SEO Content Template – helps you create well-crafted SEO-friendly content.
• SEO Writing Assistant – checks if your blog posts are following SEO best practices. A great alternative to Yoast SEO. You can use the AI-powered features in SEO Writing Assistant to optimize your existing posts.
• Brand Monitoring – tracks your and your competitors’ brand mentions online
• Post Tracking – analyzes any post by tracking its rankings, backlinks, and social shares
• Content Audit – audits your website content and suggests improvements

With the help of these aforementioned tools, you can create a winning content strategy for your blog and outsmart your rivals in search results.

Also worth mentioning are Semrush App Center tools such as BuzzGuru and AdClarity.

BuzzGuru is a powerful influencer marketing platform that helps brands manage their entire influencer marketing campaign cycle in one dashboard. With this tool, you can analyze your competitors’ ad campaigns, perform market and trends analysis, and discover the influencers that leading brands work with. Click here to learn more about BuzzGuru.

AdClarity is a competitive intelligence app that collects, analyzes, and aggregates real-time ads. This tool allows you to keep a tab on your competitors’ ad campaigns across social, video, and digital, track their total advertising spend and share of voice, and get access to their campaigns’ key performance stats. Click here to learn more about AdClarity.

Both these tools are add-ons that are a part of Semrush App Center, and they come with separate pricing.

Semrush also has superior reporting features. With Semrush, you can create, customize, and schedule PDF reports to better organize your data in one place.

I consider this an essential feature if you’re running an agency where you have to frequently send SEO reports to your clients to showcase progress.

If you’re just seeking an SEO toolkit to help you improve your search rankings, then you may be satisfied with the insights Ahrefs provides. But if you run Google ads, then you may find Semrush‘s PPC Keyword Tool to be invaluable in optimizing the results from your ad campaigns.

Bottom line? With Ahrefs, you’re just subscribing to an SEO tool for $99/mo. But with Semrush, you’re subscribing to an online marketing toolkit that will not just boost your search traffic but will also optimize your PPC as well as social media campaigns.

Winner: Semrush

[Final Score: 3-1 in favor of Semrush]

Wrap-Up: Semrush vs Ahrefs – The Verdict

Ultimately, the decision of choosing between Semrush or Ahrefs as your go-to SEO tool will depend on your specific needs and preferences.

If link building and backlink analysis are top priority for you right now, then go with Ahrefs. But if you value keyword research, technical SEO, and content marketing over link building, then Semrush is a better choice.

I’ll level with you: As a long-time Semrush user, I’m perhaps a bit biased in favor of Semrush. But I can’t help it — having spent countless hours on this tool, I was able to unravel a ton of data and insights for my clients to help their websites move up the Google search rankings.

In the end, I was able to retain these clients at my agency because of the data obtained from Semrush.

Having said that, I would still urge you to invest in both these tools if you have the budget as both of them have their own unique features.

But if you have the budget for just one, I’d recommend Semrush over Ahrefs as it offers more bang for your buck. And based on the in-depth comparison analysis above, Semrush emerges as the superior SEO tool.

To summarize this post, here’s a visual representation of how Semrush compares to Ahrefs on key parameters:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): Semrush vs Ahrefs

1. Is Semrush better than Ahrefs?

Yes, Semrush is often considered better for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, offering extensive tools for SEO, content marketing, PPC, and social media. While Ahrefs excels in backlink analysis and has strong competitor research capabilities, its site audit features are not as detailed as Semrush‘s.

Additionally, Ahrefs’s usage-based pricing can become quite expensive as your needs increase. So, while Ahrefs is a strong tool, Semrush provides a broader range of features and a more predictable pricing model, making it the preferred choice for many marketers.

2. What is the difference between Ahrefs and Semrush?

While Ahrefs is known for its stellar backlink analysis, Semrush takes the lead in competitor research, offering in-depth insights into competitors’ SEO, content, and PPC strategies. Semrush also provides a wide array of tools for SEO, content marketing, and PPC, making it a go-to for a holistic digital marketing approach. Ahrefs shines with its link analysis and Semrush excels in comprehensive competitor insights and broader marketing analytics.

3. Do Semrush and Ahrefs offer features for content marketing?

Semrush offers a Content Marketing Toolkit that includes content audit, topic research, SEO content template, and brand monitoring tools, making it a complete solution for content strategists. Ahrefs counters with its Content Explorer, which is great for finding content ideas and analyzing the performance of content in your niche.

4. Can I manage and track multiple websites with both Semrush and Ahrefs?

Yes, both tools allow for the management and tracking of multiple websites. However, Semrush offers a more granular project management feature, which is especially useful for agencies or businesses with multiple SEO projects, while Ahrefs provides a straightforward approach suitable for individual site owners and SEO professionals.

5. What sets Semrush‘s keyword research tool apart from Ahrefs?

Semrush is renowned for its extensive keyword database and the ability to see competitors’ keyword strategies, offering insights into both organic and paid search performance. This makes it particularly valuable for those looking to understand the competitive landscape and identify new opportunities.

6. Are there any PPC features in Semrush that Ahrefs lacks?

Semrush offers extensive PPC analysis tools, including Ad Builder, PPC Keyword Tool, and PLA Research, which are particularly valuable for digital marketers looking to optimize paid search campaigns. Ahrefs focuses more on organic search and does not offer dedicated PPC campaign management features.

7. How user-friendly are Semrush and Ahrefs for SEO beginners?

Both platforms have a learning curve, but Semrush is often noted for its user-friendly interface and extensive educational resources, including Semrush Academy, making it more accessible for beginners. Ahrefs also provides helpful resources and a straightforward interface but might appeal more to users with some SEO background.

8. Does Ahrefs offer any tools for tracking web mentions or social media presence?

Ahrefs primarily focuses on SEO and backlink analysis and does not offer dedicated tools for tracking web mentions or social media presence. Semrush, on the other hand, includes Brand Monitoring and Social Media Tracker tools, which can track mentions across the web and analyze social media performance.

9. Which tool is better for agency use?

Both Semrush and Ahrefs are suitable for agencies, but Semrush often gets the nod due to its extensive project management features, white-label reporting, and scalability. Ahrefs is also a strong contender with robust tools and reporting capabilities that can support client work effectively.

10. How do the pricing plans of Semrush and Ahrefs compare?

Both tools offer multiple pricing tiers based on the features and usage limits. Semrush‘s plans are generally structured around users, projects, and access to tools, while Ahrefs bases its pricing on data access levels and update frequencies. Pricing can be competitive, so it’s best to evaluate based on the specific tools and limits you need.

10. How do I decide whether Semrush or Ahrefs is the right tool for my SEO strategy?

Consider your primary focus areas in SEO: if your strategy leans heavily towards competitive keyword research, PPC, and content marketing, Semrush might offer the breadth of tools you need.

If your priority is building a robust backlink strategy and conducting detailed competitor content analysis, Ahrefs could be more aligned with your needs.

Evaluating each tool’s specific features in relation to your SEO goals and preferences is key to making the right choice.

11. Does Ahrefs work for YouTube?

Ahrefs is primarily designed for SEO analysis related to websites and does not specifically cater to YouTube or video content optimization. For YouTube-specific analytics and optimization, tools like TubeBuddy or VidIQ are more specialized. However, Ahrefs can still be useful for researching keywords that can be used in your YouTube video titles, descriptions, and tags to potentially improve your video’s visibility on Google.

12. Can I use Ahrefs for free?

Ahrefs offers a limited free version of its tool through Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT). AWT provides site owners with insights into their website’s SEO performance, including site audits and backlink checks. However, the free version offers limited access compared to the full suite of features available in the paid subscriptions. For more comprehensive access, Ahrefs requires a subscription.

If you found this article useful, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on February 26, 2020 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance, freshness, and comprehensiveness. 

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• Semrush vs SpyFu: Which Competitor Analysis Tool is Better?
• 26 Best Google Chrome Extensions for SEO

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Looking to give your site’s SEO a serious boost? Sitechecker might just be the tool you need. It’s designed to streamline your SEO efforts, from tracking rankings to auditing your website for potential improvements.

But with so many tools out there claiming to do the same, you might wonder: Is Sitechecker really worth it?

In this review, we’ll cut through the fluff and dive straight into what makes Sitechecker stand out—or not.

We know you’re busy, so we’ll focus on the features that matter most to SEO pros and website owners alike. We’ll check out its usability, key features, and how it compares to the competition.

Whether you’re a digital marketing veteran or just starting out, this Sitechecker review is all about giving you the clear, concise insights you need to decide if this is the right tool for your SEO toolkit.

What is Sitechecker?

Sitechecker is an all-in-SEO platform that lets you monitor all the important SEO metrics for dozens of sites in one dashboard. Specially designed for multi-product companies and digital marketing agencies, Sitechecker offers a streamlined solution to juggle multiple SEO campaigns efficiently

What sets Sitechecker apart is its user-friendly interface and a robust set of features designed for both beginners and seasoned pros. From real-time website tracking to detailed site audits, backlink monitoring, and keyword tracking, it’s got everything you need to take your SEO game to the next level.

And here’s the kicker: all these nifty features are wrapped up in a super user-friendly package. This means you don’t have to be an SEO expert to improve your site’s performance and visibility in search engine results.

Sign up for a 14-day trial of Sitechecker

Sitechecker: Key Features

Sitechecker boasts an impressive suite of powerful features designed to optimize your website’s SEO strategy effectively.

Here’s a breakdown of its key features:

Site Audit

Sitechecker’s Site Audit tool crawls your website to identify technical SEO issues and provides a comprehensive report with actionable insights.

With the Site Audit tool, you can:

• Scan your website for technical problems.
• Identify on-page and off-page SEO issues.
• Check for broken files and internal or external links.
• Find weak or duplicate content.
• Assess page errors, page load speed issues, and pages blocked by robots.txt.

But here’s the best part: Sitechecker doesn’t just point out the problems and leave you to it. For every issue it finds, it hands you detailed, step-by-step insights on how to fix them.

To get started, login to the Sitechecker dashboard and create a new project. Here, you need to provide details about your website — an important step that serves as the foundation for not just using the Site Audit tool, but all the other tools in the Sitechecker suite.

Once your project is set up, Sitechecker crawls your website and checks for over 100 potential SEO issues that could be undermining your site’s ability to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).

After the crawl is complete, you’ll get a top-level summary of your website’s technical SEO health.

Pay special attention to the total number of issues highlighted under “Criticals” and “Warnings” as these have the highest impact on your Website Score, an SEO metric that Sitechecker uses to assess the technical SEO health of your website.

In the next section, you can view all the issues that are affecting your site’s SEO. You can select any of the categories above to filter out specific issues.

Once you’ve decided which issue to address first, you can click on the “View issue” button against it and you’ll see all the pages affected by that specific issue.

Next, you can click on the “View issue in code” button to see where exactly this issue is located in the source code of the URL.

You can switch to the “How to fix” tab to get a better understanding of the issue, why it’s important to fix, and detailed instructions on how to fix it.

Personally, I found Sitechecker’s Site Audit tool to do a thorough job identifying some of the most critical errors that were hurting my site’s SEO.

Surprisingly, some of these errors were not even highlighted in the other SEO audit tools that I typically use, like Semrush and SE Ranking.

Site Monitoring

Sitechecker’s Site Monitoring tool allows you to monitor changes on your website and ensures that you’re promptly updated to the most critical changes affecting your SEO performance.

It checks for both major and minor changes, including changes with URLs, source code, and page content. It keeps you informed about important issues like website downtime, pages becoming non-indexable in robots.txt, or modifications in HTTP status codes, ensuring you stay on top of your site’s SEO health.

Site Monitoring is automatically activated as soon as you create a new project on Sitechecker.

In your Site Monitoring report, you’ll notice two graphs: Content Updates and Site Audit updates.

The Content Updates graph offers a clear visualization of all changes to your site’s content over your chosen period.

Similarly, the Site Audit Updates graph provides a detailed overview of your site’s technical SEO health, based on site audits conducted through Sitechecker. It highlights the total audits performed, pinpoints the issues discovered, and tracks the fixes applied, providing a complete picture of your site’s SEO progress.

In the next section, you’ll get a more detailed overview of all the updates on your website. You can scroll down to see a daily breakdown on what changes occurred on your website and click on any tile to see the specific URLs and the specific changes that were made.

If you’d like to keep a tab on your site’s SEO performance and get real-time alerts on crucial changes, the Site Monitoring tool offers key insights to make informed decisions.

Rank Tracker

Sitechecker’s Rank Tracker tool offers detailed, real-time updates on how your website ranks across different search engines for specific keywords.

With Rank Tracker, you can effortlessly track how content updates, link building, change of internal link structure, or the next Google algorithm update influences your website rankings.

You can set it up when you create a new project on Sitechecker. For deeper insights on your keyword rankings, you can connect your Google Search Console and Google Analytics accounts with Sitechecker.

You can then navigate to “Rank Tracker” from the dashboard and click on the “Add keywords” button.

Here you can select keywords from the automatic keyword suggestions from your Google Search Console or enter them manually.

You can then choose to track these keywords across different devices, search engines, and countries.

Once you’ve added the keywords you’d like to monitor, you can click on the link icon next to it to add the target URL for each keyword as shown below:

Depending on the number of keywords added to the tool, Sitechecker will take a few minutes to collect data on your keyword rankings. After the initial set up, the rankings data is collected on a daily basis.

The Rank Tracker dashboard first presents you with a summary of your rankings — keyword positions in Google’s Top 100, visibility, and indexation progress.

In the next section, you’ll find a comprehensive table that meticulously tracks the daily positions of all your keywords. This detailed overview offers a clear snapshot of how each keyword ranks over time.

From the top of the table, you can select between Basic and Advanced views.

The Basic report combines all the necessary information in an easy and accessible format.

The Advanced view allows you to get granular with your data and configure it to your liking.

By clicking on “Columns”, you can select from a variety of metrics that you would like to see.

From my experience, Sitechecker’s Rank Tracker tool provides a pretty accurate picture of your site’s keyword rankings. The advanced filtering options help you easily select and analyze the specific keywords you’re interested in monitoring.

Moreover, the tool also offers insights into trends and changes over time, giving you a clearer understanding of how your SEO efforts are impacting your site’s visibility in search results.

Backlink Tracker

The Backlink Tracker tool from Sitechecker lets you keep a close watch on your website’s backlinks. With this tool, you can see how well your link building strategy is being implemented, its impact on your search rankings, and get real-time alerts whenever you lose an important backlink.

To get started, you can navigate to “Backlink Tracker” from your dashboard and then click on the “Manage Backlinks” button.

You can either add each backlink manually or bulk import backlinks you’ve found in other SEO tools such as Google Search Console, Semrush, Ahrefs, etc.

Once the backlinks are imported, Sitechecker starts collecting data and updates it twice a week.

It alerts you as soon as you lose a backlink and outlines the necessary steps to reclaim the lost backlink.

Additional Features: On-Page SEO Checker and Keyword Suggestion Tool

In addition to the aforementioned four flagship tools in the Sitechecker toolkit, the platform also offers additional features that you can find in the “Extra tools” section of the dashboard.

Two of these features deserve a special mention because they can really elevate your website’s search engine performance: On-Page SEO Checker and Keyword Suggestion Tool.

With the On-Page SEO Checker, you can do a quick analysis of any page on your site. This tool can be used for free even if you don’t have an active subscription of Sitechecker.

Just enter the URL you’d like to analyze in the search box and in the resulting report, you’ll find all the critical on-page SEO issues you need to fix on that specific page to improve its search engine performance.

You can easily navigate to different sections of the report using the Page Navigation menu located on the right.

Pay special attention to the content optimization tips offered by Sitechecker and keep a tab on the URL’s Google Pagespeed Insights performance.

Sitechecker’s Keyword Suggestion Tool uses data from Google’s Autosuggest feature to generate new keyword ideas and displays them to you in an easy-to-use interface. The tool is extremely useful in helping you identify potentially low-competition keywords and long-tail variations of your target keywords.

You can use these keywords in your SEO, PPC, and content campaigns to improve your online visibility, drive targeted traffic to your website, and ultimately, increase conversions and revenue.

Sitechecker Pricing Plans

Sitechecker offers 3 pricing plans to choose from:

• Basic – $49/month
• Standard – $199/month
• Premium – $399/month

If you’re managing a single site, then Sitechecker’s Basic plan is the best fit for you. You can audit and analyze up to 1000 pages on your site, track rankings of up to 500 keywords, and monitor up to 500 backlinks. You can export unlimited reports and access additional features such as on-page SEO audit, keyword SERP history, and keyword suggestion tool.

If you’re a startup founder or run a small agency, then you can opt for the Standard plan. You can add up to 10 projects on Sitechecker and audit up to 10,000 pages. You can track 2,000 keywords and monitor 5,000 backlinks. In addition to these, you also get extra site audit features, Looker Studio integration, Slack alerts, and more.

For large companies and agencies, the Premium plan would be a good fit. You can add unlimited projects, analyze up to 50,000 pages, track 4000 keywords, and monitor 10,000 backlinks. You can also prepare white label reports and get custom alerts.

Sitechecker Review: Final Verdict

When it comes to SEO tools, using the right ones can make all the difference between stagnation and growth. Sitechecker is definitely a force to reckon with, bringing to the table all the cool features you need to level up your website’s SEO.

Sitechecker’s ability to identify critical technical SEO issues through its Site Audit tool, coupled with the real-time tracking capabilities of its Site Monitoring tool, offers you a powerful way to stay ahead of potential pitfalls. The Rank Tracker and Backlink Tracker further allows you to keep a pulse on your website’s performance and the effectiveness of your SEO strategies.

Comparatively, while tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and SE Ranking have their strengths, Sitechecker’s unique selling points—such as the detailed, step-by-step insights for fixing site issues and its comprehensive tracking and monitoring systems—underscore its value in a crowded market.

Bottom line: If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO platform that offers depth, flexibility, and actionable insights, Sitechecker is certainly worth considering. Its user-friendly interface, coupled with a robust set of tools, positions it as a valuable tool for anyone looking to optimize their website’s SEO performance.

Sign up for a 14-day trial of Sitechecker

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The post Sitechecker Review: Is this SEO Tool Worth It? appeared first on 99signals.

In this in-depth Serpstat review, we’ll explore the various aspects of one of the most widely used online SEO tools and help you decide whether or not it is best for your business.

When it comes to SEO, specifically keyword research, backlink analysis, and technical SEO audit, I place all my trust in two tools: Semrush and Ahrefs.

I thought I’d never find a tool that could match the incredible standards set by these tools — Semrush in keyword research, site audit, and competition analysis, and Ahrefs in backlink analysis.

Which is why I was reluctant to try out Serpstat at first despite reading rave reviews about it on various online forums and marketing subreddits on Reddit.

It’s not that I wasn’t on the lookout for promising new SEO tools. It’s just that I was afraid Serpstat was going to fall way short of my expectations.

But I was wrong.

Within a few weeks of using the tool, I discovered the true potential of Serpstat.

While I was aware of Serpstat’s features before signing up, I was blown away by how well it could do all these things and add value to my SEO and content marketing campaigns.

Having put this all-in-one SEO platform to the test for several years, I can now safely say Serpstat outperforms Ahrefs on several parameters. It also holds its own against Semrush in terms of important SEO features.

With its prices starting at just $59/month, chances are pretty good that you’ll hit the monthly ROI you’re aiming for with this tool.

Keeping this in mind, let’s deep dive and analyze Serpstat’s key features.

If you haven’t tried Serpstat yet, I’d urge you to sign up for a free trial by clicking on the link below and test out some of the features explained later in this review:

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What is Serpstat?

In case this is the first time you’re hearing of Serpstat, here are a few key things you must know about the tool. Others can skip this section and move to the next section, where we explore Serpstat’s key features.

• Serpstat was founded in 2013 as a keyword research tool. Since then, it has slowly evolved into a full-fledged SEO & PPC analysis product.
• Serpstat’s statistics are constantly evolving. Serpstat’s database has more than 6 billion keywords, 63 million ads, and 3.9 billion search suggestions. Their keywords database parallels the database of major SEO companies like Ahrefs and SE Ranking.
• Serpstat provides data from 230 Google databases, including the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Lithuania, South Africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Bulgaria.
• Serpstat is used by more than 30,000 online marketing practitioners worldwide: SEO and PPC professionals, marketing managers, agency owners, and copywriters. It’s also the best-selling SEO tool of all time on AppSumo and the most upvoted SEO tool on Product Hunt.

Now that you have some info about this product, let’s put the tool’s features and functionality under the microscope to see whether it’s worth investing in this tool.

Before we get started, make sure you sign up for a free Serpstat account to implement some of the action items discussed in this review.

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

This Serpstat review is divided into the following sections:

1. Features
2. Ease of Use
3. Pricing
4. Customer Support
5. Customer Feedback and Reviews

Serpstat Review: Serpstat’s Key Features

Serpstat’s features can be divided into 6 broad categories:

1. Website Analysis
2. Keyword Research
3. Backlink Analysis
4. Rank Tracker
5. Site Audit
6. Tools

Let’s take an in-depth look at each of these categories:

1. Website Analysis 

Website analysis has two aspects — Domain Analysis and URL Analysis.

Domain Analysis

To quickly analyze your website, you can type in your domain and hit “Search.”

The overview report will provide a top-level view of your site’s estimated search traffic, organic keywords, paid keywords, and search visibility.

Serpstat will also show your top 5 organic keywords, alongside search volume and current ranking position.

You’ll also find surface-level data on keyword position distribution, traffic trend, keyword trend, top pages, and more.

It’s a handy tool when you want a quick overview of your own domain or any of your competitors’ domains. But for a deeper analysis, you’ll need to explore other sections in Domain Analysis.

Let’s take a deeper look at each of these sections.

SEO Research

From your Serpstat dashboard, navigate to:

Website analysis > SEO research

From here, you can view your site’s top organic keywords, alongside important keyword metrics:

Identify top organic competitors for your site:

Compare your domain with two of your main competitors:

See the top organic pages on your site and your competitors’ sites:

You can click on the organic keywords number against each URL here to open Serpstat’s keyword research tool and analyze your competitors’ best keywords. (But more on Serpstat’s keyword research features in a bit)

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

PPC Research

If you rely on PPC ads to drive traffic to your website, you’ll find this data invaluable.

Just enter your competitor’s domain in the search box and you’ll be able to analyze your top competitors’ PPC strategies, identify gaps in your own PPC campaigns, and then improve upon your ad copies and targeting to reach a wider audience.

Batch Analysis

This feature allows you to quickly compare metrics of up to 200 domains.

For the example below, I picked 12 domains to check key metrics such as traffic estimate, total keywords, new keywords, lost keywords, etc.

URL Analysis

As you might expect, URL Analysis allows you to get SEO data at the URL level.

To quickly analyze a specific URL, just enter the URL in the search box and you’ll get a summary of SEO data on that URL, including top organic keywords, keyword position distribution, and organic competitors.

Now let’s take a deeper look at the other sections in URL Analysis.

SEO Research

Navigate to URL analysis > SEO Research > Enter your URL

You’ll get a list of keywords and their rankings on Google for that specific URL.

Competitors

This report shows competitors to the URL entered in the search bar, along with their total number of Facebook shares and the total number of keywords in top 10.

Compare URL

This is where you can copy two of the competing URLs from the “Competitors” report and do a side-by-side comparison with your URL to discover common or unique keywords between the URLs.

Missing Keywords

This report shows you keywords for which your competitors’ pages rank in Google’s top 10, but are not present in your specified URL.

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

2. Keyword Research

Given the importance of keyword research, it’s no surprise Serpstat has a robust keyword research tool.

With Serpstat, you can generate thousands of keyword ideas, analyze their metrics, and discover what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

To get started, just enter your seed keywords in the search bar, and Serpstat will generate a quick overview report on your keywords. You’ll see metrics like estimated monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, competition, and CPC, alongside top 5 variations for your keywords.

For more in-depth keyword research, you’ll need to dive deeper into the tool.

Like Website Analysis on Serpstat, Keyword Research is divided into two categories: SEO Keyword Search and PPC Keyword Research.

Let’s first explore the reports you can generate with Serpstat’s SEO keyword research tool.

Keywords Selection

In this section, you can find keywords selection (phrase match keywords), related keywords, search suggestions, top pages, and competitors for your target keywords.

From your dashboard, go to Keyword research > SEO research > Keywords selection

Plug in your seed keywords in the search box, and Serpstat will return with a comprehensive list of phrase match keywords, alongside important keyword metrics.

Play around with the filters and the sorting options to arrive at the best keywords for your next campaign.

Next, navigate to the “Related Keywords” report from the sidebar menu. Here you’ll discover keywords that are semantically connected to your target keywords.

Serpstat’s keyword research tool also includes a nifty report on search suggestions. These suggestions are pulled from Google’s Autocomplete feature.

The suggestions in this report can provide more keyword ideas for your content.

Next, you can view the current top-ranking pages for your target keywords to get an idea of who you’ll be competing against. You’ll also see the total number of keywords they rank for and the monthly organic traffic they generate.

Navigate to “Competitors” from the sidebar menu to view all the websites you’ll be competing against.

Although you can generate a boatload of keyword ideas with this tool and get a vivid picture of your competitors’ top keywords, the keyword difficulty score isn’t always accurate.

In some cases, the keyword difficulty score is completely missing (as seen in the “Keywords Selection” screenshot above.)

Keyword difficulty is a super important metric because it indicates the level of competition for your target keywords. It plays a key role in deciding whether a keyword is worth targeting.

So it’s a major glitch in the software, and I hope Serpstat fixes it soon.

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

PPC Keyword Research

Serpstat’s PPC research tool is surprisingly good.

It generates a list of keyword ideas for your PPC campaigns and reveals top competitors who are bidding for the same keywords as you.

Serpstat’s PPC research tool also allows you to see the ad copies your competitors are using.

Serpstat’s “Ads landing pages” report shows you the exact landing pages your competitors are using for their PPC ads.

You can click on the keywords number against each landing page to see the keywords they’re bidding on.

Use Keyword Batch Analysis tool to analyze a list of keywords.

Go to Batch Analysis > Keyword Batch Analysis. It’s an easy way to analyze keywords in bulk and compare them.

3. Backlink Analysis

Serpstat also offers you the capability to analyze your link profile as well as your competitors’ backlink profiles.

This feature allows you to uncover your competition’s link building strategies and highlights new sources you can tap into to build your backlinks.

Serpstat’s backlink analysis tool includes the following features:

Backlink Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a brief overview of your site’s referring domains, pages, total pages indexed, referring pages, and so on.

You also get to see your site’s Trust Rank score, which is Serpstat’s own take on the Domain Authority (DA) metric developed by Moz.

You can also enter any of your competitors’ domains here and get a quick overview report on their backlink profile.

Referring Domains

Here you get to view the referring domains to your website.

You also get to see the Domain Rank of each of the domains linking back to your site.

Backlinks

An all-important feature, this is where you get to see new backlinks as well as lost backlinks to your site.

You also get to see whether the links pointing to your site are “dofollow” or “nofollow” backlinks.

Anchors

Though not as important as they once were, anchors are still crucial to understanding the keywords associated with your site. On Serpstat, you get to view an anchor cloud and a list of keywords used as anchor text to link back to your website.

Top Pages

This feature allows you to see the top pages on your website or your competitor’s site based on the number of backlinks.

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

4. Rank Tracker

Search engine rankings for keywords change frequently. So it’s important to stay ahead of the curve by keeping track of position changes in SERPs for keywords your site is ranking for.

This is where SERP tracking software steps in. It helps you stay updated on how your keywords are doing in search results, so you can make smart choices if things change.

Serpstat’s rank tracking features are designed to provide you with real-time insights into the performance of your keywords in search results.

Take a look at the data and insights you can obtain from Serpstat’s Rank Tracker reports:

• Positions – This allows you to see your site’s rank distribution in search results (top 10, top 20, etc.)
• History – shows you historical data on the domain’s positions for the selected keywords.
• Competitors – shows you the traffic share for the selected keywords among competing domains.

5. Site Audit

Site Audit on Serpstat gives you a comprehensive analysis of your site’s overall SEO score, highlighting all the errors that need to be fixed to have it functioning at its optimal capacity.

Here’s a quick summary of the sections you’ll find in your audit report:

• Meta Tags – allows you to see high, medium, and low priority errors with your site’s title tag, meta description, etc.
• Headings – allows you to see high, medium, and low priority errors concerning headings (h1,h2, etc.) on your site.
• Redirects – shows you the total number of redirects on your site and provides information on whether your site has any wrong or corrupt redirects.
• Accessibility and Indexation – shows you pages with canonical tags, flash elements on page, low word count, etc.
• Links – allows you to see if your content has any problem with external links.
• Server Parameters – shows HTTP/HTTPS issues on your site.
• Loading Speed – allows you to see and fix errors affecting the site speed of your website.

6. Keyword Trends

Another tool Serpstat offers is Keyword trends. You can use this to find the hottest topics in real time.

You can check popular queries in a specific city, language or date which is super convenient and helps with creating a trending and engaging content.

7. Local SEO

Local SEO is extremely important if your business operates regionally. Serpstat’s Local SEO tool allows you to manage your location in dozens of directories straight from one interface.

You can also reply to reviews and post on social media and directories, right from your Local SEO dashboard.

8. Content Analysis

Artificial intelligence has been playing a big role in modern technologies. So it’s no surprise that Serpstat has implemented AI into their tools. This section includes tools that can help you create content based on AI.

The Content analysis section provides the following tools:

• Title generation
• Description generation
• Paraphrasing
• Grammar and spelling
• Article generation
• Keywords extraction
• Bag of words
• Keyword patterns
• Article builder
• FAQ generation
• Plagiarism checker
• Ad generation

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

Serpstat Review: Ease of Use

Since Serpstat is loaded with features, there is a bit of a learning curve involved. This is especially the case if you’re a beginner, and this is the first SEO platform you’ve been exposed to.

Despite a somewhat steep learning curve, you’ll be dazzled by the impressive UI of the tool. Kudos to the team for developing a well-designed interface that is so intuitive and user-friendly.

And if you’re migrating to this tool from other tools such as Semrush, Raven, and Moz, you’ll take some time to get adjusted to the interface.

That’s exactly what happened to me as well.

I was so used to the interface of Semrush that I was reluctant to use Serpstat at first.

But after spending a day or two on the tool, I realized how much I enjoyed using Serpstat and saw myself spending more and more time with it.

Serpstat Review: Serpstat Pricing Plans

This is where Serpstat really delivers the sucker punch to other SEO tools.

Most of the well-known SEO tools on the market seem to have reached a consensus with respect to the monthly pricing of their basic plan, which is somewhere near the region of $100 a month.

Here’s the thing: These tools have earned enough market share and reputation to command a price like that.

But if you’re a blogger who’s just starting out, the pricing of these products can stop you from even trying them out.

You could always sign up for free trials, but they often come with restrictions that prevent you from using them to their full potential.

With Serpstat, you’ll have no such problem.

Despite making several changes to their pricing setup since starting in 2013, Serpstat continues to offer competitive rates.

The prices start at just $59/month. You have the flexibility to go with the pricing plan that best meets your needs out of the four choices.

You can opt for annual subscription on any of these plans and get discounts up to 20%.

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

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Serpstat Review: Customer Support

Successful businesses have one thing in common – they provide great customer service. It’s a competitive advantage that needs to be earned.

Serpstat’s customer support team is helpful and provides resources so you can be an expert at using their tool in no time.

They even have Serpstat Academy, which is a free online learning center. This is where you can learn more about keyword research, competitor analysis, and SEO of various levels, from basic to advanced.

These are the pages you should refer to learn more about using the product:

• User Guide – Here’s you’ll find in-depth tutorials and walkthroughs on how to use Serpstat.
• FAQs – In this section, you’ll find answers to all the frequently asked questions about Serpstat. If you have a question about the product, check out this section first before you reach out to the customer support team.
• How-to Guides – Includes in-depth Serpstat tutorials, how-to resources, and actionable tips.
• Serpstat Blog – Not just good for increasing your productivity on Serpstat, but their articles will help you improve your overall SEO knowledge.

In addition to these resources, you can open up a chat box via chat icon on any of the pages and chat with a Serpstat expert who’ll respond to your query in under 5 minutes. Impressive stuff.

Serpstat Review: Customer Feedback

Serpstat reviews and ratings are quite positive on popular review aggregators such as G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius. This is commendable considering Serpstat is a relatively new tool compared to search veterans like Semrush and Moz.

Here’s how Serpstat is rated on these review sites (as of August 2023):

• G2 – 4.6/5 (453 reviews)
• Capterra – 4.7/5 (162 reviews)
• TrustRadius – 9/10 (26 reviews)

On their website, they have a few video testimonials on the home page, and they have an experts page where they have featured profiles of marketing influencers like Brian Dean and Ian Cleary, who use the product.

Serpstat Review: Final Verdict

When all is said and done, an SEO tool’s primary role should be to present accurate data for keywords, backlinks, and traffic.

The data obtained from the tool should help you create better content and drive qualified traffic to your website.

Serpstat does 3 things exceptionally well – keyword research, PPC analysis, and competitor research.

You can use it to find new keyword opportunities, content ideas, analyze PPC campaigns, and perform in-depth competitor research.

With plans starting from $69/month, it’s one of the most affordable SEO tools on the market.

If you’re seeking a reliable SEO tool that’s easy on your pockets, then you should give Serpstat a try. Sign up for their free plan and test the tool out yourself.

Try Serpstat free for 7 days

EXCLUSIVE OFFER

Serpstat Discount (22% off)

Get 22% discount on any annual Serpstat plan.

Use promo code 99signals2023.

GRAB THIS DEAL

If you have any questions regarding Serpstat, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. Feel free to share your thoughts.

If you liked this Serpstat review, please share it on Twitter using the link below:

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Feb 11, 2017. Since then, Serpstat has made changes, improvements, and added a few new features to their product. The last few post updates take all of these changes into account. I hope you found this updated Serpstat review useful.

Related Articles

• Semrush vs Moz: Which is the Best SEO Tool?
• 8 Best Competitor Research Tools to Spy on Your Competition
• Link Building Strategies: 25 Proven Techniques to Get High-Quality Backlinks
• 5 Best Blogger Outreach Tools to Find and Connect with Top Influencers
• Semrush vs Ahrefs: Which SEO Tool is Better?

The post Serpstat Review: The Ultimate SEO & PPC Tool for Bloggers appeared first on 99signals.

Having a comprehensive SEO platform is like having a Swiss Army knife for a resourceful adventurer.

Just as a Swiss Army knife provides a range of tools for various tasks, an all-in-one SEO platform equips agencies with a versatile toolkit, enabling them to conduct keyword research, analyze backlinks, generate insightful reports, and optimize strategies, all within a single powerful solution.

One such comprehensive SEO platform is SE Ranking, an all-in-one SEO platform that offers a wide range of powerful features tailored specifically for SEO agencies.

From comprehensive keyword research to in-depth backlink analysis and advanced reporting, SE Ranking provides agencies with the tools they need to optimize websites, boost search rankings, and stay ahead in the dynamic world of SEO.

In this article, we do an in-depth review of SE Ranking, exploring its key features and pricing plans. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have all the information you need to decide whether this SEO tool is worth your investment. So, let’s get started and see if SE Ranking is the real deal!

Important note: If you’d like to implement some of the action items in this post, I’d encourage you to sign up for a 2-week free trial of SE Ranking by clicking the link below.

What is SE Ranking?

SE Ranking burst onto the scene back in 2013 as a cloud-based SEO platform.

From entrepreneurs to agencies and online marketing pros, everyone quickly recognized its potential.

In just a few years, SE Ranking solidified its position among the big players in the world of cloud-based SEO tools, earning the trust of over 800,000 users worldwide.

What makes SE Ranking truly impressive is its comprehensive toolkit that equips you with all the essential tools to dominate the SEO game.

Whether you’re diving into in-depth keyword research, conducting meticulous technical SEO audits, or researching your competitors’ strategies, SE Ranking has got your back.

So, in the next section, let’s dive into some of the key features SE Ranking has to offer and see how it can help you optimize your website’s online presence.

Core Features of SE Ranking: What Sets It Apart

Keyword Research with SE Ranking: Top Suggestions for SEO and PPC

Keyword research is an essential part of any SEO strategy, and SE Ranking’s keyword research tools can help you discover the best keywords to target for your website.

With SE Ranking’s intuitive and user-friendly interface, even SEO beginners can easily conduct keyword research and optimize their website for search engines.

To get started, visit the “Keyword Research” tab and simply enter a seed keyword or phrase that you want to target. This could be a broad keyword related to your business or a more specific long-tail keyword that you want to rank for.

The tool will then generate an overview report where you’ll find important keyword metrics for your seed keyword, including keyword difficulty score, search volume, CPC, and more.

Scroll down to find a list of related keywords and phrases based on your seed keyword. You can see the search volume, and difficulty score for each of the keywords.

You can click on any of the keyword terms here to generate a keyword research overview report for those specific keywords.

Expand the list by clicking on the “View Detailed Report” button below each column to see different keyword variations for your target keywords.

Alternatively, you can click on the “Keyword Suggestions” option from the left navigation menu to access the same report.

If your seed keyword is too broad, this list is particularly useful to niche down and identify keywords with the right mix of search volume and difficulty.

If you’d like more data on any of the keywords in the list, simply select the specific keyword and you’ll be able to see the top organic search results for that keyword.

In addition to SEO keyword data, SE Ranking’s Keyword Research tool can also be used to find PPC insights for your target keywords.

In the overview report, scroll down till you find the “​​Most popular ads for the analyzed keyword” section. Here you’ll find PPC campaign data on websites that target similar keywords in their advertising campaigns.

To expand this list, click on the “View Detailed Report” button below the section to see the full list of websites that are bidding for your target keywords in Google Ads.

To view the ad copies, simply move your cursor over the ad that you’d like to see.

You can also access this report by clicking on “Ads History”  from the left navigation menu.

This report will provide valuable insights into the ideal campaign budget required to overcome your PPC competition. It will also shed light on the types of ad copies that are hitting it out of the park on Google Ads.

All things considered, SE Ranking’s keyword research features make it the ultimate choice for digital agencies, providing a comprehensive solution to enhance clients’ online visibility, drive targeted traffic, and optimize SEO strategies effectively.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

Backlink Analysis in SE Ranking: Understanding Your SEO Backlink Profile

Like other prominent backlink checker tools, SE Ranking’s backlink analysis features offer a similar set of functionalities.

To get started, visit the “Backlink Checker” tab and enter your domain.

This will open up the Backlink Overview report which will provide a comprehensive summary of your domain’s backlink metrics. This includes the total count of referring domains and backlinks, as well as domain and page trust scores. Additionally, you can also gather insights about the dofollow/nofollow ratio of your backlinks.

In the same overview report, you can scroll down to find interactive graphs that provide a visual representation into the health and performance of your backlinks.

For instance, the graph on “New & lost referring domains” provides insights into the rate at which new referring domains have been acquired over time.

This graph is useful to promptly gauge the impact and success of your link building campaigns.

In the “Referring Domains” section, you’ll see the total number of links that point to your homepage and links that point to other pages.

By clicking on the referring domains number, you can access the referring domains report, which provides a complete list of unique domains that are linked to your website.

Similarly, in the “Backlinks” column of the overview report, you can click on the number against your backlinks and access the Backlinks report to check all your backlinks and anchor texts.

While SE Ranking’s backlink analysis features are similar to other comprehensive SEO tools on the market, it sets itself apart with interactive graphs, an intuitive UI, and advanced filtering options, allowing you to customize and refine your analysis with ease.

These unique features make it a valuable asset for marketing agencies seeking to optimize their clients’ online presence.

Website Audit via SE Ranking: Website Optimization Made Easy

If you’re not sure how your website is performing, you can use SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool to get a comprehensive overview of its technical setup and user experience. The tool will identify any areas that need improvement, so you can make your website better for both you and your visitors.

It’s an invaluable tool to have at your agency as it can highlight all the technical SEO issues that are preventing your clients’ website from ranking higher in search results.

The best part about SE Ranking’s Website Audit Tool is that you don’t have to set it up manually. Your website is automatically audited by SE Ranking as soon as you add a new project.

You can access the site audit report by navigating to:

Website Audit > Overview

The Overview report provides a quick breakdown of your site’s overall SEO health, including health score, core web vitals scores, and the top-5 issues that you need to fix.

Click on “View all” on top of the “Top Issues” section to view the full site audit report.

The audit report is classified into 3 sections:

• Errors
• Warnings
• Notices

Visit each section of the report to view and fix all the critical errors that are affecting your site’s SEO health.

The “Errors” section of the report will consist of the most critical technical SEO issues on your site, fixing which you can achieve a higher SEO health score.

Simply click on each error to get a detailed breakdown of the issue. You’ll also find specific instructions on how to fix the error.

Once you’ve fixed these issues, you can run a fresh audit by hitting the “Restart Audit” button on top and check if all the fixed errors have truly been resolved.

Having put SE Ranking’s audit tool to the test across various websites at my agency, I can confidently declare that it leaves no stone unturned when scanning your website for crucial technical SEO issues. It provides a comprehensive view of your website’s technical SEO health, unveiling errors and warnings that may have slipped under the radar.

One of SE Ranking’s standout features is its ability to prioritize these technical SEO issues, giving you a clear roadmap of which errors demand immediate attention.

Competitor Analysis with SE Ranking: Unpack Competitors’ SEO and PPC Strategies

Competitor research is the key to staying ahead of the curve. By understanding your competitors’ SEO strategies, you can identify opportunities to improve your own website and gain an edge in the search results.

Luckily, SE Ranking has a robust competitor research toolkit to help you identify your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas for growth.

To get started, visit the “Competitor Research” tab and enter your competitor’s domain in the search box.

The resulting overview report provides a top-level view of your competitor’s organic traffic and paid traffic.

Scroll down to see your competitor’s top organic keywords and distribution of organic keyword rankings.

To view more organic keywords, click the “View Detailed Report” button below the section.

This will fire up the organic research report, where you can view the estimated organic traffic, organic keywords, and a breakup of all the keywords your competitor is currently ranking for.

You can use the filters above the table to dive into the most relevant data and metrics for your requirements.

The overview report also shows pages that get the largest volume of search traffic from Google. Once again, you can click on “View Detailed Report” to view all the top organic pages.

Take special note of these pages and topics as they drive the highest search traffic to your competitor’s site. You can then reverse-engineer these pages for content ideas with massive traffic potential.

The overview report also shows insights into your competitor’s PPC campaigns. You can use this actionable data to inform your own PPC strategies.

Furthermore, you can use SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker tool to monitor your competitor’s backlink profile. You can follow the steps outlined in the Backlink analysis section of this article to research your competitor’s link building strategies.

From my personal experience, SE Ranking’s competitive analysis features are top-notch.

It provides a comprehensive breakdown of your competitors’ websites, leaving no area unexplored. You can see their rankings on search engines, check out their organic and paid keywords, research on their top pages, and even peek into their backlink profiles. It’s like getting an insider scoop on their SEO and PPC strategies.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

Additional SE Ranking Features You Need to Know

In addition to these key features, SE Ranking also has other features that are deemed necessary for a comprehensive SEO tool. This includes a comprehensive rank tracking tool, on-page SEO checker, and report builder.

The Report Builder tool is a real gem for digital agencies. It’s designed to help you create professional reports that reflect data in a concise and transparent manner. You can choose one of the ready-made templates or create your own. Then, you can automatically send these reports to your clients to help them get a deeper understanding of their SEO performance.

By streamlining your reporting process with the Report Builder, you can both enhance customers’ trust and save loads of time you’d spend on manual reporting.

Another tool that deserves a special mention is SE Ranking’s Rank Tracker.

With this tool, you can track your search rankings for important keywords and phrases, and get email alerts whenever there are any changes in your rankings.

What makes this tool stand out is exceptional usability: you can group and tag target keywords and use various filters for a more granular analysis of your client’s rankings. Also, Rank Tracker helps you monitor SERP features and spot keyword cannibalization issues.

You can also use SE Ranking’s rank tracking tool to track your competitors’ keyword rankings and keep a tab on your competitors’ SEO performance.

Finally, if the site’s current rankings do not meet your client’s expectations, you can launch an on-page audit of the respective pages right from the Rank Tracker tool.

The On-Page SEO report will flag issues that prevent analyzed pages from getting better positions such as poorly optimized title and description tags, keyword stuffing or lack of keywords in your texts, plagiarized content, below-average page experience and usability, etc.

The tool benchmarks your page metrics against top-ranking results and gives recommendations based on what works for the SERP leaders.

How SE Ranking’s Pricing Fits Your Budget and Goals

SE Ranking is one of the most affordable SEO platforms on the market, with prices starting at $39/month.

You can choose from 3 pricing plans:

• Essential – $39/mo (250 keyword rankings, 10 websites)
• Pro – $89/mo (1000 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)
• Business – 189/mo (2500 keyword rankings, unlimited websites)

* The prices on the above plans change based on the number of keyword rankings, pages for tech audits and backlinks you select. For instance, if you’d like to track 500 keyword rankings, audit 65k pages and monitor 12.5k backlinks in the Essential plan, the pricing changes to $54/mo.

If you’re an individual user, the Essential plan ($39/mo) should be sufficient for your requirements. You’ll get access to most of the features, albeit with a few limitations.

If you run an agency or have more websites and data to analyze, you should probably opt for the Pro plan ($89/mo), which comes with three user seats meaning you can use the tool together with your team.

You can save 20% on any plan by switching to annual billing. SE Ranking also offers free migration with any annual plan.

SE Ranking Review: Final Thoughts

To wrap things up, after delving deep into SE Ranking, I must admit that I’m thoroughly impressed. This robust SEO tool not only simplifies the complex world of search engine optimization but also does it with style and ease.

SE Ranking delivers an impressive range of features that are essential for any online marketer or digital agency looking to level up their digital marketing game. From in-depth keyword research and competitor analysis to comprehensive website audit and backlink monitoring, this tool has got it all covered.

What sets SE Ranking apart is its user-friendly interface, which makes navigating through the tool a breeze. Even if you’re new to SEO, you’ll find yourself quickly getting the hang of things and optimizing your website like a pro.

In a world where SEO tools are a dime a dozen, SE Ranking stands out as a reliable and feature-packed option that doesn’t break the bank. It’s an all-in-one solution that empowers marketers and businesses to take their online presence to new heights.

So, if you’re looking for an SEO tool that combines power, simplicity, and affordability, look no further than SE Ranking.

Give it a try and see the difference it can make for your website. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

SE Ranking Free Trial

Get 14-day free access to SE Ranking's complete toolkit

(No credit card required)

Sign Up for SE Ranking

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Is SE Ranking accurate?

SE Ranking is widely regarded as a reliable and accurate SEO tool, used by businesses and digital marketers to track website rankings, perform website audits, and analyze competitors. Its accuracy is attributed to its frequent updates of ranking data, comprehensive database, and the ability to track rankings across different search engines and geographical locations.

However, like any tool, its accuracy can depend on various factors including search engine algorithms changes, localization, and the specific keywords being tracked. Users generally find SE Ranking’s data to be consistent with real-world search engine results, making it a trusted choice for SEO professionals.

2. Is SE Ranking free?

SE Ranking is not free, but it offers a 2-week free trial on any plan, allowing users to explore its features and capabilities before committing to a subscription. This trial period is a great opportunity to assess its effectiveness and decide if it suits your SEO needs.

3. What is SE Ranking used for?

SE Ranking is used for tracking website rankings, conducting website audits, analyzing competitors, and keyword research. It’s a comprehensive SEO tool designed to improve online visibility and SEO strategies.

4. What are the differences between Semrush and SE Ranking?

Semrush is more feature-rich, offering broader digital marketing tools beyond SEO, such as PPC, content marketing, and social media tracking. SE Ranking, while comprehensive for SEO tasks, is more budget-friendly and offers a simpler, user-friendly interface suited for small to medium-sized businesses.

5. What are the cons of SE Ranking?

The cons of SE Ranking include a steep learning curve for beginners due to its wide array of features, and some users may find its data updates less frequent compared to other premium SEO tools.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on 11 June 2023 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance and comprehensiveness. 

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