SE Ranking vs Semrush 2025: A Detailed Comparison. Who Wins in SEO?

If you want to improve your SEO, you need an SEO tool to help you.

I first wrote this article in 2021, but a lot has changed since then, so read on for the updates!

Both SE Ranking and Semrush are still popular among small business owners, bloggers, SEO consultants, and agencies, as they offer many features to help you improve your website’s ranking.

I have used both tools extensively, and in this post, I will make a side-by-side comparison of SE Ranking vs. Semrush with a focus on their SEO effectiveness.

Let’s get started!

Semrush Overview

Semrush is one of the best SEO tools in the market, if not the best. Check out my Semrush review to know all its pros and cons.

I describe it as an all-in-1 digital marketing suite, offering much more than SEO features.

Besides all the features of SEO like keyword research, competitor research, website audit, on-page checker, and position tracking, Semrush also offers additional features, such as content optimization tools and link-building opportunities.

Its keyword database, with more than 20 billion keywords, is the largest among all SEO tools, and it also has one of the largest backlink databases, with more than 40 trillion backlinks. The recent introduction of AI features and Bing search engine results on Semrush takes the capabilities of this tool to the roof.

From my experience, Semrush is great for both beginners and experienced SEOs. I’ve been using Semrush for a few years, and honestly, I can’t do without it now.

You can get a free trial for Semrush. The regular free trial lasts 7 days, but you can use my affiliate link for a 14-day free trial.

If you want to know how to use Semrush for SEO in detail, read my full tutorial on the topic.

SE Ranking Overview

Since its launch in 2013, SE Ranking has become one of the most popular SEO tools on the market. It can help you improve your search engine rankings and get more traffic to your website.

I describe it as an all-in-1 SEO software.

Like other SEO tools, SE Ranking offers all the essential features for keyword research, site audits, competitor analysis, rank tracking, and backlink management. SE Ranking has recently updated its features, including an AI Results Tracker and Share of Voice for competitor comparisons.

It is easy to use and has a user-friendly interface.

Its keyword database comprises over 7 billion keywords, which can help you find keyword opportunities. It also has a good site audit and an on-page SEO checker tool to help you optimize your pages and the site’s technical health.

You can try SE Ranking for free with a 14-day trial.

Read my full SE Ranking review to learn more about this tool.

Now, let’s dig into each feature and compare SE Ranking vs Semrush side-by-side to help you understand them better.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Keyword Research

Conducting keyword research is essential for any business that wants to rank higher in search engines and attract more organic traffic.

Both SE Ranking and Semrush are great tools for keyword research.

Each offers a variety of features that can help you find the right keywords for your business.

Here are the key features included in Keyword Research for both tools:

Keyword Overview: The Keyword Overview shows you the overall metrics about a keyword, including average monthly volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC (cost-per-click) for paid traffic.

Semantic Keywords: Keywords related to your main keyword but may or may not contain the same words. You can see this in SEO tools as Related Keywords.

SERP Analysis: SERP results are the first page of results you see after typing in a keyword in a search engine. While an actual SERP will include ads, featured snippets, etc., an SEO tool will only show you a list of the organic results for organic search.

Keyword Manager: A keyword manager lets you create lists for your keywords, making it easy to research, plan, and organize them.

Keyword Gap: The keyword gap helps you to find and analyze the keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. This is a valuable tool because it allows you to adjust your keyword strategy in order to close the gap and outrank your competitors.

Let’s look at a side-by-side comparison of each of these features.

Keyword Overview

The Keyword Overview of each SEO tool has three main sections:

• Keyword Overview
• Related keywords
• SERP Analysis

The first part of the Keyword Overview gives you an overall idea about the keyword.

Note that, in SEO tools, you get volume results by country.

I just searched the keyword ‘best Android phones 2022’ in the USA, and you see the overview provided by the two tools.

Both tools provide the monthly volume for the keyword in the US, the difficulty, and the CPC. While the data don’t exactly match, they are close.

What I love about Semrush here is that it provides the global volume and an immediate snapshot of the volume breakup by country. So you know that maybe the potential of a keyword is not the biggest in one country; there might be other countries that may be interesting to target.

I find this overview more helpful than that of SE Ranking, but of course, if you are looking for data for one country specifically, then the SE Ranking Keyword Overview is also good enough.

What I also like about the Keyword Overview of Semush is that it shows the search intent. In this case, because of the keyword ‘best android phones 2022’, it immediately shows you that it’s a commercial keyword.

Additionally, it shows you how difficult it will be to rank for a particular keyword.

For example, if Keyword A in Semrush has a difficulty of 50 and Keyword B has 20, then you know one is easier to rank than the other.

The next part of the Keyword Overview shows you the Related Keywords.

Here is how the tools compare:

Semrush
The related keyword features I love about Semrush are:

Questions: Question-type keywords are very helpful in ranking for featured snippets, and you should definitely include them in your content. In Semrush, you can easily find them with one click.

Related keywords: The related keywords in Semrush are also more accurate than many of the keywords found in SE Ranking.

SE Ranking
Low search volume keywords are great for finding long-tail keywords you can rank for easier and faster. SE Ranking provides you with these keywords in a separate section. In Semrush, you have to filter the volume levels to find low-volume keywords.

This brings us to the next comparison: finding related and semantic keywords with low competition and high potential.

Related: The Importance of Semantics to Improve Your SEO

Related Keywords

The tool to find semantic and related keywords in SE Ranking is called Keyword Suggestions, and in Semrush, it’s called Keyword Magic Tool.

Both tools offer a lot of related keywords, and you can filter keywords in both tools by:

• Volume
• Keyword Difficulty
• SERP Features
• CPC

The biggest difference here is that Semrush is much more powerful. Here’s why:

• Semrush can help you find many more semantic keywords because of its huge keyword database
• You can review and filter keywords by the exact word included in the left section
• You can filter keywords by intent, so you get keywords relevant to your blog content or commercial pages
• You can filter by ‘All Keywords’ and ‘Questions,’ moving between ‘Phrase Match,’ ‘Exact Match,’ etc. Learn more about this in my Semrush tutorial.

One thing I like about SE Ranking is that you can filter by many more featured snippet options than Semrush.

Now, let’s look at the SERP overview of the two tools, i.e., the top 10 results in Google for a keyword.

SE Ranking’s Organic Results vs Semrush’s SERP Analysis

In the third section of the Keyword Overview, you see the SERPs, and you can click on them to get detailed reports.

Both SE Ranking and Semrush show the key reports for each of the top-ranking pages:

• Organic Traffic: The amount of traffic that the page gets through organic search
• Keywords: All the keywords that the specific page ranks for
• Page Authority/ Trust: A score on a 100-point scale that indicates how high a page can rank in the SERPs

The only difference is that while Semrush shows you all the backlinks the page ranks for, SE Ranking shows you how the page has moved in its position rank.

I find both pieces of information helpful to investigate further, and so SE Ranking vs Semrush for SERP Analysis would be the same.

Update: The recent updates on Semrush keyword overview are mindblowing and extend the gap between both tools to a wider margin. Semrush has transformed the Keyword Overview feature to give you deeper, more actionable insights.

I like the level of personalization it brings, as I no longer have to find the specific data that suits my strategy.
So, what’s this new feature?

You can now gain more valuable insights to improve your SEO efforts from the topical authority, potential SERP positions, domain competitive power, and personal keyword difficulty (PKD %) on the Semrush keyword overview page. You must add your domain URL to get these insights; otherwise, you can only access the general keyword overview insights provided above.

Topical authority provides insights into how authoritative your domain is for certain topics. In other words, it helps you check your domain’s relevance and expertise on a topic. For example, your topical authority will be low if you search for a health-related keyword when your domain focuses on financial content.

It is no longer enough to know where your keywords rank on SERPs. With Semrush’s Potential SERP Positions feature, you will know where they could rank if you optimize your content better.

The Semrush Overview feature also gives you insights into your domain’s competitive power. It shows where you stand with your competitors in ranking for a specific keyword and where your domain can get to. For example, if you have a domain authority of 45, you have the potential to outrank competitors with less dominating domains.

However, you won’t know the authority of the domain ranking above you until you look at your domain’s competitive power, especially if you’re tens of pages down the SERP’s first page.

Now, here’s my favorite among the new features Semrush added.

The Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD %) narrows down the keyword difficulty metric to show how your domain can compete for specific keywords. With this, it’s easy to identify keyword opportunities for your domain. A keyword can be generally difficult to rank for but easy for your domain because of the authority and relevance of your domain in the subject area.

In the Keyword Magic Tool, the PKD % data is displayed alongside the original KD data to help you easily identify keywords that are realistically within your reach.

Keyword Manager

More than research, the keyword manager is an organizational tool for keywords, and both Semrush and SE Ranking have this feature.

However, Semrush has revolutionized its keyword manager (now keyword strategy builder) to a tool that helps you visualize and build your SEO content strategy from scratch. You simply need to enter your seed keywords, and it will create a map of pillar pages and subpages for your website.

While SE Ranking offers a tool that lets you organize your keywords into a list, it doesn’t offer the content plan feature.

SE Ranking vs. Semrush: Keyword Research Winner

Overall, we see that while both SEO tools offer substantial data on keywords, Semrush provides more extensive and in-depth data and filtering tools to find the exact information you need. And with its recent updates, Semrush has made finding keyword opportunities to improve your website performance easier.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Rank/ Position Tracking

Rank tracking, or position tracking, is a feature in SEO tools that lets you track your brand website’s rankings on search engines for certain keywords over some time.

Rank tracking is key to helping you adjust your SEO strategy and is a valuable tool for anyone serious about their website’s SEO.

SE Ranking and Semrush both offer this feature, and the data they show are:

• Position changes of your website pages over time for specific keywords
• The number of keywords in the top 5, top 10, etc.
• Pages and keywords that rank for featured snippets

You have to add the domain you want to track as a project and the keywords you want to track it for.

You can track your rankings every 7 days, 30 days, and other periods of time.

The rank tracking of both SE Ranking and Semrush is pretty accurate.

What I like most about SE Ranking’s is that it breaks up your keyword position into more brackets. While Semrush only does Top 3, Top 10, Top 20, and Top 100, SE Ranking gives you positions Top 1, Top 2-3, Top 4-5, etc.

Another advantage of SE Ranking’s Rank Tracker is that it lets you track keywords on Google, Google Mobile, and Yahoo.

Semrush, on the other hand, provides more insights about position tracking:

• Competitors that rank for the same keywords as your domain and in which position.
• The keywords from your list that have gained or lost a featured snippet in Google.
• Opportunities for your domain to rank in more featured snippets.

A helpful feature in the Semrush Guru plan is the Keyword Cannibalization feature, which helps you check if your domain has two pages competing to rank for the same keyword.

You can check out this feature with a 14-day free trial of the Guru plan.

! Note that the Guru plan has a much higher price point.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Rank Tracking Winner

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Competitor Research

To win in SEO, it’s important to stay ahead of domains that compete with yours. By understanding your competitors’ actions, you can learn from their successes and avoid their mistakes.

Both SE Ranking and Semrush offer valuable insights into your competitor’s SEO activities.

Go to each tool’s Competitor Research section and enter a competitor’s domain.

The report overview that both the tools offer are:

• Total monthly organic traffic received by a domain
• Distribution of the organic traffic by country
• Change in traffic over different periods of time
• Organic keywords that the domain ranks for
• Distribution of the keywords within the top 10, top 50, and more in SERP
• SERP features that the domain ranks for
• Organic competitors of the domain, i.e., competitors of the domain in organic search
• Top pages in organic search, i.e., the organic traffic received by each page
• Paid competitors of the domain, i.e., competitors of the domain in a paid search

However, there is additional data that Semrush provides with its Traffic Analytics and Organic Research Report that is not available on SE Ranking.

Some of these insights include:

1. User engagement: How the visitor to your competitor’s domain engages with the website. These include metrics like:

• Unique visitors
• Pages/ Visit
• Average Visit Duration
• Bounce Rate

It is almost like having a peek into your competitor’s Google Analytics report.

You can compare these metrics with Google Analytics data and revise your SEO strategy as necessary. I do this often, and it helps me stay ahead of the curve and beat the competition.

2. Keywords by intent: The distribution of the types of keywords your competitor ranks for.

3. Traffic share by device: Whether their traffic comes primarily from desktop or mobile.

4. Traffic sources: The type of traffic that your competitor gets most, organic, direct, etc.

SE Ranking vs. Semrush: Competition Research Winner

The data that Semrush provides to gain insights about a competitor domain or URL can change the fundamentals of your SEO strategy and make it much more targeted and effective.

Semrush is hands down the winner in competition research.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are crucial for SEO, which makes backlink analysis an essential part of any SEO campaign. By understanding what types of backlinks your competitors have, you can identify opportunities to acquire similar (or better) links for your own site.

Semrush and SE Ranking both provide a feature to analyze your competition, and the key data they both provide are:

• The number of domains and pages linking to a certain domain or page
• The link attributes, i.e., whether the links are follow or nofollow
• The type of links, whether they are text or image links
• The anchor text, which is the piece of text on a web page that contains the link to another domain

However, there are some key differences between the insights provided by the two tools:

• Semrush has a much larger backlink database, with which it can find more opportunities for backlinks. In the screenshot below, for example, Semrush has found 20 million backlinks to a domain, whereas SE Ranking has found 10 million.
• Semrush’s filtering options let you track links depending on which kind of site they are in and which kind of page they feature in. For example, you can see domain backlinks coming from a message board’s header or a sitewide link from an e-commerce site.
• Whereas SE Ranking provides data only on Follow or Nofollow links, Semrush also lets you track sponsored or user-generated links.
• In Semrush, you can also choose the language of the referring page and use Advanced Filters to check if the link is a text, image, form, or frame one.

Backlink Gap

The backlink gap feature in SEO tools helps you compare the number of backlinks your website has with those of your competitors. This is a useful metric to track, as it can indicate where your website stands regarding link popularity and help you identify opportunities to build more links.

SE Ranking and Semrush can provide data on which domains link to your competitors but not yours.

Semrush has an added edge in that it can help you filter the backlinks to see which ones are the best for you to target. You can also filter the results by their domain authority scores.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Site Audit

A site audit is a comprehensive report on the health and performance of your website. It can be used to identify technical issues, content problems, and areas where your site needs improvement.

These are the key data that both Semrush and SE Ranking provide:

• Overall website health
• Missing title tags and meta descriptions
• Broken links
• Orphan pages
• Duplicate content
• Redirects

SE Ranking vs Semrush: On-Page Checker

The on-page checker is a feature that some tools like SE Ranking and Semrush have that allows you to identify potential areas of improvement for the on-page SEO of each page on your website.

Some of the insights that Semrush provides to improve your on-page SEO are:

SE Ranking On-Page Checker

The SE Ranking On-Page SEO Checker gives you first a score of your on-page performance and then recommendations to improve various aspects of your on-page SEO based on the top 5 SERP competitors of the page you are analyzing.

• URL
• Content
• Page Experience
• Internal and external links
• Backlinks
• SERP Features
• Indexing
• Meta tags

Semrush On-Page Checker

Semrush divides its on-page SEO recommendations into 7 brackets:

• Strategy
• Backlinks
• Technical SEO
• SERP Features
• Semantic
• Content

It can include a mix of recommendations for each page of your site to make it rank higher on SERP and get more organic traffic. The Checker compares your site (or URL) to the top 10 pages in the SERP for different keywords based on each page URL.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: User experience & interface

Both SE Ranking and Semrush offer a variety of features and functionality, but they have very different interfaces and approaches to user experience.

SE Ranking User Experience & Interface

The interface of SE Ranking is clean and streamlined, making it easy to find the features you need.

The dashboard is simply divided into a top bar where you immediately see the important tools like Keyword Research, Competitive Research, etc.

And if you want to track your project, you have the entire set of features on your left. When you click on one main tool, the menu opens into detailed reports.

The data presentation is also very visual and easy to navigate.

If you are new to SEO or haven’t used an SEO tool before, you don’t need to worry, as SE Ranking is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.

Semrush User Experience & Interface

Semrush, on the other hand, divides its features into toolkits.

You have the SEO toolkit with its sub-features, the Competitor Research toolkit, the On-Page & Tech SEO toolkit, and so on.

Each sub-feature is immediately visible, and you can simply click on it to get the insights you want.

However, I find the data presented a little less visual. It’s more numbers and charts, and you have to take your time and review the information to get the insights you want.

There are more options and settings, which can be overwhelming for some users. So, there is a higher learning curve. However, once you get the hang of it, Semrush is intuitive and easy to navigate.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Additional Features

I will mention the tools’ other features in this section of the SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison.

Advertising Research: SE Ranking and Semrush provide metrics on paid traffic, cost-per-click data, and click-through data to help you make informed decisions about your AdWords campaigns. To be honest, I haven’t tried this feature and don’t plan to try it soon, so I can’t tell you how they compare and which is better.

In this post, I only focus on the SEO features.

Social Media Integration: Both platforms offer tools to manage your social media presence. You can schedule, post, and track content on social media. Semrush lets you post on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, whereas SE Ranking integrates only Twitter and Facebook.

SE Ranking Additional Features

Keyword Grouper

The Keyword Grouper tool is a keyword clustering tool that lets you group keywords from the SERP data so you can avoid keyword cannibalization and improve your on-page SEO.

Search Engine Autocomplete

The Search Engine Autocomplete feature guesses the next word or phrase of a query you start typing in a search engine. This feature gets data from both Google and Bing.

Index Status Checker

The Index Status Checker lets you check if search engines index a page. You can choose Google, Yahoo, or Bing as your search engine.

Search Volume Checker

The Search Volume Checker gives you the search volume for keywords based on Google’s Keyword Planner data.

Marketing Plan

The Marketing Plan feature of SE Ranking is a checklist of steps you need to take for your SEO. If you have experience in SEO or have already developed an SEO strategy, you don’t really need this a lot.

But this is a great and helpful starting point if you are new to SEO!

Share of Voice

SE Ranking’s Share of Voice (SoV) feature shows you the fraction of your domain’s organic traffic in the market. This helps you know your place in the market and identify those who occupy the top positions you want to occupy.

The SoV also gives you insights into the keywords and URLs that give your competitors the most traffic. This gives you valuable ideas on how to improve your share of voice and gain authority in your market.

If you want to be a thought leader in your market or rank higher on SERPs to improve your organic traffic or brand awareness, then the SoV feature is one you should take seriously.

Semrush Additional Features

Backlink Audit

The Semrush backlink audit tool makes it easy to assess the quality of your incoming links. The aim is to identify any harmful links that come from low-quality websites so you can disavow or remove them.

Link Building Tool

Semrush’s link-building tool is designed to help you find and create high-quality backlinks to your website. With this tool, you can search for link opportunities by type of link, identify the outreach method you want to use, and even contact them directly through the Semrush interface (though I don’t recommend that).

SEO Content Marketing Template and the SEO Writing Assistant

The SEO Content Marketing Template is a great tool to create well-optimized content. It provides recommendations to optimize your content based on the top 10 results in search engines. You can also download the template in PDF form to share with content creators.

The SEO Writing Assistant helps you write your SEO content to optimize it for search engines. It also gives suggestions on the tone of voice and the number of words.

Together, these two content marketing tools from Semrush can help you create high-quality, well-optimized content.

Related keywords in Yoast SEO

If you use WordPress or Shopify, you can leverage the related keywords feature in your Yoast plugin to target more keywords and enhance your visibility. This data is made available from Semrush to give you the best keyword ideas for your content.

While it’s not a feature you can access directly from Semrush, it’s still a wonderful feature you can make the most of as a Semrush and Yoast SEO user.

Want to get the most out of Semrush to boost your SEO?

Get a 60-min consultation with me to demystify Semrush tools to fit your specific SEO & business needs. Fix your issues and get the most value out of Semrush.

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SE Ranking vs Semrush: Pricing

Now that we’ve seen many of their features, let’s compare the pricing of these two tools.

SE Ranking Pricing

SE Ranking has three pricing plans.

Essential Plan:  You can track up to 750 keywords and get all the basic SEO features of Keyword Research, Competitive Research, Site Audit, and SERP Analyzer. You can add up to 10 projects for monitoring and tracking. The cheapest pricing for this plan starts at $44  per month if you get reports weekly and pay annually.

Pro Plan: If you need to track more than 750 keywords, an unlimited number of projects, or additional features like historical data, organic SERP history, more users, and white-label reporting, the Pro plan is best for you. It starts at $87.20 for weekly reports and annual payments.

Business Plan: The Business plan offers all SE Ranking’s features and more. Its biggest difference from the Pro plan is that it has higher limits on all the features and includes an API. The Business plan of SE Ranking starts at  $191.20  for annual payments and weekly reports.

What is especially nice about SE Ranking is that it lets you choose your pricing plan per your needs. Your price changes depend on the keywords you want to track and the frequency of your payments.

Read the complete details in my posts on SE Ranking pricing and SE Ranking lifetime deal.

Semrush Pricing

Semrush also has three levels of pricing based on the features it offers.

Pro: The Semrush Pro plan starts at $108.33 monthly if you pay yearly. It covers all the basic features of SEO, including keyword research, competitor research, backlink analysis, and site audit. It even includes limited use of the Content Marketing Template and SEO Writing Assistant. In the Pro plan, you can add up to 5 projects for tracking.

Guru: The Guru plan starts at $208.33 for an annual subscription. It includes higher limits on the Pro features, full use of the Content Marketing Toolkit, and historical data.

Business: The Semrush Business plan starts at $416.66 for annual subscriptions. Besides all the Guru features, it includes API access and free migration from third-party tools.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Pros and Cons

One thing you must consider before choosing either SE Ranking or Semrush for your SEO needs is their pros and cons. This is necessary as every great software has a downside, one you must critically examine to determine if it’s negligible or essential for your needs.

Here’s a detailed SE Ranking vs Semrush pros and cons comparison.

What I like about SE Ranking

• It’s an all-in-one SEO tool
• It has a clean interface and is easy to use
• I definitely like the pricing compared to Semrush
• The customer service is pretty great
• It offers a 14-day free trial
• I get data not just for Google, but also for Bing and other search engines (yes, sometimes it matters)

This detailed SE Ranking review will give you more insights on its pros and cons. Also check out my SE Ranking vs Ahrefs comparison.

What I like about Semrush

• It’s an all-in-one marketing toolkit, not just an SEO one
• It has a huge range of SEO features ( I am still getting used to some)
• It introduces new features and tools quite often
• It has an exclusive content marketing toolkit
• It gives me access to huge amounts of data, more than any other SEO tool
• It has, in my opinion, the best keyword research tool
• It offers detailed metrics about competitors
• There is an inbuilt link-building and outreach tool, unlike any other SEO tool
• It offers a 14-day free trial (only through my link, remember, otherwise it’s 7 days only.

Here’s my Semrush pros and cons review that you might find helpful.

SE Ranking vs Semrush: Conclusion and Overall Winner

Semrush is a much more powerful tool for SEO, hands down. I swear by it.

But here’s the thing. It may not be the best tool for you.

Truth be told, SE Ranking and Semrush are both winners. They each have their strengths and reasons to be chosen.

Especially if you are a small business owner/ solopreneur just getting started with SEO and want to get SEO wins within a small budget, you are much better off with SE Ranking.

It is truly a fantastic tool for SEO. You don’t need Semrush. It is also helpful if you need Bing or Yahoo data, which Semrush doesn’t provide.

But if you are a (pro) blogger, content marketer, or SEO writer, you know your way around SEO, and you can make a higher investment to get higher returns quickly; you may find SE Ranking a little more limited than Semrush.

If you are still not sure/ convinced, just try out both the tools for free and then make a decision.