SE Ranking Vs Semrush: What's The Better SEO Tool In 2024 [+review]

So having used SE Ranking and Semrush for a while now,

We have noticed some differences as well as similarities, some pros, and cons, some features which we will be discussing.

In this blog post, we will do a SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison along with a detailed review for both of these SEO tools

We will compare both these tools on various SEO parameters to see how both stack up against each other

The comparative study of Semrush vs SE Ranking begins now!

Tabular Comparison – Semrush vs Se Ranking

Below is a quick Tabular Comparison to show on high-level features and prices for Semrush vs Se Ranking

Features	Semrush	Se Ranking
SEO	Advanced Dashboard and SEO Capabilities Workflow-based Tool – easy to use and set up	Advanced Dashboard and Features at Low Pricing Love the Competitor Analysis Dashboard
Local SEO	Separate Local SEO Tools for better local results	Basic Local SEO Features
Advertising	Dedicated Ads Tool for PPC Research	Better Ads Tool
Social Media	Entire Social Media Monitoring Suite	Only Social Media Posts can be scheduled with Analytics
Content Marketing	Dedicated Content Marketing Platform	No Dedicated Tool – Has KW research and Competitor analysis features for Content Analysis
Trends Analysis	Yes	No
Agency Solutions	Custom solutions for Agency like Bid finder, CRMs, and reports	Not Present – Has Enterprise Plans
Pricing	Starts $119/Mo – Best suited for Growing Sites and Agency Recommended for Advanced SEO Analysis Enterprise SEO Solution	Starts $18/mo – best Suited for Freelancers and Agency on Budget Highly recommended due to Cheap Pricing and Amazing Features it Offers
Website	Semrush.com	SERanking.com

Now, let’s do a deep dive and start the comparative study of Semrush vs SE Ranking

SE Ranking Overview

SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO software for website analysis and SEO optimization.

We bought the Business Plan for this SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison and we found this Cheap SEO tool to be a worthy SEO Platform that is very useful in terms of the features it offers

All you have to do is one click SE Ranking SignUp here – for 14 days of free Trial

No Credit Card is Required!

Once you have signed up, add your First Project

As Shown Below: Just perform the below steps to get started

Enter your Website URL and Domain
Set up project name
Give User access settings according to requirement.
Enable the Weekly Report and Website Audit

This will help you to get started with SE Ranking

Se Ranking Offers the following Tools as a part of their SEO Platform

Keyword Research Tool
Keyword Position Tracker along with keyword group Functionalities
Competitor Analysis Tool – for Competitive analysis
Free Backlink Checker Tool
Website SEO Analysis Tool
On-Page SEO Checker
AutoComplete Suggestion tool
Page Changes Monitoring tool
Social Media Posting tool

In this blog post, we will do a deep dive on these tools below

Semrush Overview

SEMrush is a cloud-based SEO platform that is suitable for experienced freelancers, agency owners, or even bigger enterprises.

One of the Best SEO tools, it offers various features to help brands improve their online visibility and build effective marketing campaigns.

In a Nutshell, Semrush offers the following Capabilities for SEO Pros

Keyword Research Tool
Keyword Position Tracking Tool
Website SEO Audit tool
Advertising analytics tools
Social Media Management tool
Competitive Research,
Brand Monitoring tool
Dedicated Content Marketing Suite

To start with Semrush login, Sign Up for a Semrush 7 Days free trial here

Enter your Details or access Semrush Logic sign up via your email or Facebook account.

Get Free Trial of Semrush – worth $119

All you have to do is Add your Project as shown – the project can be your website or even your Competitors website for Competitive analysis

We entered the URL of our website, and the analysis started right there.

Keyword Research – SE Ranking vs. Semrush

SE Ranking Keyword Research tool

There is a dedicated tool in Se Ranking for Keyword suggestions.

For any Seed keyword, the Se Ranking Keyword research tool shows metrics like

Keyword Difficulty level
Search Volume of a keyword every month, updated for all countries.
Cost-per-click(CPC) or the bidding value of the keyword.Organic SERP history
Ads History

These details are visually presented in the form of bars, graphs, and charts which makes the Keyword analysis even simpler.

Let’s enter – Kitchen Tools as Seed keyword for analysis for region ‘USA’

There is one interesting view!

I can see the Keyword difficulty along with search volume for the target keyword

Additionally,

SE Ranking Keyword research tool shows us the below details :

Keywords Ideas Section in SE Ranking

This section contains: Similar Keywords, Related keywords, and Long Tail keywords: all related to the target keyword: kitchen tools

When you click on View Detailed Report, you will get a list of Keywords with all the details of CPC, Volume Difficulty

There are various filters present that one can use to filter the keywords with Low Difficulty and high Search volume

SE Ranking Keyword research detailed view

Then I get: Organic Search Results

This section shows top-ranking URLs for the seed keyword along with Traffic Share and an estimated total cost associated with the traffic

Ranking Dynamics section

This shows whether the rankings of the URL/domain have jumped or dropped during the selected period.

There is also a section that shows Ads for the Seed Keyword with a detailed report section

See Below!

These views are very important – because as an SEO specialist, you get all the relevant info in one place.

All you have to do is download the excel report and start using the relevant keywords.

Once you click on the View Detailed Report, you will have the very minute information of SERP features, Traffic generated, total revenue collected and the total number of powerful keywords used.

But Hold On!

We found a separate section for Keyword Grouper which automatically buckets keywords into groups according to SERP Results in the top 10 SERPs.

This grouping was particularly important for SEO and contextual advertising as it helped us in understanding the distribution of Keywords on web pages.

Start your Keyword Reserach with Se ranking – FREE

Semrush Keyword Research

Keyword Research using Semrush consisted of:

Keyword Overview Tool – For Keyword analysis. It Supports Bulk Keyword research for 100 Keywords
Keyword Magic Tool – Give all the Keywords you need to build an SEO strategy
Keyword Manager – Helps you create a list of keywords and allows you to save them in form of a list and perform analytics on it
Position Tracking – For Keyword Position Tracking
Organic Traffic Insights – Combines Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Semrush data to create a dashboard for actionable insights

Semrush Keyword Overview Tool – How to Use this SEO tool

Let’s use the same Seed keyword for Se Ranking vs Semrush Analysis – Kitchen Tools

This is what we get – a View on Volume, Global volume, and Intent.

We have added some highlights in the image below :

You can also get Historical data here along with Desktop vs Mobile view

The ‘Intent View’ is new in Semrush and not available in SE Ranking

DML Tip: Intent shows what is the User Intent with the Seed keyword – as in when the user searches Kitchen Tool, the user is generally looking for some informational content and not commercial content

Thus, this information leads us to the thought that in case we opt for this keyword, then we should be creating informational content, not the Commercial Content

Next,

There is also a section on Keyword variations, Questions, and Related keywords

Se Ranking does not have the Questions sections here but has other two sections

Then there is a very useful SERP Analysis Feature section in Semrush

This section gives the top 100 Google results that appear for the analyzed keyword

Keyword Magic tool in Semrush

This is for a detailed list of Keywords. The Keyword Magic tool gives us an insight on:

Keyword Volumes
Keyword Density
Cost-per-click(CPC)
Keyword Trends
Keyword inclusion or exclusion suggestions

There are Advanced Features Like – Word Count, Competitive Density, SERP Features, and SERP results

What I like is the various reports present here – like Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match

These reports give you more variation of your seed keyword or keyword phrase

There is also a dedicated section for Questions

What I love here is a separate section of Groups – By Number and by Volume

The Keywords can be separately grouped based on both number and volume.

See Below :

You can utilize this section to get an idea of various other relevant keywords usage

Example –

For kitchen tools, there is relevant usage on Equipment, Use, and Utensils.

This will help you build a variety of Content

Semrush Keyword Manager Tool

Semrush Keyword Manager allows us to create Keywords lists after our analysis.

Additionally,

Provides Detailed metrics
Quantify keywords traffic potential
Allows consolidating keywords from regional databases in List format for export

You can save your keyword research findings into an XML format, download and share them further within the reams

You can create multiple Lists and collect keywords in those lists from the Position Tracking tool or PPC Keyword Tool and export them further to create white-label reports

The PPC Keyword Tool will allow you to set up groups of keywords and use them for ad campaigns and advertising purposes.

Essentially, the Keyword Manager allows you to bring all your keyword Analysis data points into one place for further Deep Keyword Analysis

Rank Tracking – SE Ranking vs. Semrush

Keyword Rank Tracking is all about tracking the ranking position of a website major keywords on Google SERPs

DML Tip – Keyword tracking is important as it gives you insights on Keyword Opportunities along with Keywords Improvement areas

SE Ranking’s Keyword Position Tracker

SE Ranking offers advanced Keyword Position tracking capabilities

Using SE Ranking, you can track keyword positions across every major search engine, All locations, and across all types of devices – Desktop or Mobile.

Search Engines Supported: Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Google Maps

Locations – All

Devices – Desktop and Mobile

SE Ranking Rank tracker provides data on –

Organic Rankings
Google Maps for Local Rankings
Search Volume
Traffic Forecast and Search Visibility
Google Ads Rankings
SERP Features
Average Position Chart of Keywords in a Monthly Basis

For example, See Below –

This List like page gives the details of the Ranking Changes over time

Also, you can create various keyword Groups and track the performance of the entire keyword group as a whole

Additionally,

SE Ranking Rank Tracker offers Competitive Intelligence

This means – along with your keywords, you can also track how your Competitors are performing on SERPs

See Image Below,

you can see how the competitors are performing for the keywords I am targeting

White labeling of reports is allowed and is accessible by our clients too thus helping us gain the trust of our clients.

The API Option is also available for use

DML Tip: Check 20 Keywords for Free with SE Ranking here

Want more details on the SE Ranking Rank Tracking capabilities? Read the detailed Guide!

Semrush Position Tracker Tool

Semrush has a position tracker tool for updated Keyword Rank Tracking

The Semrush Position tracker tool gave us options for-

Tracking rank on both mobile and desktop.
Get an insight into the site’s previous ranks.
Tracks the position of the keywords used in our Site’s content and also suggests any required changes.
Provides us a report on SERP history.

There is an overview page that gives you a quick overview of the traffic and Rankings Distribution

Then you can see your Top Keywords along with Positive and Negative Impact keywords

Positive impact = Keywords whose SERP position has improved

Negative Impact = keywords whose rankings have dropped

We got notified about the crucial position changes of our site which helps us improve each time.

There is also a Top Pages along with Cannibalization Health metric.

DML Tip: Cannibalization Health is a metric based on the ratio of keywords that have cannibalization issues to the total number of keywords in your campaign.

Then there is a Llist view that shows relevant metrics along with ranking positions of keywords

Competition Map Report

There is a Competition map report that shows all my competitors in one view along with their average position of the keywords I am tracking in the Semrush Keyword Position tool

Featured Snippet Report

This shows the data for which your website has the Featured Snippets.

Competitor Analysis – SE Ranking vs. Semrush

SE Ranking Competitor Research Tool

I love the Competitive research tool of SE Ranking tool.

The immense value it provides is great – at a cheap price of $18/mo, you can uncover the SEO strategy of your biggest rivals and do much more!

You can easily analyze your Competitors, Find new competitors and set up campaigns to outrank them.

SE Ranking Competitor Research tool gives us the ability to see what keywords your rival is ranking for paid search and organic search.

Go to Competitor Research as Shown above and enter your rival’s URL :

You will get to see the below metrics :

Domain trust count extracted from referring domains and backlinks of competitor sites.
Organic Traffic
Page Trust
Keyword count and the revenue generated from paid traffic.
Graphs of site changes every month
Distribution of Organic Keyword rankings
SERP Features like – reviews, site links, shopping results, videos, bottom ads, podcasts, featured snippets, and copyright infringements.
List of Top ranking keywords, domains, and subdomains of our competitor’s site.

Organic Competitors View in SE Ranking

For better analysis, SE Ranking Competitor Analysis gives you the list of keywords that your rival site is ranking for which helps drive traffic from organic and paid searches.

Here also, you have a Detailed Report View.

Top Pages Report in SE Ranking Competitor Research

After you Scroll down, you will see the Top Pages Report.

Here, You will see what pages are getting the most traffic and which site gets the same or similar keyword.

In case you click on the Detailed Report, you will have all the detailed metrics at page level

Organic Traffic of Rivals

SE Ranking Shows a graphical representation of how your rivals’ Traffic has Evolved over time

You can select a time frame and check the Traffic performance.

Additionally,

You can see what Organic Keywords or Pages bring the maximum traffic to your rival website

Example,

se ranking Organic Traffic of Rivals Traffic Analysis

Backlink Analysis

SE Ranking allows detecting the number of backlinks of our website as well as the competitor’s site.

There is a detailed backlink report that shows :

New and lost backlinks
Anchor Text Distribution
Distribution maps
Referring Domains

Semrush Competitive Research Suite

Semrush offers a wide range of features for an effective competitive analysis of your rival website.

Semrush offers us insights on below Competitive Analysis Data Points –

Domain Overview: An overview of strengths and weaknesses of your Rival Website or Customer
Traffic Analysis: Insights into Traffic Sources of Rival website
Organic Research – How the Rival website is performing for Organic Searches
Keyword Gap – Keywords where your Rival is ranking but you are not
Backlink Gap – Helps identify Backlink Opportunities after analyzing your competitor website

Competitor Domain Overview

The Domain Overview gives us insights on

Domain and its online visibility
Domain’s growth trend over time
Top keywords that bring the most traffic from the organic and paid channels

There is also a section on – Keywords by Intent

This is an interesting section – as you get to know what type of keywords your Competitor is using – are they focussing more on Informational Keywords or Commercial Keywords

This information is important for you to adjust your SEO Campaigns

You can also compare domains and analyze the key metrics and compare by countries

Then you have a section for Top Organic Keywords as shown below

Traffic insights from Semrush

The traffic Insights section gives us details on

Audience Insights
Traffic Analytics – for traffic Acquisition Strategy
Top Pages Report of RivalWebsite
Audience Insight – for audience behavior ( This is also available in Google Analytics for Free)
Geo Distribution helps to know about the origin of the target audience
Bulk Analysis to get the Crucial Backlink Metrics
Bounce Rate

Organic Research for Competitors

Semrush Organic research tool tells you about a website’s top organic search competitors, their primary keywords that bring most traffic and Traffic source, along with SERP features

Keyword Gap Analysis with Competitor Websit

This SEO tool allows you to do a detailed analysis of your keywords with keywords of your competitor’s sites

This is similar to what SE Ranking also offers.

You will see ‘Top Opportunities’ that you can rank along with keyword Overlap.

The comparison metrics are:

Organic and Paid Keywords
Suggestions of Top Keyword Opportunities
Number of Overlapping Keywords via Venn Diagrams
Keyword Volume
Keyword Density Percentage
CPC, that is, the average revenue generated per click of the user on the ads
The competitive density of individual Keywords for advertisers using the given term for ads.

Backlink gap with Competitors

The Backlink Gap tool of Semrush allowed us to compare the domains of our with the rival’s website, find the unnoticed backlink opportunities, and target the link-building campaigns.

Semrush vs Se Ranking for Content Marketing Features

SE Ranking Content Marketing Features

SE Ranking doesn’t have a separate Tool for Content marketing

However, one can implement a smart content marketing strategy with help of the following SE Ranking tools

On-Page SEO Checker – to run SEO Website analysis audit reports and optimize content
LSI, Semantic and Long Tail Keyword research Capabilities which tend to detect the intent and deeper meaning of the search based on words used in Query.
Backlink Monitor Tool to review the Backlink Trends and Growth
Marketing Plan along with a To-Do List
Social Media calendar
Social media Management Capabilities with tools for scheduling on Social media
Off-site SEO optimization opportunities
Business Listings

Semrush Content Marketing Platform

The Semrush Content marketing toolkit offers features

Topic Research Tool to detect the ongoing trends
SEO Content Template to strategize your site content
Content or Log File Analyzer informs us about our site’s

Performance,
Backlinks,
Keyword ranking,
Bounce rate,
Content audit and
Post tracking.

List of Broken backlinks
Brand Monitoring for campaign setups
Content plans and Audits include relevant topics having good SEO potential, attractive headlines, and most asked questions by the audience.

DML Tip: Check out our detailed review of Semrush Content Marketing Platform

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Website Audit Features

SE Ranking Website Audit Tool

SE Ranking provides comprehensive website SEO analysis tools that analyze a website on the below parameters:

Website Security
Crawl Issues
On-Page SEO Issues
Technical SEO Issues
Off-page SEO Issues

While performing a Website SEO Analysis with SE Ranking, we came across our website’s info:

Website Security Issues
HTTP status issues
Page depths which check the minimum number of clicks required to reach the particular page from the home page
Server Response Time
Number of Redirects
Meta tags and Link Attributes Issues
Page Changes Monitor to monitor the changes and their impact on our website as a whole.

Semrush SEO Audit tool

This tool provides us with:

Reports of our site’s crawl ability, markups, internal linking, speed of our site, and HTTP Status Codes.
Analyze the areas of improvement of our site and our site’s indexability.
Accessibility to search engines and bots.
Distribution of links throughout our site
Identifying broken as well as recognized backlinks.

Focus is also on Internal Linkings, Markups, and Core Web Vitals.

This is how the research looked!

User Management – SE Ranking vs. Semrush

SE Ranking User Management

SE Ranking has very simple and easy-to-go beginner-friendly user management tactics.

Also, creating multiple user accounts is essentially cheap even with their Basic plan

Additional User Seat costs $20
Users can be given custom access to view projects, update rankings, add or delete projects, etc

SE Ranking has a robust account Account administration – even access to particular sections of projects can be given

Semrush User management-

For Pro Plan, Semrush allows additional users at $45/Mo

As a Semrush user, one can :

Log in through only 1 email address at a particular time.
Permission to share only particular portions of our plan limit.
Have an easy flow of information by making notes to graphs which would be visible to other team members as well.
Get Personalized and relevant dashboards.
Monitor team’s queries or history usages

Pricing – SE Ranking vs. Semrush

SE Ranking Pricing

SE Ranking is a cheap SEO tool with paid features.

Rates start from $18/mo which gives us Keyword position updates every week.

It has three plans:

Essential – starting $18/mo with features of building 10 projects with 5 competitors per project with 1 user. This plan is best suited for beginners
Pro – starting $43/mo with building unlimited projects with 10 competitors per project. This plan is best suited for startups and small firms.
Business – starting $91/mo with ease of building unlimited projects and 20 competitors for each project. This plan is best suited for growing Businesses.

*All the above SE Ranking plan offers custom plans for a number of keywords to track and update frequency

SE Ranking Free Trial 14 Days – $78 Value

Semrush Pricing Plans

Semrush has three pricing plans :

Pro – starting @ $119/mo – for freelancers and startups
Guru – starting @ $229/mo – for SMbs, Developing Marketing agencies along with Content marketing Platform.
Business – starting @ $449/mo – designed for highly developing Agencies, E-commerce websites, and businesses with greater reach on the Web.

Additionally,

One can purchase the local SEO pack, Agency pack, and Semrush trends as per below additional pricing

Refund Policy – Semrush

You get a 7-day money-back guarantee on all Semrush plans.

One can submit a refund request here via the semrush contact form, and they will refund the payment made if the request is made within 7 days after the sign-up.

Semrush Free Trial – $119 Value!

Final Thoughts – SE Ranking vs Semrush

We have been thoroughly researching these tools for quite some time now, and we would put focus on some genuine takeaways of our analysis of Semrush vs Se Ranking

Compared with SE Ranking, Semrush offers more data appoints to perform Keyword research. For example, Metrics like ‘Intent’, ‘Questions’ and Capabilities of Keyword Manager are missing in Se Ranking

In SE Ranking, you can not create a List and keep on adding keywords in that list- I believe this is important for SEO Pros.

However, in case you are a beginner, you may not need these advanced Semrush and I still feel that SE Ranking does a pretty decent job here too

Below is a summary of Semrush capabilities that are not in Se Ranking

Semrush Trends
A separate Agency Growth kit – with Bid finder etc
A Dedicated Local SEO Tools
Dedicated Content Management Platform

Signup with SE Ranking is very Easy. There is a free trial and no Credit Card is Required.

Semrush offers a free 7 days Trial but you will have to enter your credit card detail

A dedicated Content Marketing platform and Local SEO Tools definitely give an edge to Semrush over SE Ranking.

However, SE Ranking intuitive dashboard and coverage of all important SEO features definitely make it one of the Go-To SEO tools in 2023.

Pricing is a big differentiator here –

Semrush is more costly than SE Ranking.

Semrush starts at $119/Mo whereas SE Ranking starts at a low price of $18/mo for 250 keywords rank tracking

The point is SE Ranking covers a wide range of customers – from beginner to enterprise offering wide pricing options.

Semrush lacks here

SE Ranking offers a free trial period for 14 days with no Credit card

On the other hand, Semrush allows free trials for a particular period but the features offered in this period are very limited.

For first-time users, it is preferable to use the SE Ranking free trial first and then take decisions.

Semrush is preferable for professionals who want highly customized and accurate business improvements.

Semrush is a definitely great Enterprise SEO platform. We recommend it very strongly given the features it offers

Semrush has all the capabilities for large teams and can help enterprise SEO to scale

SE Ranking is amazing in user management – At low prices, it allows you to create multiple subaccounts with different access levels to manage the SEO workspace.

Semrush on the other hand charges a bomb to add every extra user!