The best SEO software varies from business to business and is based on the aspects of SEO that you need to streamline. It is also important to consider budget opportunities and scaling capabilities. There are a variety of decent platforms on the market, and Semrush and SimilarWeb are among the best at achieving success and surpassing expectations. They will reinforce your strategies with unique data-driven solutions, you couldn’t reach throughout a solo digital journey.
However, since both apps provide similar features, it can be challenging to determine which one will bring you optimization value. Therefore, our experts have thoroughly reviewed SimlarWeb vs Semrush so you might understand what to expect from each toolset. Drill down to their detailed showdown and discover the option ideally aligned with your set goals.
What Are Semrush and SimilarWeb?
Semrush Overview
Semrush was launched in 2008 and has become even more popular since that time. Initially conceived as a tool for competitive research purposes, this is currently a powerful all-in-one SEO instrument. With as many as 50+ utilities users can successfully deal with keyword research, site audits, backlink tracking, traffic analysis, and more to enhance search engine and social media visibility and earn a name in the industry. The fact that Semrush is a year-to-year choice for world-known brands such as Tesla and Samsung proves it is a robust and efficient assistant to scale the business.
Get an in-depth Semrush Review to learn about its all-encompassing SEO and marketing toolkit, including keyword research, site audit, and competitor analysis features.
Pros
- Allows performing 360-degree traffic analysis by collecting data across 142 geo-locations and 808M domains
- Enables accuracy and rich-metric evaluation within SEO, PPC, SMM, and paid search campaigns
- Keyword Magic Tool comes with valuable in-depth insights to uncover keyword opportunities
- Stellar local and social media management features
- Remarkable content creation tools
- Rank tracking updates daily
Cons
- The interface might be confusing to use and navigate for beginners
- A bit expensive pricing, especially for newbie marketers
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is a service with a strong focus on web presence measurement and competitive analysis. With its extensive research intelligence, powered by up-to-date and granular data, you can always keep your business a step ahead. The platform scrapes critical and priceless insights only for traffic analysis. SimilarWeb lacks such optimizations as SEO and PPC keywords and position tracking and has to integrate with other more dedicated platforms to handle it. However, you can still meet some useful keyword investigation functions for streamlining SEO and PPC, but they are not as viable.
Pros
- Straightforward to use UI
- Scrutinizes and incorporates traffic trends
- Extracts data from all search engines and gauges site performance against them
- Digital Marketing Intelligence helps detect profitable keywords to target
- Can accurately process data for major brands
- White-label reporting is available
Cons
- Misses SEO tools for all-purpose optimization
- Intransparent pricing policy that provides contacting sales to know prices
Features Comparison
If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it is pivotal to keep a close eye on your main digital rivals in terms of their strategies, along with strengths and weaknesses. So let’s start our Semrush vs SimilarWeb overview by side-by-side comparing both competitive analysis toolkits.
Competitor Analysis
Semrush
The selling point of Semrush is SEO Competitive Analysis tools. Powered by 7 cutting-edge features, users can trace the competition’s performance across organic and paid campaigns from position in SERPs to keywords and backlinks. When studying out competitive research capabilities of SimilarWeb vs Semrush, we have figured out that the latter platform will help get an edge over opponents with utilities like:
- Organic Research. It allows unearthing the profitable practices of organic competitors via SERP progress audit and revealing their most traffic-driving keywords. You can also pinpoint domains that target the same key terms and filter keyword ranking history by position, search intent, CPC, estimated traffic, SERP feature types, etc.
- Keyword Gap. This is the useful capacity to benchmark against up to 5 competitors’ keyword profiles for uncovering keyword gaps and new ranking opportunities. It helps find valuable key terms from competitors that you are missing.
- Keyword Overview. Our Semrush comparison team affirms that with the extensive database, performing in-depth competitive analysis on specific keywords is effortless and lightning-fast. Gauge key terms by metrics such as search volume at local and global levels, KD, CPC, and intent to find the best long-tail keywords/phrases to target.
- Backlink Analytics. Simply enter rivals’ URLs and obtain a holistic picture of all their backlinks in no time. You can discover new link-building opportunities with accurate data on top referring domains, backlink types, link attributes, anchors, location distribution, domain authority, and more.
- Backlink Gap. This module is responsible for enriching you with a range of relevant backlink prospects in your niche. Stack up against up to 5 competitive backlink profiles to understand who links to your opponents’ sites but not yours.
- Position Tracking. With this solution, users can easily check a site’s ranking in SERPs and track and cluster pages that increased and declined for specific keywords. Unveil what domains compete with them for traffic. Leverage an insightful Competition Map to see what sites you share your keywords and audience within organic Google’s top 3, 10, and 100 as well as paid SERP results.
- My Reports. Competitive intelligence reporting is the functionality most Semrush vs SimilarWeb reviews highlight. Packed with a bunch of formatting options and drag-and-drop widgets, the tool perfectly customizes and structures all the findings in a PDF file to ensure clearness to your team or clients.
SimilarWeb
It is difficult to outperform competitors without understanding how they are doing across various channels. SimilarWeb offers potent competitive research features to lead the industry game. They are based on the comprehensive analytics by core points below.
- Marketing Channels. The primary purpose of this section is to learn sources that generate immense traffic to competitive sites. The dashboard will provide stats on channels like direct, organic search, paid search, referrals, display ads, and emails. For deeper insights, you can measure the traffic by organic and paid keywords. The thing Semrush vs SimilarWeb comparison experts adore about this tool is the ability to accurately sort traffic that keywords engage based on search engines or social media networks. In addition, gauge each keyword’s traffic distribution by geo-location, difficulty level, and search intent to discover the most efficient tactics to incorporate. Experienced marketers can also delve into average page visits and bounce rate info.
- Competitive Tracker. It keeps you updated on traffic fluctuations of competitors over time. You are free to choose the required timeline and look over traffic share data. Evaluate any domain regarding whether its engagement increased or decreased and by how much. Plus, it is possible to extract precise figures for new and returning users. The tool generously allows spying on the performance of up to 25 competitive sites, which is rare on other platforms.
- Organic and Paid Competitors. By utilizing this feature, users can closely view where opponents reach their referral traffic the most based on global/country/industry rank, total visits, and device distribution. That way, the tool facilitates spotting high-value and relevant partners resonating with your query.
- Traffic and Engagement. Peep into opponents’ digital market share and realize the traffic quality via measuring volume, distribution, reach, and engagement. The unique perk underlined by plenty of SimilarWeb vs Semrush within this module is Ad Network. It contributes to deciphering what streams your rivals have targeted for paid ads and the overall revenue they earn from each.
Read a comprehensive SimilarWeb Review to understand its features, usability, and how it stacks up against other market analytics platforms for informed decision-making
Verdict
If you are picking a reliable instrument for researching the competitive realm between SimilarWeb and Semrush, the latter is a clear winner. No doubt, SimilarWeb ensures high-quality analytics and stands out with the Ad Network feature, but Semrush boasts a broader scope of tools to investigate competitors more diligently and from different angles.
Keyword Research
You can’t climb up Google SERPs without discovering the right keywords to monetize. This part of the SimilarWeb and Semrush comparison is devoted to shedding light on both apps’ potential to identify the most niche-gainful terms.
Semrush
The Keyword Overview is a center-stage feature of the overall toolset. It focuses on seeking the best keywords to optimize your strategies for organic and paid campaigns. The simple-to-comprehend dashboard will provide marketers with long-tail and low-competition gems based on global volume, monthly search rates, CPC, and SERP features. If you want to dip your toes into the specific keyword performance, the tool comes with stats on its difficulty level to rank, and usage variations, including questions and related terms. Also, explore their total volume and trending to know if they are worth targeting.
The Keyword Magic Tool is another stunning functionality our Semrush vs SimilarWeb review can’t but note. With the extensive database of 25B keywords and over 20M ideas for a single term, you will unlock impressive ranking opportunities in a few clicks. The tool divides keywords into 4 groups: broad match, phrase match, exact match, and related. Users can leverage advanced filtering to search for terms by volume, CPC, KD, and more. Furthermore, Semrush is brilliant at segmenting keywords into shared, missing, untapped, weak, strong, and unique with further exporting to Keyword Manager for in-depth analysis. But keep in mind, that this feature processes only organic keywords.
Unlike the previous tool, Keyword Gap scrapes info both on organic and paid key terms. Still, you can set the filter only on organic, paid, or PLA results, depending on your project. Benchmark your site up as many as 5 competitive domains and get keyword overlap and missing opportunities to target on desktops and mobiles alike.
When you compare SimilarWeb and Semrush close-up, the last one is prominent with the Organic Traffic Insights module. This intelligence enables seamless integration with Google Analytics to disclose ‘not provided’ keywords for boosting the site’s organic search performance. The Keyword Manager Tool mentioned above delivers automated clustering lists of up to 2,000 terms from scratch to audit them thoroughly.
SimilarWeb
Whether you are yearning to analyze individual key terms or strengthen strategies with high-performing ones for a specific site, SimilarWeb will handle it with flying colors. The main dashboard is Analyze Keywords, where users can insert needed phrases and see their activities over time. It showcases stats on traffic share, search visits, search volume, and CPC. While conducting diligent research, it is feasible to extract insights into organic/paid/mobile competitors, geo-location distribution, and top search/ product ads.
After testing out the tool, Semrush vs SimilarWeb professionals state that it lacks organic research capabilities. Nevertheless, the Keyword Generator feature might replace it, detecting the trending key terms aligned with your business. Look through sections like phrase match, related keywords, and question queries to spot best-fitting terms to adapt your content strategy. Regardless of how detailed the data within each section is, you can access it in a separately opened window only. This is a time-consuming and tedious process compared to Semrush, which immediately displays all findings in one window or with popping-up boxes.
You may filter keywords based on volume ranges, CPC, keyword difficulty, and more. The ability to sift through terms in terms of audience interests and industry makes keyword research by SimilarWeb unique. Besides, users can compare different sites to unveil the top common key terms and phrases both organic and paid, along with their traffic distribution and CPC figures.
Similarly to Semrush, the tool has a built-in Keyword Gap feature. It crafts a colorful diagram representing paid and unpaid keyword overlap and generates data-driven lists, including volume and traffic estimations. SimilarWeb vs Semrush reviews highly emphasize the Seasonal Trend function, which is a relatively new add-on. Clinking on it, you will see the exact time frames when specific keywords were extremely popular and perfectly performed across multiple sites.
Verdict
When making up your between Semrush or SimilarWeb regarding keyword research power, these two can equally take your business to new heights. But Semrush still processes data quicker and is more effortless to extract data with no overwhelming screens as at SimilarWev. At the same time, the latter app can help marketers make waves in their niches with valuable insights from the Seasonal Trend feature.
Explore Semrush Alternatives to identify other SEO and marketing tools that might better suit your budget, feature requirements, or user experience preferences.
Paid Marketing
Without reasonable paid marketing, it is pretty hard to win the market. So aside from core features of rank tracking, competitor analysis, and keyword research, you should also take into consideration what capacities SimilarWeb vs Semrush can offer for advertising through various channels.
Semrush
The first and decisive point to develop a successful ad campaign is targeting the proper keywords. The Keyword Magic Tool that we already discussed earlier will supply you with the most suitable keywords. By analyzing niche topics, the system scans through tons of related key terms and phrases, including question keywords, and shapes the list of those matching your paid content. That way, you will obtain the hottest suggestions for your campaigns tailored to the target audience based on search intent.
Advertising Research Tool plays a significant role in exploring competitive marketing performance. It helps dissect the paid search strategies of rivals and pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses to deploy efficient PPC campaigns. Simply in a moment, acquire the exhaustive report with a list of a domain’s opponents, the number of common key terms, scores on paid traffic, and ad spend. For deeper insights, find out budget distributions on ads throughout the year, along with their profitability. Many Semrush vs SimilarWeb reviews highlight the exclusive feature of tracking competitors’ online ads. Evaluate frequently used CTAs, brand mentions, and emotional triggers and adjust your ad copies based on these findings. In addition, peeping into what subdomains rivals direct vast paid traffic is accessible as well.
With Semrush, you can easily and effectively localize ad campaigns. The tool comes with extra opportunities for keyword bidding by discovering what terms international users are looking for. Look through keywords and ad texts for more than 100 countries and over 20 languages to tweak Google Ads appropriately about geo-location.
Last but not least tool that brings value to empowering e-commerce strategies is PLA Research. It scrutinizes competitors’ product feeds and defines niche-leading rivals that might grab your potential sales. By exploring Google Shopping competition, get a clear picture of what PLA keywords you share with other advertisers and their total number.
SimilarWeb
To secure fruitful paid marketing, SimilarWeb presents the Ad Intelligence toolset. It rests on such basic SEO pillars as competitive analysis, keyword research, affiliate exploration, media buying, and ad creatives. To not go wrong selecting between SimilarWeb or Semrush solution, let’s profoundly estimate advertising functionalities by SimilarWeb. As in the previous sections we have already covered competitive analysis and keyword research tools, this department will accent on the other 3 utilities.
- Affiliate Research. Users can optimize their ad campaigns with robust features for finding, qualifying, and monitoring affiliate partnerships. It is possible to find affiliates, and outpace competitors. By starting to cooperate with affiliates and sharing revenue with them, you will concurrently conquer the bigger market share to earn regular customers. On top of that, analyzing metrics of affiliate sites and shaping lists of potential and current affiliates are at your disposal.
- Media Buying. This module is useful for driving paid search growth through building beneficial media buying tactics. In this context, SimilarWeb gauges potential ad networks, partnerships, and media outlets as well as streamlines existing media affiliates. You can also leverage this tool to track your opponents’ ad campaigns for working techniques and missing opportunities. Completing all these benefits is the capacity to determine new trends on a country level.
- Ad Creatives. Spy on your competitors’ active ads by campaign, publisher, and ad channel to reach viable ideas on how to effectively reshape creative designs and texts. With this feature, you can enjoy accurate traffic and audience engagement stats, insights into top-notch Display and Video Ad formats, and the most frequently used posting sources and ad channels. To understand how well specific ad campaigns are working, you are free to review their longevity-related data. According to our SimilarWeb comparison team, you might revamp your ad creatives on the basis of consumer demand, competitive dynamics, and paid network efficiency.
Verdict
There is no evident leader within the Semrush vs SimilarWeb showdown in paid marketing opportunities. Both are formidable and contribute to developing profitable ad strategies. We can state that Semrush shows up with unique capabilities of localization ad campaigns, while SimilarWeb impresses with its Ad Creatives suite of features.
PPC Keyword Research
The final aspect to investigate in this Semrush vs SimilarWeb comparison is finding promising keywords for PPC campaigns. Take a closer look at how both services maintain the balance between enriching the keyword list and keeping it topic-relevant for running thriving PPC projects.
Semrush
Similar to standard keyword exploration, the PPC Research Tool pinpoints the best key terms to target based on search volume, CPC, difficulty to rank for, and so on. Nevertheless, you can meet many other valuable assets to build your outstanding keyword list. When experienced marketers compare Semrush and SimilarWeb, they underscore such incorporated features of this Semrush module as:
- Gathering Keywords Through Different Channels. Due to the impeccable algorithms of PPC Keyword Planner, users may acquire key terms in various ways. For example, import keywords/phrases from .txt, .xls, and .csv files, obtain long-tail suggestions and related keywords and merge terms to generate brand-new combinations.
- Complete Keyword Lists Management. It is natural to end up with duplicates if you collect keywords from multiple sources. Semrush includes the Remove Duplicates button to get rid of unnecessary articles, prepositions, or other irrelevant characters and figures. Swift keyword clustering is available with a manual drag-and-drop function or by choosing the ‘1 keyword – 1 group’ option.
- Elimination of Cross-Group Negatives. As mentioned in SimilarWeb vs Semrush reviews, sometimes your own ads might compete with each other, and the reason for that is cross-matching negative key terms.With this tool, marketers can automatically spot intersecting keywords across various ad clusters in seconds to supercharge PPC campaigns.
SimilarWeb
If you want to be ahead of the PPC advertising game, SimilarWeb offers to start with competitive research on keywords. Figure out what is working for your rivals’ strategies by measuring terms on CPC and quality score. When shaping your keyword list, it is vital to ensure there is a balanced unity of short-tail and long-tail keywords.
The next priceless feature to plan your PPC key terms is the Keyword Generator Tool. You can unlock profitable keyword ideas by dedicated sorting by match types as well as crucial data metrics. In reference to our SimilarWeb vs Semrush comparison team, not all the extracted keywords can resonate with your products and ads. In this case, the tool comes in handy with grouping PPC keywords into ad clusters on the basis of similarity.
The final step of PPC keyword research is prioritizing and SimilarWeb facilitates this process via:
- Offering keywords with the greatest potential for turnover
- Analyzing the quality score against facets like CTR, landing page’s relevancy to the target keyword, ad copy value, and account performance history across search engines.
- Understanding search volume and value
- Getting insights into the audience’s behavior and search intent
- Removing double-meaning terms by adding them as negative keywords in the specific ad group
- Analyzing rivals’ landing pages by traffic share, URL spens, top keywords, and ads
Verdict
No doubt, keyword research capabilities for PPC differ from tool to tool and there is no ultimate decision. Still, after trying Semrush vs SimilarWeb features on the fly, we declare they have parity. Both toolkits are accomplished solutions for collecting PPC keywords and gauging competitive strategies.
Comparison of Other Features
To make sure you opt for the optimal platform for your SEO needs between SimilarWeb vs Semrush, it is vital to learn other bells and whistles added to their core tools. This part of our comparison will showcase what unique beneficial features each app offers to grow online presence and brand recognition.
Semrush
- On-Page SEO Checker. Crawl through your pages from top to bottom to detect all weak points. The tool meticulously gauges all the on-page and off-page SEO aspects affecting the site’s overall health and gives data-driven recommendations to boost rankings. Based on the site auditing, Semrush delivers precious ideas to improve organic traffic by categories like strategy, backlinks, technical SEO, SERP features, user experience, semantics, and content. The breakdown of issues by priority will help promptly fix potentially harmful errors so they can’t turn into more dangerous bugs.
- Listing Management. With this intelligence, adding your business info to dedicated directories is a cakewalk. Just point out the important NAP data and the tool automatically spreads it to the related resources across Google, Facebook, Alexa, etc. The excellent perk emphasized by our Semrush comparison experts is users may hassle-free update their business info for all the directories at once.
SimilarWeb
As this SimilarWeb comparison solely plays around with Digital Marketing Intelligence, it is worth reviewing features from other modules for an informed decision.
- Audience Analysis. This tool refers to learning consumer behavior through diligent page-level browsing. Get a clear understanding of how the target audience surfs the web across over 100M sites and apps and their interests, resonating with your industry. Users may also measure audience demographics/loyalty and drill down into untapped segments to acquire new paying customers.
- Consumer Demand. The Shopper Intelligence module comes with a dedicated tool to meet customer demand in every market. Track sale data at brand, product, and category levels across different marketplaces and find areas of opportunity. You can incredibly enhance your product portfolio by monitoring the competition as well as category performance and brand market distribution in various networks.
- Lead Generation. Unlocking promising customers is accessible with SimilarWeb’s extensive database of roughly 40M advertisers, 50M digital publishers, and 30M eCommerce companies. To be aware of potential revenue and willingness to purchase, the tool shapes a list of prospects by metrics like site visits and engagement. If you want to immerse deeper, complex filtering by over 50 digital criteria is at your disposal. In addition, users might constantly refresh their customer base through suggestions based on their profitable prospects.
Discover a range of SimilarWeb Alternatives to find tools that match your specific digital marketing needs, offering insights into traffic, engagement, and competitive analysis
Price Comparison
Semrush
While comparing Semrush pricing vs SimilarWb pricing, you want to know whether the offered capabilities have bang for your back. Semrush bids a quite expensive pricing system, especially for newbies. Still, it is worth every dollar spent considering the all-in-one toolbox, extensive databases, and unique features for advanced optimization. Users can choose from the following 3 packages, depending on the required number of projects, tracked keywords, and results per report:
- Pro – $129.95 monthly
- Guru – $249.95 monthly
- Business – $499.95 monthly
To ensure built-in functionality is concise with your SEO requirements and scaling goals, it is possible to test the platform for 7 days for free. With an annual payment, users may save up to 17%.
SimilarWeb
Like Semrush, SimilarWeb is a pricey solution. It offers 4 paid plans on a monthly payment basis, catering to the marketing needs of startups, individuals, businesses, and enterprises:
- Starter – $125 (best for basic traffic analysis and competitive research)
- Professional – $333 (perfect for developing powerful marketing strategies)
- Team – custom (suitable for running multi-channel strategies)
- Enterprise – custom ( ideal for scaling the digital growth of mature organizations)
To pick their cup of tea, users can leverage a 7-day free trial before subscription.
Verdict
We can see that tiers within SimilarWeb pricing vs Semrush pricing are in the same ballpark. They both will cost you dearly to unlock all features for dedicated optimization. However, Semrush proves to be a better investment since the tools and features you attain might successfully handle 360-degree streamlining for any SEO task.
Alternative to SimilarWeb and Semrush
Looking for the optimal alternative to Semrush and SimilarWeb? We highly recommend paying attention to SE Ranking, which is recently the talk of the town. With its state-of-the-art interface and all-purpose toolkit from entry-level to sophisticated optimization features, the platform has conquered the hearts of thousands of digital marketers and site owners.
Its viable assets will revamp your business through seamless and effective rank-tracking, site auditing, keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink performance checks. You might also expect these functionalities at SimilarWeb vs Semrush, but they apparently lack that optimization power as SE Ranking has. On top of that, this cloud-based software boasts exquisite market-leading tools to enhance online visibility, namely Social Media Management and Content Marketing suites. Agencies and large companies can take advantage of cutting-edge white-label reporting features to grow in the industry even smoother, faster, and more effective.
When it comes to pricing, it is challenging to find such affordable plans for the suggested capacities. Even the basic tools by Essential plan for $44 per month may ensure decent streamlining.
Conclusion
In conclusion our Semrush vs SimilarWeb showdown, we declare both platforms are optimization titans to stay ahead of the competition. However, our professionals would like to single out Semrush as a winner. It covers a much broader scope of tools and features as well as metrics to make data-driven improvements. Not to mention, the app offers more lucrative pricing models too. Semrush flawlessly fits those who focus on climbing up rankings and keeping track of their online presence.
Even though SimilarWeb lags behind its head-to-head competitor, you might find it valuable for comprehensive site analytics and competitive research. The built-in functionalities also match marketers who want to empower ad campaigns and unveil partnership opportunities.
Nonetheless, the ultimate choice between Similarweb vs Semrush primarily depends on specific SEO objectives and business scaling goals in general. Consider your priorities and decide what you should target. If the answer is competitive intelligence and site traffic performance, then SimilarWeb suits the best. On the other hand, when you yearn for more accomplished SEO and marketing features, Semrush is the most suitable go-to option.