Which SEO Tool to Choose in 2024?

This Semrush vs SE Ranking comparison will help you determine which option is better. However, the answer isn’t straightforward because we’re comparing two premium tools with numerous features. They also differ in terms of pricing, which many will find interesting.

SE Ranking and Semrush have been around for quite a while. Both excel in keyword research, site audits, and daily rank tracking. With their content management features and local SEO tools, they’re all-around tools to give your SEO strategy a much-needed jolt.

Since the question of choice still lingers, you’re wondering which SEO tool to pick – SE Ranking or Semrush. In this comparison, we’ll answer that question by comparing them side-by-side in the most important categories and evaluate their performance.

SE Ranking vs Semrush Keyword Research

Most people will select between Semrush or SE Ranking based on their keyword research performance. To be frank, they’re excellent, as explained in our keyword analysis guide. Once the keyword is provided, both display pretty similar information, such as:

Keyword volume
Difficulty
Global volume
Search intent
CPC
Competition, and so forth…

We can also notice that their interfaces look good too. Scrolling down in both cases lets you catch a glimpse of keyword suggestions. Viewing a detailed report is simple; in this case, you’ll find all keyword suggestions based on the seed key phrase.

Users who focus on PPC can also benefit from both. SE Ranking and Semrush display popular ads for the given keyword plus ad history. Semrush displays SERP analysis for each keyword and even includes ad copies and PLA copies for deeper PPC research.

Semrush takes the lead by offering the Keyword Strategy part. It’ll automatically provide you with ideas for pillar posts, topics, and subpages. SE Ranking, on the other side, has features like the keyword manager, grouper, and search volume checker.

These are explained further in our SE Ranking test. The keyword manager tool lets you make keyword lists for later use. In comparison, the search volume checker examines keywords for volumes in specific countries. Both tools offer the keyword gap tool.

However, Semrush can compare your domain to 4, while SE Ranking can only do 2 competitors. Semrush, in addition, offers a few more tidbits.

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Keyword Magic Tool

This one is a masterclass in keyword research. It works by providing keyword suggestions for the provided keywords. Better yet, you’ll get HUNDREDS of them, all with volume, intent, CPC, difficulty, and other data. That’s not all – the tool is incredibly advanced.

You can discover long-tail keywords by applying the longer word count filter. Questions can also be discovered and search results can be customized according to the phrase, broad, or exact match. Semrush supports multiple languages, as well.

So if you aim to rank in France, you can set this language and get French keyword suggestions. Our team uses this tool daily to improve our keyword optimization and drive more traffic. It’s not your run-of-the-mill keyword analysis tool.

Keyword Strategy Builder

In this Semrush vs SE Ranking comparison, we’ll also mention Semrush’s magnum opus feature. This keyword strategy builder works similarly to the keyword manager in SE Ranking, only at first. Namely, it works by obtaining a few keywords from you and making the list.

This is a list of topics and pages that you can cover. For the “SEO tools” keyword, Semrush created an entire pillar page titled “Monitoring SEO Performance.” It also included subpages for it, as well as the other pillar pages it crafted in minutes.

These ready-made ideas come with their search volume and difficulty, showing you how hard or easy it will be to rank for them. Applying advanced filters leads to more bespoke results that you can use to your advantage when overtaking your competition.

While both picks are very good for keyword analysis, Semrush is a bit better than SE Ranking thanks to advanced features like the keyword strategy builder and keyword magic tool.

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Backlink Analysis & Link Building

Backlink analysis is paramount to know your position on the market. More importantly, it gives you insight into your competitors’ performance that can be leveraged in the future. On paper, Semrush is better than SE Ranking for discovering backlinks.

How?

It has a larger backlink database. However, to ensure this is the case, this SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison led us to test both using our site – gizmodo.com. Below is the table that displays which SEO tool found more backlinks and referring domains.

	Found Backlinks	Found Referring Domains
Semrush	63.5M	288K
SE Ranking	21.5M	238K

We can see that Semrush’s unrelenting performance beats SE Ranking by a long shot. It found pretty much 3 times more backlinks and around 20% more referring domains for the same site. The amount of data Semrush provides is staggering but SE Ranking isn’t bad.

Both offer more info about toxic and broken backlinks, top backlink anchors, domain/page trust, and so on. However, Semrush spews out information more intuitively, so its Backlink Analytics tool showcases categories of referring domains and backlink types.

Its authority score trend graph is also handy but so is the option to see websites with similar backlink profiles. In both cases, you’ll see your top pages with the highest number of referring domains, with new and lost referring domains and backlinks.

SE Ranking’s backlink gap analyzer is superior to Semrush’s backlink gap tool. The former can compare your domain to 5 competitors and the latter goes up to 4. Still, Semrush provides slightly more data with a bit better accuracy.

Link Building

Link building is where SE Ranking fails to deliver. It can be used for that but not directly like Semrush. This SEO tool is astounding in this regard. The link-building tool finds prospects for your domain. These prospects are websites that Semrush “thinks” are the most suitable for a backlink.

You’ll get thousands of them, with their authority score, rating, and URL types. Now, Semrush lets you contact each website directly and ask for a backlink, product review, or guest post. This is very handy if you want everything done nearly automatically.

Besides, you can track every prospect and mark it as “in progress” or “done” if you’ve achieved your goal. The link-building tool is almost our favorite Semrush feature given its sheer power that SE Ranking lacks. You can find additional information about tools for link-building here.

Backlink Audit

SE Ranking also doesn’t have a backlink audit tool. I mean, it technically has it as part of its backlink checker but it’s not the same. The backlink audit feature in Semrush analyzes your backlink profile for toxic and broken backlinks for easier reparation.

Broken backlinks can be fixed to prevent redirects and 404 errors. There’s the option to disavow broken links and tell Google to “ignore” them to prevent your rank from harm. Just to make it clear, SE Ranking also displays toxic and broken backlinks.

However, the number of displayed links is still smaller because of Semrush’s backlink database. While analyzing the same domain, SE Ranking spewed out 4.7K, while Semrush displayed 5K toxic backlinks.

In general, Semrush is better than SE Ranking at backlink analysis and link-building. However, if you decide on SE Ranking, you’ll still be very satisfied.

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Rank Tracking: SE Ranking or Semrush?

This is a comparison of our favorite rank trackers. After testing them numerous times, we can only say they’re very close performance-wise. You see, we think they’re better than Ahrefs because of daily information updates. Yes, that’s a huge relief.

Another perk is accuracy. We think both do well in this regard, providing impeccable data on rank changes, history, and various fluctuations. They also come with similar parameters like visibility, estimated traffic, average position, and ranking distribution.

Their clear interfaces allow you to examine everything more closely and the Google Analytics integration makes things much simpler. We like that SE Ranking can track up to 15,000 keywords, while Semrush does only 5,000 in the most expensive plan, so it’s a huge difference.

Semrush, as expected, offers a tad more information. It lets you check the visibility by location but only in the Guru plan. Interestingly, you’ll also find cannibalization reports, again, locked behind the Guru plan paywall. SE Ranking is different.

While it offers marginally less information, all of it is available in every paid plan. You can even see which keywords’s rankings have dropped or increased. The competitors’ distribution graph is also handy to discover your organic competitors.

SE Ranking also tracks your ranking in different countries and on mobile/desktop platforms. Semrush’s Multitargeting feature is only in the Guru plan. As expected, this feature would allow you to track rankings in multiple languages, locations, and devices.

This round is a tie for us. Both excel in rank tracking, and while Semrush is a bit better overall than SE Ranking, its crucial information is locked behind the Guru plan. SE Ranking is much easier to get into, and with the Basic plan, you’re getting all the information you need, even though it’s smaller in scale.

Site Audits (Technical SEO)

Discovering issues and errors in your SEO strategy can be beneficial for obvious reasons. Doing it manually is virtually impossible, so you’ll need either Semrush or SE Ranking. We discovered both work pretty well and again, they’re similar.

Semrush crawls your pages slightly faster and in addition, it can crawl way more. The cheapest plan is capped at 15,000 pages per project and Semrush raises this number to 20,000. In terms of overall usefulness, we can’t complain in any case.

Semrush and SE Ranking promptly discover issues with even the tiniest things like missing meta titles, alt text, JavaScript problems, and so forth. Both display core web vitals to showcase the website performance through LCP, INP, and CLS parameters.

These tools also grade your website with a health score that goes from 0 to 100. Semrush’s health score was always higher when comparing the same site. In both cases, we love the crawl comparison that shows the difference between the recurrent and previous crawls.

This lets you measure the results directly and see if the performance went up or down. Thanks to their ease of use, you’ll get the most urgent errors highlighted in red. You can check them individually and be advised on how to approach them effectively.

We had a similar experience with site audits in Semrush and Ahrefs, for example. But we must say we prefer SE Ranking and Semrush over Ahrefs and Moz, as they’re simpler and more intuitive overall.

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On-Page SEO

Which SEO tool to pick for on-page SEO audits? We’d say both. SE Ranking and Semrush have comprehensive on-page SEO checkers that discover all the relevant problems plaguing your page.

Simply provide the page URL, wait for a few minutes, and voila!

SE Ranking displays the page score, which comes as a result of indexing, usability, page experience, text content, URL, title, SERP features, and other factors. You’ll get high, medium, and low-priority issues on the right, which, when repaired, improve the page’s SEO.

Each error is, again, explained thoroughly with an appropriate solution. Semrush’s on-page SEO checker is amazing too. It comes with various strategy, backlink, SERP features, and semantic ideas that you can implement to improve the page promptly.

You can click on any of the optimization ideas and see what’s in store for you. In addition, Semrush includes the top pages to optimize and shows you the recurrent traffic for each page along with its potential that could be achieved with optimization.

This round is pretty close overall, so picking between SE Ranking or Semrush will be difficult. If you often perform site audits and deem them vital to your success, both are sufficient, making this round yet another tie.

Content Marketing Features

In this Semrush vs SE Ranking comparison, we’ll go over their content marketing features. Both have them, so you can improve your content with the help of these tools. In Semrush, we like the Topic Research feature that provides you with topic ideas based on the keyword.

SE Ranking has an identical feature, generating lists of keyword clusters once the seed keyword is provided. We love SE Ranking’s content editor which lets you write content and edit it in a Word-like environment. On the right side, you have optimization scores too.

SE Ranking will highlight your content score, text length, headings, keywords, and so forth. It’ll also advise which keywords to use to improve optimization. Best of all, SE Ranking has this AI writer tool to automatically generate topics, paragraphs, FAQ sections, etc.

We especially appreciate its ability to expand text and make it more comprehensive. It’s a solid alternative to Ahrefs that lacks this feature. We’ll say the same for Semrush whose SEO Writing Assistant is extremely good and works like Grammarly.

It even includes the rephrase tool to alter your sentences and make them more readable. Semrush includes a few unique scores, such as originality and tone of voice. However, there’s another feature called SEO Content Template – we still use it pretty often.

It works by obtaining the target keyword, after which, you get SEO recommendations. For instance, it finds semantically related keywords and backlinks. Moreover, there’s the average readability score for the top 10 URLs plus the average text length you should aim for.

We’ll give this round to Semrush because it offers more content marketing features like ContentShake AI and the SEO Content Template. Just be aware content marketing is only in the Guru plan, while SE Ranking’s Content Editor is a paid add-on in all plans.

Semrush vs SE Ranking Price Comparison

Comparing SE Ranking and Semrush price-wise is vital for this duel and here, we see the largest differences. Let’s start with their free plans. Semrush has one, and while it’s extremely limited, you can still use many of its premium tools to an extent.

It also includes a 14-day free trial. SE Ranking has NO free plan but offers a few SEO tools that you can use for free without registering. They’re not very useful, though. Finally, it also sports a 14-day free trial but without credit card info – better than Semrush.

Semrush

We’ll examine both services’ annual plans because they’re the cheapest. Semrush comes with a 17% discount for its annual plans – the discount can be obtained below. The entire range starts with the Basic plan at $117.33 a month. Is it a lot? Well, it’s average.

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The Basic plan gets you pretty much all features except content marketing, device tracking, and a few others. Frankly, we think the Basic plan is a tad underwhelming for the price but the Guru plan is beefed up like a pro bodybuilder. It, however, costs $208.33 a month.

Semrush’s plans are made for one user only and you’ll have to pay for more seats. Basic plan users will pay $45/mo per user, while Business users will have to shell out $100/mo per seat. Semrush’s plans are feature-rich but not very generous, which can easily be seen.

The Basic plan tracks only 500 keywords and crawls only 20,000 pages. It also has no topic research, cannibalization reports, and JS rendering. Worse yet, it doesn’t include historical data for keyword and domain analytics, and for us, that’s a fatal flaw.

If needed, you can find even more details in our Semrush review.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking kicks off at a measly $52 a month. This plan includes 5 projects and 1 user seat. However, it tracks 500 keywords and crawls 15,000 pages for site audits. Its Essential plan limits aren’t the best in the world, especially since it lacks the on-page SEO checker.

The Essential plan also excludes content marketing, which becomes available in the Pro plan. This one tracks 2,000 keywords and costs $95.20/mo for the annual variant. We discovered it also crawls 40,000 pages per project, which you can increase to 50,000 as well.

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At this price, SE Ranking is dangerously close to Semrush’s cheapest plan. The good news is that the Pro plan includes 3 user seats and space for up to 30 projects. Rest assured, all content marketing tools are there, including plagiarism checks and content editor.

SE Ranking’s Business plan at over $207/mo is worth mentioning. It packs 5 user seats, unlimited projects, 5,000 trackable keywords, and 80,000 pages to crawl. This plan has full API access, social media integration, historical data, and much more.

We must give this round to SE Ranking for one reason – it’s way cheaper. Semrush’s top-tier plan tracks fewer keywords and includes one user seat. Its Guru plan at $208.33 isn’t the top offer, yet, SE Ranking caps at $207.20 for its most expensive plan.

While Semrush is better than SE Ranking overall, the value category goes to the latter. It’s easy to see why.

Customer Support

Before wrapping up this SE Ranking vs Semrush analysis, let’s go over their support. This round will be a tie because both services are helpful. Semrush or SE Ranking, it doesn’t matter which one you choose in this regard. Live chat is always there to pick you up.

Once you send the message, someone will greet you and resolve the problem. SE Ranking and Semrush can be contacted via email and they have a heap of helpful articles and how-to guides on their websites. It’s hard to complain about such minorities.

Besides, everything functions like a well-oiled engine in both services. In our experience, we rarely had to reach out to customer support. We’re sure the same will apply to you.

Conclusion: Which is better, Semrush or SE Ranking?

The end of our Semrush vs SE Ranking duel for 2024 marks a strong win for the former. Semrush emerges victorious as an overall better SEO tool than SE Ranking. We’ve had plenty of ties in site audits and rank tracking, as both displayed amazing performance.

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However, Semrush took the edge in keyword research, backlink analysis, link building, and content marketing. While SE Ranking won price-wise, it’s hard to come close to Semrush in terms of information and raw data it provides for keywords and backlinks.

At the end of the day, we must say we value these services immensely. We don’t think you necessarily need Semrush if you can’t pay more. But with the recent price increase of SE Ranking, it’s much closer to Semrush value-wise. We explained that a minute ago.

If you have an unconstrained budget, we recommend Semrush’s Guru plan. It’s an end-all-be-all solution to rank better on Google and amplify your SEO. SE Ranking’s Basic plan is underwhelming, so we advise the Pro plan at around $95/mo.

Whether you choose one or the other, you won’t go wrong. Perfectionists who want zero compromises would benefit more from Semrush, while those with moderate demands won’t mind paying less and enjoying SE Ranking’s still respectable offers.

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