How would it feel to have a single go-to SEO toolkit?
How would it feel not to have to waffle between several SEO tools daily, researching keywords on one and tracking rankings on another?
That, indeed, would be liberating, wouldn’t it?
Ubersuggest and Semrush are among the best SEO tools on the market right now that can do precisely that.
So if you’re looking for tools that can help improve your SEO strategies, you’re on the right page.
I have been familiar with Ubersuggest and Semrush for years, and I have used them well for various projects. So which of them should you go for? Which one has the best features? Which one provides more precise data? These and more are the questions I aim to answer in this detailed comparison.
If you’re too busy for a long read, I’ve made a shorter version you can peruse in a minute or so. Though I’d recommend, you read the full article for an in-depth comparison of both tools.
Ubersuggest is a powerful SEO and digital marketing tool that has gained significant popularity among marketers and website owners recently. Its surge in popularity is mainly due to its acquisition by Neil Patel in 2017.
Establishing itself as an excellent solution for various aspects of search engine optimization, Ubersuggest helps with multiple digital marketing activities. These include keyword research, rank tracking, and even backlink analysis.
It also lets users see their competitors' rankings, backlink profiles, and domain overviews, which provides valuable insights for developing effective SEO strategies.
Before Neil acquired Ubersuggest, it gained users primarily because of its generous free version (and the paid account was cheap too).
Since Neil’s era, though, the free account got stricter limitations, and the brand grew on Neil’s fame.
Semrush is one of the biggest brands in the SEO and digital marketing community, and for a good reason.
It was launched in 2008, just about 2 years after the launch of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. This makes it one of the first SEO tools ever to exist.
While Semrush is a comprehensive online marketing tool, its primary focus is SEO.
One of the first Semrush features is competitive research which lets you have an in-depth competitor analysis. You can see their rankings, backlink profile, domain overview, monthly search volume, and more.
Today you will find many more Semrush alternative tools that let you do everything from keyword research to rank tracking to finding keyword gaps.
It also has an analytics tool that does a great job of reporting your website traffic, breaking it down into sections like time of day, traffic source, and demographics.
Semrush has the largest keyword database and advanced features such as share of voice, SERP feature, and a full content marketing suite within the platform.
Bottom line: Semrush offers a comprehensive suite of tools for SEO, paid advertising, and social media marketing. It is an overall better tool than Ubersuggest, and the difference is quite clear.
Although Ubersuggest is not bad, it’s out of its league here. Here are some key differences between Semrush and Ubersuggest:
On the surface, both Semrush and Ubersuggest offer the same toolkit. Beneath the surface, however, Semrush offers way more.
Here’s a detailed comparison table for both of them:
The Ubersuggest user interface is pretty clean and, for the most part, simple. You will mostly be concerned with the sidebar on your dashboard. That’s where you’ll switch between the tools offered on the platform.
Navigation on Ubersuggest is similar to Semrush. Upon logging in, you’re taken to your dashboard. On the dashboard, you can see an overview of your project (if it's been set up).
The overview includes SEO opportunities you can explore and some information about your website's SEO issues.
On Ubersuggest, data and results are relayed in tables and clear graphs, which come one after the other. Hence, you can quickly tell what is what.
When you analyze a domain, for instance, you get a result page similar to this:
First, you can see the traffic overview, then a graph of the organic traffic trend. You’ll see a bar chart of the SEO keyword rankings when you scroll down. And after that, a table of the top SEO pages.
You can notice this orderliness across every tool on the Ubersuggest platform.
For instance, you get the keyword overview using the keyword research tool. Then a graph depicting the search volume trend over time. On and on like that till the final data.
This orderliness makes Ubersuggest a lot easier to use than most other all-in-one SEO tools, including Semrush.
The Semrush interface is equally clean. But it offers many more features than Ubersuggest, which makes it a complicated system overall. Oftentimes, you’ll have so much data coming at you that an untrained fellow may feel intimidated.
When analyzing a domain, for instance, Semrush returns a load of information at once:
The same holds true for other features on Semrush. Here’s the result page when I tried to see the keyword overview for “automate tasks”:
The result page from the keyword magic tool isn’t any better, as it returns a large table filled with acronyms, mini graphs, and unlimited metrics.
I also find Semrush’s color usage rather unappealing. Although it is of little importance, an attractive interface does have its perks.
On Semrush, you’ll find yourself using the sidebar a lot. It holds every tool available in your account.
If you compare the snapshots of both tools, you will see immediately that Semrush’s sidebar is a lot fuller. Well, that’s because it holds things not found on Ubersuggest.
Winner: Ubersuggest. Regarding information rendition and object alignment on the UI, Ubersuggest does a better job than Semrush.
Ubersugget’s keyword tool can help you to identify profitable keywords, analyze competition, and improve your SEO and content marketing strategies.
The first thing you’ll see on the overview page is the keyword difficulty, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and CPC value for the seed keyword you provided.
Next is a tip box telling you what the top 10 ranking websites for that keyword have in common. Then the search volume graph, and some demographic data.
Scroll down a bit further to see keyword ideas that are related to your seed keywords, along with metrics such as search volume, CPC, and SEO difficulty.
You can click “view all keyword ideas” to see the full result. It also lets you filter the results to show which keywords your site has the potential to rank for on page 1.
Finally, you have the keyword ideas table that lists existing articles related to your seed keyword.
For each article, you’ll see figures on estimated traffic, backlink data, and social shares.
The keyword info you’ll find on Ubersuggest can help stir your content strategy in the right direction.
To research keywords on Semrush, launch the keyword research tool by clicking “keyword overview” in the left sidebar.
Unlike Ubersuggest, you can analyze up to 100 keywords at a time. It also lets you narrow down your search area from national to state, city, municipality, and county levels.
Your result page will look like this:
The first line of data gives you metrics such as the national and global search volume, keyword intent, keyword difficulty, keyword trend, CPC value, and current live ads.
The following line is the keyword ideas section, broken into keyword variations, questions, and related keywords.
The SERP analysis section lets you see the pages currently ranking for SERP features for that keyword.
If you want to research a particular keyword deeper, your best bet is the keyword magic tool.
It can blow up your on-page SEO game by supplying you with loads of long-tail keywords that can stand alone as new content or article subheadings.
One of the best things about the keyword magic tool is its filter features. For example, if you’re looking to target keywords with low difficulty, you can filter the result:
You can filter by intent:
You can filter by how much the result matches your seed keyword:
There’s also the advanced filters box which lets you filter by word count, competitive density, SERP features, and results in SERP:
Still, under keyword research, you can find the organic traffic insights tool that lets you connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console to see which keywords actually drive organic traffic to your pages.
Winner: Semrush. It has an overall better keyword research tool than Ubersuggest. Its keyword database is way larger and its data are more accurate.
The traffic estimation tool on Ubersuggest lets you analyze any website you’d like to spy on.
Once you input the website’s URL in the search bar and press “enter”, you’ll see its organic traffic, backlinks, and keyword ranking analysis.
You can also see their top-ranking pages and top keywords by country if you scroll down the page.
If you’ve added competitors to your project, you can easily see a comparison of your website. Then you can see how you stack up and also analyze keyword gaps.
Semrush also offers some competitor research tools that allow you to spy on your competitors and see what organic keywords they rank for.
Leveraging the tools under “Competitive Analysis” on the sidebar, you can see competitors’ keywords, domain scores, organic traffic generation, page rankings, backlinks, and more.
The traffic analytics tool lets you dig deeper into their traffic insight, digging up every possible information:
And the best of them is the keyword gap tool. It lets you directly compare your website with your competitor’s.
With this tool, you can see the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors but which you don’t rank for. You can also see the ones you have low rankings for.
Again, the filter feature on this tool can help you find untapped keywords you can go after and (hopefully) rank for. You just have to sort by keyword difficulty:
Winner: Semrush has a much better competitor analysis tool than Ubersuggest. Besides, Semrush’s filters can let you weed out ‘bad keywords’ easily.
If you’re not entirely new to SEO, then you’ll know that on-page SEO is only one-half of a coin. You also know that the other half is off-page SEO with technical SEO and link-building as its significant activities.
If you want to gain more insight into your competitor’s backlinks, Ubersuggest offers a backlink tool that lets you see your competitor’s backlink overview.
This tool lets you analyze your or your competitors’ backlink profile. You can see the number of backlinks they’ve accrued over time and the DA of the referring domains.
The backlink opportunities feature can also compare your domain with your competitors to identify where you can get backlinks.
Semrsuh also comes with a feature-rich backlink analysis tool you can leverage to see everything related to your competitor’s backlink profile and your website’s.
These include the referring domains, domain authority score, new and lost backlinks, categories of referring domains, and top anchors.
Not only that, but you can also use Semrush’s backlink analysis tool to find backlinking opportunities by comparing your backlink profile to that of your competitors.
It also lets you see your (and your competitor’s) toxicity report based on the quality of your backlinks.
Winner: Semrush. Even though they have identical frameworks in their backlink analysis tool, Semrush provides more backlink analytics and features, allowing more profound research.
For every marketer or entrepreneur looking to improve or maintain their website’s SEO, conducting site audits is an essential activity.
Ubersuggest’s site audit tool helps scan your website for errors that may be affecting your rankings:
While it can help give you a quick overview of your website and things you’re currently not doing right, it’s focused only on on-page SEO.
It gives you information about word count, duplicate meta descriptions, and a bit about site speed. But it gives nothing technical.
Semrush offers a more comprehensive site audit tool than Ubersuggest. It is like an exhaustive site SEO checker that checks your website for both on-page SEO and technical SEO errors.
Of course, it gives a ton of information, from your site health all the way down to information about your robots.txt:
To make things a lot easier, there’s a “top issues” section where you can find a list of the things that need your attention. Hence, you won’t be spending too much time staring at graphs.
You can also use Semrush’s actual on-page SEO checker (under site audit) to generate content ideas. And you can do this for virtually any URL—yours or your competitors.
Winner: Semrush. The site audit tool on Semrush is way more comprehensive than that on Ubersuggest which only checks for on-page SEO errors. It also sends a copy of the audit to your email.
Alongside its knowledgebase, Ubersuggest offers email support to its users. You can find the link to the support page on the sidebar. Clicking on it takes you to a page where you can submit a request.
If you have any issues with the platform, you can consult the knowledge base first as most issues have been addressed there. But if you need more hands-on help, then submit a request.
Semrush offers live chat, email support, and a rich knowledge base to help its users blow through any obstacle they might face on the platform.
You can find this by clicking on the question mark button at the bottom-right of the page.
A bot tends the live chat, but it can help you find helpful resources fast. And the knowledge base is divided into categories to help you easily find articles.
Winner: Semrush. Semrush offers a more affluent knowledge base and live chat support, which is unavailable on Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest offers 3 pricing plans which are Individual, Business, and Enterprise, which cost $29, $49, and $99, respectively. I find Ubersuggest’s explanation of its pricing somewhat “not-straightforward”.
It says, “Get 90% off when you pay a single lifetime payment and 75% off of monthly subscriptions”. But nobody knows the 100% price value.
The tier named “Individual” is Ubersuggest's “best value” plan, which costs $29/mo and a $290 one-time payment. It contains everything offered on Ubersuggest but with strict limitations. These include:
Semrush pricing includes 3 tiers—Pro, Guru, and Business— which cost $129.95/mo, $249.95/mo, and $499.95/mo respectively. However, you can get up to 17% off each one when you pay for an annual plan. This lowers the prices to $107.85/mo, $207.45/mo, and $373.45/mo.
While that’s obviously not cheap, you’d be surprised to find that the Pro and Guru tiers don’t offer every feature on Semrush. With each subscription tier comes new features and wider boundaries.
The lowest pricing tier on Semrush, Pro, which costs $129.95/mo, offers:
Winner: Ubersuggest. With a starting price of $29/mo and a max price of $99/mo, Ubersuggest wins the price battle.
Overall, Semrush is the better tool of the two. Its features can help with several aspects of your online marketing, including SEO, social media, and PPC.
It is perfect for marketing agencies and large enterprises that can take advantage of its full feature spectrum as well as the resources to fund it.
On the other hand, Ubersuggest is perfect for small businesses, solo entrepreneurs, and bloggers who only need a tool to help them find new keywords and content ideas.
Irina is a Founder at ONSAAS, Growth Lead at Aura, and a SaaS marketing consultant. She helps companies to grow their revenue with SEO and inbound marketing. In her spare time, Irina entertains her cat Persie and collects airline miles.
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