Comprehensive Comparison of Two of the Best SEO Tools in the Market: Semrush vs Google Analytics

Semrush and Google Analytics are tools that help digital marketing experts understand how well their website is performing. But their uses are very different. Semrush helps you analyze any website, including your own and your competitors. Google Analytics gives you helpful information about your own website.

Google Analytics has more accurate data about how many people visit a website and how they interact with it compared to Semrush. However, Semrush allows you to keep an eye on information from your competitors’ websites too.

It also helps you find out about your competition, improve your website’s ranking on search engines, find the best keywords to use, get more people to link to your website, advertise online, and market your content.

It’s important to compare the features of Semrush vs Google Analytics, and also to point out where they are similar. In this post, we will help you understand why both are important and why you should use them together to get the best results.

What Does Semrush Do?

Semrush is a collection of digital marketing tools that can help with things like improving your website’s visibility in search engines, creating content, understanding your market and competitors, advertising, and using social media for marketing. With Semrush, you can see helpful information like:

Traffic Analytics: It helps to understand where the visitors are coming from, whether they are using the web or mobile, and which pages are most popular in driving traffic.

Competitor Analysis: Looking at how much traffic they get from search engines, how many websites link to them, what keywords they use, and keeping an eye on any new competition or changes in their website’s position.

Keyword Research: How often they are searched, how hard they are to rank for, what people are looking for, analyzing search engine results, and keeping track of how your website ranks for those words.

Link Building: It involves gaining new backlinks, finding lost backlinks, identifying referring domains, discovering untapped backlink opportunities, evaluating the quality of existing links, and fixing broken links.

SEO Audit: Checking web pages, problems with the website, issues with making content better.

Content Marketing: It is about finding good topics to write about, using keywords to help your posts show up in search engines, keeping track of how well your posts are doing, and figuring out which posts aren’t doing so well.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Paid search traffic where you pay to have your website show up in search results. Competitors’ keywords and ad copy where you can see what words and ads your competitors are using. Position tracking helps you keep an eye on where your website shows up in search results.

Social Analytics: It measures the increase in people who follow a social media account and how often people interact with the content on that account.

What Does Google Analytics Do?

Google Analytics is the best tool for keeping track of how well your website or app is doing. It shows you all the information about how many people visit your website and what they do on it. It helps you track and study:

• Who are the people visiting your website?
• Where do your visitors come from?
• Which web pages do they go to?
• How long do they stay on your website and on specific web pages?
• Which posts or pages are getting the most attention?
• Which countries send the least or most amount of traffic to you?
• What words do people use to find your website?

Google Analytics helps you to learn about your customers and make your website better, and it doesn’t cost anything. This makes it a necessary analytics tool to have in your collection.

Semrush Vs Google Analytics – Quick Comparison

Semrush helps you find keywords and ideas that can bring more people to your website. You can also see what your competition is doing with their SEO and content. You can see information about a website’s domain and how much traffic it gets with Semrush.

However, the traffic analysis data is not as precise as Google Analytics, which collects data directly from a tracking code on your website. However, you can only access Google Analytics data for a website that belongs to you or that you are in charge of.

One big difference between the two platforms is that Google Analytics helps you learn how people behave on your website. Let us look at a quick comparison of the features of Semrush vs Google Analytics in the table below:

Features	Semrush	Google Analytics
Real-time traffic	No	Yes
Traffic sources	Yes	Yes
Site traffic	Yes	Yes
Traffic comparison	Yes	Yes
User behavior	No	Yes
Demographics	No	Yes
Keyword research	Yes	No
Competitor research	Yes	No
Position tracking	Yes	No
Link building	Yes	No
Backlink tracking	Yes	No
Content marketing	Yes	No
Technical SEO	Yes	No
Historical performance data	No	Yes
Data offered	Performance of SEO	Performance of website and user data
Platforms supported	Web, Desktop	Web, Desktop, Android, iOS
Pricing	Multiple plans available	Free
Customer support	Tutorials, Email and Live chat support	Forum and Knowledge base

Semrush: Features Analysis

Semrush is a tool with many features used by more than 10 million marketers. It has more than 55 tools and reports to help improve your search and marketing performance.

We use it almost every day for many things, like deciding on topics and updating posts each month, and fixing broken links on our website. Let’s see how Semrush can help you.

1. Web Traffic Analysis

We will show you what information Semrush provides about website traffic. This website might be yours, your competitors’, or your partners’. Semrush helps you keep track of important website traffic metrics like:

• The total amount of times people visited a site.
• Unique visitors to a site.
• Number of pages people look at each time they visit.
• The typical amount of time someone spends in a session.
• Visitors who leave your site without interacting with any of the web pages.
• Different ways people find a website – directly by typing the URL, through another website link, from a search engine, from social media, or through paid ads.
• The devices used to visit your website – computer, tab, mobile.
• The most popular pages users visit.
• Most popular places people go after they visit.
• How traffic is divided up by different countries.

Semrush traffic analytics helps you know the traffic volume of a website and the sources it comes from. You can also look at how many people are visiting different websites and see if the numbers are getting better or worse.

Semrush looks at the statistics of how many people visit one or more websites and compares them. Its traffic analytics is not as precise as Google Analytics, but it’s the most accurate information you can get from an outside tool about your website.

But the good news is that Semrush tells you how correct their data is. Using Semrush to see how well your website is doing can really make a big difference. You can increase your website traffic in a short period of time.

2. Perform Competitive Research

Semrush lets you see how well a website is doing. You can use it to quickly learn about what your competitors, partners, or customers are good at and what they need to improve on. Semrush helps you understand:

• The domain authority of a site.
• The number of people who visit the site, both from regular search results and from advertising.
• How traffic is spread out in different countries.
• The overall number of links that go to the website.
• The amount of search terms that the website appears in search engine results for.
• Keywords for getting lots of people to visit the website.
• Tracking where specific keywords appear in search results over time.

You can check and compare the numbers on your website with your competitors’ websites.

Semrush can also help you find words that are not being used and take advantage of opportunities that have been missed or ignored to make your website perform better in online searches.

Find out what keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. You can use Semrush to find out where your competitors are getting their backlinks from and take advantage of those opportunities. Overall, it has everything you need to compare with others.

3. Do Keyword Research

We use Semrush to research content for our website. Semrush helps us find the best keywords and content to rank higher in search results. Semrush has a Keyword Research tool that lets you see:

• The average number of times people search for a keyword every month.
• Keyword difficulty score tells how hard it is to rank for a certain keyword.
• Understand why the user is searching for a certain keyword.
• The average amount of money spent each time someone clicks on a keyword.
• Different words that mean the same thing as your main keyword.
• Other words and questions connected to your main keyword.
• Top posts or pages that are ranked highly for a specific keyword.
• Keyword research filter that helps you find the best words to use.

Semrush helps you find the best keywords for content marketing. Doing thorough research on the right words to use is the first thing you need to do to make content that will help your website make money. It can help you keep an eye on where your website ranks in search engine results so you can see how well your SEO is doing.
Also Read: Why ChatGPT is the Ultimate Keyword Research Tool?

4. Create and Review Your Link Profile

We also use Semrush to build backlinks and check the quality of the links. It helps us find all the websites that are linking to ours and see if those links are good for our website. You can also use Semrush’s Backlink Checker to:

• Discover new links to any website.
• Receive a notification when your backlinks are lost.
• Find out how trustworthy the website is and how valuable the link is.
• Study what your competitors are doing to get links on other websites and look at the types of links they have.
• Find the websites that your competitors are getting the most backlinks from.
• Find any bad or harmful links that might be hurting how well your website shows up in searches.
• Examine different types of backlinks based on the text used for the link, the type of link, and its characteristics.
• Search for places to build links.

Semrush helps you find ways to get more links to your website. It can help make your link building strategy stronger and show that you are an expert in your field. We think Semrush is the best tool for SEO professionals, even though there are other tools you can use.

5. Optimize Your Website for Technical and On-Page SEO

Semrush is the top tool for technical and on-page SEO. It shows you information about your website, like what needs to get better to make it show up higher in search results. Here are the main metrics you can find:

• The number of pages on your website that were crawled and their status
  • Healthy
  • Has issues
  • Broken
• The main issues on your website
  • Duplicate title and H1 tags
  • Links that are broken, both internal and external
  • Not having a meta description
  • Complex web addresses without a specific format
  • Less words on a page
  • Having the same content in multiple places
  • Using non-specific words as anchor text
  • Canonical tags not present
• Best ways to make the website better and improve its performance

Google Analytics: Features Analysis

Google Analytics is a helpful tool that gives you a lot of information about the people who visit your website and how they behave. Plus, it’s free. It’s really important for you to know how people find your website and what they do on it.

This information helps you plan what content to make in the future and how to make your website better. This is why you should use Google Analytics.

1. Web Traffic Tracking and Analysis

Google Analytics helps you see how many people visit your website every day, month, or year. You can see how much your website visitors have increased over time and find out where they are coming from. It helps you keep an eye on important metrics about the people who visit your website, such as:

• The amount of unique people who visit your website
  • On a certain day
  • Over time (you can see how many people visit your website each year for 10 years in a row)
• Where the traffic comes from
  • When a user directly enters your website’s name
  • Traffic from people finding a website without any paid advertising
  • When people click on your links in other websites
  • People who visit your site through social media
  • Advertisements
• Daily sessions
  • You can make sure your website is doing well by having more people visit it every day. If you see that people are not visiting your website every day, it means there is a problem that you need to fix

2. Better Knowledge of Your Audience

Google Analytics tells you a lot about the people who visit your website. It gives you details like their age, gender, what they are interested in, and where they are from.

Visitors: Find out how many are new and returning visitors, how long they stay on your website, and how many pages they look at before leaving.

Demographics: Find out the ages and genders of your audience.

Interests: Find out what your audience likes to do. Do they enjoy traveling, reading, shopping, or are they really into technology?

Location: Find out where your website visitors are located. You can see where they live, the countries and cities they are from.

Devices: Find out information about the devices they use to look at your website. You can see how many people visit your website and mobile app.

This information will help you know who your main audience is, where they are from, and how you can adjust your content and marketing plan to connect with them more effectively.

3. Get User Engagement and Content Performance Data

With Google Analytics, you can see how well your website is doing and how people are using it and its content. It helps you understand more about:

• The total amount of times people have looked at a page.
• The usual amount of time spent on each page.
• The number of people who leave your website without doing anything.
• The time it takes for a page to load on the internet.
• The total number of different searches on your website and the most commonly searched words.
• How many people see your page and how much money you make from it.

By using these ideas, you can improve your SEO content plan to get more people to visit your website and have a better experience. Creating useful information can help you keep your customers and make them more loyal to your business. This can lead to making more money.

4. Track Your Conversions

You can use Google Analytics to keep track of how many people take action on your website. Find out how many visitors are doing what you want them to do. These changes can be about anything, and are different types:

• Joining your email newsletter
• Click on a link from another website on your own website
• Posting your content on social media
• Purchasing your item

Google Analytics keeps track of when people complete an action on your website, such as buying a product or signing up for new arrival emails. You can use this information to make your website better at getting people to do what you want.

Semrush Vs Google Analytics: Comparison of Data Collection

We use Semrush and Google Analytics to manage our website and help our clients’ businesses. The data from both tools helps us make our website and content better, but they are not the same. Let us explain how these web analytics tools collect data.

Semrush Data Collection

Semrush collects its data:

• With the help of machine learning algorithms.
• Gathering data from many reliable outside sources and data providers.

Semrush collects data about how people use websites from over 200 million real internet users in 190 countries and regions to analyze website traffic. To make sure it’s right, they use an algorithm that looks for patterns in the data and gives you a good guess after testing it.

Semrush has a tool called Backlink Crawler that looks at a lot of web pages every day to find and add new links to its database.

Google Analytics Data Collection

Google Analytics collects data straight from your website. It wants you to put a special JavaScript tracking code in your website’s code. Whenever someone goes to your website, this code tells Google Analytics what they did on your site.

Google Analytics also gathers information using cookies, and pixel tags on website pages. When someone goes to a website with Google Analytics, the code there sends a message to Google’s servers to start collecting data.

The tracking code keeps track of information like what kind of device someone is using, what browser and operating system they have, their IP address, and where they are located. Also, the code keeps track of what users do on the website, like which pages they look at, what they click on, and when they fill out forms.

Cookies are important because they track what users do online and save their preferences. Google Analytics uses cookies to follow how users interact with a website and recognize individual visitors. These cookies help Google Analytics connect user actions to specific visits and follow how users behave across different visits.

Pixel tags are hidden pictures on web pages that track what users do. When someone visits a website with a pixel tag, it sends a request to Google’s servers. This lets Google Analytics gather information about the user’s visit.

Google Analytics collects a lot of information about who visits a website and how they behave. This helps website owners and marketers understand their audience and improve their online presence and marketing.

Also Read: 14 Essential Free SEO Tools Every Website Owner Should Use

Semrush Vs Google Analytics: Comparison of Pricing

Semrush has three different pricing options to choose from:

• Pro: $129.95 every month
• Guru: $249.95 every month
• Business: $499.95 every month

You will be able to save up to 17% if you pay for a whole year at once. If you cancel your subscription or switch to a lower plan within the first seven days, Semrush will give you all your money back.

You can use Semrush for free for 14 days. However, when trying out the platform for free, you can only access a certain amount of data each day.

Google Analytics gives you all this important data for free. If lots of people visit your website every month, you might need to switch to Google Analytics 360. This might be very expensive, but it will give you a lot in return.

• Data without limits
• Advanced reports
• Quicker data updates

Google gives lots of free tools that can be very useful for people in marketing and people who develop software.

Semrush Vs Google Analytics: Partners or Competitors?

Semrush and Google Analytics are really important tools for people who own websites and businesses. They are good at different things. Semrush is supposed to work together with Google Analytics, not take its place. And the other way around.

You can make your website and content better by using Semrush vs Google Analytics. This is how you can do it:

• Use Semrush to find keywords that are frequently searched for and have less competition
• Create the content and put it on your website for people to see. Use Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant to find problems with how easy it is to read, how well it does in search engines, and if it’s original. This helps you make your content better and increase the chances of it ranking higher.
• Track the number of people visiting your blog using Google Analytics and Semrush. Find the most popular pages and check how well your latest posts are doing.
• Add the specific keyword you want to focus on to Semrush’s position tracking tool. This will help you see if the content you publish is showing up better in online searches.
• You can use Google Analytics to see how people are using your website – which pages they look at and which links they click on from other websites.
• Check how many people visit your website every day to see if it’s doing well. You can connect Google Analytics and Slack so you can get updates on how many people are using your website each day.

We think you should use Google Analytics and Semrush together to make your marketing data and reports better, which will help improve your marketing ROI.

How to Link Google Analytics With Semrush?

You can link your Google Analytics and Search Console to Semrush. This will help you look at all your website’s information in one place and make it more accurate.

To link Google Analytics with Semrush, you must have “viewer” access. In addition, you have to connect Google Analytics to specific Semrush tools one by one:

• Site Audit
• Position Tracking
• Social Media Ads

You can connect these Semrush features to both Google Analytics and Search Console:

• Backlink Audit
• On-Page SEO Checker
• Content Analyzer
• Traffic Insights
• SEO Dashboard

To link Search Console with Semrush, you must have “full user or owner” access to your Google Search Console account. You can use Semrush’s website to find out how to connect GA and GSC with the features we talked about earlier.

Final Thoughts

We have already said this many times in the post, and we will say it again – you should not choose one over the other. Both Semrush and Google Analytics are very important tools for people who own a website.

We think you should use both platforms to the fullest. Both of them will help you examine how many people visit your website. You can find who visits your site and how they use it. Also, helps to find the important keywords to focus on.

You can also keep an eye on where your website ranks for different keywords. Helps you find and take advantage of chances to build links. Overall, they make your website’s search better and easier for people to use.

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