PPC - Pay Per Click Management

It can be said that the best traffic a website can obtain of them all is organic. It’s the healthiest traffic source for a number of reasons:

• It’s generally free (just the time/potential cost of writing the content)
• It’s long term, potentially forever, if evergreen content
• It generally brings in lots of new visitors

Search engine optimization, therefore, goes a long way in making a site successful. With this, for those that want to eek out and streamline their efforts with SEO, it is a very good idea to pay for an SEO tool to maximize such potential.

The main three biggest contenders are SEMRush, Moz, and Ahrefs. In this article, I’ll be looking at SEMRush and Ahref, to help decide, if between the two, which should you go for.

It is noted that I have not used all of the potentials of both services, and some of my findings come down to preferred user experience and visuals. Ultimately, this is important if you are to use the tool on a daily basis.

SEMRush USPs against Ahrefs

• Site Audit – of all the SEO tools, SEMRush provides one of the audits for a website. SEMRush allows a user to choose the crawling robot to crawl a website, providing information, errors, warnings, and more about the website, for the owner of the website to fix. Typically, every website will have some sort of things to fix to improve SEO, with SEMRush being able to find it.
• Organic research > Position Changes – this is an extremely useful and visual way to see how the rankings of a website change on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis. This is one of the pages I use most on SEMRush, to see visually and dive into the rankings of posts that are getting the highest gains/declines.

Ahrefs USPs against SEMRush

• Keyword explorer – although SEMRush has the keyword magic tool, Ahrefs’s keyword explorer is more sophisticated. Not only is it far quicker to find information than the SEMRush equivalent, but it also allows you to see the popularity of search terms from the likes of Yahoo, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, and more.
• Linking – similarly, SEMRush does have linking tools, but Ahrefs is easier to use. Ahrefs is very good at showing new links, old links, and much more, so you can improve your link building activity for your site. A particularly nice feature is also seeing the domain ranking and URL ranking for each SERP, with the number of links going to such a URL. Take the below example:
  

  Click image to view numbers in detail

  What you can see here is that most of the websites listed here have high DR – the fact Book Analysis has a low DR and UR rating, with a low number of backlinks, is a great piece of information that the content is very good. For the owner (being me), it also tells me that to rank higher, the biggest weak link of this result comes with the site and URL’s domain ranking. This is something that is very useful information to see in Ahrefs.