3 Alternative to SEMRush that are Affordable and User friendly

If pricing has been a deterrent for you in buying SEMRush, then this affordable alternative to SEMRush is going to interest you.

SEMRush has been the chosen tool for most bloggers and marketers who are looking to rank their content on search engines.

In fact, I happened to stumble upon SEMRush after I read a post on Backlinko, that showed a demo of the tool.

At first, I was a little too overwhelmed with the many features of SEMRush, but using the tool during the FREE trial helped me get a better understanding of the many features.

But then, there’s a couple of things I realized after using the tool for some time –

• SEMRush is a wonderful tool from an SEO perspective. But most of its features are targeted towards an SEO professional and might be something that you as a blogger might not use.
• You can easily get overwhelmed with the features and options available in the tool and the fact is that there are barely a couple of features that you would use in your day-to-day blogging routine
• Understanding what to do with the analytics that the tool provides, is important to get the most out of the tool

With that being said, it is also important that you know that SEMRush is still one of the best SEO tools you can find online and if the price point isn’t something you are concerned with, then this is a tool that you could go for. You can check out SEMRush here!

Now, with that out of the way, let us look at the alternative to SEMRush.

All of these are much more affordable than SEMRush though they too come with as monthly subscriptions, which means you still need to commit to a monthly payment for all of them.

PS: Want to know how to get these and many other tools for a low one-time lifetime payment and not have to pay anymore. Then read on and I will tell you that nice little tip towards the end of the article.

In this post today, I will show you 3 tools that are SEMRush alternatives.

The one thing to keep in mind is that these 3 tools, though can be called an alternative to SEMRush, isn’t an exact replacement.

But they have most of those features that you as a blogger or, a marketer would need.

Let us take a look at these and their features.

Alternative to SEMRush – 3 Tools that can do the Job

Gone are the days of the tools that were desktop applications. It’s the age of the cloud and most software today are offered as a SaaS (Software as a Service). And SEO tools too, follow that model and are mostly cloud-based these days.

In fact, SaaS is a lot better as a service because of multiple reasons –

• You don’t have to install another software on your computer and increase all that unnecessary load on your computer’s processors and storage
• With most software needing to access third party online tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console etc., it can be a lot of load on your computer and you internet connection.
• You can access the software from anywhere. So the need to carry your laptop around is eliminated.
• Regular updates and fixes will happen online and you don’t need to be worried about downloading and installing another update on your computer
• There are no limitations to processing speeds and storage. Hence everything is a lot more faster and the only thing that limits you is the speed of your internet.

The 3 SEMRush alternatives that we are discussing today are also SaaS and hence accessible from anywhere.

Here are these 3 alternatives and their features –

Labrika – Our favorite All in one SEO tool

Labrika is my go-to tool when it comes to SEO.

The tool has helped me increase my search engine traffic by almost 235% on this blog. It helped with SERPs and increased the search engine traffic on another of my blog by almost 460%.

There’s a lot that this tool can do when it comes to SEO. My favorite one is the content optimizer.

This content optimizer tool, find competitors ranking for a specific keyword and gives you a list of recommendations to rank for that keyword based on the analysis that it does on these competitors.

Once you have optimized your article based on these recommendations, it is just a matter of copying it onto your blog.

Labrika has some other very interesting features that are similar to what SEMRush offers. Here’s some of them:

Full SEO Audit: This is an audit of your site for 39 of the most critical ranking factors

Technical Audit: The technical audit is an audit of the technical issues affecting the search engine indexing of your site. It does an audit of 72 such factors and give you a detailed report of where you need to improve.

Keyword Characteristics: It is a report that you give a lot of details about keywords, like how good is your keyword choice, tips, and advice on your keyword usage, etc. This includes the Number of main pages in TOP10; A list of relevant landing pages; The optimal click depth of a landing page; Latent semantics (LSI) and many others.

User Metrics: Labrika provides you a lot of handy user metrics like %bounce rate, average session time etc. in addition to a lot of detailed analysis of your users. The 2 features that I like the most are – a list of all search requests that people used to find your site and a list of all the pages with no traffic. This information can help you a lot in terms of optimizing your site.

Analysis of Competitor’s websites: Labrika provides a decent evaluation of your competitors and provides you with some amazing statistics that you can use to outrank them.

Some of this includes information like the list of competitors, Snippets of competitors, recommendations for texts based on the analysis of competitors’ websites etc.

Search Rankings Tracking: Labrika also tracks your search engine rankings. You can setup the frequency of running the reports and Labrika will send you a notification when the report is ready. Rankings are available for different Google locations and it is even downloadable in XLS format.

Domain Information: Labrika also provides you with a lot of information about your domain.

Essential Landing Page Elements: Labrika also does an indepth analysis of your landing pages and tells you what changes you need to do for better conversions.

Pricing for the tool

There are a lot of other features as well which are all very handy and comparable to SEMRush. The best part is that you wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with the information that you get.

Labrika is affordable and starts at only $19/month for 500 keyword search queries and 10,000 page crawling credits. This is more than enough for a blog that gets a reasonable amount of traffic.

You can check out Labrika here!

SERanking – My favorite All in One SEO tool

This is my favorite SEO tool and my most preferred alternative to SEMRush.

One of the biggest reasons for this is that it is very much similar to SEMRush and has a lot of similar features. So for a much lower price, you get pretty much everything.

In fact, SE Ranking does more than any other tool in the market today, yet it is not overwhelming. It is pretty simple and easy to use and even a newbie who is using a similar tool for the first time can easily use it.

Here are some of the features of SE Ranking.

• Keyword research and suggestions tools
• Keyword rank tracker
• Website Audit
• Backlink Monitor
• Backlink checker
• Competitive research
• On-page checker

Here’s a quick look at how the dashboard for SE Ranking looks.

Keyword research and suggestions tool – The Keyword research tool in SE Ranking gives a lot of information. In addition to showing you keyword ideas with its associated search volumes, CPC, ranking difficulty etc., it also gives you information about both organic search results for the keyword and paid search results for the keyword

You can use this information to develop your keyword strategy and use these keywords in your content and outperform your competitors.

Keyword Rank Tracker – The Keyword Rank tracker in SE ranking is one of the best that I have seen. They claim that it is a 100% accurate rank tracker which though there isn’t a real way to verify, looks to be true from whatever I could manually verify.

The tracker helps check Google/Yahoo/Bing/YouTube rankings for all locations and devices. It also tracks your competitors ranking for keywords and analyses the SERP for the top 100 search results.

Website Audit – SE Ranking provides you with a comprehensive website audit report that includes things like Technical errors, missing or, duplicate meta tags and headers, website loading speed related issues etc.

The report gives you a lot of information to optimize your website for SEO and is presented in a very easy to understand format.

But at this point, I need to agree that the Website audit report by Labrika is something that I prefer over SE ranking because theirs is a lot more comprehensive and actionable.

Backlink Monitor – SE ranking monitors your backlinks regularly and provides you with a lot of useable information like number of backlinks, the backlinks target ratio, new and lost backlinks, % of dofollow to nofollow etc.

It also gives you a lot of information about the origin of these backlinks like domain trust, Alexa rank etc. along with other information like the page trust, the number of external links from the page etc.

Backlink Checker – Backlink checker is the same as Backlink Monitor, with the only difference that it is for your website. You could get valuable information about the backlinks to your website, their quality, trust rank, are they do follow or, no follow etc.

The one feature that is my absolute favorite in SEM Rush is the backlink monitoring tool. They have a nice “Toxicity rating” for each of the domains/urls that the backlinks are coming from, which then helps you to disavow them, if you think that there are a lot of toxic domains that are backlinking to your site.

This feature isn’t really available in any other tool. The Backlink checker in SE Ranking is a little closer to this.

Competitive Research – The competitive research module is probably one of the most sought after feature in all of these tools. The competitive research feature in SEMRush is one of the best you could ever find but that doesn’t mean that the other tools do not have this feature or, that it isn’t as good as SEMRush.

SE Ranking gives you a detailed analysis of your competitors and provides some valuable insights as well. It gives you information like traffic, domain trust and page trust, the most popular pages and the PPC ads that they are running in addition to the usual information like backlinks, keywords etc.

If you are somebody who runs PPC ads, then the information about the most profitable PPC ads run by your competitors can come is very handy to build you own profitable campaigns.

On page checker – Finally the on-page checker which is a common feature that is available with all SEO tools. It analyses your pages for specific search queries and gives you a lot of information to optimize those pages for search engine rankings.

Pricing and My Opinion

SE Ranking is probably one of the closest tool to SEMRush and one of the best complete alternative. Features are comparable and easy to use and since the dashboard and presentation doesn’t look overwhelming, most bloggers will find it pretty helpful.

The pricing for SE Ranking is a little confusing though.

They have a usage based subscription model. But the lowest you can start off is for about $25.00/month. You can track about 250 keywords which is good enough for any blogger.

You also get most of the other features that you would need as a blogger. So that plan should be more than enough for anybody who is planning to use the tool for blogging.

But if you are looking for some of the other advanced features and more keyword rank tracking quota etc., then you will have to shell out a little more and pay around $59/month which is still a lot cheaper in comparison to SEMRush.

You can check out SE Ranking here!

Ubersuggest – Keyword Research and SEO Analysis tool

Ubersuggest is my favorite tool when it comes to keyword research. In fact, I use it along with Labrika for all of my keyword research and SEO analysis.

The best part about Ubersuggest is that they have a free option as well, which you can try before you actually make the decision to buy it.

Just like SEMRush, Ubersuggest also offers similar analytical tools –

• Complete Website Analysis
• Keyword Rank Tracking
• Keyword Research
• Content Ideas
• Backlink data
• Competitive Analysis

Complete Website Analysis – Ubersuggest crawls your website periodically and presents a detailed analysis for your website with information like the amount of organic traffic, the number of backlinks, the tracked keywords and their positions and the overall health of your site from an SEO perspective.

Keyword Rank tracking – You can add a list of keywords that you want to track and Ubersuggest will crawl and track them for you. You can see how the ranking for these keywords change and optimize your pages accordingly.

Keyword research – The keyword research module in Ubersuggest is extremely handy and easy to use. You can enter seed keywords to get keyword ideas or, even enter your competitor’s website to get a list of keywords that they are ranking for and which you can use to outrank them.

Content Ideas – The Content Ideas module show you content ideas based on the keywords you enter. You can check out these ideas and take inspiration from them to write an even better piece of content so that you outrank them.

Backlink Data – Ubersuggest gives you some extensive backlinks data which you can use to make decisions like disavowing harmful backlinks, planning your anchor text spread etc.

Competitive Analysis – Ubersuggest also gives you a lot of information about your competitors, like the keywords they are ranking for and you are not, the backlinks they are getting, Keyword gap between you and them and a lot of other useful metrics.

Pricing and Overall Opinion

Ubersuggest is an extremely useful tool with a lot of options and is something that is comparable to SEMRush. It can give you a lot of data that you can use especially if you are a blogger.

The best part about Ubersuggest is their pricing. Its one of the most affordable tools starting at about $12/month or, a $120 lifetime option. This plan should be more than enough for most bloggers and affiliate marketers.

Also, they have a free option which is something good for people who want to try it out.

You can checkout Ubersuggest here!

BIQ – All in One SEO Tool

This is a bonus tool and another alternative to SEMRush. This is BIQ.

I came across this tool a few weeks back when I saw it being mentioned in an email. Some of the features fascinated me and that’s when I thought of checking it out.

BIQ is created by the same folks who created SEOPressor. So you can be rest assured that they have a fair bit of understanding of how SEO works.

BIQ has a lot of the features that are available in SEMRush and is hence one of the best alternatives to SEMRush. The features are categorized into 4 primary ones –

• Keyword Research
• Content Analyzer
• Competitive Research
• Rank Tracking

BIQ has a very clean, simple and user friendly dashboard. You wouldn’t be confused with what you should do. You just need to select what you want to do from the 4 options presented and proceed. That’s it!

Here’s what BIQ can do for you –

Keyword Intelligence

Keyword intelligence is the keyword research module of BIQ. Just like any other tool, you can just enter a seed keyword and BIQ will provide you with keyword suggestions in 4 categories.

The first is Related Keywords which will show you all the related keywords to the seed keyword you entered along with the trend, volume, CPC, competition, intent and value. The best part in this is the “intent” which tells you what is the intent with which somebody will be using this keyword.

The second one is Content ideas where you get a bunch of content ideas . These are basically similar posts which were written for the keyword you searched.

The third is the Popular questions which gives you a list of popular questions that people are asking for that specific keyword

The fourth is trending searches for the keyword.

That’s a good amount of information for a keyword and this can help you write informative blog posts that can rank pretty easily on search engines.

Content Intelligence

The content intelligence module analyzes your content for 25 crucial ranking factors and gives you a list of recommendations to rank better on Google.

This is a very handy module though it has its own shortcomings.

The module gives you a list of suggested keywords which you should use in your article which is extremely handy from an LSI perspective. But the Wordscope score is a little confusing and the readability analysis is a little off when you compare it with some other tools.

Nevertheless, it is still an extremely useful module that can come in handy while writing your blog posts.

Rank Intelligence

This module gives you a list of keywords that you have been ranking for and you never realized that you were.

Interesting! Isn’t it?

This is one of my favorite modules in the tool because it gives you an opportunity to work and optimize your articles for those keywords that aren’t ranking on the first page. That’s a huge opportunity for additional traffic.

Further, you can add these keywords to the rank tracking tool so that you can monitor the progress of these keywords.

There’s a lot many other features and data that the rank intelligence tool gives which is all extremely useful in optimizing your content and getting them to rank on the first page of Google.

Rank Tracking

Rank tracking tracks the keywords that you want to monitor and updates you about their progress. You can see data for keywords that lost rankings, gained ranking positions and the ones that remained unchanged.

And you get this data for both Desktop and Mobile searches which is good if you are somebody who is looking to optimize your content for both desktops and mobiles.

Pricing for the tool

BIQ is as affordable as Labrika and the lowest plan starts at about $55/month and this plan gives you about 200 keyword researches per month, about 100 tracked keywords and about 5000 keywords in rank discovery.

While that is enough for most bloggers and solopreneurs, it still is a little expensive for the average blogger.

You can check out BIQ here.

The Best SEMRush Alternative – Conclusion

Before I give out my opinion, it is critical for you to understand a few things.

Deciding on picking an SEO tool, needs a careful evaluation on what you needs are. Depending upon your needs you might need some features or, you might not need them.

Paying that extra money for a feature that you don’t need or, plan to use isn’t a viable business decision. You will be wasting your money (earning it isn’t the easiest thing though).

It also depends upon your decision on doing it yourself or, hiring an agency to do the job for you.

Based on the above considerations, you can pick the tool that suits you.

If I were to suggest a tool, assuming you are a blogger and affiliate marketer like me, then my first choice would be Labrika, followed by SE Ranking.

Ubersuggest can also do the job for you, if the features that are available on it is all that you would need. In fact, it would be the first choice in that case.

Whatever is the tool that you buy, the most important thing is to put it to use. If it sits there and gathers dust, then it is of no value.

The Secret to not pay for another Subscription

Now onto the final part. The secret to getting tools like these and a lot many others without paying for a monthly subscription.

I know and I can understand the pain of paying a monthly subscription to a tool, especially if you use it about 4-6 times a month.

Though, the subscription model has a lot of advantage and ensures that you get the latest feature updates from the service provider, it can sometimes be a burden for a lot of new bloggers and affiliate marketers.

But there is a way you can get the same benefits but without paying for a monthly subscription. I use this regularly and most of the tools I have purchased is through this method.

Wondering what that is?

It is Appsumo.

Yes. That’s right. Appsumo is a marketplace that has a ton of amazing deals from some of the top product and service creators and almost all of them are available for a one time payment for a lifetime access.

If you want to save a few thousand dollars every year, I would recommend that you check out Appsumo.

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