When coming up with a content strategy for your website, keyword research and SEO optimization are of utmost importance. Do it correctly, and you will rank for the most popular keywords in your field and thus drive loads of organic traffic to your website. However, this is not always easy, and there’s often a lot of data involved you have to keep an eye on.

In addition to that, the competition is huge and pretty brutal out there, so you need to be equipped with the right tools. Some of the best SEO tools for the job are Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, three titans in this particular field, all of which are considered to be excellent and have an army of loyal followers.

But which one is really the best? That’s what we’re here to find out! Welcome to the ultimate Ubersuggest vs Ahrefs vs SEMrush comparison that will show you everything you need to know about each of these fine products.

User interface

So, first things first. How does it feel to use each one of the tools?

Well, Ubersuggest keeps things nice and simple, showing you search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and CPC numbers at the top of the screen for the keyword you choose. Right below that is a nice graph of the search volume over the last year, and if you scroll down you can find loads of useful information about the demographics of people searching for that particular keyword and loads of keyword ideas you can use when creating new content.

Keyword overview Ahrefs works in a similar manner and even goes into quite a lot of details when it comes to the websites referring back to you – domain rating and even anchor text can be inspected. However, this can make your screen pretty clogged up with text, and we would argue that Ubersuggest has a better user interface precisely because of its simplicity.

That is not to say that Ahrefs doesn’t deliver good results, it does, but Ubersuggest is more user-friendly.

Ahrefs dashboard SEMrush also provides a whole lot of data, but it can be easy to lose yourself in that, especially if you’re a beginner. Sometimes their screen gets pretty clogged up as well, and you can miss the piece of information you’re looking for.

People more experienced in this line of work may not have so many problems, but we would still argue that Ubersuggest has a better design.

SEMRush dashboard

Keyword research

How keyword research is done and what you can expect from it deserves a few more words to be said about it. The metrics you get are exceptionally important, so let’s check how each product fares in this category.

Ahrefs offers all the basic info you would need to come up with a good strategy. This includes keyword difficulty, the number of monthly searches and clicks, as well as an estimate on your CPC.

Below that are potential keyword ideas you can use, but they are sorted out in several categories to help you find what you need.

Ahrefs keyword CPC Ubersuggest takes things one step further, though, because, in addition to providing all the basic info as Ahrefs, it also tells you the age of people clicking on a particular search result. This allows you to optimize your content better for readers of a certain age and can be very helpful if you know exactly who your audience is.

You will also get a list of potential keywords you can use here too, but Ubersuggest also analyses published content and gives you estimates on how you’d perform. Very useful!

Ubersuggest keyword overview Finally, SEMrush offers the same basic data as the other two, but the level of analysis is quite deep. You can check who your top competitors are for any given keyword, plus there’s a list of related topics and subtopics you can focus on.

There is a lot of data to go through here, but you can do so easily thanks to the great filtering options you get.

Keyword research We would argue that the latter two are a bit ahead of Ahrefs in this respect, with Ubersuggest having a neat option of showing you the age of your potential audience so that you can include that in your predictions. On the other hand, SEMrush is incredibly detailed in the results it offers, so we would consider this category a tie for the first place between these two products.

Analyzing competition

Taking a look at the competition is incredibly important with tools like this because you can see what works and how you can improve on it to make your way to the top.

SEMrush is once again very meticulous in its approach, providing the user with loads of data on their competition. It does so with the help of various graphs and charts so that you can get the main idea with a single glance. So, you start out by taking a look at the competition as a whole, and then you can analyze individual competitors.

SEMrush report Ubersuggest takes a different approach because you can enter a domain in the same bar in which you type the keyword that interests you. The tool will “realize” that you want to analyze a website and give you the info on it.

This includes the keywords it ranks for, its traffic, backlinks, and much more useful data. But you will also get information concerning pages that rank on top with loads of interesting numbers (social shares, visits, etc.) next to them, so you can take a look at what the best of the best are doing and how you can beat them.

And thanks to Ubersuggest’s great design, you can go through these results and easily compare them in keyword difficulty to determine where you have the most room for growth.

Keyword ideas Ahrefs has a similar approach, with its keyword gap report being particularly handy. The level of analysis here is quite deep, and you can browse your competition’s backlinks quite extensively. This may reveal various opportunities to you, opportunities that your competition has missed or hasn’t made the most of.

The amount of info you get is quite impressive and the attention to detail commendable, but this, much like SEMrush’s example, may prove to be too much for beginners.

Extra features

But apart from all this, each SEO tool has a unique ace up its sleeve. For Ahrefs, it’s the fact that it can help you find the right keywords for no less than ten different search engines, from Google to Amazon. So, if you’re aiming for a particular platform, let’s say YoutTube, you can get a much more precise reading on the keyword you should target.

After all, what works for one doesn’t necessarily have to work (equally well) for other search engines.

Ubersuggest keeps things nice and simple once again. For every search you conduct there, you will get two tips – the number of backlinks and the domain score you need to get to the first page of Google search results.

This is very nice because it immediately tells you how much work you need to invest to rank at the top. In other words, you get a clear goal put in front of you and you don’t have to keep wondering how much you need to do before you start seeing results.

Backlinks report
Finally, SEMrush has a tool called Content Analyzer which provides a lot of useful info on how your posts are doing. Thanks to this feature you can easily find the posts that are not performing well and update, fix, or even altogether remove them from the website.

This can help a lot with the quality of your content, as you can be sure your website always has the best performing posts on it.

Hard to call a winner here – it depends on what you prefer, but all three options are extremely useful and good to have when coming up with your strategy.

Free trials

It’s very different when you can actually test the product instead of just reading about it here. That’s why free trials are important – you can see for yourself what you’re getting into and then decide if the product is good enough for you.

SEMrush offers a free trial lasting seven days, whereas Ahrefs will charge you seven dollars for a trial run. The fact that you have to pay for a test run has to put Ahrefs at the bottom of the list in this category. Simply, you would expect this to be free.

However, all that becomes quite irrelevant when we get to the third candidate because Ubersuggest blows those two out of the water with the fact that it is a freemium product. Yes, you can actually use a huge chunk of it for free, so if you’re not a full-time pro dealing with keywords on a daily basis, you can simply type in the keyword that interests you and get the data you need.

On top of that, there is a free Google Chrome extension you can install to get metrics from YouTube, Amazon, and even Google itself when you perform a search. So, if you’re more on the casual side, Ubersuggest is what you want to use to get some reliable SEO information. However, even if you’re considering making an investment and purchasing one of these three products, Ubersuggest is above the competition.

Pricing

Yes, last but not least, we come to the pricing comparison. And right away, we have to say that Ubersuggest is the clear winner here because it offers three pricing plans which cost 12$, 20$ and 40$ per month respectively. However, if you multiply that price ten times, you will get the cost you have to pay for LIFETIME access to any of these packages. That’s just a fantastic deal if you’re looking for a reliable tool that will always deliver good results.

Ubersuggest price
Ahrefs, on the other hand, has four different plans, but their cheapest one starts from 99$ per month. True, you can opt for an annual subscription model and get two months free, but this is still way more expensive and limited by time. No doubt, Ubersuggest is a clear winner here.

Ahrefs pricing
SEMrush has a policy similar to Ahrefs, and the most affordable package starts at 99.95$ a month. So, it is still quite a long way from Ubersuggest in terms of pricing.

SEMrush pricing

Conclusion

All three SEO tools are exceptionally good and offer plenty of excellent features that can go a long way in helping you secure a high rank in overall search results and ultimately leading lots of organic traffic towards your website. However, while it is close, we would still pick Ubersuggest over the other two, primarily because of the huge difference in pricing. There’s really no contest in that respect. And it’s not just about the pricing, Ubersuggest’s free version is way ahead of the other two too because you can actually use a big part of its features completely free, which makes this tool an excellent choice for just about anyone!

Apart from that, Ubersuggest has an interface that is much easier to follow, and even a beginner will quickly get a firm grasp of what’s what here. If you’re new to this, the other two can maybe be a bit overwhelming at times, and it is possible to miss important data because of that. On the other hand, Ubersuggest is nice and simple, so you will find what you need much quicker.

But from a technical perspective, the three are really close, especially because each product has some unique features that can help you conduct a different kind of analysis. Because of that, the financial side of things has to be the deciding factor, and Ubersuggest is the clear winner here.

So, if you want to be as efficient as possible when doing your keyword research and competition analysis, this is the product you will want to go for.

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Marko Domljanovic

This former student of English studies has been around blogs, SEO, keywords and all that good stuff for more than five years now. During that time he has written about a variety of topic, always being careful to fully optimize his every text, obviously. When he's not writing, he's probably on some kind of a trip, with his trusty laptop always at his side.

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