SEMrush vs Majestic: Comprehensive SEO Battle
Contents
SEMrush is definitely one of the behemoth SEO tools right up there with Ahrefs as the most popular option. Majestic is a little more niche and provides a few specific features that you might not get with SEMrush.
That said, which is preferred by SEOs and Digital Marketers? Which option is easier to use, more affordable, and more accurate?
By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to answer these questions for yourself.
Main Takeaways
If you’re not in the mood to read the whole article, here are the main points for each tool that you’ll want to understand.
SEMrush
All-in-One: SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO tools for a reason. It provides everything you’ll need to start and build a successful website including keyword research, competitor analysis, topic ideas, PPC, and more.
Keyword Research: SEMrush offers comprehensive keyword research including data, volume, difficulty, trends, related terms, and topic ideas.
Competitor Analysis: The tool offers robust competitor analysis, helping users identify top competitors, their strategies, and areas for improvement.
Backlink Analysis: While it’s not as involved as Majestic, SEMrush provides plenty of backlink data so you can evaluate your competitors, find out where their links are from, and perform manual outreach.
PPC: Users can gain insights into competitors’ ad strategies, keywords, and ad copies, valuable for PPC campaigns.
Majestic
Backlink Dynamo: Majestic’s claim to fame is their backlink analysis tools. It has one of the largest indexes in the industry so it truly can’t be beat in this department.
Unique Link Metrics: Another thing Majestic does that you won’t find with SEMrush or many other tools is provide unique metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow which help you understand more about a website’s backlink profile.
Historical Data: Majestic offers historical data on backlinks, helping users track link growth and changes over time.
Link Context: This tool has a link context feature which shows you where the link appears on a page so you can choose better anchor text for your backlinks.
Both of these SEO tools provide unique and valuable features but your choice depends on what your main goal is. If you need an all-in-one solution to build a successful website using organic traffic, you’ll benefit more from SEMrush. If backlinks are your primary goal, then Majestic is the better choice.
SEMrush Features
Now let’s talk about the specific features that make SEMrush such an SEO powerhouse.
Position Tracking
One of the standout features you’ll get with SEMrush is the position tracking tool which allows you to monitor your websites performance against your top competitors over a period of time.
You can track your target keywords, their positions, and stack it up against the other websites ranking alongside you. This helps you to identify changes in the SERPs so you can determine if refreshes are needed.
One thing I love about this tool is how easy it is to use for someone who doesn’t understand much about SEO. All you need to do is add your keywords to the tracker and your domain and it will provide you with historical data of how your website performs for those keywords.
Competitor & Gap Analysis
If you read my writing, you know I’m big on competitor analysis. You can use your competitors and almost nothing else to build a successful website based on what they’ve done right and how Google has rewarded them.
This is why competitor and gap analysis are so important and why they work well together.
Competitor Analysis in SEMrush involves the in-depth examination of your competitors’ online presence, including their websites, keywords, backlinks, and content strategies.
SEMrush allows you to see what keywords your competitors rank for, what content they’ve created, where their backlinks are from, and how well those pages perform.
Equipped with that information, you can now replicate their exact process on your own site.
Adding in the gap analysis tool, you can take the top five competitors from Google and see what keywords are missing between all five of the pages. Then, you simply take those keyword gaps and add them into your content.
If you write a great blog and provide valuable information – your keyword research and gap keywords will help boost your rankings and ideally outrank your competitors.
Site Audits
Another reason why SEMrush is a great all-in-one tool is because of its site audit feature. This provides you with valuable insight for the technical and on-page elements of your website. You can evaluate technical issues with page speed, loading times, missing metadata, broken links, images, and more.
The tool examines a wide range of technical and on-page SEO factors, offering a holistic view of your website’s health.
Backlink Research
While not as robust as Majestic, SEMrush does offer backlink analysis that is comprehensive enough for most site owners. You can find information on your competitors’ backlink profiles to figure out where they’re getting their links from, how many they have, and the types of links they’re getting.
By understanding this, you can figure out how many links you’ll need to outrank them and who you might want to reach out to so you can try and get a link as well.
PPC Campaigns
SEMrush provides a full suite of PPC and paid search tools including advertising research, keyword gap analysis, position tracking, and social media advertising.
Equipped with these tools, you can figure out who your top competitors are, what keywords they’re bidding on, how much they’re bidding on average, and what you need to do to compete with them and earn your share.
Majestic SEO Features
Now that you have a complete understanding of SEMrush’s features, let’s see if Majestic can stack up against this powerhouse.
Trust & Citation Flow
The main feature that helps Majestic stand out as a great backlink research tool is their Trust and Citation Flow data. This metric helps you determine the value of a link so you can decide how hard you should pursue it.
Trust Flow is a metric that quantifies the trustworthiness of a website’s backlink profile. It is based on the idea that links from authoritative and trustworthy websites are more valuable than links from less reputable sources.
Citation Flow is a metric that measures the quantity of backlinks a website has, regardless of their quality. It helps gauge the “popularity” of a website based on the sheer volume of links pointing to it.
As you can imagine, finding the perfect balance between quality and quantity is the goal. Since Majestic provides you with this information for every website on the internet, it better prepares you to do backlink outreach knowing that a certain site is well worth the effort.
Historical Data
Majestic offers something called a “Historical Index” which provides historical information about a website’s backlink profile over time. This can help you determine the value of a link by paying special attention to the age of that website’s backlink profile.
A lot of websites will try to game the system and build a ton of low-quality backlinks in a short amount of time to make their site look good when it’s actually not.
Majestic’s Historic Index is a collection of data snapshots taken at different points in time, allowing users to track the historical evolution of backlinks and referring domains for a specific website. This index provides data on how a website’s link profile has changed, grown, or declined over months and years.
Where Majestic exceeds SEMrush is in the strength of their data. It’s more accurate and more detailed specifically on backlink-related metrics.
Bulk Backlink Analysis
The bulk backlink checker allows you to analyze up to 400 URLs by copy and pasting and up to 1,000,000 if you use the file upload feature.
Once you upload the URLs, you’ll receive all information for each URL including organic stats, keywords, link information, backlink gaps, and more.
SEMrush also offers a bulk backlink checker but you can only do up to 200 URLs at a time.
API Access
I won’t go too far into this feature because it’s a bit complex and not applicable to most people doing SEO, backlink, and keyword research. But, since Majestic has such a plethora of backlink data, using their API can be a powerful way of extracting this data at scale.
Their API allows you to automatically access and retrieve their data through the backend rather than having to use the front end application. Keep in mind this requires a bit of programming expertise so I don’t recommend it for the average Joe.
To use Majestic’s API, you need to sign up for API access. Visit Majestic’s official website and navigate to the API section to get information on obtaining an API key.
SEMrush vs Majestic SEO Pricing
Budget and pricing matter. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking for a more advanced research tool, you’ll need to know what these cost, what you get for your money, and which plan you should choose based on your needs.
Let’s break it down.
SEMrush Pricing Breakdown
Pro Plan: $129.95 per month
Guru Plan: $249.95 per month
Business Plan: $499.95 per month
Pro Plan:
- 5 Projects
- 500 tracked keywords
- 100,000 pages to crawl
- 50 social media profiles
Guru Plan:
- 15 Projects
- 1,500 tracked keywords
- 300,000 pages to crawl
- 100 social media profiles
Business Plan:
- 40 Projects
- 5,000 tracked keywords
- 1,000,000 pages to crawl
- 300 social media profiles
The plan you choose depends on how many projects you need to do. For the individual who is trying to build or grow their own website, the Pro Plan is more than enough. If you’re a large agency with dozens of clients then you might need to go for the Business Plan.
Majestic Pricing Breakdown
Lite Plan: $49.99 per month
Pro Plan: $99.99 per month
API Plan: $399.99 per month
Lite Plan:
- Maximum 1 user
- Maximum 1,000,000 analysis units
- Maximum 200,000 backlinks per report
- Site Explorer access
- Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and other link metrics
- Backlink history (12 months)
- Link context
- Bulk Backlink Checker
Pro Plan:
- Maximum 1 user
- Maximum 20,000,000 analysis units
- Maximum 5,000,000 backlinks per report
- All Lite Plan features
- Historic Index (up to 5 years)
- Campaigns and “Link Context”
- Scheduled Backlink Crawls
- Custom reports
API Plan:
- All custom options plus access to the API
While the pricing definitely favors Majestic, you can see that their features and plans are built entirely around their backlink research features.
So, What Tool is Better?
I can’t really say that one tool is better than the other because they do such different things so well. SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO research and content marketing tool that can only be beaten by Ahrefs in my eyes.
When it comes to sheer backlink research, it’s almost impossible to beat Majestic. The problem I have is that I struggle to see why someone would need this level of data to build a website or even a small agency.
I think Majestic is most useful for large scale link building teams that need to extract a lot of data to have dozens of people performing link building outreach on a daily basis.
If you’re an independent contractor or website owner trying to build and grow a website, SEMrush provides more than enough backlink data to get you where you want to be. Plus, it provides everything you need as well. Long story short, I choose SEMrush.