6 killer features of SEMRush - Smallseotools.com
In the past, we've reviewed, very comprehensively, both Ahrefs and SEMrush individually. In today's post, we are comparing Ahrefs vs. SEMrush. Specifically, we're comparing the FEATURES of these two SEO tools. We want to help you quickly make the best decision as to which of the tools to pick in terms of the features they pack and by extension, the functions these features perform. But first, let's introduce the competitors.
Table Of Content
1: Ahrefs vs SEMrush: Which SEO Tool Has The Best Features?
2: 6 Killer Features of SEMRush
2.1: The Most Accurate Data for Search Volume
2.1.1: What does Search Volume Mean?
2.2: How Keyword Search Volume Effects SEO and PPC campaigns?
2.3: How to Get Keyword Search Volume Data?
2.4: Why does Keyword Search Volume Data Matter?
3: Huge Keyword Database for Google
3.1: The Most Accurate Position Tracking Tool on the Market
3.2: Why do you Need a Position Tracking Tool?
3.3: How Important is it to Track Positions of your Competitors?
3.4: Position Tracking Reports and Features by SEMRush
3.5: Is it Helpful for SEO Specialists?
4.1: SEO Reporting
4.2: Is it Necessary to Create an SEO Report?
4.3: How SEMRush Facilitates you in SEO Reporting?
5: A tool for Toxic Links Monitoring and Penalty Recovery.
5.2: Find Complete Details of Toxic Links
7: INTRODUCING: AHREFS VS SEMRUSH
8: AHREFS VS SEMRUSH FEATURES COMPARISON
9.1: SITE EXPLORER
9.2: Backlink Profile Analysis
9.3: Organic Search
9.4 Outgoing Links
9.5 Pages
9.6: Other tools in the Site Explorer section are:
11: Keywords Lists
12: Country-based Keyword Support
13: SERP Overview and Ranking History
14.1: Search Volume
14.2: Clicks” Metric
14.3: Advanced Metrics
14.4: Return Rate
14.5: Scatterplot
15: CONTENT EXPLORER
15.1: Other features of Ahrefs include:
17.1: Organic Research
17.2: Advertising Research
17.3: Display Advertising Tool
17.4: Backlinks
17.5: Keyword Research
17.6: Product Listing Ads
17.7: Traffic Analytics
18: TOOLS SECTION
18.1: Keyword Difficulty
18.2: Domain vs. Domain
18.3: Charts
18.4: My Reports
18.5: Keyword Magic Tool
18.6: CPC Map
18.7: SEO Writing Assistant
19: PROJECTS SECTION
19.1: Position Tracking
19.2: Audit Site
19.3: Social Media Tracker
19.4: Social Media Poster
19.5: Brand Monitoring
19.6: On-Page SEO Checker
19.7: Backlink Audit Tool
19.8: Organic Traffic Insights
19.9: Content Analyzer
19.10: PPC Keyword Tool
19.11: Ad Builder
20: CONCLUSION
21: DISCLOSURE:
6 Killer Features of SEMRush
The Most Accurate Data for Search Volume
What does Search Volume Mean?
In easy words, search volume is the expected number of searches of a given keyword in a specific time frame. The search volume is analytical data used in keyword analysis for the measurement of search engine traffic of a particular keyword.
How does Keyword Search Volume Effects SEO and PPC campaigns?
By getting your hands on the keyword search volume data, you can choose and target the keywords in your niche that will give a boost to your SEO and PPC campaigns. You can easily find how difficult it is to rank a keyword and improve the traffic of your site. It’s up to you to decide whether high, low, or medium search volume keywords can reap the best rewards for your website and attract more visitors.
How to Get Keyword Search Volume Data?
SEMRush helps you to get your hands on and examine keyword search volume data. With this tool, you can analyze the average searches of a keyword as per local and global trends. The keyword search volume can be assessed on the basis of any targeted language, such as Portuguese, Italian, French, etc. It also allows you to evaluate a particular keyword’s search volume in a specific country.
Why does Keyword Search Volume Data Matter?
Relying on inaccurate data will become an obstacle and hurt your SEO and PPC campaigns. The precise search volume data, on the other hand, will become a helping hand in achieving your desired outcome effectively. The keyword search volume data will keep you on track and save your time, efforts, and money.
Huge Keyword Database for Google
The style of searching varies from user to user, and it’s impossible for any person to grasp this knowledge. This information is vital for marketers and SEOs as it aids them in making their SEO and PPC campaigns flourish in this competitive environment. SEMRush has a huge database that helps people to find more keyword ideas. It has the largest database in the market, as the total number of keywords exceeds 20 Billion.
The Most Accurate Position Tracking Tool on the Market
Why do you Need a Position Tracking Tool?
The Position tracker tool allows you to track down the ranking of your website in the Search Engine Result Pages for any keyword. This tool is essential for every web owner as it allows them to analyze how their website’s ranking has progressed over time.
How Important is it to Track Positions of your Competitors?
This tool allows you to keep track of your competitor’s ranking and compare it with your site. It is essential to track competitor’s ranking as it allows you to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your site in comparison with the site that’s ranking above you.
Position Tracking Reports and Features by SEMRush
Daily Data Update
In SERP, the rankings of the webpage keep changing on a daily basis. The users of this tool can have daily data updates that will enable them to figure out the fluctuations in their site’s ranking by making certain changes.
Mobile Rankings
Google has made the mobile version of websites as the baseline for determining their search rankings. Hence, this tool offers mobile rankings data that can help users in analyzing where their site’s mobile version ranks in SERP.
Is it Helpful for SEO Specialists?
Without having a tool that provides such features and data, there’s no way a person can improve their position on SERP. It is extremely essential for SEO specialists to get their hands on this tool to examine the loopholes in their SEO strategy and work on filling them to outclass competitors.
SEO Reporting
Is it Necessary to Create an SEO Report?
An SEO report helps the users in monitoring the Key Performance Indicators that can assist a site in achieving its main objectives. It’s essential to make an SEO report as all the data will be available in one place and can be presented to your employer, team, or clients at any time.
How SEMRush Facilitates you in SEO Reporting?
Create Visually Appealing Custom PDF Reports
The SEO reports created by this tool aid the users in streamlining their reporting process. It allows you to create visually appealing custom PDF reports by accessing dozens of data and compiling them in a single PDF file.
Report Scheduling and Integration with GA, GMB, and GSC
This tool makes it easier for the users to schedule reporting and automatically deliver the report to the preset email addresses after a certain period of time. You can make perfect SEO reports for your site as it also lets you integrate dozens of modules like Google Analytics, Google My Business, and Google Search Console.
A tool for Toxic Links Monitoring and Penalty Recovery.
What are Toxic Links?
The unnatural links from low authoritative sites that weaken your SEO are known as toxic links. These links can prove to be a downfall for a site’s ranking in SERP, as Google highly disregards and penalizes pages associated with them.
Find Complete Details of Toxic Links
SEMRush offers its users a comprehensive analysis of toxic links. With it, you can check the toxicity score of every bad backlink and get rid of harmful links with a built-in cleanup workflow. Its 45+ toxicity markers detect the domains that are proved to be harmful.
Content Marketing Platform
Pro Features of SEMRush
The users of SEMrRush can take their content marketing strategy to the next level, as it contains content optimization and creation tools and features. They include:
SEO Writing Assistant:
This tool allows you to inspect whether your text is following the best SEO practices. You can check the SEO-friendliness of your content for your targeted keywords.
On-Page SEO Checker:
It provides an absolute list of things that you can implement on the pages of your website to improve their ranking. It will provide you with SEO ideas, ideal content length, content readability, and backlinks inspection.
SEO Content Template:
SEMRush helps you in the creation of compelling and SEO-friendly content after analyzing competitors’ content.
Content Audit:
The content analyzer will help you figure out the performance of your website’s content and what your visitors think of it. It allows the user to assess the content that’s not doing well and take the required action.
INTRODUCING: AHREFS VS SEMRUSH
Ahrefs is an all-in-one, SaaS-based toolset for a content, backlink, and general SEO analysis. It tracks and provides data about content, organic search, backlinks, etc., from all over the web, and constantly updates all its algorithms and databases to provide users with the freshest and most actual digital marketing data.While Ahrefs was initially best known as a backlink analysis tool, they've now added lots of new features, which qualifies it to be a direct competitor to SEMrush. Such features include:
- Keyword research features
- Keyword competitor analysis
- Technical SEO tools (like a site audit feature)
- Rank tracking
On the other end, SEMrush serves as a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence tool with which you can gain full visibility into the marketing activities of your competitors on a multichannel level and as such gain an insight into the effectiveness of their marketing approaches.
But much beyond competitor analysis, SEMrush does a bunch of other search engines marketing-related stuff as you'll see soon. Let's get on with the comparison of the features of these online marketing tools.[Exclusive deal for SST users: We were able to work out awesome deals with these two companies exclusively for YOU! For a limited time, we are offering you a 7-day trial of Ahrefs, which gives you full access to all the tools and features of your chosen plan (it's normally $99/mo and $179/mo). Again, we also offer you a 30-day free trial of SEMrush (usually $119.95). Ensure you grab these deals before they end!]
AHREFS VS SEMRUSH FEATURES COMPARISON
If you look closely, you'll find that both SEMrush and Ahrefs pack closely related or similar features.
For example Ahrefs comes with features that support:
- Content analysis
- Keyword research
- Backlink strategizing
- Link building
- Competitive analysis
- Audience targeting
- Position tracking
- Technical SEO
- On-page optimization
- Content planning
- Organic traffic analysis
- And more!
And:
SEMrush comes adorned with features that support:
- Competitor analysis
- Comprehensive keyword research
- Detailed SEO audit for blogs
- Crawl auditing
- Backlink tracking and strategizing
- Social media marketing research
- Pay-per-click advertising research
- On-page optimization
- Technical SEO
- Position tracking
- And a lot more.
With these closely similar features, it could prove a challenge to pick the best tool among the two especially if you're not ready to spend on both SEO tools at the same time. Let's see their features.
FEATURES OF AHREFS
Ahrefs has a robust feature set that is organized in sections — including Site Explorer, Keyword Explorer, and Content Explorer. Below is section-by-section detailed information about the main features of Ahrefs.
SITE EXPLORER
Site Explorer is the first major section of Ahrefs. The features in this section allow you to dive deeper into researching any domain or URL, particularly those of competing sites.
The Site Explorer section is stuffed with quite a number of tools and covers some standard SEO metrics. Below are some of the tools on the Site Explorer section:
Backlink Profile Analysis
The backlink analysis tool allows you to see the websites that are linking out to similar sites or articles. This is essentially great for finding websites that will be more willing to link to your pages.
Ahrefs backlinks database is super huge with over 12 trillion known links regularly being crawled.
Organic Search
This is where Ahrefs displays result from Google's first page based on a given keyword. It contains all of the information an SEO would want like domain rating and backlink counts.
Additional SERP features within this region include a paragraph box, image pack, etc.
Outgoing Links
This feature gives you an idea of a target website's linking patterns: what websites they link to the most, which anchors they use, and if any of their outgoing links are broken.
Pages
This part of the Site Explorer called “Pages” allows you to quickly find out which pages on a target website have the most backlinks and social shares.
Other tools in the Site Explorer section are:
-
Backlink Research: Ahrefs has the fastest backlink crawler in the industry and boasts the world's biggest index of live backlinks (over 12 trillion links), which makes Site Explorer the best tool for backlink research. The “Backlink” feature in Ahrefs lets you perform comprehensive backlink research on any site.
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Competing Domains: Want to see your closest competitors based on the keywords you have in common? This part shows you that.
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Paid Keywords: Additionally, there is a “Paid Keywords” section in Site Explorer. This shows actual PPC ads the site you are exploring runs. It even shows you an estimate of the paid traffic that resulted from the ad along with some historical PPC ad data.
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Organic Keywords: This shows you the exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search results and how much traffic this brings them.
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Calendar View: Ahrefs’ unique calendar view lets you see new and lost backlinks trends.
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Top Pages: This is a report on Site Explorer that shows the most visited pages of the site you are analyzing + the number of keywords the article is ranking for.
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Anchor Text Table: With this part of Site Explorer, you can sort and view 1, 2, 3 or 4-word anchor text phrases.
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Content Gap: This tool shows keywords that your competitors are ranking well for, but which you suck at.
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Referring Domains: As part of the backlink tool, this feature shows you the count of referring domains (that is, all the sites with links back to your website).
KEYWORDS EXPLORER
The second major section of Ahrefs is one called Keywords Explorer.
Keywords Explorer is an impressive tool for discovering thousands of great keywords to rank for, analyzing their ranking difficulty, and calculating their traffic potential. This section was recently updated so it's actually 2.0-ish. According to Ahrefs, “Keywords Explorer will get you loads of promising keyword ideas from the 4 billion keyword database and provide you with the most accurate keyword metrics.”Here are some of the features and elements that make Keywords Explorer stand out:
Keyword Suggestions/Ideas
Keywords Explorer runs on a huge database of more than 4 billion keywords, which is updated with fresh data every month so that you never run out of keyword ideas. You can enter up to 10 “seed” keywords into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and you’ll get a huge list with thousands of great keyword ideas. Keywords Explorer generates keyword ideas in four different ways namely “phrase match,” “having same terms,” “also rank for,” “search suggestions” (autosuggest).
Keywords Lists
This feature lets you create lists of your favorite keywords for future reference. Keyword Lists provide aggregate data for large groups of keywords. You can group up to 1,000 keywords in a list. For each list, you get super powerful aggregate information like histograms of the difficulty and volume of the group (categories).
Country-based Keyword Support
Most keyword research tools only run databases that return US-only results, but Ahrefs provides keyword support for over 100 countries.
SERP Overview and Ranking History
This section has a kind of overview of the front page of Google; meaning the “SERP Overview” report basically allows you to see the top-ranking results on Google, along with all their SEO metrics. This report helps you quickly evaluate the SERP and understand why these pages rank where they do.
You also get to see the ranking history of pages for the past year.
Keyword Difficulty Score
The KD score feature calculates how hard it will be to rank for your keyword based on the current top-ranking pages, letting you find the “low-hanging fruit” among your keyword ideas.
Search Volume
Keyword Explorer's “Search volume” metric is extremely accurate thanks to the unique process Ahrefs uses to combine numbers from Google Keyword Planner with large amounts of clickstream data.
Clicks Metric
Another impressive feature is “Clicks.” It shows the actual “click” data for your keywords. This is great for targeting only traffic-generating keywords, because a keyword may be receiving a high search volume but not necessarily a lot of clicks.
Advanced Metrics
Using a large volume of clickstream data, Ahrefs shows you advanced keyword metrics almost no other tool will show you, like return rate, clicks per search, % of clicks, % of paid clicks, and more.
Return Rate
This data shows you how often people search for the same keywords again. Great for tracking the popularity of your target keywords.
Scatterplot
Ahrefs Scatterplot shows the relationship between keyword volume and difficulty. Ahrefs even estimates the number of backlinks needed to rank in the top 10.
CONTENT EXPLORER
If you create or work with online content a lot, then Ahrefs Content Explorer might just turn out to be your next best companion. This section of Ahrefs is so impressive and data-packed that it'll literally improve your content strategy noticeably.
Content Explorer allows you to discover the most popular content for any topic — by backlinks, organic traffic, and social shares. It helps you find the most shared and 'linked to content so that you can explore the best ideas for your new content.
Ahrefs states that “Content Explorer has over 2 billion articles in its index, and new ones are added every single day.”
With this huge collection, it's possible to get 1000s of relevant articles for every keyword you enter. Usability is easy: You begin by entering the keywords you desire to explore (or the URL). Content Explorer will analyze and return a huge, well-curated list of useful articles based on their "performance metrics" along with in-depth statistics for each article.
These “performance metrics” is based on:
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Organic search traffic — the number of visits a given article is generating from search per month.
-
Referring domains — the number of unique websites that are linking to the article.
-
Social shares — collected from top social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, G+, and LinkedIn.
These returned results are different from your average Google search in many ways:
-
It is mainly editorial content (like blog posts and articles) that you can actually use to analyze and devise your strategy
-
It has information specific to SEO
-
It shows key data for each article (like shares, traffic, etc.).
On Content Explorer, you can sort and narrow the results to dig up *really* specific results. For example, you can search for articles…
- With a particularly specific word or phrase in the title or content
- Published on a certain period (MM/YY)
- Published on a site with a specific domain rating
- Shared over XXXX times
- Published in a given language
- With a particular word count
- Etc.
To do this, use the boolean operators and advanced search filters (search everywhere/in title/in content). Amongst other things, the search operators also allow you to include a term (boolean operator +) and exclude a term (boolean operator -) in the search query.
With these operators and filters, you can find the best results for specific types of successful content you want to create. For example, you may decide to create a blog post that will get a lot of tweets or a seasonal content piece that drives search traffic around the end of the year.
Apart from this, Content Explorer also lets you filter the results by:
- Language
- Social shares
- Domain Rating
- Backlinks
- Traffic
- Word count
Additionally, you can dive deeper into each piece of content without leaving the tool. Just click on the “Details” button.
By diving deeper, you'll be able to access the following set of data about each content piece:
-
Organic Keywords — for knowing the keywords a piece of content ranks for in search.
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Charts — for knowing how a piece of content performs over time in terms of backlinks, search traffic, and social shares.
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Backlinks — for knowing how many backlinks are pointing to a piece of content and where they’re coming from.
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Referring Domains — for knowing how many different websites are linking to this piece of content.
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Anchors — for knowing all the backlink anchor texts pointing to a piece of content.
Based on some tests we run previously, we found that Content Explorer is very useful for outreach.
If you want to grab a list of potential people who could be interested in sharing your content, the social media data on Content Explorer is your best bet. Content Explorer shows very useful sharing information for each article covering Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Pinterest.
Apart from the number of shares, Content Explorer also shows the link to the searches on the social media sites themselves and the users that initiated the shares.
You can access a button that shows who tweeted a specific article. When you click on this button, it takes you to a table with all the people who have tweeted the article, along with information like tweet date, the website associated with the Twitter account, and so on.
This is extremely useful for outreach and you can even sort and import the table.
Other features of Ahrefs include:
- Ahrefs Rank
- Domain Comparison
- Batch Analysis
- Ahrefs Alerts
- Link Intersect
- SEO Audit
- Competitors Tab
- SEO Toolbar
- Ahrefs App
- Ahrefs API
- Chrome Extension
- Rank Tracker
[Exclusive deal for SST users: We were able to work out awesome deals with these two companies exclusively for YOU! For a limited time, we are offering you a 7-day trial of Ahrefs, which gives you full access to all the tools and features of your chosen plan (it's normally $99/mo and $179/mo). Again, we also offer you a 30-day free trial of SEMrush (usually $119.95). Ensure you grab these deals before they end!]
FEATURES OF SEMRUSH
SEMrush features are categorized into three sections — Analytics Reports, Tools, and Projects. And each of these categories is versatile and robust, with many different features and toolkits under each one. Let's explore each of these following in a section-by-section format.
ANALYTICS REPORTS SECTION
This section of SEMrush is designed to provide you with key insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. Below are the features you'll find in the Analytics Reports section plus what you can do with each of them:
Organic Research
- See competitors’ best keywords
- Discover new organic competitors
- Observe position changes of domains
Advertising Research
- Uncover your competitors’ ad strategies and budget
- Monitor and analyze ad copy and landing pages
- Discover new competitors in AdWords and Bing ads
- Localize your ad campaigns
Display Advertising Tool
- Get an overview of your competitors’ GDN strategies
- Analyze competitors' display ads
- Spot new publishers
- View display ads from different devices
- [EXCLUSIVE] Target the right audience with Audience Insights
Backlinks
- Conduct a deep link analysis
- Understand referring domains' authority
- Check backlinks' types
- Spot your links' geolocation
Keyword Research
- Find the right keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns
- Gather phrase matches and related keywords
- Get long-tail keywords
- Explore multinational and multilingual environments
Product Listing Ads
- Define your product listing ad (PLA) competitors
- Get insight into your PLA competitors’ product feeds
- See your competitors’ best-performing PLAs
Traffic Analytics
- Reveal any company’s website traffic and online performance
- Monitor your competitors’ marketing activities and strategies
- Discover new markets and niches
- Understand your potential customers’ behavior and media consumption
- Qualify leads, prospects, and potential partners
- Research new opportunities for investment
TOOLS SECTION
The Tools section of SEMrush allows you to cross, combine and visualize SEMrush data to compare competitive domains and estimate keyword difficulty with a few clicks. Below are the features you'll find in this section and their functions:
Keyword Difficulty
- Find keywords with less competition
- Estimate keyword difficulty instantly
Domain vs. Domain
- Set side-by-side domains' comparisons
- See domains’ common and unique keywords
- Visualize data
Charts
- Compare domains with key visibility indicators
- Conduct competitive analysis
My Reports
- Gather all the SEMrush data in one elegant custom PDF report
- Design your report using branding and commenting features
- Share and schedule your reports to go out on a regular basis
Keyword Magic Tool
- Get over 2 million keyword ideas
- Use Keyword Grouping to segment your keywords by topic
- Pick the best keywords and save them in Keyword Analyzer
- Export your selected keywords to other SEMrush tools
- Create up to 50 target keyword lists
CPC Map
- Check the average CPC in your niche across different regions
- Compare CPC vs. search volume to find “hidden gems” in your niche
- Find unlimited ideas for A/B testing and experiments
- Explore local competition in SEO and PPC
SEO Writing Assistant
- Optimize your content for your target keywords
- Fine-tune your content’s readability
- Maintain your brand's tone of voice in each content piece
- Check your content for originality with a plagiarism checker
- Use Google Docs add-on, WordPress plugin, or work from the SEMrush interface
PROJECTS SECTION
The Projects section allows you to launch global campaigns for your website and get all the necessary metrics regarding its competitors, keyword rankings, and on-page health from one place. Features in this section include:
Position Tracking
- Track your positions for any keyword
- Discover local competitors
- Group keywords with tags
- Target different devices
Site Audit
- Check your site’s health with our SEO analysis tool
- Prioritize SEO issues and decide what to fix first
- Track SEO optimization progress
- Find and fix hreflang mistakes
- Ensure the security of your website with HTTPS checks
- Detect all possible AMP implementation issues
Social Media Tracker
- Develop a winning social media strategy
- Track and analyze results
- Build amazing reports
Social Media Poster
- Post to all of your social accounts from one place
- Schedule posts and manage your queues
- Save time with social media automation features
- Analyze your content's performance
- Poster Chrome Extension
Brand Monitoring
- Monitor your brand reputation
- Discover new opportunities
- Track backlinks
- Learn from your competitors
On-Page SEO Checker
- Analyze Google ranking factors affecting your website’s performance
- Get actionable recommendations based on collected data
- Carry out an in-depth comparative analysis of Google’s top 10 performers
Backlink Audit Tool
- Find all your backlinks using the Search Console integration
- Discover and remove potentially dangerous backlinks
- Send toxic backlinks to the Google Disavow tool
- Keep your backlink profile clean with regular recrawls
Organic Traffic Insights
- Unlock the ‘not provided’ keywords
- Merge Analytics and Search Console data
- Analyze keyword potential
Content Analyzer
- Assess your website’s content
- Measure the content you publish externally
- Compare the performance of different content pieces
PPC Keyword Tool
- Collect keywords through multiple channels
- Manage and optimize keyword lists
- Cross-match negative keywords [EXCLUSIVE]
- Polish your keyword list with Recommendations
Ad Builder
- Find ideas for your ad creatives and use them as a template
- Create effective text ads right in the tool
- Add relevant ad extensions
- Build responsive HTML ads for your GDN campaigns
[Exclusive deal for SST users: We worked out awesome deals with these two companies exclusively for YOU! For a limited time, we are offering you a 7-day trial of Ahrefs, which gives you full access to all the tools and features of your chosen plan (usually $119/mo and $179/mo). Again, we also offer you a 30-day free trial of SEMrush (usually $119.95). Ensure you grab these deals before they end!]
CONCLUSION
We hope this comparison of Ahrefs and SEMrush has helped you see how these two SEO tools stack up against each other in terms of the features they pack and what these features can do. And that you can now make an informed decision as to which tool to choose Feel free to share this post with anyone you think might need the information.
DISCLOSURE:
This post may contain affiliate links, if you click on them and ultimately make a purchase, we may receive a commission. This does not affect the prices of the items.
