SEMRush vs Serpstat [2023]: Best SEO Tools Comparison!

#1 Ease-Of-use

When it comes to the tool usability and interface, both SEMRush and Serpstat has a well-designed dashboard displaying their set of features. Indeed, more user-friendly the tool is – better the user experience and hence, productivity.

Comparing SEMRush vs Serpstat, the SEMRush dashboard might look a little outdated and dump with an extensive set of features.

However, you can access those entire things just from its left menu. But, if you are a new user, you might need some time to get familiar with the features and nested capabilities of the tool. To get started with SEMRush, just enter a keyword or domain or any specific page URL and hit “Search” for the wealth of information.

On the other hand, the Serpstat dashboard looks more sophisticated with its intuitive design. Start with “List of Projects.” Indeed, you can right away access all your saved projects from the dashboard.

Like SEMRush, feed a domain or keyword or URL prefix into the search bar to kick off the actual game research and analysis.

The major difference lies in how the tool displays the data and results.

Serpstat displays the data more organized and spaced-out. That makes the Serpstat tool more user-friendly, especially beginner-friendly. With almost the same set of features and amount of data, Serpstat manages to deliver it streamlined.

Perhaps, the experienced SEMRush users would have no concerns using the tool for years. Even I’m fine and happy with it. If usability isn’t your priority, then SEMRush is great. Otherwise, go with the well-designed SEO tool, Serpstat that renders data in a more organized manner. Also, Serpstat has ‘Menu Search’ option to help beginners to find their required tool or feature easily. That’s great.

#2 Keyword Research

Since keyword research and analysis is the most critical task in SEO, the majority of the marketers, SEOs, and bloggers use keyword tools like SEMRush and Serpstat. Obviously, both of these SEO tools are renowned for keyword research. Let’s see how the tools differ, offering the BEST possible ways to research, analyze, and discover the most potential keywords for any niche.

For our today SEMRush vs Serpstat comparison, let’s use a keyword “freelance writing” for review and analysis.

Just by feeding the keywords in the dashboard, you will get a comprehensive overview of the particular keywords on its organic search volume, keyword difficulty, global volume, keyword trend, results on SERP, Keyword variations, related keywords, etc.

But, when you are more specific about discovering keywords that can boost your search visibility, take the “Keyword Magic Tool” under Keyword Analytics. You will get wealthy information of keyword ideas based on most strategic metrics.

The specialty of its Keyword Magic Tool is – it is highly flexible to sort out the BEST profitable keywords since it has more filter options.

You can see the below image. Instead of adding multiple filters one after the other (like in Ahrefs), you can set your required parameters at a shot and get a list of sorted keywords at once. You can filter the keywords based on even the number of words, keyword difficulty, CPC, etc.

Keeping the keyword length above 3 (no. of words) can get you medium or long-tail keywords so simply.

Also, you can choose different keyword types between phrase match, exact match, related keywords, and broad match.

Especially, just clicking on its Questions tab, you can simply sort the question-based keywords. The tool greatly expands your seed keyword, like how users ask for something on Google. Considering the SEO benefits in targeting question-based keywords, this feature is awesome.

As you have got a comprehensive list of keywords, you will get confused about which keywords to target for better SERP results. Here comes the Keyword Difficulty in the picture.

Applying filters (word count – 4, Volume – 50, and KD% – 60), here I have sorted some long-tail keywords.

Let us further narrow down the list comparing the keywords based on its ranking ability. The keyword difficulty score lets you know how easy or hard the particular keyword is to rank for.

This feature gets your detailed comparison between the short-listed keywords based on volume, search results, SERP features, trend, etc. Pick the least-difficult keyword for quick and guaranteed rankings.

So, you have all the essentials to explore the most profitable keywords. You can filter question keywords, buyer intent keywords, low-competition keywords, long-tail keywords, or anything you guess it works for your niche. Moreover, just with a click, you can find those keywords.

Further, let’s see how its competitor Serpstat serves it, users, with such potential keyword research and analysis.

Here is a keyword overview when you feed a seed keyword in the Serpstat search bar from its dashboard or under Keyword Research. For a more detailed review and research like we do with SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool, Serpstat comes with significant metrics like search volume, competitiveness, CPC, and keyword difficulty.

Serpstat keyword research also provides related keywords for both organic and paid from the top 100 Google SERP results and bid on in ads, respectively.

Clicking on ‘Show All” organic keywords, you will see a full list of organic keywords with more filtering options and keyword metrics. Play around with the nested filters.

You can also filter the keywords based on geo-location or country-wise.

Click on this ‘3-dotted’ icon adjacent to every keyword to understand special blocks in SERP like video thumbnail, carousel, related questions, etc. Indeed, these SERP features have a great impact on your click-through rates.

We all know that using LSI keywords can help you drive in the right audience to your content. But, it is a tedious process grouping the semantically related keywords. But, Serpstat keyword clustering options makes your job easy.

It works by ascertaining hierarchical clustering based on the keywords with common URL’s in search results. Serpstat ‘Text Analytics’ helps you with the breakdown of any specified URL’s content into header, title, etc. and gets you strategic on-page SEO recommendations.

When comparing SEMRush and Serpstat in terms of keyword analysis, SEMRush makes it so easy to dig more about a particular keyword, explore keywords ideas, and discover potential keywords. Like how SEMRush helps in filtering out the question-based keywords.

On the other hand, Serpstat has almost all the features and options in a more organized way. Also, its strategic keyword clustering feature that makes it stands out among the online marketers.

#3 Domain Analysis

One of the significant steps in moving your SEO towards the success path is, understanding what your competitors are doing good. What opportunities can you explore to compete with those rivals?

Only with a thorough competitive analysis, you can set your SEO campaign to outrank the competitions and drive more organic traffic to your site. How capable these tools in allowing you to understand your competitor’s SEO inputs and pay-offs.

Indeed, SEMRush has incomparable SEO analytics features than any other SEO tool. Despite the domain overview that includes authority score, organic search traffic, backlinks, paid search traffic, etc, the tool also gets you main organic competitors, competitive positioning map, backlinks, top indexed pages, and even more.

In the traffic trend graph, you can also see SEMRush Sensor detecting high activity, change in the rankings, etc. That might greatly help you with what particular SEO input over the particular period impacts your SEO rankings.

Switching between the tabs – positions, position changes, competitors, pages, and sub-domains, you can retrieve more detailed information about the particulars of your competitor.

You can dig still deeper into ‘Organic Research,’ to explore the SERP features, list of top organic keywords you or your competitor ranking for, position changes, etc.

Further, its Traffic Analytics is much helpful to know how your website traffic is shared, targeted audience that you haven’t reached yet, geo-distribution of your audience, traffic sources, etc. Also, you can compare three competitors to evaluate your traffic data.

To put it simply, SEMRush in domain analysis has an incredible set of features, including traffic analytics. Analyzing the current traffic your website drives, you can further improve it focusing on particular areas.

In such a way, SEMRush helps you with the site’s top traffic sources (including social media channels), demographic data (like Google Analytics), etc.

Fine! Let’s see how Serpstat runs behind or ahead of SEMRush in its way.

When you just input a domain in the Serpstat Domain Analysis tool, it fetches more helpful information about the particular domain. Especially, the tool organizes and displays the data neatly with more visual graphs.

When I use any SEO tool to review a domain, first, I would be eager to know three things. It includes the organic traffic, a number of organic keywords that the site is ranking for, and the number of backlinks that the site has got. In such a case, I vote for Ahrefs since it displays all the required information at the top like badges.

However, Serpstat fails to display the total number of backlinks, whereas SEMRush fails to display the number of ranking keywords, at top. That’s quite a little disappointment. But, both the tools have a detailed review section on every aspect.

Instead of discussing the typical features like domain overview, organic research, keywords, and backlinks, Serpstat has some more inspiring abilities like Infographics, Tree View, and Batch Analysis.

Moving down to the ‘SEO Research’ option, you can explore wealthy information about the keywords, competitors, top pages, etc. like in SEMRush. The ‘Tree View’ feature in this tool gets you a clever report on keywords of each individual page and its ranking changes, etc.

Most exciting feature that every SEO would love Serpstat is its Batch Analysis. It allows you to compare hundreds of domains at a single shot on various parameters.

But how Serpstat can gather all such big data? Serpstat extracts these details from 230 Google databases of different countries.

On the other hand, SEMRush doesn’t have this batch analysis feature, and it just gets data from 120 databases.

But, SEMRush gives you more established results through traffic analytics that gives you space to improve your traffic resources. If your target market is one that SEMRush doesn’t have a database, then try Serpstat. Otherwise, SEMRush is ideal with its elite domain analysis and traffic analytics data.

#4 Backlink Analysis

Indeed, we know that Google alone considers 200+ ranking factors to evaluate and reward a site with suitable positions on SERP. And, the same applies to any other search engines. No one can regret backlinks are one dominant factor among all.

But, how do you know that your website is SEO-friendly and has a good link profile? Have you optimized all the SEO factors, including backlinks on your website? How link healthy your website is? Let’s see how these tools SEMRush and Serpstat helps us in this area.

Despite the common backlinks dashboard with the total number of backlinks, referring domains, top anchors, link types and attributes, TLD distribution, etc. let’s skim through some distinct features alone.

SEMRush gets competitive research in its every tool. Here in backlinks also, you can compare multiple competitors to study their backlink strategy. When you need to analyze your site’s or your competitor’s link profile, you have adoptable filtering options to extract the most appropriate results.

One great thing is, evaluating the link value; if you decide to remove a backlink, you have a built-in option to add a particular link to the disavow list.

But, SEMRush doesn’t have its own popular link metrics to determine a particular link is good or bad.

Further, while getting into Serpstat Backlink Analysis, the tool doesn’t give up in rendering comprehensive link data like SEMRush.

Just within a click, the feature will get you links from malicious sites (if any), lost backlinks, top pages that have got more backlinks, etc. But, you don’t have the option to evaluate and remove/disavow bad backlinks within the tool.

By the way, as in competitive research, you can compare multiple domains and examine their link profile and strategy using its batch analysis.

The backlinks module was added to SEMRush in 2008, whereas in 2016 to Serpstat. But, the latter one has grown rapidly to acquire a big database and fetch the most updated and comprehensive data than other tools.

#5 Add-on features

Like the tool’s usability, the additional features or benefits that any tool offers makes its stand out from the crowd. Even that tweaks the users to convince that they are getting something extra for which they are paying.

So, let’s compare SEMRush vs Serpstat in providing extra features that favors you.

API 

Subscribing to the Serpstat account (starting from Lite plan), API access is included for at no additional costs. Extract the data from the tool and seamlessly integrate into your own business applications for more data processing and analytics. Indeed, Serpstat API is only internal business purposes, not for commercial or resale purposes.

SEMRush doesn’t offer its API for free, but it is worth paying if you really need to handle big data. You can either upgrade to the business plan to access its API or purchase API units exclusively. SEMRush API was designed to integrate with any kind of software, widget seamlessly, or dashboard to display data through custom UI visually.

To the bottom line, for small scale integrations, you can wisely go for Serpstat free API. Still, when it comes to big data for large companies, indeed, SEMRush API is perfect for integrating and extracting data in volume.

Users Access

Both SEMRush and Serpstat allow multi-user access. But, you have to contact the SEMRush team and request for the same. Again, it comes with limitations. On the other hand, Serpstat multi-user mode allows you to build teams, manage users, track usage, etc. That’s impressive.

White-label Reporting

Competing on entire aspects, both the teams are matured enough in allowing you to generate white-label reports too. But, as well all know, you must be subscribing to their premium plans like SEMRush Guru and Serpstat plans – E, F, and so on.

In SEMRush, you have varieties – either white-label or branded reports. In both reports, you have your custom logo, but in the branded report, there would be saying that the report data is taken from SEMRush, whereas white-label doesn’t have such mentions.

Indeed, Serpstat also has its own rules in getting white-label reports based on your plan subscription. For A and B plan users, the Serpstat logo is available for C and D users – can export reports with both Serpstat and own logo (while web versions have Serpstat logo). Only E, F, G, and H plan users can get custom reports of both web version and export data.

As a start-up SEO agency, freelance SEO service providers, or big-league SEO and digital marketing companies, choose the suitable one based on your requirement.

#6 Pricing Plans

We all know that both SEMRush and Serpstat – you can access some of its features just by sign-up a free account. But, to unlock more features and resource limitations, you have to upgrade. Literally, Serpstat is a cheaper one compared to SEMRush. But you can’t make your decision solely based on money.

SEMRush has its flat pricing structure – Pro, Guru & custom. You might not require its entire features; indeed, you can’t pay for something you don’t use. In such a case, SEMRush helps you with custom plans. As a comprehensive marketing tool-kit, it makes sense to have such a custom plan.

In the case of Serpstat, it almost has its hand-picked set of features that commonly every SEO and digital marketer would need. You don’t require any custom plan here.

Unfortunately, SEMRush doesn’t have any annual or lifetime plan, but Serpstat allows you to save 20% of the money, choosing a yearly subscription.