When to Use Ahrefs or SEMrush as Your Primary SEO Tool

Choosing the right SEO tool can feel overwhelming—especially when you’re deciding between two giants like Ahrefs and SEMrush. Both offer powerful features, massive data sets, and loyal user bases. But depending on your goals, the right tool for you may not be the right one for someone else.

In this article, we’ll explore how a marketing agency successfully used SEMrush as their all-in-one marketing hub while turning to Ahrefs for specialized off-page SEO work. Their approach shows that success often comes from knowing when to use each tool—not just which one to pick.

The Challenge: Diverse Clients, Different Needs

The agency managed digital marketing for a variety of clients—e-commerce stores, B2B services, tech startups, and local brands. Their work spanned everything from Google Ads to content strategy and backlink building.

They needed tools that could:

• Handle PPC research and performance tracking

• Conduct deep SEO audits and keyword analysis

• Track branded mentions and online reputation

• Support link building and off-page SEO
  
  

After testing both tools across their client base, the agency found their sweet spot by assigning different core tasks to each platform.

Why They Chose SEMrush as Their Primary Marketing Platform

SEMrush offered a broader marketing toolkit, making it ideal for agencies that do more than SEO. Here's how they used it:

PPC Campaign Support

The Advertising Research and Keyword Magic Tool allowed the team to:

• Discover cost-effective PPC keywords

• Study competitor ad copy and strategy

• Identify negative keywords and budget wasters
  
  

Brand Monitoring

SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring tool alerted them when clients were mentioned across blogs, forums, or news sites—valuable for managing reputation and discovering link opportunities.

Competitive Research

Using Traffic Analytics and Domain Overview, they:

• Benchmarked client performance against top industry players

• Identified traffic sources and user engagement trends

• Evaluated what content and offers competitors were promoting
  
  

Site Health

SEMrush’s Site Audit gave them real-time insights into technical issues and prioritized fixes, allowing their developers to take swift action.

This made SEMrush their daily driver—the tool they logged into first each morning to plan, react, and strategize.

Where Ahrefs Shined: Off-Page SEO and Link Building

While SEMrush served the agency’s broad needs, Ahrefs became the go-to tool for backlink strategy. Here's why:

Backlink Auditing

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer offered a more intuitive and detailed view of backlink profiles. It showed:

• Referring domains and their authority

• Anchor text distribution

• New, lost, and broken links
  
  

This was crucial for clients recovering from algorithmic penalties or trying to build authority in a competitive niche.

Competitor Link Analysis

With Ahrefs, the agency uncovered link-building opportunities by analyzing where competitors were getting featured. These insights fed directly into their outreach strategies.

Content Gap Discovery

Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool helped pinpoint which keywords competitors ranked for, but their clients didn’t—unlocking blog topics and sub-pages worth creating.

SERP Movement

For long-term tracking of high-value keywords, Ahrefs provided trend graphs and keyword movement data that helped fine-tune strategy.

Ultimately, while Ahrefs wasn’t used daily for every client, it became an essential part of monthly SEO audits and campaign planning for off-page growth.

Key Takeaways from Their Strategy

This agency’s success came not from choosing one tool over the other, but from using each tool for what it does best:

• SEMrush covered daily operations, from PPC to content planning to site health.

• Ahrefs focused on depth—especially in backlink strategy and content opportunity.
  
  

They created a simple internal rule:

“If it’s about optimizing what we own—use SEMrush. If it’s about building what we don’t—use Ahrefs.”

This division of labor helped them stay efficient, precise, and highly responsive across different service lines.

Final Verdict: Which Tool Should You Use?

It depends entirely on your goals:

Choose SEMrush if you:

• Manage Google Ads or other PPC campaigns

• Need ongoing site audits and health monitoring

• Want to track branded mentions and reputation

• Rely on frequent client reports and cross-platform marketing tools
  
  

Choose Ahrefs if you:

• Focus heavily on link building and off-page SEO

• Need detailed backlink research and monitoring

• Want to analyze content gaps and keyword overlaps

• Work on high-authority ranking strategies
  
  

Or, like this agency, use both strategically. While the investment may be higher, the ROI from clearer insights, better campaigns, and faster fixes makes it worthwhile—especially when managing multiple brands.