Ubersuggest and SEMrush are both SEO software that focuses on keyword research. For years, I’ve been a SEMrush customer, and just recently bought the lifetime Ubersuggest package. Now, I can compare Ubersuggest to Semrush in person.
I do want to disclose that I have an affiliate relationship with SEMrush and not with Ubersuggest. That being said, my review about the various features is honest, and I believe Ubersuggest is best for beginners.
I follow Neil Patel, the owner of Ubersuggest, and believe in his SEO efforts. That being said, Ubersuggest, just isn’t all that comprehensive, yet.
Get 50 Content Marketing Tools
SEMrush is the all-in-one marketing toolkit for digital businesses. It has everything you need to research your competitors, improve your SEO and PPC campaigns, create excellent content, and measure your success. Get a free 7-day trial today!
The Main Difference
The most significant distinction between Ubersuggest and SEMrush is the tool’s completeness. SEMrush is more comprehensive in all aspects. On the other hand, Ubersuggest is a lot easier to use.
SEMrush is a great all-around SEO solution for both beginners and experts. If you want a more feature-rich SEO tool, go with SEMrush. Get Ubersuggest if you’re a novice and just looking for something simple.
I’m a bells and whistles girl, so I prefer SEMrush. They both would be considered a freemium SEO tool in that there are free and paid features.
Pros and Cons
SEMrush Pros
Customers can track search engine rankings across multiple devices (desktop, tablet, and mobile), Track backlinks, Monitor competitors’ PPC and organic campaigns, create an SEO content template, perform comprehensive site audits, and more. It’s the most complete solution of the two for SEO strategies.
I appreciate the fact that SEMrush continues to update its tool and add new features as a SEMrush user. You can take a 7-day free trial.
SEMrush Cons
Some features are hidden under different menus, can be overwhelming for beginners A lot of people find the user interface to be cluttered and confusing. In a nutshell, it’s very geeky. I find the daily limit on keyword search frustrating when using the extension.
In addition, it comes with a pretty hefty monthly subscription fee.
Ubersuggest Pros
Easy to use for content marketing. Even someone who’s really new to SEO can get on board, just follow the instructions. The process is very straightforward, with no technical difficulties whatsoever.
Cool extension for Chrome, although you can quickly hit your search limit if you leave the extension active. You can take a seven-day free trial.
Ubersuggest Cons
Ubersuggest has limited functionality compared to SEMrush. It reveals keywords related to your seed keyword or root URL, but not so much besides that. I’d prefer a little more depth to the keyword research, but it’s still helpful if you’re looking for something quick and easy.
I find myself hitting a wall while performing comprehensive keyword research on Ubersuggest, and the SEO site audit is limited.
The system is glitchy. I often have to log out and back in, or refresh.
SEMrush vs Ubersuggest
The difference between SEMrush and Ubersuggest is like comparing apples and oranges. They both do the same thing but in very different ways. SEMrush is a more comprehensive SEO solution, and Ubersuggest is great for beginners and people who just need simple keyword data.
I know which one I prefer: SEMrush! The price isn’t so bad when you compare it to other SEO tools on the market, but the monthly fee might be high for some users.
Features
Keyword Research
SEMrush does an excellent job of providing keyword analysis reports. Ubersuggest is pretty good, too. However, I think SEMrush has it beat hands down as far as a keyword research tool.
Here’s what both tools do:
- Provide monthly search volume for a keyword
- Provide keyword ideas
- Provide domain score averages
- Provide organic SEO difficulty (how hard will it be to rank)
- Provide paid ad difficulty levels (how competitive are the advertisers)
- Provide cost per click values
- Provide related keywords
- Provide questions related to the keyword
- Allow you to add keywords for rank tracking
- Allow you to add keywords to a list (to-do)
Ubersuggest Keyword Features
- The general age of people who click on the keyword
- Total number of people clicking on the keyword (organic vs. paid)
- Offers comparison keywords, although not exactly comparisons (vs), but rather longtail options (and).
- Offers a personalized score on how likely you are to rank for a keyword, but I’m not sure how they determine this since the domain authority scores are very high. (so I don’t use this feature).
SEMrush Keyword Features
- Global charts
- Intent: Informational, Navigational, Commercial, Transactional
- Allows you to sort by phrase match, exact match, and broad match
- Offers a variety of filtering tools such as filtering keywords by a total word count of 3 or more in a phrase. (I use this frequently).
- Provides a Google trends feature.
- Search features per keyword such as sitelinks, featured snippets, maps, and video
- Domain Comparisons for organic and paid SEO strategies. A competitor analysis can help you find your gaps.
SEO Site Audit
SEMrush provides a much more comprehensive report involving on-page, off-page, and technical SEO than Ubersuggest. That being said, Ubersuggest’s SEO audit is simpler and easier to understand.
Once again, if you want the whole enchilada, you want SEMrush. If you want easy, then go with Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest SEO Audit
- Domain overview
- On-page Search engine optimization score
- Organic monthly traffic volume
- Total number of ranking keywords in organic search
- Total number of backlinks
- Total discovered pages
- Critical Issues, warnings, recommendations
- Site Speed
SEMrush SEO Audit
- Site SEO Health Score
- Organic monthly traffic
- Total number of ranking keywords in organic search
- Total number of backlinks
- Total discovered pages
- Critical Issues, warnings, recommendations
- Site Speed
- Core Vitals
- Total positive keywords making an impact
- Total negative loss keywords making an impact
- Internal Linking
- Schema Markup
- Crawl Depth
- Canonicalization
- AMP Links
- Sitemap vs. Crawled Pages
- Hreflang Usage
- Mixed Content
- Redirect Chains and Loops
Additional SEMrush Features
In addition to keyword research, and Site Audits, SEMrush also offers the following advanced features.
Backlink Audits: This allows you to see where your backlinks are coming from. You can also see anchor texts and the quality of those links, as well as view trust flow and authority scores.
Link Profile: Allows you to see what sites link to your site, and which ones are linking to other sites that are linking to yours.
Domain vs. Domain Competing: This helps you discover sites that your competitor is ranking above you. It will help you determine how difficult it’s going to be to rank on the first page.
Link Building Tool: This will help you discover potential link-building opportunities, and allow you to run a link outreach campaign within the tool.
Local SEO Listing Management: With the Local SEO Tool, you can manage and update your local business listings.
SEO Content Template: With this feature, you can analyze the competition based on a target keyword and discover average word counts and more.
Social Media Tool: This allows you to track social shares, mentions, engagement, and reach.
On-page SEO Checker: With the On-page SEO Checker, you can compare your on-page optimization with your competitors.
EyeOn Trends: A new feature, and quickly becoming my favorite, the EyeOn trends allows you to set up competitor alerts, and receive notifications when they publish content or post ads.
SERP Sensor: Reports when there is volatility on the search engines.
SEO Agency Solutions: Provide white label SEO services.
How I Use Ubersuggest vs. SEMrush
For the most part, I stick with Ubersuggest. However, when I’m working on keyword strategy, I like Ubersuggest’s Chrome extension. The basic features provided at-a-glance data on the right side of the SERP. The key features are the provided search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC value.
Inside SEMrush, I use the keyword explorer to look at keyword phrases related to a broad keyword to help find the long-tail, more targeted phrase.
I use the + symbol next to any keyword to add the keyword to my to-do list in SEMrush. I’ve just begun playing with the backlink tool which I believe will be very valuable in building backlinks.
Pricing
Subject to change, there is a big difference in pricing between SEMrush and Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest Pricing
Ubersuggest has 3 tiers of pricing, each with an annual discount. As an individual, you can pay as little as $29 per month. The business plan is $49, and the enterprise plan is $99 per month.
The biggest difference in the pricing plans at Ubersuggest is the total number of reports, projects, tracked keywords, pages crawled during a site audit, keyword suggestions, content ideas, data exporting rows, tracked competitors, and backlink profile and history. You can upgrade, and downgrade anytime.
SEMrush Pricing
This is where SEMrush falls short, in my view. The pricing is exorbitant. There are three plans ranging from $119.95 per month to $449.95 per month. I have the lower plan of the 3.
While there is annual billing with a discount, some of the features SEMrush has added costs associated.
I recoup my expense by teaching the product on Youtube, and in my live webinars. When someone signs up for the software using my affiliate link, I earn commissions. This is how I get my software paid for, and then make some additional income as well.
In fact, while this started as a way to pay for my software, affiliate marketing accidentally became a 6-figure side hustle. And yes, I use SEMrush in that side hustle every day.
Summary
I like SEMrush, and consider it to be the most comprehensive solution. It is one of the more popular SEO tools. I couldn’t imagine not having these features available in my blogging business. That being said, Ubersuggest is more user-friendly, cheaper, and better for beginners.
Get 50 Content Marketing Tools
SEMrush is the all-in-one marketing toolkit for digital businesses. It has everything you need to research your competitors, improve your SEO and PPC campaigns, create excellent content, and measure your success. Get a free 7-day trial today!
Glossary of Terms
Keyword Difficulty: A scoring system in which the keyword tool determines how hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword based on the authority (backlinks) of the competitive pages.
SERP: Search engine results page. The listing of search results returned by a particular search engine.
Backlink Analysis: An analysis of links pointing to a website, including their anchor text, referring domain, and date.
Competitor Keywords: A list of keywords used by similar websites.
Content Audit: A detailed report of all elements of a webpage, such as title tags, meta descriptions, headings, body copy, images, videos, etc.
Content Ideas: A list of topics related to a certain topic. These can be used to create blog posts.
Data Export Rows: A CSV file containing all the data exported from the tool.
Keyword Difficulty Score: A score indicating how difficult it would be to rank for a given keyword.
Keyword Suggestion: A keyword suggestion is generated when the keyword is entered into the tool. It includes suggested keywords along with estimated difficulty scores.
Keyword Tracking: This allows you to track your rankings over time.
Page Crawl History: This shows the URLs visited by Googlebot.
Project: A project contains multiple tasks, each task has its own URL. For example, if you want to find new blogs to add to your RSS feed, you could create a project called “New Blogs”.
Authority Score: A score that indicates the popularity or importance of a website.
Website Audits: A report showing the quality of a website’s HTML code, CSS, and other aspects.
Search Traffic: The number of visitors coming to a site from a search engine.
Traffic Analytics: A report showing the traffic sources for a website.
Long-tail phrases: Phrases that are less common than short-tail phrases but have higher search volumes. Long-tail phrases also tend to be more profitable because they require fewer searches to achieve high search volume.
