Semrush vs Similarweb: Which Tool Keeps You Ahead of Trends?

Professional marketers and business leaders trust Semrush and Similarweb.

While the tools are quite different at their core, it might be difficult to understand which one is best for you without a deep dive.

Let’s take an in-depth look at what each platform offers (and how much the platforms cost).

Semrush vs. Similarweb: Feature-by-Feature Comparison

At a glance, the most significant difference between Semrush and Similarweb is the breadth of the tools that they offer.

	Semrush	Similarweb
Used by	Professional marketers, business leaders, small businesses	Professional marketers, business leaders
Best for	SEO, digital marketing, content marketing, PPC, social media, market research	Digital marketing, market research
Helps with	Understanding your audience, improving market positioning, getting more website traffic, engaging with local customers, running effective ad campaigns	Understanding your audience and improving market positioning
Notable features	SEO Content Template and Writing Assistant tools that help you create optimized website content	Domain and market analysis reports including organic traffic data and demographic info
Pricing starts at	$0	$125 per month (billed annually)

I’ve used both of these tools many times over the course of my decade-plus marketing career, and I think they both bring value to the marketing process.

We have to get a bit more specific in order to figure out the best option for you.

There are definitely times when I turn to Semrush over Similarweb. It all comes down to what I need to do, and what my goals are.

Let’s dig in!

Keyword Research and SEO

If your business operates online, you need to think about search engine optimization (SEO).

Whether you want people to find directions to your brick-and-mortar store online or you’re selling business services, knowing what keywords to target is essential.

Semrush is fundamentally an SEO tool. Yes, there are over 55 different marketing tools available on the platform—it can do a lot—but SEO is the original focus at which it excels.

This means that the platform has a vast keyword database with lots of data about each term.

You can use Semrush to see keyword information like:

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Search intent
• Popularity trends
• Cost-per-click rates (for PPC ads)
• Related terms and variations
• Search engine results page (SERP) overviews
• Ad copy

Semrush also gives you different ways to sort, explore, and group related keywords. This is very helpful when developing a website content strategy.

Similarweb is a market research tool that includes keyword data and some other SEO features. You can use it to view keyword metrics like:

• Search volume
• Difficulty
• Search intent
• Popularity trends
• Cost-per-click rates
• Related terms and variations
• Clicks on search results
• Top competitors for a keyword
• Zero-click searches
• SERP features

I noticed one important difference when comparing Similarweb vs Semrush. Semrush lets you add your own domain to get personalized keyword research results.

This isn't a common feature in keyword research tools—and it's a helpful one.

Check it out—if I put in explodingtopics.com as the domain, our customized difficulty score for the term “Shopify” actually goes down a bit, from 100% to 94%.

Exploding Topics has content about some e-commerce trends, so the personal keyword difficulty score factors that in. It uses AI to evaluate the likelihood that we could rank for that term.

If I put in digitalcommerce360.com, the difficulty score goes down even more to 69%.

This is because Digital Commerce 360 is a known resource for e-commerce businesses and has already built up good authority on the topic.

Competitor Analysis

If you’re entering a new market or want to improve your current share of voice, you need a good competitive analysis tool at your disposal.

Semrush can help you learn about your top competitors in a few different ways. You can:

• See detailed industry overviews
• Look up the top players in any market
• View the biggest SEO traffic drivers in your industry
• Track how often your competitors post content online
• Research target audience demographics and interests

You can also look up specific competitors’ websites and view information about the site’s:

• Authority score
• Paid and organic traffic
• Backlinks
• Organic keywords and search intent
• Branded vs. unbranded traffic metrics
• Related competitors
• Recent PPC ads

All of this information can help you better understand your competitors’ strategies (i.e. how they’re reacting to audience interests) and make sure that your targeted marketing aligns with audience needs and search intent.

Similarweb maintains data on over 100 million websites and apps. When you look up one of these properties, you can see information like:

• Typical traffic volume
• Visitor device distribution
• Search terms that drive traffic to the site
• Top competitors
• Engagement metrics
• Related marketing channels
• Recent PPC ads
• Visitor demographics and interests

You can also look up an entire industry sector and find out more about its:

• Total size
• Top players and new competitors
• Historical market trends
• Popular topics

This information is useful whether you want to create benchmarks for your own business or you’re trying to learn more about a new market.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is an increasingly popular way for brands to connect with customers. (This is true whether you’re a B2C or a B2B company—B2B content marketing is growing exponentially right now.)

Semrush offers a complete suite of content marketing tools. You can research topics, create content clusters, and even get real-time feedback on the quality of your SEO content.

I’ve been working as a writer for 20 years and a content marketer for over 10; trust me when I say that the SEO Writing Assistant is valuable.

It makes the content optimization process much faster (and it works in Google Docs, too, which is very convenient).

Similarweb doesn’t offer any dedicated content marketing features, though you can use its audience insights to better tailor your writing to specific groups.

This information is similar to what you can find in the Semrush Market Explorer.

Ease of Use

Semrush includes a ton of tools, but the company does an impressive job of organizing everything by workflow or task.

This makes it pretty user-friendly, in my opinion.

There are also helpful tool tips that pop up the first time you use a new feature in Semrush. This makes it easy for beginners to learn how to use the platform as they work.

Similarweb has two layers of menus and groups its tools based on use case.

The first menu level collapses into icons while you work. This allows you to see the screen more easily.

I do find, though, that I often get lost and forget where things are. I have to continually re-orient myself by opening the full menu and reviewing my options.

Pricing

Semrush has a free plan; you can also choose from three additional pricing plans that start at $117.33 per month when billed annually.

It’s important to note that some Semrush features, like the .Trends toolkit, are only available as add-ons to a paid plan.

Similarweb offers five paid plans; there is no free option. Prices start at $125 per month when billed annually.

If you want access to all of Similarweb’s market and audience analysis tools, though, you’ll need to contact the company for a custom price quote.

Semrush: A Deep Dive

There are so many features available in Semrush that a quick comparison won’t cut it—let’s dig a little deeper into the platform’s most useful tools.

Search Engine Optimization

Nearly every feature you find in Semrush can help you improve your SEO.

The Site Audit tool is particularly useful for uncovering and fixing technical SEO issues like:

• Crawl issues
• Robots.txt and sitemap errors
• Slow site speeds
• Broken links
• HTTP vs. HTTPs URLs
• Duplicate content
• Missing H1s
• JavaScript errors

When I’m auditing a new site, I always start with the “Site Health” overview.

Semrush breaks down any issues into three categories: errors, warnings, and notices. This helps me prioritize what I need to tackle first to improve a site’s performance.

From there, I dig deeper to view broken links, view large assets that might be slowing down my site, and identify any sitemap problems.

Advanced Keyword Research

The sheer amount of keyword data available in Semrush makes it a great choice for anyone interested in SEO, content optimization, and audience research.

I’m a writer by trade, so let’s imagine that I want to write a blog post about e-readers. I’ll start by typing my topic into the Semrush Keyword Overview tool.

I have four big takeaways from the data:

1. There are many people searching for this keyword
2. Most of these searchers want to learn more about e-reader brands
3. It’s a hard term to rank highly for in the SERP
4. This keyword is increasing in popularity

“E-reader” is pretty broad, though. I’d like my content to be more specific, so I can head over to the Keyword Magic Tool to continue my research.

Here I can view and sort all related keywords by different metrics including volume, difficulty, and whether it’s a question.

When I find keywords I like, I can send them to the Keyword Strategy Builder with just a click.

Semrush analyzes the keywords I select and turns them into several topic clusters. This takes less than 15 minutes; it’s much faster than doing it manually!

By exploring these clusters, I can learn even more about related keywords. I never would have thought to write about an app that could read pub files, but it actually has decent search volume!

This shows me that people are not only interested in e-reader devices, but apps they can use on the phone they already own. I’ll start with this topic.

Content Creation and Optimization

Now that I’ve narrowed down a topic I’m going to write about, I can visit the SEO Content Template tool and learn what it’ll take for my content to perform well in search results.

Each SEO Content Template shows me:

• Sites in the current top 10 SERP positions
• Semantic keywords that can improve my text
• Backlink suggestions
• An ideal text length
• How competitors use the target keyword

I can then transfer my Content Template to the SEO Writing Assistant. As I write, I’ll get immediate feedback about:

• Keyword use
• Readability
• Formatting
• Tone of voice
• Originality

I’m not limited to writing in Semrush, though. I can send all of this information to my Google Docs account or download a copy of the SEO Content Template and refer to it while I write in Microsoft Word.

Competitor Research

The research tools in Semrush also allow me to analyze my competitors in detail.

Market Explorer is my favorite competitive analysis tool in my Semrush account. The ability to see key market insights at a glance—like the total serviceable market and key players—is incredibly valuable.

I really like the growth quadrant, too. This interactive chart lets me visualize how competitors in my market are growing and what their growth paths look like. I can change the quadrant to show me traffic growth, bounce rate growth, conversion growth, and more.

And if I want to monitor how different competitors are performing over time, I can track them using EyeOn. This lets me see their PPC ad, blog, and social media activity.

You can conduct competitor-specific keyword analysis, too, using the Keyword Gap tool. Just put in your domain and a competitor’s to see which keywords they rank for—and you don’t.

Trend Discovery

Semrush is also a great tool for learning more about popular trends in your industry.

As I mentioned earlier, you can see historic trend patterns for any keyword in the Semrush database.

You can take this discovery further with Semrush .Trends tools like One2Target. This report shows you demographic and socioeconomic details about your (and your competitor’s) audience, including:

• Age
• Household income
• Employment
• Interests
• Favorite social media platforms

This gives you important background about the people driving a particular trend up in popularity. With this data, you can make sure that your messaging is better aligned to capture their attention, interest, and money.

We’ve covered these features in more detail in our Semrush Review.

Similarweb: An Overview

Similarweb’s focus on audience and market insights can help you create better connections, stand apart from competitors, and improve online visibility.

Because there isn’t a free Similarweb plan, it’s important to understand exactly what it does and doesn’t do before you sign up. (They do offer a free trial.)

Website Traffic Analytics

Similarweb offers its users broad traffic analytics.

If you would like to know more about a competitor’s website performance, just enter in their domain.

The resulting traffic analysis report will show you information including total website visits, popularity by country, and user engagement.

Audience Insights and Engagement Metrics

Similarweb is similar to Semrush in that it shows you demographic information about a website’s visitors, too. You can see:

• Gender distribution
• Age distribution
• Audience location
• Interests and browsing habits

You can even see how long the average visitor spends on your top competitor’s website, and whether they visit similar sites in the same browsing session.

Competitor Benchmarking

If you aren’t sure who your competitors are, that’s okay—Similarweb helps you figure that out.

You can start by using the platform’s competitive tracking tool to get a better understanding of all the key players in a particular industry. Or jump right to the Similarweb benchmarking tool that shows you information about:

• Your website traffic share
• Top competitors’ traffic share
• Week-over-week changes in traffic
• Your audience reach
• Your engagement metrics vs. competitors’

Market Analysis

Similarweb users on custom plan tiers can do further research using the platform’s market analysis tool.

This tool includes a quadrant analysis graph that shares some similarities with the Semrush Market Explorer growth quadrant.

You can:

• Learn more about a competitor’s market share or growth rate
• Assess how difficult it will be to enter a new market
• Monitor changing audience interests

The Missing Piece: Predicting Emerging Trends

While Similarweb and Semrush can show you data about trending topics, they’re both missing one key thing: trend forecasts.

Yes, it’s useful to know how interest in a topic has fluctuated over time up to this point. This historical data can help you ascertain how strong a trend is and may support your SEO keyword choices, too.

But knowing what trends will be popular next can give you a remarkable competitive advantage. Especially when someone notifies you of those trends automatically.

This is where Exploding Topics Pro comes in.

Our trend analysis reports show you how a topic has fluctuated in popularity historically and how popular it’s likely to be in the future.

How To Use Exploding Topics With Semrush or Similarweb

Exploding Topics Pro is a great complement to both Semrush and Similarweb. And it’s simple to use the tools together, too.

Step 1: Discover Emerging Trends with Exploding Topics Pro

Trend analysis tools add an extra dimension to your SEO strategy. You can use trending keywords to build organic traffic around new topics.

The first step is to discover trends you care about and start tracking them with your Exploding Topics account.

You can find trends by browsing our complete trends database, or look up any term that comes to mind with the trends analysis feature.

Our data sources include social media sites, online forums, news outlets, and more so that you get a complete picture of what people are talking about (and where).

You can create lists of custom trends, too, and add new findings with a click.

Step 2: Validate Keywords

From here, you can use Semrush or Similarweb to find and validate keywords that are related to your tracked trends.

• Semrush users can type trend terms into the Keyword Magic Tool to find more related keywords and view search volumes. (I also recommend doing a Keyword Gap analysis at this stage so you can see how your top competitors are talking about specific trends.)
• Similarweb customers can run a keyword analysis on trend-related terms, then gather additional ideas with the platform’s keyword generator.

Step 3: Analyze Market Potential

Exploding Topics shows you key growth indicators about every trend.

You can use this information to get a feel for how quickly a trend is growing, audience sentiment, and also whether or not it’s a good time to try and enter a related market.

If you want to go further with your market research, you can do so in Semrush and Similarweb:

• Semrush users with a .Trends subscription can explore markets related to specific terms and competitors using the Market Explorer tool.
• Similarweb customers with an appropriate plan can use the market analysis feature to learn more about how difficult it may be to take over competitors or lead in a new market.

Step 4: Develop and Implement a Marketing Strategy

Finally, once you feel like you have a good handle on what trends are relevant to your industry—and related keywords—you can begin your planning.

• Semrush makes this easy with tools like the Keyword Strategy Builder and SEO Content Template.
• Similarweb doesn’t include many tools that can help you build your SEO strategy from the ground up. That said, you can use its analytics features for content and campaign performance monitoring.

Take the Next Step Toward Growth

Semrush and Similarweb both have strengths and weaknesses. The best fit for you will depend on your goals as a content marketer.

I find Semrush provides more detailed data about search results and social media, for example. Those tools are important to me as a writer. Your strategy and marketing efforts may be different.

Either way, if you’re serious about becoming a bigger player in your industry or better understanding your customer, you can’t go wrong with an Exploding Topics Pro subscription.

Exploding Topics Pro empowers you to identify and capitalize on emerging trends before they peak, giving you a first-mover advantage. Give it a try—it’s just $1 for 14 days.

And to get the most out of your test, sign up for a free Semrush account, too. This way, you can see how well Exploding Topics and Semrush work together when you’re developing a marketing plan.