Picking the best SEO tool to improve your online presence and achieve your digital marketing goals can be difficult. Most specialized platforms now offer dozens of tools that contain many important features, from rank tracking and keyword research to backlink analysis and local SEO.
Can Semrush and SE Ranking meet your expectations? We compared these two tools that have a long market tradition, and you’ll learn everything about their features and prices below. Which offers the better value for money, and which one should you choose if you are an individual or an industry professional? Keep reading our review to learn what our experts have to say!
What Are SE Ranking and Semrush?
SE Ranking Overview (+ Pros and Cons)
SE Ranking is a California-based SEO platform with its main office in California, United States. Since the company’s founding in 2013, the creators of SE Ranking had an idea to design an all-around SEO solution for individuals and companies. Today, this cloud-based platform has over 30 tools for search engine optimization and digital marketing purposes.
Pros
- A two-week free trial.no credit card needed
- Beautiful graphs that show useful information
- Backlink gap analyzer is among the standout tools
- Reliable and detailed rank tracking results
Cons
- Some services are offered as extras to standard subscriptions
- You can only connect Facebook and Twitter accounts for tracking purposes
For a more in-depth understanding of its features and capabilities, don’t miss our detailed SE Ranking Review.
Semrush Overview (+ Pros and Cons)
When comparing Semrush vs SE Ranking, we should point out that both platforms have been available for a long time. Semrush has an even longer tradition, considering it was established in 2008. For over 15 years, it has been offering an all-around platform designed for everyone from freelancers and personal website owners to agencies and other digital marketing professionals.
Pros
- Excellent backlink database with over 43 trillion backlinks
- Incredible competitor research depth
- Wide range of social media management tools, including influencer analytics
- Thematic reports with extensive detail when performing a site audit
Cons
- Rank tracking information could be updated more often
- Subscription prices are nowhere near affordable
Gain deeper insights into SEMrush’s functionalities in our exhaustive Semrush Review.
Features Comparison
With advanced SEO platforms like Semrush and SE Ranking, it’s hard to keep track of all the available features. We focused our research on the topics that are most important for any individual or business user, and here’s what we discovered!
Rank Tracking
Keeping track of your positions in search engines is imperative, and that’s why our SE Ranking vs Semrush showdown starts here. Here’s what our experts concluded about the features offered by both services!
SE Ranking
Our SE Ranking comparison established that first it is necessary to create a project to have an overview of the tools and searches performed for a specific domain. The good news is making a project only takes about a minute or two, and many adjustments simplify things.
You can pick which engine to focus on, be it Google, Google Mobile Yahoo, or Bing. Searching in a specific language and area is also possible, and you can even enter the ZIP code to narrow down the search.
As for rank tracking, you have an entire submenu in the dashboard dedicated to these tools. It all starts from the summary page, which displays the search visibility in a percentage. You’ll also receive information about the average position and details about top position distribution. The section also shows a page overview with traffic forecasts, and the distribution of competitors.
It’s also possible to see an overview of rankings for each keyword in the last two years. Search volume information is useful as well since it reveals how popular certain pages are.
SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison shows that this tool has a truly user-friendly interface, at least in this department. You can easily pick which information to show for the chosen keywords. It could range from traffic forecasts, CPC, and competition to SERP features and tags. Those who plan to launch CPC advertising campaigns will find this information beneficial. You can even sort information by group, date, and other parameters.
If you need more information, head to the Detailed page, or proceed to overall statistics and historical data. Information from the past is excellent for comparing current results with those from the past, and for determining if your current campaign strategy is working.
Semrush
Don’t be confused because this feature is named Position Tracking in this tool’s dashboard. Everything it offers covers tracking your ranks to the smallest detail, but there is an important downside. Our Semrush comparison discovered that this tool only focuses on Google. Although that’s the primary search engine, it can sometimes be useful to know your ranks on other platforms, too, which is not possible with this tool.
Semrush has a user-friendly interface, and it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get used to using the tool. Once you analyze your rankings, you’ll receive the visibility score, which will tell you about your platform’s current success on search engines. This metric is important as it can also show the progress you make over time. The historical data offered by Semrush is a vital parameter to understand if your advertising strategies are working.
The tool has excellent integration options. It’s compatible with Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, so collecting details about particular keywords should be a piece of cake. Competitive analysis is another convenient feature, especially since you can see positions in the top three, ten, or 100 search engine results.
While choosing SE Ranking or Semrush, keep in mind that this tool updates information on rank tracking every 24-48 hours. That means you might access some data with a bit of delay.
Verdict
The first area of comparing SE Ranking vs Semrush is a close call. SE Ranking covers multiple search engines and offers well-sorted information that’s easy to filter. Semrush has great integration options and detailed results, but its rate of refreshing the information isn’t that great. Ultimately, both tools can do a good job at tracking your ranks and help improve your position in the search engine results.
Interested in exploring other options? Our article on Semrush Alternatives offers a thorough comparison of similar tools.
Competitive research
Learning about your competitors and their strategies is an excellent way to boost your campaign success and improve your digital marketing results. It’s time for the SE Ranking vs Semrush showdown in this category to begin, and here’s what our review team discovered about the two platforms!
SE Ranking
Before conducting any competitive research, it’s vital to establish who your rivals are. You can do this by running the Competitive Research tool, which focuses on identifying the main rivals for your domain. It shows useful statistics like common and missing keywords, and traffic cost. Filtering results and focusing only on big players is also available. The graphs are there to improve the visual presentation, which is a nice touch.
Our SE Ranking comparison team found that you can add up to five competitors per project, at least in the trial, but even that is more than enough. After adding the competitors, you can pick the desired key phrases and see how your website compares to the rivals. You will see a graph portraying the average position in the SERP, and a nice table that shows details related to each keyword.
You will notice Overall and Detailed tabs, so you can switch to the latter option for more comprehensive info. That will display top positions, but also keywords, Domain Trust score, backlinks, and referring domains. It’s great to get an overview of everyone’s backlink profile, and if necessary, you can collect the entire list of backlinks for a specific domain by simply clicking the searched number.
Seeing graphs for the traffic forecast, search visibility, and competitor distribution might also provide useful info. However, it could take a moment or two longer to find the desired information at first, but getting used to the interface shouldn’t be a problem .
Our SE Ranking vs Semrush experts note that there’s also a SERP competitor page. It’s a section where you can see the top-ranked pages and websites for the entered keywords. Various sorting options will help to customize the results list to your preference.
Semrush
Our Semrush comparison experts note that several tools can serve to analyze competitors and look for their strengths and weaknesses. Traffic Analytics is where you can analyze their traffic stats and get valuable information. After entering the domains to search and narrowing down the analysis to a particular region (if you need that), the results should be available in seconds.
The initial screen will give you an overview with an estimation on the number of total visits, unique visitors, average visit duration, and other details. You’ll also get a comparison showing if the website is performing better than in the previous month.
Getting audience insights is great for understanding user preferences better, and you can also check top pages and visit other tabs to get even more useful information. Semrush also offers entrance sources divided into direct, referral, search, social, and paid categories. All this is in the Top Pages section, which is great for identifying trending content topics and blogs.
While considering SE Ranking or Semrush, keep in mind that this platform has a useful EyeOn tool. It’s a 24/7 competitor monitoring tool that helps you stay informed about the latest content published, new products, and any other relevant trends.
Verdict
If you compare SE Ranking and Semrush, you will first see that both services offer tools to identify competitors. And while the results are reliable, it seems like SE Ranking results are better presented and visually more pleasing.
As for the actual competitor analysis, it seems that Semrush is the winner in this category. It offers incredibly useful information sorted into many categories. And although both platforms offer a decent level of depth to analyze competitors, going the extra mile secures this platform the victory in the Semrush vs SE Ranking showdown.
Backlink analysis
The next area of our SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison focuses on backlink analysis, which is an important part of digital marketing efforts. Here’s our brief overview of the two services and its tools in this category.
SE Ranking
Our SE Ranking comparison team determined that there’s an entire module dedicated to backlink analysis. The pages you’ll find include backlinks, domains, anchor texts, pages, Ips/Subnets, and Disavow.
SE Ranking has the Backlink Checker tool, which is surprisingly fast as the results are available in only a second. The report is comprehensive and offers a Domain Trust score, which indicates how likely the domain is to appear in the search engine results. You’ll see the total number of referring domains, and you can also access a detailed analysis of the referring domains. However, this depends on the subscription plan.
Our SE Ranking vs Semrush review team found that the graph showing historical data for total backlinks and referring domains offers a beautiful visual presentation of these parameters. You’ll also see information regarding new and lost referring domains and backlinks, and a list of top referring domain anchors, as well as top backlink anchors. The distribution map sorted by countries and domain zones are also shown in tables and on an actual world map.
From the Backlink Checker tool, you can access a page about referring domains, anchor texts, and even IPS. You’ll also find sections dedicated to active, new, and lost backlinks. This includes source and target URLs, estimation of the Domain Trust for the location of the backlink, and total traffic for the page, including first and last-seen details.
As our Semrush vs SE Ranking comparison experts determined, you can also use the Backlink Gap Analyzer. You can enter two platforms to compare and check if there are any URLs or domains linking to the rival platform but not your own. It’s a standard tool offered by many SEO services, but SE Ranking manages to simplify it by offering a nice table with useful details regarding backlinks and referring domains.
Semrush
While choosing Semrush or SE Ranking, it might be important that this platform indicates that over 43 trillion backlinks are in its database. It’s an impressive number, especially when combined with the information that the platform aims on making frequent updates to offer the latest possible information.
You can initiate Backlink Analytics in only a few clicks, and the audit is performed fairly fast. You can receive details on a particular domain or URL. The information in the summary page will compare referring domains and backlinks at the moment to the previous month.
If we compare Semrush and SE Ranking, we find that both have unique metrics for estimating domain authority. Semrush will show how the domain’s score changed compared to the previous year, which is convenient.
The graphical presentation seems clean and useful, so there’s no extra effort needed when analyzing the charts. You can check for lost and new backlinks, top anchors, backlink attributes, and other relevant details.
Verdict
Semrush vs SE Ranking comparison shows that both tools do a good job in this department. While Semrush might have an impressive database, SE Ranking isn’t far behind. The information seems to be a bit better sorted on SE Ranking, which might be important if you are an SEO newbie that’s still learning how everything works.
Website Audit
The following sections will compare Semrush and SE Ranking in terms of site audit and related features. Here are the impressions of our experts!
SE Ranking
Site audit is marked as a “new” feature on the platform, but once you start using it, you’ll see it offers everything an average user might need. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete a site audit, and it offers detailed results that start with the basics like pages crawled and URLs found.
Pay attention to the Health score, as it’s a fast metric to tell you about your website optimization. Core web vitals that measure the quality of the website user experience are also incredibly useful. These include the First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift, and the Largest Contentful Paint metrics.
The platform lists top issues immediately, such as a duplicate description, 4xx images, and other technical problems. Errors are the most serious issues, followed by warnings and notes, and you can see them all in a nice chart that presents distribution by category. If you want more information about problems, visit the Issue Report page to receive detailed information.
Page indexation, server response time, page depth, and the number of redirects are all presented via graphs. You can also see an overview of link attributes. SE Ranking also lists found resources and links on separate pages for your convenience.
Semrush
Semrush will ask you to set a new project for every site audit, and after you do that, you should pay attention to the different settings available. Parameters like choosing what to crawl, JS rendering, and other extra features can make the search more customized and comprehensive.
It will take some patience until the results become available, especially for large websites. The information you receive is nicely sorted into categories like site health, warnings, and issues. Site Health is a special score that will assess your website’s current performance according to technical aspects. It’s convenient and it will also show averages in different industries.
Our Semrush vs SE Ranking experts underline that this tool sorts out priority issues well. The problems you should resolve first are errors, which could be 4xx errors, certificate expirations, and other issues. Reports by a specific theme are also incredibly detailed, and you’ll learn a lot about site performance, crawlability, internal linking, and other areas.
Verdict
SE Ranking and Semrush both have great website audit tools. It seems that SE Rankings portrays the information in a more visually attractive way, including all sorts of graphs. However, Semrush gives detailed reports in several areas, which can provide incredibly detailed information, making this platform a better choice for advanced industry professionals.
Keyword research
Who is the winner of the SE Ranking vs Semrush showdown in keyword research? Our team tested both tools, and here’s what we discovered!
SE Ranking
As expected, SE Ranking allows for searching in different countries, which is something you will find useful. The company made sure to come up with a Difficulty score, which tells you how hard of a challenge it will be to position at the top of Google SERP for that keyword.
Global volume is the total number of searches, while search volume shows monthly searches on an organic level. The platform offers statistics regarding PPC Google Ads campaigns, and you’ll learn the average cost per click, which is another useful metric.
Bulk keyword analysis is a convenient feature as you can analyze thousands of keywords quickly. All analyses are conducted quickly, which is an important advantage in the SE Ranking vs Semrush review. It’s even possible to add keywords to the database and access historical data from previous months. The platform covers everything up to February 2020.
The keyword manager is an organizer that helps you save, modify, and create keyword lists for various regions. It’s excellent for storing information and finding the desired data easily.
After the search is conducted, the results are well-sorted and presented visually in a nice way. SE Ranking also adds keywords ideas and related keywords. You can see detailed reports on both, but low search volume keywords deserve special consideration. Those are suggestions that you can use to optimize the rankings quickly.
Semrush
Semrush allows you to enter up to 100 key phrases and execute fast keyword research. It’s possible to sort them by country or city, which is useful to get more filtered results. The overview offers the expected basic information, but if you want more info on a specific keyword, you can click on it to get comprehensive details.
Apart from the search volume for the selected market, you’ll also see it on a global level. The difficulty score is there and it comes with a brief description. CPC results are there, and you can also focus on keyword trends. These are important for identifying periods when there’s significantly more interest in a keyword, or any other unusual movement.
Semrush has a Keyword Magic Tool, which assists you in receiving related options to the selected term. It’s a nice touch that the platform also lists questions that appear in the search engine results.
Verdict
It’s not easy to choose SE Ranking or Semrush for keyword research. Both platforms perform fast and reliable searches, and they provide a trustworthy difficulty score, CPC, and other information. You can expect certain additions on both services, such as low search volume keyword recommendations or questions users ask when using search engines.
Comparison of Other Features
Although we covered the main aspects, SE Ranking and Semrush also have a variety of other features that increase the value of each subscription. These extra features can help your digital marketing effort in different departments, making them a convenient addition.
Let’s start the Semrush vs SE Ranking overview with SE Ranking – here’s what else you can expect from this tool:
- Marketing plan. It starts with a To-Do List, which recommends the basic steps for SEO newbies, although you can add custom tasks at any point.
- Local marketing. Although it wasn’t among the initial features, this comprehensive tool is now quite detailed. It offers local rankings, marketing audit, access to business listings and reviews from different platforms on a single page.
- Page changes monitor. It allows you to monitor changes on a specific website page, which is great if multiple webmasters are working on a single site.
- Social media management. You can monitor Facebook and Twitter accounts, use auto-posting features, and access different metrics.
- Content marketing. A content editor and idea finder are two assets available in this department.
- Report builder. You can start from a template, or create a report manually. Supported formats include XLS, HTML, and PDF, and you can download them or send them to the desired email address.
Before choosing Semrush or SE Ranking, here’s an overview of other features offered by Semrush:
- One2Target. This tool is a complete audience analytics solution that allows comparing up to five sites in terms of demographics, socioeconomics, audience behavior, and any overlaps.
- Social media. You can connect Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and Pinterest. Additional tools like a poster, tracker, and even influencer analytics are also available.
- Content marketing. From using content templates to a writing assistant and content audit, the available features are quite extensive.
- Marketing calendar. It’s a convenient way for organizing and tracking your campaigns from a single location.
- Local SEO. Listing and review management, as well as position tracking and an on-page SEO checker are all useful tools for local SEO marketing efforts.
Now, if we compare SE Ranking and Semrush, it’s clear that Semrush does offer more in some areas. For example, it supports connecting more social platforms than the other service, and you can also use a wider variety of tools for local SEO and content marketing. But if we consider that it’s also the more expensive service, that extra step is somewhat expected.
Price Comparison
SE Ranking
SE Ranking offers a 14-day free trial that doesn’t even require a credit card. All you need to do is register an account, which is why this is a great option to test how the service works.
As for subscription options, you can pick between three packages:
- Essential. The basic subscription costs $55 a month and offers a single user seat, the ability to add up to five competitors and use most features but with some limitations.
- Pro. This option includes unlimited projects and considerably more credits to use in different tools for $109 a month.
- Business. For $239 a month, you get the most extensive features, including extras like API and comprehensive team training secured by support.
Some SE Ranking features, such as Local SEO or Content Marketing, are available as add-ons. Annual subscriptions secure you a 20% discount compared to monthly prices.
Semrush
Semrush pricing vs SE Ranking pricing details reveal that both platforms have free trials. The difference is that it only lasts for a week with Semrush, and here are the premium subscription options available later:
- Pro. You get five projects, along with keyword, backlink, domain analytics, and basic reporting features, for $119 a month.
- Guru. It’ss $229 a month, and it offers 15 projects but also comes with historical data tracking, a content marketing platform and advanced reporting tools.
- Business. The priciest package costs $449 a month and you get API access, Share of Voice Metric, and up to 40 projects.
You can separately purchase Trends, Local, and Agency Growth Kit tools, as well as contact the company for a yearly plan. With annual payments, you can save up to 17% compared to the default prices.
Verdict
In the SE Ranking pricing vs Semrush pricing showdown, the clear winner is SE Ranking. It’s not just because subscription costs are significantly lower, but you get plenty more value for the money. From unlimited projects in the more expensive packages to being able to use all the platform’s features at a decent price, this service seems like a smarter investment for everyone, except those who prefer Semrush for some personal reason.
Conclusion
Our final impression after the Semrush vs SE Ranking detailed review is that both tools are excellent choices for your SEO efforts. It ultimately depends on your preference. For example, SE Ranking covers all the essentials well, from rank tracking and competitive analysis to keyword research. You can expect the platform to execute tasks quickly and deliver reliable results. It also offers extra features like social media and local SEO tools. And considering the lower price, you get huge value for the money. That makes this tool perfect for individuals and small businesses, as well as marketing agencies of moderate sizes.
But if you want even more data, the winner of the Semrush vs SE Ranking comparison will be the former. The tool offers integration with more social media platforms, and more extensive results in some areas. However, these might not be game-changers if you compare the subscription prices. That’s why the decision is ultimately up to you, and we strongly suggest checking each platform with a free trial first!