SimilarWeb vs SEMrush: Website Traffic Analysis

Last Updated on December 8, 2023 by Ewen Finser

Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese military strategist is renowned for helping his warlord achieve numerous battle victories for years. His greatest accomplishment, however, was writing a book that passed down theories and philosophies of war- consequently assisting subsequent generations against their enemies.

Admittedly, his Art of War script has many interesting philosophies. But, the most outstanding has got to be this:

“If you understand your enemy and understand yourself, you don’t need to fear the outcome of a hundred battles. But, if you understand yourself and fail to know the enemy, you will suffer a defeat for each victorious gain.  If you don’t understand neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in all battles.”

The point?

Quite simply, the most effective strategies in the business realm rely on understanding your enterprise and analyzing your competitors.

According to Crayon’s  State of Market Intelligence report, 77% of businesses are convinced that holistic competitive intel is crucial if you intend to beat your rivals. So, you can bet that some of your competitors are already gathering information about your online store.

Well, you can temporarily bring the curtains down on your site. But, that will only slow them down. Your best option here is taking the fight to them. And the primary weapon, of course, should be a comprehensive digital market intelligence tool.

So, how about we look into two of the most notable ones today?

Bottom Line Up Front Summary: For most SEOs, SEMRush is the better option for keyword based research. If you can take advantage of the 14-day trial for our readers here, it’s a no-brainer to at least test it out. That said, if you are an affiliate manager or ad buyer looking to reverse engineer ideal biz dev prospects, Similarweb might be a better fit here.

Main Difference Between SimilarWeb vs SEMrush

The main difference between SimilarWeb and SEMrush is that SEMrush offers a comprehensive Traffic Analytics suite for online visibility, SEO, PPC, and social media. In contrast, SimilarWeb is focused solely on website statistics.

SimilarWeb vs SEMrush: Competative Analysis Tool Overview

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is popularly leveraged as a web measurement and competitive intelligence tool. Through its analytics tools, you’ll be able to keep a close eye on your overall business health, monitor developing opportunities, and progressively improve decision-making processes.

The cool thing is- it extends this assessment to other similar sites. The consequent spying process gathers critical intelligence for benchmarking your site’s performance, and learning about proven business techniques, plus new growth opportunities.

SEMrush

SEMrush is more of a holistic suite for managing digital marketing. It basically facilitates traffic analysis of several marketing channels to inform the subsequent decision-making processes.

Then, through its auditing tool, marketers are able to identify possible SEO weaknesses. Rectifying those helps reposition a site in the search engine rankings.

Most importantly, SEMrush will help you gain valuable leverage over a rival competitor’s website by providing critical insight into their digital marketing campaigns, plus subjects that interest your target customers.

SimilarWeb vs. SEMrush: Features

Data Collection

First things first. Intelligence is information, and information is data. So, of course, the accuracy of your business intelligence tool fundamentally depends on how and where it collects data.

SimilarWeb

If you seek to collect comprehensive web information, you’ve got to start with a decent web crawler. And SimilarWeb certainly has one, which persistently scans search engine pages and websites quite extensively.

But that’s not all. It’s no secret by now that valuable intelligence goes beyond standard site data and ranking. Consequently, SimilarWeb supplements its web crawler with a seemingly clever strategy.

It turns out that it also capitalizes on its user panel to further generate crucial user and traffic details.

How, you ask?

Well, by downloading and installing SimilarWeb’s apps, add-ons, and plugins, you essentially become a part of the user panel. Their Chrome extension, for instance, will help you track basic website metrics as you surf around the web. However, it also takes something from your side- your browsing data, which ultimately reinforces SimilarWeb’s database

As a matter of fact, SimilarWeb boasts of the most extensive panel in the planet for web measurement. It’s substantially represented in APAC, South America, North America, and Europe.

SEMrush

SEMrush is built on two things: its keyword database and clickstream data.

The SEMrush keyword database made them famous as a powerful suite for SEO specialists and creators of keyword-based content.

Clickstream data made SEMrush Traffic Analytics possible.

Now, before we proceed let’s get one thing straight. Although the internet is basically the World Wide Web, it’s made up of multiple localized networks- which vary in size, surfing patterns, and overall user preferences. That’s essentially why Google, for example, has numerous local versions, whose ranking is based on localized SEO.

Since this creates numerous specialized information environments, SEMrush decided to take a holistic approach with the entire data collection. It developed several crawling systems to comb through all the search engine local versions, and subsequently establish the corresponding data sets.

So far, SEMrush has gathered globally more than 16.4 billion keywords and 500TB of raw clickstream data from 200M panelists worldwide.

And get this. These are basically the most searched keywords. And the lists are regularly updated to retire outdated keywords then replace them with the freshest terms.

Verdict

SimilarWeb and SEMrush, unfortunately, cannot access all the information on the web. However, you can rely on them to provide the most relevant data based on the trendiest keywords and traffic patterns.

How Accurate is Similarweb?

SimilarWeb relies on its web crawlers and user panels as data sources to generate critical insights. That said, it’s clearly built for high level market estimates and you should expect a wide margin of error.

How Accurate is SEMrush

SEMrush, on the other hand, is built on databases which hold more than 7.7 billion keywords from different areas of the globe. While I might trust Similarweb to better capture the overall size of an industry and the ranking of major brands, I trust keyword data from SEMrush with a MUCH higher degree of confidence. Put simply, SEMrush IS fundamentally a search marketing software at it’s core.

Keyword Analysis

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb’s Keyword Analysis function, for starters, seeks to help users identify keywords for optimizing their SEO, PCC, and content strategies.

In addition to that, it closely monitors the progress of various keywords and their corresponding traffic share. The subsequent insights are useful when it comes to discovering sites that are seemingly losing or gaining traffic from a specific set of keywords.

In a nutshell, that means one thing. That the keyword analysis tool is also the principal informer of sites that continue to attract the largest traffic shares from each particular keyword.

Depending on how your marketing campaigns are set up, you can leverage the resultant info in discovering your chief competitors, or potential content and backlink partners.

Now that sounds good overall. But, what exactly does the tool provide? And which parameters does it apply?

Well, the Keyword Analysis tool is accessible through the main menu bar of the dashboard. After entering and searching a specific keyword, the system allows you to specify the applicable time frame, plus the country of ranking.

You’ll notice that the results are displayed in terms of the corresponding organic traffic breakdown. But that’s just the default view. You can filter the results further to view the top paid and organic competitors using the keyword.

That said, you might also want to know how popular a keyword is among internet users. Well, the procedure is quite straightforward. Simply go to the search volume metric.

A keyword’s demand, on the other hand, is best analyzed through the CPC price estimation.

Another feature that makes SimilarWeb pretty special is the extrapolation of traffic trends from various keywords. Through a traffic share graph, for example, you can progressively track traffic tendencies of five leading sites capitalizing on a particular keyword.

And that’s not all. You can still access information about other sites using the keyword through SimilarWeb’s domains column. Then their respective SERP positions are provided in a separate position’s columns.

Well, that’s neat. But, as you’ve probably already noticed by now, one thing’s missing. Other sites aside, how do you even establish the best keywords for your website?

Thankfully, SimilarWeb has that sorted out too. All you need to do is enter up to 200 different keywords and the system will handle the analysis. It even comes with filters for users who’d like to focus on specific time periods or countries.

To top it off, SimilarWeb gives you insights into the best landing pages for your keywords through its traffic breakdown table. Quite helpful in restructuring campaigns around the most effective keywords.

SEMrush

It shouldn’t take you long to find SEMrush’s Organic Search feature. Functions pretty much like SimilarWeb’s Keyword research. The only difference is the fact that this one only delves into organic keywords. So don’t expect to find information about paid keywords here.

Its principal objective is to help you discover the most strategic keywords for your website. And for the best possible results, all keywords are analyzed based on their respective search volume, CPC, competitive density, and overall traffic.

Then guess what? You’ll also get information about other websites that survive organically on the selected keywords.

Closely tied to this feature is a unique tool that SEMrush has named “Keyword Magic Tool”. It goes beyond basic keyword research to focus on the real intricacies that eventually make the difference between close competitors.

Apart from arranging keywords in groups based on subject, it helps users evaluate general keyword difficulty, and determine all the ranking parameters triggered by the keywords. Most importantly, you’ll also view the trendiest search questions containing your specific keyword.

Then guess what? SEMrush doesn’t leave it at that. Such insights would only form the first part of your campaign strategy, then adopting the most promising keywords into your site comes second. And to supplement it all, SEMrush offers a site audit tool.

As the name suggests, the site audit tool does just that. It keenly crawls through your entire site to pick out possible mistakes you might have made on the keywords and other SEO elements. In total, it can sniff out about 120 negative issues that might be holding your ranking back.

Fair enough. But, the most impressive bit is what comes next. After identifying underlying weaknesses, the system goes ahead to throw in actionable resolution tips.

Now hang on a minute. What about paid keywords?

Well, it turns out SEMrush is also well-optimized for paid ad analysis. At the top, you get an ad builder, complete with templates lifted from your competitors.

And here’s the thing. We are not talking about random templates. The fact of the matter is- only the best ones are copied.

Admittedly, this alone has always been extremely helpful in kick-starting a solid ad campaign. All things considered, however, the ultimate PPC weapon is SEMrush’s PPC Keyword tool.

It’s not only critical in determining the most effective PPC keywords, but also resolving possible problems.  So think of it as a PPC keyword auditing tool.

Verdict

All in all, SimilarWeb and SEMrush provide valuable information on both paid and organic keywords. They help users establish the best keywords to center their campaigns around, plus the comparative competitiveness of various keywords. As a result, you even get to learn about other domains using specific keywords, and the corresponding effect on traffic generation.

That said, it’s commendable that SimilarWeb goes ahead to point out ideal landing pages for your keywords. Nevertheless, the winning shot goes to SEMrush. Although they match up to each other in keyword research, SEMrush manages to reinforce everything further through its site audit tool, Keyword Magic Tool, plus PPC Keyword Tool.

Competitor Analysis

SimilarWeb

By the time you launched your e-commerce business, you probably knew all your primary competitors. Let’s face it. It doesn’t take much to discover the dominant players in a selected online space.

That notwithstanding, SimilarWeb will still do some digging for you using its standard search algorithm. Then it’ll generate domains that are similar to your online business. From that alone, you might pick up several notable competitors that might have fallen off your radar.

Well, knowing your competitors is important. But, what’s even more critical is the next step- learning about them.

For that, SimilarWeb offers a benchmarking feature which compares your site against any rival domain by page views per visit, bounce rate, time spent on site, and overall visits.

Now that’s how you’ll be able to assess how your site is fairing compared to its competitors. Think of it as a popularity index of some sort.

The next thing you’ll need, of course, is to improve your relative position. And to help you out, SimilarWeb provides organic and inorganic keyword analysis for any website. You’ll even access data about the less-known organic search keywords that are usually not provided on Google Analytics or Search Console.

Then to find out more about the keywords, the system generates the trending terms that your competitors have been riding on. Your rivals won’t like the fact that you’ll also be able to track the subsequent amount of traffic generated, plus all search ads connected with the respective keywords.

And you know what? SimilarWeb also goes into the finer details about your competitors’ individual web pages. Consequently, it reveals the trendiest content visitors love, plus the most frequented areas of various websites.

If you still want to know more, you can follow the trail to assess your competitors’ conversion funnels, approximate conversion rates, and monitor their primary traffic generation campaigns.

And speaking of traffic generation, SimilarWeb has just the right tools for unveiling the lead baits other domains are leveraging- display, social, search, and referrals. This is particularly invaluable because it significantly informs your hunting strategy.

Interestingly, SimilarWeb even goes beyond your rivals’ domains. It tracks their audiences to establish other sites they access in the same browsing session. This eventually helps you discover prospective publishers, affiliates, retargeting lists, and traffic.

SEMrush

SEMrush is deservedly a James Bond of some sort. To win you at first sight, it provides you with a bigger picture overview.

We admitted earlier that normally you know all of your competitors in the niche; however, there are cases like entering a new market, courting an agency’s client from a new industry or assessing investment perspectives. For all of them, you need to get a top view of a market fast.

This is what a brand new tool by SEMrush can help you with. Market Explorer supplies data on top players, seasonal trends, and in-market audience demographics and interests for the chosen industry.

Next step, you can choose up to five competitors and benchmark their website performance metrics against each other with Traffic Analytics.

Comparison of overall Traffic Volume, user engagement metrics, and main Traffic Sources — wait a minute, this is just the Overview tab!

True killer features hide in further tabs. Look at Audience Overlap, for example, that allows you to see if the same visitors go to several platforms (or not) and make conclusions on how companies win and lose their audiences or what media you’d better choose for placement.

And, if you’re especially curious about your competitor’s conversion funnel and top-performing content (we bet you are), there is the Top Pages report that lets you take a peek on this. Below, we’ve found out what articles are the most popular on the Huffington Post website — just to test the feature.

A quick (and important!) note: Top Pages really gain an extra point for SEMrush as SimilarWeb doesn’t have a similar feature in their arsenal.

All these stats are based on website traffic data, and all you need to do to get them is to enter one company’s domain.

Looks quite impressive, right?

Closely related to all that is an additional traffic analytics function, which SEMrush provides to divulge juicier details about your rivals’ campaigns. You can capitalize on it to discover all about various audiences, including their location. Other than that, you’ll be able to see and assess the efficacy levels of your competitors’ SEO, link building, and search campaigns.

To top it off, SEMrush also exposes what your competitors are spending on ads. And that comes with information about the leading paid search rivals, plus their corresponding primary keywords, campaign framework, and overall PPC activities.

Then here’s something extra. It turns out SEMrush also offers social media analytics to spy on your rivals’ social engagement strategies.

Verdict

Going by the features we’ve seen here, it’s quite obvious why competitive intelligence is considered SimilarWeb’s and SEMrush’s fundamental objective.

They have you covered when it comes to keywords your competitors are using for organic and paid search. Plus, of course, strategies other sites are leveraging on their ad campaigns and content marketing.

Another striking resemblance is the benchmarking feature, which systematically compares websites by parameters like amount of traffic, bounce rate, session duration, and more.

The most invaluable information, overall, is obtained from their traffic analytics. They both help you discover critical details about your competitors’ audiences- which ultimately informs your countermeasures.

That said, SimilarWeb wins points over SEMrush in deeper webpage and session analysis. It helps you discover additional information about your competitors’ pages and their traffic’s surfing sessions. However, SEMrush compensates for that by revealing your rivals’ ad spending and social media marketing strategies.

All in all, we can agree that competitor analysis is one heck of a neck to neck contest. Too close to call.

UPDATE: SEMrush Traffic Analysis Tool

SEMrush has rolled out a new feature (one that I wasn’t aware of previously) which specifically provides traffic analysis, just like Similarweb.

The best way to describe how it works is to SHOW an example below of the Traffic Analytics module in action.

For this example, I wanted to figure out what blogs were sending traffic to AthleticGreens.com (a program we work with on one of our sites).

Here’s a look at the basic traffic analytics dashboard with you enter a competitor. And then we can drill down to the specific referral sources (and toggle by channel, if desired and depending on our business model):

Here are the main referral sources for Athletic Greens. Good to know!

My favorite feature about SEMrush Traffic Analytics is being able to filter by channel (e.g. social, paid, search, etc…). This is NOT something I was able to do in my Similarweb package (they also cap you to a set number of results, depending on your pricing tier – I was at $399 per month).

Best of all, you can JUST sign up for Traffic Analytics here, if that’s all you need!

Social Media Analysis

SimilarWeb

Well, SimilarWeb is not exactly your go-to solution for deep social media analysis. The farthest it goes, as far as social media is concerned, is traffic analysis.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We are not talking about traffic on social media. But rather, traffic generated from social media.

Through the Website Analysis tab, one of the traffic sources you’ll be able to track is social. It unveils details about the amount of social traffic directed to a specific site within a selected period.

More specifically, the report discloses the total number of visits from social sources, the referring social pages, plus the corresponding traffic share.

Not bad. But, to be honest, it’s not as comprehensive as we’d like it. There’s more to social media.

SEMrush

SEMrush, on the other hand, is comparatively lethal in social media analysis.

For starters, it provides information about the traffic generated from various social media sites. But that’s nothing compared to its star tool here, known as the Social Media Tracker.

This tracker is not just about your social media marketing strategies. It also concerns itself with your competitors’ social channels. Consequently, you’ll be able to tell what they do on social media, the content they are posting, how often they post, and the most effective engagement practices.

Basically, all the critical pieces of information you need to boost your entire social media campaign.

Verdict

SEMrush wins hands down in social media analysis.

While SimilarWeb only explores the traffic generated from social media, SEMrush digs deeper into the social media pages to disclose important details for informing your social strategies. In addition to your rivals’ social media activities, you’ll be able to keep tabs on their content, posting frequencies, plus proven engagement best practices.

Overview of Features

SimilarWeb

• Provides Traffic sources for mobile apps
• Apple App Store and Google PlayStore data
• Generates social media traffic and email reports
• Industry analysis tool providing keywords and traffic sources
• Mobile app market ranks based on country and category
• Popular keywords for mobile apps
• Industry analysis for mobile apps
• KPI visual graphs and charts
• Track subdomains, landing pages, and conversion funnel pages
• Side-by-side traffic analysis for up to 5 websites
• Establish competitor display ads and corresponding networks
• In-depth keyword analysis of competitors
• Track traffic size based on device- both desktop and mobile traffic
• Track engagement metrics- popular pages, time spent on site, bounce rate
• Website traffic analysis on competitors
• Compares the performance of organic and PPC keywords
• Organic keyword research tool
• PPC keyword research tool
• Track traffic share based on marketing channel
• Provides website data on referrals, geography, keywords, visits, etc

SEMrush

• Track traffic size based on device- both desktop and mobile traffic
• Track engagement metrics- popular pages, time spent on site, bounce rate
• Website traffic analysis on competitors
• Track traffic share based on marketing channel
• Reveals where competitors are ranking
• In-depth analysis of ad campaign data
• Track multiple keyword metrics
• Compares numerous websites simultaneously
• Reveals best possible long-tail keywords
• Competitor ad texts assessment
• Track competitor organic positions
• Track website ranking
• Organic keyword research
• PPC keyword research
• Backlink analysis
• Ad sense assessment
• Advertising research
• Website SEO auditing
• Domain comparison by keywords
• Tracking website position
• Domain-specific keyword ranking
• Social media tracking

Verdict

Admit it. It’s pretty obvious SimilarWeb and SEMrush mean business here. Their feature offerings are pretty solid, to say the least.

Overall, they both conduct competitor analysis and subsequently provide in-depth data on SEO, PPC, traffic size, plus traffic sources. Then, to further reinforce your competitive strategy, they also offer site analysis tools for establishing and tracking organic and inorganic keywords, ads, plus KPIs for various traffic channels.

However, and rather Interestingly, SEMrush dives deeper into site analysis through its auditing tool. Apart from identifying critical SEO problems, it suggests possible solutions based on ranking algorithms and proven best practices.

Beyond that, SimilarWeb’s and SEMrush’s individual approaches take different paths when it comes to specialized segments. While SEMrush delves into social media analysis, SimilarWeb chooses to power mobile app marketing through its assessment of the two leading app markets- Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

SimilarWeb vs SEMrush Pricing

SimilarWeb Pricing

As you start off, you’ll be pleased that SimilarWeb offers a free package. And yes, it’s completely free. Certainly, a much-needed option since we’ve seen quite a lot of 2-4 weeks long free trials in this space.

However, here’s the kicker- it turns out that the free package is only useful for three months. It’s fairly useless beyond that point. But, on the bright side, 90 days is adequately sufficient for testing out the service’s capabilities.

Upgrading moves you to the Enterprise package, which is made up of custom plans. Instead of tying you down with a static plan providing extra features that you might not even need, SimilarWeb allows you to customize the features based on your specific needs. Consequently, you end up saving money in the long run.

That said, here are the details:

Free

• 3 Months of Web Traffic Data
• 1 Month of Mobile App Data
• 5 Results Per Metric

Once you sign up for a free plan or free trial email signup, you should be able to access the following pricing:

Enterprise- Custom Plans

• Multiple users
• Unique visitors
• Industry analysis
• Keyword analysis
• Popular pages
• Mobile app engagement
• Desktop – mobile web split
• Global and country level data
• Up to 3 years of web traffic data
• Up to 28 months of mobile app data
• Up to unlimited results per metric

SEMrush Pricing

Sadly, SEMrush doesn’t offer a free package. The best you can get here is a free trial, which only runs for 7 days. UPDATED: We were actually able to negotiate a 14 day extended trial for our readers using this link here!

Beyond that, the subsequent plans have been structured according to the standard market usage scales. There is one developed for startups, another with provisions for small and medium businesses, while the next is adequate for marketing agencies, and the costliest plan can be customized for enterprises.

Pro Plan – For freelancers and startups. Costs $99.95 per month, or $999.40 if you choose the annual prepaid option.

• 5 programmed PDF reports
• Standard SEMrush features
• Analyzes 100,000 web pages
• Monitors up to 500 keywords
• 5 projects
• 3,000 regular reports
• 10,000 results on each report

Guru Plan– For small and medium businesses, plus developing marketing firms. Costs $199.95 per month, or $1999.40 if you choose the annual prepaid option.

• Branded PDF reports
• All Pro provisions
• Standard SEMrush features
• Historical information
• 20 programmed PDF reports
• Analyzes 300,000 web pages
• Monitors up to 1500 keywords
• 50 projects
• 5,000 regular reports
• 30,000 results on each report

Business Plan– For big marketing agencies and businesses with an extensively large presence on the web. Costs $399.95 per month, or $3999.40 if you choose the annual prepaid option.

• Product listing ads
• All Guru provisions
• Standard SEMrush features
• Historical information
• Branded PDF reports
• 50 programmed PDF reports
• Analyzes 1,000,000 web pages
• Monitors up to 5,000 keywords
• 200 projects
• 10,000 regular reports
• 50,000 results on each report

Enterprise package is personalized for large enterprises based on their respective needs.

• Limitless crawling
• Standard SEMrush features
• Training on-site
• Customized keyword databases
• Customized limits

Verdict

SimilarWeb would be overwhelmingly preferred by beginners because of its free package, which is essentially practical for three months. SEMrush’s free offer, on the other hand, is limited to 14 days.

It’s also commendable that SimilarWeb is willing to negotiate the price based on the specific features you choose to address your needs. Although SEMrush has structured its plans according to popular usage patterns, they might feel static for users with special needs. Only the largest enterprises have the benefit of negotiating for custom provisions.

Where Does SEMrush Get it’s Data?

This is a common question I see. It makes sense if you are trying to narrow down which tool to use.

So where does SEMrush get their data?

The answer is a bit shrouded in proprietary mystery. SEMrush states that they get their data from “machine learning algorithms and trusted data providers”. But what does this mean?

While there’s no definitive confirmation for what data is collected or acquired, some solid conjectures include:

• It’s own customer database of hundreds of customers and their integrated analytics + search console activity: This likely provides a base model for SEMrush to make estimations of other sites (that aren’t a customer or data user). In this way SEMrush becomes a self-reinforcing data set. The more people use SEMrush, the more accurate the data becomes (in theory).
• Google’s API: This is commonly available and forms a general reference point. Basically this is the data you might find in the Google Keyword Planner. 
• Clickstream Data: This is actually confirmed by SEMrush and is a very common source. Clickstream data is aggregated to essentially “tell the story” of a user journey as they click through the web. This data is also provided by Search Engines (including Google), IT & telecom companies, advertising networks, and internet service providers (ISPs). 
• Google Ads & Google Shopping Ads: Anyone who uses these services also generally agrees to provide their data to Google. As such, companies like SEMrush can purchase anonymous data to support their data models.

Where Does Similarweb Get it’s Data?

Similarly, if you are trying to judge the accuracy of Similarweb, or just see if it pulls in different data sources than you already have, understanding where Similarweb get’s it’s data could be helpful.

Similarweb no doubt uses many of the same data sources as SEMrush, just aggregated (sliced & diced) in different proprietary ways.

Sources may include:

• Their Own Data: Just like SEMrush, Similarweb likely gets data piped directly into their platform from customers who sync their various organic analytics utilities onto their platform.
• Clickstream Data: Clickstream is used by virtually every market research and SEO platform and Similarweb is definitely not an exception here.
• Google Products: Google Ads and Google Keyword API data, likely used as a baseline. 

Beyond these sources, most of Similarweb (like SEMrush and others) is just a serious of complicated in-house models. The data is almost certainly directional, but things like volume and difficulty metrics can vary wildly, even between tools like SEMrush and Similarweb (who largely share the same raw data inputs). 

SimilarWeb vs SEMrush: Summary

Here are a few things we do know, SimilarWeb relies on its web crawlers and user panels as data sources to generate critical insights. It identifies suitable ideal landing pages for various keywords.

SEMrush is built on databases which holds billions of keywords from different areas of the globe.

SimilarWeb and SEMrush Share Similar Features

• SimilarWeb and SEMrush provide valuable information on both paid and inorganic keywords.
• Both offer benchmarking to compare and contrast websites by parameters like amount of traffic, bounce rate, session duration, and more.
• Competitive intelligence is considered SimilarWeb’s and SEMrush’s fundamental objective.
• SEMrush and SimilarWeb conduct competitor analysis, and provide in-depth data on SEO, PPC, traffic size, plus traffic sources.
• Offer site analysis tools for establishing and tracking organic and inorganic keywords, ads, plus KPIs for various traffic channels.

Tool	Features	Pros	Cons	Price
SimilarWeb	• It gives data for every site that you visit • Traffic source data helps you see SEO strong sites • Accurate data and competitor's analysis	• Detailed analysis such as total visits and traffic share • Audience and demographic analysis • Can improve the SEO of your website	• Expensive • Free version has limited options	• Free Plan - $0 • Enterprise Plan - custom made plans
SEMrush	• Has keyword tracking which shows your rank • There is Site audit, pointing out errors, and notices of your site • Powerful backlink checker • Historical data if using the paid version	• Analyzes the SEO of your site • Organized interface • Allows keyword monitoring and analyzing • Gives data for competitor’s domain	• Subscription costs are high • Additional cost for several users	• Pro Plan - $99.95 • Guru Plan - $199.95 • Business Plan- $399.95 • Enterprise Plan - not stated

So Which One is Better?

SEMrush is superior to SimilarWeb in keyword analysis thanks to its extra site audit tool, Keyword Magic Tool, plus PPC Keyword Tool. It also provides deeper site analysis through its auditing tool, which identifies critical SEO problems and suggests possible remedies.

SimilarWeb wins points over SEMrush in deeper webpage and session analysis. SEMrush compensates for that by disclosing your rivals’ ad spending and social media marketing strategies.  SimilarWeb offers a free package. What is also great about SimilarWeb is it adjusts its price based on the specific features you choose for your business.

So now what? You be the judge, review your business goals and find out which software will work best for your SEO goals.

Bottom Line Summary: For most SEOs, SEMRush is the better option for keyword based research. If you can take advantage of the 14-day trial for our readers here, it’s a no-brainer to at least test it out. That said, if you are an affiliate manager or ad buyer looking to reverse engineer ideal biz dev prospects, Similarweb might be a better fit here.

However, SimilarWeb can be a great option for doing deep dives into entire market segments, traffic data, and competitor analysis.

Further Recommendations on Market Intelligence Tools:

If you’re still not convinced, check out:

• 8 Best SimilarWeb Alternatives to Add to your Web Intelligence Tool Kit Now or;
• 7 Best SEMrush Alternatives for Serious Marketers
• Also review the Best SEMrush Pricing Plan to choose for your business case.

For Direct Comparisons of These Tools:

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• SEMrush vs Moz Compared
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• SEMrush vs Raven Tools Compared
• SEMrush vs SE Ranking Compared
• SEMrush vs SEO PowerSuite Compared
• SEMrush vs SEOprofiler Compared
• SEMrush vs AccuRanker Compared
• SEMrush vs Serpstat Compared
• SEMrush vs SpyFu Compared
• Best Alternatives to KWFinder