Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools that provide data-driven reports along with plenty of features. Not just marketers, but small businesses as well as large enterprises are utilizing it for several years.
However, there are other SEO tools that get more appreciation and providing better results. We have analyzed several feedback and reviews that mention some challenges of using Semrush, such as high pricing as compared to other tools and a steep learning curve.
This post will help you know more Semrush alternatives that can be utilized for various SEO tasks along with the features and varied pricing plans. But before start comparison, let’s begin with an overview of Semrush.
Overview of Semrush
While most marketers know Semrush, for a brief it is an all-in-one digital marketing software that can help businesses with their online presence and performance.
Have a look at some most utilized features of Semrush:
- Competitor analysis: Semrush will let you analyze the websites of your competitors, define their top keywords and backlinks, and define the general strategy of their online marketing.
- Keyword research: It will allow you to get relevant keywords for your website, together with difficulty and search volume data, using the keyword research feature from Semrush.
- Paid ad analysis: Another impressive feature is paid advertising optimization, where Semrush is going to let you optimize and track how well ads are doing, perform keyword bidding, and determine targeting.
- SERP analysis: You will be able to track the ranking of your website against target keywords and analyze how other pages are performing on SERPs.
- Social media insight: Semrush has facilities for monitoring your performance on social media, analyzing the engagement of the audience, and trend spotting.
After everything, Semrush is indeed a useful tool for a business aspiring to enhance its online marketing. However, it’s worth noting the limitations this tool carries, and with those in mind, delve into other options that will help you find the best tool for your needs.
Why Do Users Look for Semrush Alternatives?
While Semrush is loaded with great features, one can understand why some people would look for alternatives for the following reasons, among others:
- Complicated to use: The completeness of Semrush sometimes makes it difficult for a fresher to get used to and reach the tool he/she wants.
- Pricing: Depending on the budget, subscription costs to Semrush can be quite expensive; hence, limiting expenses that one can incur with the tool. Besides, possible limitations and price increases in the future may negatively affect the affordability of the tool.
- Additional costs: Most times, one is compelled to purchase Semrush add-ons for specific features, which then adds to the overall cost of using the tool.
- Data accuracy concerns: Some users appear discontent with data accuracy from Semrush on rank tracking and backlink analysis. Identifying toxic links is difficult, and the website audit feature may also not be of the highest quality.
Whether you use Semrush or look for alternatives to it, all these aspects will be very critical to assess, coming out with the tool that best fits your needs and budget.
Best Semrush Alternatives
To help you overcome these challenges, we have curated a list of detailed SEO tools that are ideal Semrush alternatives. We have compiled a comparison of each Semrush alternative altogether to help you choose the best one according to your business needs.
Here is the list of top Semrush competitors and alternatives:
- RanksPro
- Ahrefs
- Moz Pro
- Ubersuggest
- WooRank
- Mangools
- SEO Power Suite
- Similarweb
- SpyFu
- Serpstat
1. RanksPro
Hundreds of tools are available in the world of SEO to marketers for tracking their campaigns and optimizing their strategies. Among them, RanksPro is emerging as a perfect SEO platform and a tough Semrush alternative and competitor.
Be it for a complete beginner or for running a scaling business, you get more streamlined solutions with the provision of a fully integrated suite of SEO tools. RanksPro is built to improve your online visibility, drive real results, and keep all of your SEO work centralized in one lean platform.
Key Features:
- Rank Tracking: RanksPro helps you monitor rankings of landing pages through targeted keywords in real time. You can also group those keywords to track and analyze easily.
- Historical data: Insights are necessary for reading or tracking results. RanksPro provides in-depth data on your past performance to understand the trend and measure SEO changes.
- Site Audit: Another great feature of RanksPro that helps in addressing all possible issues that may be hurting the search visibility of your website.
- On-page Suggestions: RanksPro has a section to provide on-page suggestions that can help in optimizing website structure content, structure, and technical aspects of your website.
- Keyword Research: Get an idea about the keywords and phrases of your business and analyze their competitiveness. This will let you know which ones to target in your content so that you easily get notified about opportunities.
- Backlink Analysis: Monitor your website’s backlinks and get new chances to build links with the RanksPro backlink analysis feature. It also compares your backlink profile with competitors.
- Competitor Analysis: The user can track the change in the ranking position, identify from where your competitors are creating backlinks, and find opportunities for link building.
- Backlink Gap Analysis: You can compare your backlink profile with the competitor, and generate more backlink creation opportunities from high authority websites.
- Google Integration: Integrate RanksPro with Google Search Console to acquire all detailed search data with performance insights.
- Daily Updates: Get detailed reports for your website via email as well as PDF and analyze key performance metrics (KPIs) for further optimization.
Pros | Cons |
Intuitive interfaceSmooth handlingAdaptable data and reportsMultilingual supportFlexible pricing and plans | Tough competitionLimited features (expanding soon) |
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs represents one of the most powerful Semrush alternatives and one of the strongest competitors. It has to offer a huge set of SEO tools that are quite similar in features and functionality.
The large database of backlinks gives it prominence, ensuring valuable insight into your website’s backlink profile and competitive landscape. While both tools are superior in one way or another, one should remember that Ahrefs isn’t perfect and may have some areas where it would lack.
Source: https://ahrefs.com/dashboard
However, some users experienced that the volume and traffic estimates of keyword searches aren’t always as accurate. The UI may be less intuitive, too, compared with other SEO tools available.
Key Features:
- Dashboard: You will have an overview of your website KPIs, which will be fully customizable, in one dashboard – organic traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings.
- Site Explorer: Examine the backlink profile of your website looking at referring domains, anchor text, and different link types. Also, keep an eye on the organic traffic coming in from search engines. Ahrefs will closely monitor competitors’ rankings for further optimization.
- Keywords Explorer: Uncover the keywords and phrases to attract potential audiences. Assess the competition level for these keywords and pinpoint opportunities for your website. Come up
- Site Audit: Know the technical issues or problems that may be weighing your website’s SEO down. These include broken links, slow page loading, and mobile-friendliness. Improve content and structure, and get suggestions to enhance the technical components of a website.
- Rank Tracker: Track your website’s ranking for the target keywords on different search engines. You will get to know the time changes in your rankings and the trends of these changes.
- Domain Comparison: Compare the performance of your website against other competitors. Know areas where your competitors are ahead and your competitive edge.
- Content Gap Analysis: Find out what others are writing and you’re not. This, in turn, will help create content without any gap, making your site outstanding from the competition and attracting organic traffic.
- Traffic Checker: Find out how much organic traffic your website receives on specific keywords while tracking referring domains.
- SEO reporting: It generates customizable reports to track progress and communicate meaningful insights to stakeholders. You can even schedule an automatic delivery of your reports directly in your inbox.
Pros | Cons |
Large crawling capacityCustomizable dashboardIn-depth research outcomesPlenty of free toolsPerfect for large-scale businesses | Expensive plansNo free trialsInterface is a bit sluggish |
3. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-in-one SEO toolset, which is technically built to be of great simplicity in every sense, to ease the pain-in-head associated with doing search engine optimization. In contrast to some of the tools out there, Moz Pro puts a premium on user experience by making it much easier to use and understand.
Source: https://moz.com/help/moz-pro/getting-started/dashboard
Moz Pro provides clear, actionable recommendations to help you prioritize your work. If highly customizable UI is the most important thing to you or you need the freshest data possible, look elsewhere. Still, Moz Pro remains one of the most robust tools out there for many SEO professionals.
Key Features:
- Keyword Research: Find words and phrases that people use to search, and get fresh keyword suggestions to target in your appropriately optimized content. Analyze the competitiveness of keywords and try to capture keyword opportunities.
- Site Audits: Find potential technical issues that could stand in the way of your site performing better in web searches-issues like broken links, slow loading pages, and mobile-friendliness, amongst others.
- On-page Recommendations: Get recommendations for modification in the contents of the website, its structure, and some technical suggestions.
- XML Sitemap generation: This module generates a sitemap.xml file, which you will be able to upload to help search engines crawl the pages and index them.
- Rank Tracking: Keep track of your website’s ranking for target keywords in multiple search engines. Provide a graph for how the ranking has changed over time and indicate the trends.
- Competitor Tracking: Research your competitors’ SERP performance and provide better opportunities.
- Backlink Analysis: Analyze your backlink profile regarding domains, anchor text, and link types. Compare your backlink profile with others against your competitors.
- SERP Analysis: Analyze the type of search engine result pages you are getting particularly on featured snippets, knowledge graphs, people also ask boxes, etc.
- Technical Audit: Your website’s overall health, including technical issues that affect sites due to several metrics-page load times, linking errors, mobile-friendliness, etc.
- Crawl Reports: Find and fix crawl errors so that search engines do not fail to index the content on your website. Some areas of potential improvements will be highlighted through these reports, which will help you have further optimization.
- Local SEO Audit: Measure your Google My Business listing and other key areas that can help you improve your visibility in local searches.
- Automated & Custom Reports: Create a custom report to track your progress, including insights to share with various stakeholders, and have reports scheduled to be delivered to your inbox regularly.
Pros | Cons |
Deep SEO tool suiteRedefined crawling featurePlenty of metrics and reportingMultiple website SEO management | Steep learning curveLimited technical SEO toolsAdditional charges for local SEO |
4. Ubersuggest
Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest has quickly moved from a simple keyword research tool to an all-clusive SEO platform. Don’t let the plain interface fool you, though-there are some really valuable features and insights packed into it.
Source: https://ubersuggest.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405442920731-Getting-to-Know-Your-Project-Dashboard
Even though it’s not the most complicated tool in order to really dive deep into an audit of the website, or some sophisticated ideas for link-building; Ubersuggest is one of the best options for accessible, user-friendly SEO platforms.
Among other features, the user-friendly interface and easy access make Ubersuggest a perfect tool for beginners.
Key Features:
- Backlink Monitor: Identify the backlink of your website or compare your backlink profile with your competitors and analysis area of improvement.
- Competitor Analysis: Keep track of competitor keyword, backlink profile as well as organic traffic and find key area of improvement through performance analysis.
- Personalized Dashboard: Following is an example of customizable dashboard, organic traffic, keyword ranking and backlink growth would be major metrics. Understand your progress with easy-to-understand charts and graphs.
- Keyword Rank Tracker: Tracks how your website performs with respect to target keywords, analyzes the shifting patterns of rankings over time, identifies trends, and ranks your website compared with competitors.
- Keyword Research Tools: It generates ideas for relevant keywords with estimated search volumes, offers potential opportunities to optimize for landing pages and content.
- Web Analytics: Track your website’s traffic, such as visitor behavior, sources of referral, and landing pages. Also track the conversion rate as a metric to monitor the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
Pros | Cons |
User-friendly interfacePlans for lifetimeA bit budget-friendlyMoney-back guarantee for 30 days | Lack of advanced toolsSlow processing Limited usage for individual plans |
5. WooRank
WooRank is indeed a very great SEO platform that comes at a much easier-to-swallow cost than Semrush. It offers many essential features bunched up into one platform may not be as wide-ranging, yet WooRank offers an easy-to-navigate dashboard. It also provides invaluable insights and comes at more budget-friendly prices for businesses.
Source: https://help.woorank.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000236049-Audit-Your-SEO-Quickly
If you’re searching for a budget-friendly SEO tool with ease of use then WooRank is the way to go, but surely this product, like any other on the market, has its strengths and weaknesses, so join according to your business needs.
Key Features:
- Link Building: Find the backlinks for your website, compare with competitors’ backlink profiles, and uncover opportunities for new quality backlinks.
- Keyword Research: Find relevant keywords for your website and optimize your content for better rankings; track keywords for ranking, and identify more opportunities for optimization.
- SERP Rank Tracking: Track your website rankings for target keywords, understand how your rankings have shifted over time, and identify trends towards better outcomes.
- Competitor Analysis: Monitor how your competitors are performing in SEO, their progress against your own, and adapt accordingly.
- Activity Dashboard: Achieve a customizable dashboard showing all pertinent KPIs tracking your progress, or with charts and graphs easy to understand for you.
- Customized Reports: Create customized reports to track your progress and share insights with stakeholders. Set up regular reports to arrive in your inbox.
- Mobile Keywords: Identify high search terms on your mobile device and ensure that the site is optimized to mobile users for better chances on the search engine ranking and user experience.
- Audit Management: Schedule regular audits to identify potential technical issues that would affect the SEO of your website. Get recommendations for improving your website’s SEO based on the results of such an audit.
Pros | Cons |
Cheaper plansIntuitive navigationUnlimited reports24-hour support | Short, limited trialLesser keyword tracking and crawls Limited advanced features |
6. Mangools
Mangools is a full SEO platform and is famous for its user-friendly interface and simplicity. The feature set, although not very expansive, forms a solid foundation for beginners and experienced pros in SEO.
Source: https://mangools.com/
Mangools offers competitive pricing and thus can be said to be cost-effective for any business size. Its potential here makes it great and good for individual marketers as well as newly-started companies.
Key Features:
- SEO Auditing & Monitoring: Dig into potential issues affecting your website’s SEO, gain a bird’s-eye view of the health of your website, and monitor your site overtime to see how it’s improving.
- Technical SEO Tracking: Find and fix technical mistakes, review your site’s page load times, and offer room for overall technical optimization.
- SEO Content & Rankings: Get recommendations as to how to improve SEO on your content-this includes keyword usage, structure and readability.
- Link Analysis: Backlinks toward your website- Identify them and analyze the quality. Compare your backlink profile with competitors and discover possible factors that may bring new backlinks to you.
- Keyword Research: Find relevant keyword ideas and track the existing ones for optimizing your strategy. Analyze their difficulty and search volume to utilize them for optimizing content.
- SERP Rank Tracking: Analyze rank of your site’s pages on targeted keywords and track progress through a time period. Implement the current trends to stay competitive throughout the SEO journey.
- Content Insights: Get inspiration for new content topics based on trending searches, and improve your content’s SEO and user engagement.
- Competitor Analysis: Identify your competitors and track their progress to discover more opportunities for organic traffic, link building, and content optimization.
- Custom Reports: Schedule customized reports to track your progress, along with data visualization to present the information in detail.
Pros | Cons |
In-depth keyword researchUser-friendly dashboardFree KW tool48-hour money-back guarantee | Limited overall SEO toolsSluggish customer support Lack of site audit tool |
7. SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite is a dynamic SEO tool that caters to all the user’s requirements with its wide variety of features. Therefore, SEO PowerSuite has gained significant popularity and fame as an alternative to Semrush. Users admire the tool due to its capabilities to automate, customize, and brand SEO reports.
Source: https://www.link-assistant.com/news/free-seo-powersuite-features.html
It has maintained continuous top ratings as the best SEO software among G2. Through SEO PowerSuite, one can access powerfully collected data. Even though it is effective at collecting data, the analysis part of the data may not be quite advanced like other tools.
The interface is a little complicated and you will need to give more time for getting familiar with; however, for those that are willing to take time, SEO PowerSuite may be able to give you the insights you seek about optimizing your site’s SEO.
Key Features:
- Local and Global SEO: Use the SEO PowerSuite to optimize your site for local search in attracting customers while you increase your online presence in targeting other international markets.
- Keyword Research: Consider getting keyword ideas from analyzing your competitors, and get potential insights through search volumes and traffic so that you’d better optimize your content.
- Competitive Analysis: Using SEO PowerSuite, you could look at your competitors by regarding backlinks, ranks, and even organic traffic. You could thus find core areas of optimization on your website through such features.
- Rank Tracking: Your keywords won’t be exempted from tracking for this feature to allow you analyze their performance. You could easily identify SEO gaps through such features and even identify trends within them.
- Ads and Analytics Integration: Merge into widely used PPC platforms so that you can track the performance of your paid ads. Connect SEO PowerSuite to Google Analytics to gain more detailed insights.
- Technical Audit: The main feature SEO PowerSuite will provide you with the technical audit report where you will be able to find out broken links, slow pages, crawl errors, mobile friendliness, and more.
- Social Media Stats: Connect your social media profiles to SEO PowerSuite and analyze key metrics from engagement to visits and conversions.
- HTML Optimization: It also offers insights through which the underlying HTML code for the website can be properly structured.
Pros | Cons |
Perfect for agenciesPlenty of SEO featuresCompetitive pricing | Inaccurate backlink dataPoor desktop app Steep learning curve |
8. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb platform is very strong in providing valuable SEO insights, which are significant for business leaders, analysts, and marketers. It gives you the ability to benchmark your business’s digital performance among the leaders.
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/blog/updates/product-updates/my-brand-analytics/
Using SimilarWeb can help you identify weaknesses and scopes of improvements. However, some reviews claim that it lacks a little data for some websites and provides insufficient information.
And with all these facts, the tool somehow impressed several users with its competitive analysis feature. With SimilarWeb, you will possess all the tools and information you require to take data-driven decisions and push your business ahead.
Key Features:
- Ad Tracking Tool: Analyze the performance of your ads and identify areas for improvement. This also includes keyword bidding with optimized strategies based on competitor data.
- Keyword Research: Discover relevant keywords, and optimize your pages accordingly. SimilarWeb lets users find traffic-oriented keywords for their SEO strategy.
- Competitor Analysis: SimilarWeb provides competitive analysis features along with backlink profile analysis. It identifies potential areas of optimization along with strategic improvements.
- Brand Protection: Track mentions of your brand across the web, and protect your brand’s reputation by addressing negative online sentiment.
- Keyword Gap Analysis: Gain insights from SimilarWeb to find keyword gaps and discover opportunities for optimization. Generate new ideas to target keywords for a wider audience reach.
- Landing Page Analyzer: Track metrics like conversion rate and bounce rate to measure performance of your landing pages.
- Product Ad Analytics: Analyze the performance of your product ads on platforms like Amazon and Google Shopping. Identify areas for improvement to increase your product ad’s effectiveness.
- Rank Tracker: Track your website’s as well as competitors’ ranking for the targeted keywords. Analyze changes in your rankings over time and identify trends for further optimization.
- SEO Site Audit: From technical issues to content gaps, SimilarWeb offers a complete SEO audit report. It helps to recognize these issues and make necessary changes to the website.
- YouTube Keyword Tool: Find appropriate keywords to target your YouTube audience and rank your videos among the top search positions on the platform.
Pros | Cons |
In-depth rankingRecognizes quality and poor trafficEnhanced competitive researchFree trial for both beginner and expert | Reliability issuesLimited information for some sitesDelayed traffic updates |
9. SpyFu
SpyFu is one of the most popular website choices for those looking for a full-featured SEO solution at an affordable cost. It’s both easy to use and explicitly allows competitor analysis.
Source: https://startupstash.com/tools/spyfu/
SpyFu does not offer features as advanced on technical SEO audits and optimization. Overall, SpyFu is one of the best tools businesses can settle for if they are looking for a low-budget SEO tool that has an emphasis in competitor analysis as well as understanding paid advertisement insights.
Key Features:
- Backlink Monitoring: SpyFu detects toxic backlinks and disavows them. You can also compare your backlink profile with competitors and increase the possibility of getting more quality backlinks.
- Competitive Analysis: Analyzing your competitors, comparing their performance with yours. It encompasses organic as well as PPC campaigns so that you can improve your strategy to get better outcomes.
- Campaign Management: Another useful feature in SpyFu is where you can track the performance of your paid advertisement campaigns. You can optimize keyword bidding strategies, therefore improving your ROI.
- Keyword Analysis: You can monitor relevant keywords using SpyFu that could increase organic rankings. You can compare competitor keywords and make relevant optimization on search visibility to your content.
- Rank Tracking: Use the rank-tracking with SpyFu keyword-based and track the content and landing pages for position change.
- PPC Research: Collect information for PPC campaigns, find the potential keywords to bid for, and also monitor ads for good analysis of conversion rates during the run.
Pros | Cons |
In-depth results for multiple keywordsLow on pricingGoogle ads managementUser-friendly analytics | Lack of keyword trends dataComplex and lengthy reports |
10. Serpstat
Serpstat is one of the most comprehensive SEO toolsets at an affordable price. Although not as feature-rich as some of the competition, it gives away very interesting insights and capabilities to optimize your online presence.
Source: https://serpstat.com/tutorial/
It may not be as good in terms of data quality or depth of analysis compared to these paid tools, but for the money, Serpstat is a true gem. Overall, it is the perfect solution for business organizations seeking an affordable, decent SEO tool that still offers all the features and useful insights required.
Key Features:
- Competitive Analysis: Find your competitors and analyze their progress to find out where you stand. Get complete reports from Serpstat and identify potential areas of optimization.
- Keyword Discovery: Get keyword suggestions for your landing pages and content ideas. You can also analyze what keywords competitors are using and implement them in your SEO strategy and content creation.
- Link Analysis: Analyze your backlinks and find more opportunities for creating high-quality backlinks by comparing your profile with competitors.
- SERP Tracking: Track the performance of your top-ranking content on SERPs and find pages that require optimization according to the latest trends and reports.
- Custom Reporting: Get personalized reports on Serpstat’s dashboard and emails as well. You can analyze top metrics to track the progress of your website, organic traffic, and rankings.
- Content Insights: Find content gaps between your pieces and competitors’, and prepare strategies for content optimization for better rankings and search visibility.
Pros | Cons |
Affordable pricingGood for beginners and small brandsEasy to understand | Lack of accurate keyword trackingHampered quality |
How to Choose the Right SEO Tool?
The right SEO tool differs for different people depending on one’s needs and budget. The following are considerations:
- Features: Look for the majority of basic features such as keyword research, backlink analysis, auditing site, and rank tracking. Consider contents marketing tools, social media management, or specific local SEO tools based on your requirements.
- Ease of use: It should provide an easy interface that the user can easily navigate. Consider if it is complex for the user to take a little time learning how to use it effectively.
- Cost: Compare the pricing plans of different tools that would work best with your budget. Consider the feature and benefits of each tool in relation to what they cost.
- Integrations: Seek tools that interdigitate with other marketing tools you use, such as Google Analytics or social media platforms.
- Customer support: Ensure that the tool provider provides proper customer support in case you need them. Assess the speed and effectiveness of their response in regards to your questions.
- Reviews and recommendations: Check out other users’ reviews to gain insights about the strength and weaknesses of the tool. Ask colleagues or industry experts for recommendations.
Based on these factors, you can choose the best SEO tool that suits you and helps you reach your desired goals in marketing.
Key Takeaways
Often considered the most critical SEO platform, Semrush is a complete suite of tools and features. Yet, for beginners in SEO or those on a tight budget, the cost and complexity of Semrush may be a bit too high for them.
Even for a seasoned SEO pro, he or she will have to spend some time getting familiar with the new tool and feature offerings from other platforms. Before choosing an SEO platform, ensure you know what you need and your priorities.
Map out what’s critical for you to look for in the platform: whether it offers keyword research, backlink analysis, or rank tracking features. Also assess how easy the platform is to use and whether it matches your team size and your SEO budget.
Utilize as many free trials as possible so that you can try the features of the available platforms before settling down to a paid subscription.
At this point, if you find a suitable platform, subscribe; for the moment, it is all about staying aware of the emerging trends and best alternatives in the SEO landscape to choose what will be suitable for the business.