You’re here because you’re serious about SEO and you know the right tools can help or hinder your strategy.
Semrush, Ahrefs, and Majestic are three of the most popular SEO platforms, and each promises powerful insights into backlinks, keyword rankings, and competitor analysis. The problem? They all have strengths and weaknesses, and picking the wrong one could mean wasting time, money, and missing out on valuable opportunities. ☹️
So which is the best choice?
The answer is the SEO tool that best fits your specific goals. But it isn’t exactly practical to try out each tool to see which is ideal. Instead, we’ve done the research, compared the features, and broken it all down for you—so you can make an informed decision without the headache.
It’s time for the ultimate showdown: Semrush vs. Ahrefs vs. Majestic. 🥊
What is Semrush?
Semrush is a powerhouse SEO tool designed for businesses, marketers, and agencies looking to dominate search rankings. More than just a keyword research tool, it offers a full suite of features, including competitor analysis, backlink tracking, site audits, and content optimization. Its keyword database is one of the largest in the industry, making it a go-to choice for uncovering high-traffic opportunities.
One of Semrush’s standout features is its comprehensive competitor research. You can see which keywords your rivals rank for, where their backlinks come from, and even analyze their ad strategies. It also offers PPC insights, making it a favorite for businesses running paid search campaigns.
For SEO professionals who want an all-in-one platform with deep insights and easy-to-use reporting, Semrush is a solid choice. However, it comes at a premium price, so it’s best suited for those who need a robust, data-driven approach to SEO.
Semrush Popular Features
- Keyword Research: Discover high-traffic keywords, analyze search volume, and uncover long-tail opportunities for SEO and PPC.
- Competitive Analysis: Spy on competitors’ rankings, backlinks, and paid ad strategies to stay ahead.
- Site Audit: Identify technical SEO issues, broken links, and optimization opportunities for better site health.
- Backlink Analytics: Analyze backlink profiles, track new and lost links, and find link-building opportunities.
- Content Marketing Toolkit: Get topic suggestions, optimize content, and track performance.
- PPC & Advertising Research: Gain insights into paid campaigns, ad copies, and keyword bids.
- Rank Tracking: Monitor keyword rankings over time and compare against competitors.
Semrush Pricing
- Pro Plan: $139.95/month – 5 projects, 500 keywords to track.
- Guru Plan: $249.95/month – 15 projects, 1,500 keywords to track.
- Business Plan: $499.95/month – 40 projects, 5,000 keywords to track.
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool known for its industry-leading backlink analysis and in-depth keyword research capabilities. It helps you uncover valuable insights to improve your search rankings. Its massive database of backlinks and keywords makes it a favorite for those focused on link-building and competitor analysis.
One of Ahrefs’ biggest strengths is its Site Explorer, which lets you analyze any website’s organic traffic, backlinks, and top-performing pages. It also includes a Keyword Explorer, which provides detailed keyword difficulty scores and traffic potential insights. Unlike Semrush, Ahrefs focuses more on off-page SEO, making it a great choice for those prioritizing backlinks and domain authority.
With its user-friendly interface and data-driven reports, Ahrefs is a must-have for SEO professionals looking to strengthen their backlink profiles, track keyword rankings, and optimize content. However, its lack of PPC insights makes it less ideal for paid search strategies.
Ahrefs Popular Features
- Site Explorer: Analyze any website’s backlinks, organic traffic, and top-performing pages.
- Keyword Explorer: Discover keyword ideas, search volumes, and ranking difficulty to optimize SEO strategies.
- Backlink Analysis: Access one of the largest backlink databases to track new, lost, and referring domains.
- Rank Tracker: Monitor keyword rankings over time and compare against competitors.
- Content Explorer: Find high-performing content based on backlinks, social shares, and traffic.
- Site Audit: Identify and fix technical SEO issues to improve website performance.
- Competitive Analysis: Uncover competitors’ top keywords, backlinks, and SEO strategies.
Ahrefs Pricing
- Starter Plan: $29/month – 1 project, 1 month historical data, 50 tracked keywords.
- Lite Plan: $129/month – 5 projects, 6 months historical data, 750 tracked keywords, 100,000 crawl credits.
- Standard Plan: $249/month – 20 projects, 2 years historical data, 2,000 tracked keywords, 500,000 crawl credits.
- Advanced Plan: $449/month – 50 projects, 5 years historical data, 5,000 tracked keywords, 1.5m crawl credits.
- Enterprise Plan: $1,499/month – 100 projects, unlimited historical data, 10,000 tracked keywords, 5m crawl credits.
What is Majestic?
Majestic is an SEO tool that specializes in backlink analysis and is widely known for its Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics, which measure a website’s authority and link quality. Unlike Semrush and Ahrefs, which offer broader SEO toolkits, Majestic focuses almost exclusively on link intelligence, making it a top choice for SEO professionals and link-building specialists.
One of Majestic’s key strengths is its huge backlink database, allowing users to explore link profiles, identify referring domains, and analyze competitor backlinks. Its Historic Index provides access to years of backlink data, making it useful for long-term SEO strategies.
Majestic’s Site Explorer offers a deep dive into link equity, helping users understand the quality of inbound links rather than just the quantity. While it lacks features like keyword research and rank tracking, Majestic excels in evaluating backlink strength, making it ideal for agencies and professionals focused on link-building strategies.
Majestic Popular Features
- Trust Flow & Citation Flow: Proprietary metrics that measure the quality and quantity of backlinks.
- Site Explorer: Analyze backlink profiles, referring domains, and link quality.
- Historic Index: Access years of backlink data to track link-building trends over time.
- Fresh Index: Get real-time backlink data for the most up-to-date insights.
- Backlink Comparison: Compare multiple domains’ backlink profiles side by side.
- Link Context: See how and where backlinks appear on a page for better link-building strategies.
- Bulk Backlink Checker: Analyze thousands of URLs at once to assess link equity efficiently.
Majestic Pricing
- Lite Plan: $49.99/month – 1 user, 1 million analysis units.
- Pro Plan: $99.99/month – 1 user, 20 million analysis units.
- API Plan: $399.99.99/month – 5 users, 100 million analysis units.
Semrush, Ahrefs, or Majestic?
Each of the three contenders, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Majestic, brings unique strengths to the table. Semrush is an all-in-one SEO platform, Ahrefs excels in backlink and keyword analysis, and Majestic is a specialist in link intelligence. While they share some common features, their approaches and data sets vary significantly.
1. Backlink Analysis
SEMrush provides comprehensive backlink analysis, allowing users to track new and lost links, analyze referring domains, and evaluate link toxicity.
It includes a Backlink Gap Tool for comparing competitor backlink profiles and offers a toxic score metric to identify harmful links. However, its backlink database is smaller than that of Ahrefs and Majestic.
Ahrefs is widely regarded as the gold standard for backlink analysis, boasting one of the largest and freshest backlink databases.
Its Site Explorer provides detailed insights into backlink profiles, including domain rating (DR), anchor text distribution, and historical link data. Ahrefs also offers a Link Intersect tool to find competitor backlinks.
Majestic focuses exclusively on backlinks, making it the go-to tool for link-building specialists. It provides unique metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow to assess backlink quality. Unlike Semrush and Ahrefs, Majestic’s Historic Index allows users to analyze backlink trends over time, making it ideal for long-term SEO tracking.
Winner: Ahrefs
Unlike Semrush, which has a smaller backlink database, and Majestic, which lacks broader SEO features, Ahrefs strikes the perfect balance between data depth, usability, and competitor insights.
2. Site Explorer/Competitor Analysis
Semrush’s Domain Overview provides insights into a competitor’s organic and paid search performance, including top keywords, backlink profiles, and traffic trends.
Its Traffic Analytics tool even estimates visitor behavior and engagement, making it useful for competitive benchmarking beyond just SEO.
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is a powerhouse for competitor research, showing detailed insights into a site’s organic traffic, backlinks, and top-performing pages. It also provides a Content Gap tool, which highlights missing keyword opportunities based on competitor rankings, making it valuable for content-driven SEO strategies.
Majestic’s Site Explorer is entirely backlink-focused. While it lacks keyword or traffic data, it provides deep insights into link profiles, including top referring domains, anchor text distributions, and historical backlink trends.
It’s the best tool for those who prioritize link-building and domain authority analysis over keyword tracking.
Winner: Ahrefs
Ahrefs delivers a more well-rounded competitive analysis, including keyword rankings, content performance, and link-building opportunities. It also has the largest backlink database and more accurate organic traffic estimations.
3. Keyword Research
Semrush offers a massive database of keywords across multiple countries. Its Keyword Magic Tool helps users find long-tail keywords, search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitive density.
It also includes SERP features analysis, allowing users to target featured snippets, local packs, and more. Additionally, SEMrush provides historical keyword trends, making it great for tracking seasonal fluctuations.
Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is known for its highly accurate keyword difficulty score and advanced filtering options. Unlike Semrush, Ahrefs focuses heavily on click potential, showing how many users actually click on a search result after typing in a query. It provides global search volume data, helping users understand how keywords perform across different countries. However, it lacks some of SEMrush’s PPC keyword insights, making it slightly less useful for paid search campaigns.
Majestic does not specialize in keyword research, as its primary focus is on backlink analysis. While it does provide some keyword-related data through its Search Explorer tool, it lacks the depth and usability of SEMrush and Ahrefs. If keyword research is a priority, Majestic is not the best choice.
Winner: Semrush
Its Keyword Magic Tool makes it easy to discover high-value keywords, while its historical data and SERP feature tracking give users an edge in both organic and paid search. SEMrush offers a more comprehensive solution for SEO professionals, content creators, and digital marketers looking to dominate search results.
4. Rank Tracking
SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool allows users to monitor keyword rankings across different devices, locations, and search engines. It provides daily ranking updates, which are helpful for tracking SEO progress over time.
A standout feature is its Visibility Score, which measures how visible a website is in SERPs based on its tracked keywords. SEMrush also offers competitor tracking, enabling users to compare their rankings against competitors.
Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker is a simple yet effective tool that allows users to track keyword positions across different locations. It provides ranking trends, estimated traffic, and SERP features data, helping users understand keyword movement.
However, Ahrefs updates rankings less frequently than SEMrush, which can be a drawback for those who need daily tracking. It also lacks the advanced competitor tracking and visibility scoring that SEMrush provides.
Majestic does not offer a dedicated rank-tracking tool. Its focus is primarily on backlink analysis, and while it provides some insights into search visibility through its Search Explorer tool, it is not a reliable option for tracking keyword rankings over time.
Winner: Semrush
Semrush’s Position Tracking tool offers more flexibility and actionable insights than Ahrefs, making it ideal for businesses and agencies that need to closely monitor keyword performance. While Ahrefs provides reliable rank tracking, its update frequency and limited competitor tracking make it slightly less competitive than Semrush.
5. Site Audit and Technical SEO Analysis
Semrush offers a comprehensive Site Audit tool that scans websites for technical SEO issues, including crawl errors, duplicate content, broken links, and site speed problems.
It assigns an SEO Health Score and provides actionable recommendations to fix issues. Additionally, Semrush’s audit tool can track Core Web Vitals, helping users improve page experience for SEO.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool is highly visual, using interactive charts to display a website’s technical health. It checks for over 100 SEO issues, including crawlability, indexability, and on-page optimization factors.
One unique feature is its JavaScript rendering analysis, which helps identify problems with JavaScript-based sites. However, Ahrefs lacks Core Web Vitals tracking and doesn’t provide an overall SEO Health Score like Semrush.
Majestic does not offer a traditional Site Audit tool. Since its primary focus is on backlink analysis, it does not provide insights into technical SEO issues, making it unsuitable for those who need full on-page and technical SEO assessments.
Winner: Semrush
Semrush is the better tool for site audits due to its detailed issue reports, SEO Health Score, and Core Web Vitals tracking. While Ahrefs offers strong auditing capabilities with a visual approach, it lacks certain technical insights that SEMrush provides.
6. Pricing
Semrush’s pricing is on the higher end, but it provides a broad suite of SEO, PPC, and content marketing tools, making it a solid all-in-one choice.
Ahrefs’ pricing is similar to Semrush, but it does not offer a free trial, which can make it harder for new users to test before committing.
Majestic is cheaper than Semrush and Ahrefs, but it also offers fewer features, focusing almost entirely on backlink analysis.
No Clear Winner
Choosing the best pricing plan depends on your SEO needs. Semrush and Ahrefs are similarly priced, offering robust features beyond backlinks, while Majestic is cheaper but limited to link analysis. If you need an all-in-one SEO tool, Semrush or Ahrefs is worth the investment.
There’s a Better Alternative to Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Majestic: Search Atlas
While Semrush, Ahrefs, and Majestic offer powerful SEO tools, Search Atlas outperforms them by delivering a smarter, all-in-one solution. It combines AI-driven keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, competitor insights, and technical SEO audits—all at a more affordable price.
Unlike its competitors, Search Atlas provides real-time data, predictive analytics, and seamless integration for a more efficient SEO workflow. Instead of juggling multiple tools, you get everything in one streamlined platform, making SEO simpler and more effective.
Search Atlas backlink analysis
Search Atlas’s powerful backlink analysis tool goes beyond just tracking links—it provides AI-driven insights to help you build a stronger, high-quality backlink profile. Unlike other SEO tools, it doesn’t just report numbers; it analyzes link quality, identifies toxic backlinks, and suggests actionable link-building strategies.
With a massive, constantly updated backlink database, users can track new and lost backlinks, assess domain authority, and compare link profiles with competitors. Its Trust Score and Link Relevancy features help distinguish valuable backlinks from low-quality ones, ensuring your link-building efforts drive real SEO results.
The tool also provides historical backlink data, enabling long-term analysis of link trends and growth.
Search Atlas Site Explorer and Competitor Analysis
Search Atlas’s Site Explorer tool offers deep competitor analysis, giving you valuable insights into how your website stacks up against industry rivals. It provides a comprehensive view of your competitors’ organic traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings, helping you identify new opportunities and areas for improvement.
What sets Search Atlas apart is its ability to go beyond basic competitor tracking. The tool uses advanced AI algorithms to offer detailed traffic trends, keyword gaps, and SEO performance comparisons, giving you a clear understanding of where you can outperform your competition. You can also uncover high-value keywords, content strategies, and backlink profiles that your competitors are leveraging.
With real-time data and historical analysis, Search Atlas helps you stay ahead by optimizing your site’s SEO strategy.
Search Atlas Keyword Research
Search Atlas’s keyword research tool is designed to help users uncover the most relevant and high-performing keywords for their SEO strategy. By utilizing AI-driven insights, it goes beyond standard keyword data to provide actionable recommendations that optimize search visibility and traffic.
The tool offers detailed metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, click-through potential, and competition analysis, helping users identify keywords that will yield the highest ROI. Search Atlas also offers a unique keyword gap analysis that shows which keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t—an essential feature for discovering new opportunities.
Additionally, the tool provides long-tail keyword suggestions and related keyword groups, making it easier to target niche markets and create content that meets users’ search intent.
Search Atlas Rank Tracking
Search Atlas’s rank tracking tool provides accurate, real-time insights into how your website ranks across a wide range of keywords. Whether you’re tracking organic rankings, local SEO performance, or SERP features, this tool allows you to monitor progress with precision.
The tool automatically updates daily and presents keyword ranking trends in an easy-to-read dashboard, so you can see how your site’s performance evolves over time. With location-based tracking, Search Atlas gives you a clearer view of how your rankings fluctuate in different regions and markets.
It even offers competitor rank comparison, helping you understand how your site performs against others in your niche. You can also track rankings for multiple search engines to ensure a comprehensive SEO approach.
Search Atlas Site Audit and Technical SEO Analysis
Search Atlas’s Site Audit & Technical SEO Analysis tool offers a comprehensive checkup of your website’s health, identifying critical issues that could affect your rankings. With AI-powered insights, it automatically scans your site for common technical SEO problems such as broken links, slow page speeds, crawl errors, and duplicate content.
The tool goes beyond simple error detection by providing detailed recommendations to fix issues and improve site performance. It evaluates Core Web Vitals, ensuring your site meets the latest Google performance standards for a better user experience. It also helps you understand on-page SEO issues, from missing meta tags to keyword optimization, giving you the insights needed to enhance your content.
With real-time reporting and actionable suggestions, Search Atlas’s audit tool empowers you to maintain a healthy, SEO-friendly site, leading to improved rankings, faster load times, and an overall better user experience.
Search Atlas Pricing
Search Atlas offers competitive pricing compared to tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, providing comprehensive features at a lower cost. With its all-in-one platform, it’s an ideal choice for businesses seeking powerful SEO tools without breaking the bank.
| Starter plan | Growth plan | Pro plan | Enterprise | |
| Price: | $99 monthly | $199 monthly | $399 monthly | Custom |
| Free OTTO Activation | 1 | 1 | 3 | Custom |
| User Seats | 2 | 3 | 5 | Custom |
| GSC Sites | 5 | 15 | Unlimited | Custom |
| GBP Accounts | 3 | 10 | 25 | Custom |
| Regular AI Quota | 100 | 250 | Unlimited | Custom |
The Ultimate SEO Tool: Why Search Atlas Reigns Supreme
When choosing an SEO tool, what matters most is not just the number of features, but how effective and integrated those features are. You need a tool that provides accurate data, actionable insights, and an easy-to-use interface.
Search Atlas combines AI-powered insights, comprehensive keyword research, backlink analysis, and site audits into one seamless platform. Unlike others, it offers everything you need for long-term SEO success at a fraction of the cost. With its affordable pricing and flexible plans, Search Atlas is the clear winner for anyone serious about optimizing their SEO strategy.
Start your free trial with Search Atlas today!
