SEMrush Opinions

[NotaLawyer]

I saw a few threads talking about SEMrush having a bigger backlink index than Ahrefs and I'm seeing about a 2x to 3x difference in links. Major thing being that it seems like SEMrush is picking up a lot more scraper sites than Ahrefs, so Idk if Ahrefs is intentionally filtering those or if they just aren't finding them.

Anyway, what are opinions on SEMrush these days? I haven't paid for it in a while but at one point it was trying to be everything for everyone, but underperforming. Have they gotten better than the pack? Worth dumping ahrefs for SEMrush? How valuable are you currently finding SEMrush?

 

[BakerStreet]

I prefer Majestic over SEMRUsh or Ahrefs. Like you, I find most of Ahrefs data to be spam and noise. With Majestic i Get to filter it with tf/cf. If SEMRush is worst with spam, then it is even a worst tool.

 

[Smith]

what are opinions on SEMrush these days?

It depends on how and why you're using it.

Links:
I've seen the same comments regarding backlink audits etc. I've personally used SEM for almost a decade. It has around 3x the links that ahrefs finds and about 50% of the links that LRT finds for me. That said, I find ahrefs picks up legit links faster, e.g. when I'm building links from DR 80-90 sites to my domain, ahrefs has them a week before SEM - not that it matters. But I also see the same thing you've mentioned with regard to spam links, ahrefs often doesn't pick them up at all while SEM has thousands broken down by page.

Keyword research:
No better or worse than any other tool, though again it depends on how you're using it.

Competitor research:
SEM has keyword gaps and other tools you can use against the competition. But I don't use SEM for this. I find ahrefs more useful in terms of assessing site structure and finding opportunities.

Site health:
Decent monitoring and can be used as a push notification to keep your site in good condition. I find this more active than ahrefs.

Worth dumping ahrefs for SEMrush?

Why not do both?

I haven't paid for it in a while

It sounds like you're leading a scaled-up SEO operation at a professional firm. Would love to hear how you intend on using SEM (or currently use ahrefs) to support your team's workflow.

 

[NotaLawyer]

Good insight on the links side, that's what I was mainly curious about. We're using a combo of Pitchbox and ahrefs for link building and both have tracking in their own way. I feel like we're hitting a little bit of a wall with ahref's content explorer and some of the competitor analysis/site explorer in the way we're currently using it so I was starting to look at alternatives.

I've been playing around with SEMrush's site audit, which is cool but I also use Sitebulb for a lot of the more dirty technical work I'm doing. Starting to play around with more competitor research and see how it might be able to simplify some things for the rest of the team.

I'm mainly looking to get a stronger link building/link research tool.

As others on this forum have mentioned, I also think one main issue for sites that have been impacted by these recent google updates is because of an issue with their backlink profile. I'm trying to get ahead of that for the sites I'm working on.

 

[secretagentdad]

Majestic is the most useful for metrics and being smart about stuff.

For spam link removal and disavow sem rush new king??? would be a useful comparison. Anyone done any actual comparisons?

What are the options even. Ahrefs, SEMrush, link research tools?
Also what about low cost common crawl indexes and stuff.