To this end, there is a nice feature in Semrush’s domain analysis that you won’t find a direct equivalent for in Ahrefs: its ‘competitive positioning map’ (pictured below). The important thing to remember with either set of traffic stats is that they should be used to identify trends (i.e., is site A more popular than sites B and C?) - rather than taken as absolute gospel. Domain analysis in SEMrush.Īs part of their domain analysis overviews, both Ahrefs and Semrush give you an estimate of the monthly traffic to the domain you’re analysing - it’s important to note however that the figures provided here are estimates.īased on my own (small-scale) testing - using sites for which I have access to visitor data - I’ve found that the Semrush estimates tend to be closer to the actual traffic and furthermore, Semrush contextualises its figures a bit by giving you an indication of how accurate its estimates are likely to be (high, medium or low). Not the end of the world, but it would be nice to see this figure immediately on the domain overview page.Īnd, unlike Ahrefs, Semrush doesn’t give you a ‘global’ value for a site’s traffic - you can only see it on a per-country basis (Ahrefs gives you both options). In Semrush, you need to pull a separate report (‘Organic Research’) to view this data. In Ahrefs, the domain traffic value is displayed as part of a domain overview report This is a pretty important piece of data. With Semrush, by contrast, it feels like there’s a little bit more clicking around the place to do to get at key metrics.įor example, Ahrefs lets you see the traffic value of a domain immediately (the amount of money that you’d need to pay each month to buy ads that would deliver an equivalent number of hits to a site). Anchor text commonly used in links to the website.Īlthough the quality of the domain analysis in Ahrefs and Semrush is similar, I’d argue that Ahrefs has a slight edge when it comes to ease-of-access to the key stats - more of them are displayed at once.The total number of keywords the website ranks for.The total number of external links - or ‘backlinks’ - pointing to the website (the more of these the better from an SEO point of view).An estimate of the total number of visitors to the website per month.An ‘ authority score’ that gives you an at-a-glance indication of how well a website is likely to perform in search results.Domain analysis in Ahrefs using its ‘Site Explorer’ feature.Ĭarrying out domain analysis is straightforward in both tools - you simply enter a domain into an input box, and key metrics are returned quickly for you, in a dashboard format.