Google Analytics vs. SEMrush: Which Provides Better Insights?

Introduction

Google Analytics and SEMrush are two of the most widely utilized web analytics tools that help digital marketers and SEO experts, as well as website owners, monitor a range of website data. However, they diverge in terms of their primary functions.

The first point about Google Analytics is that they don’t tell you about the traffic and performance of other sites; they are only concerned about your site. In comparison, SEMrush pays more attention to analysing competitor’s activities and positioning metrics against them. While one is helpful in one way or the other, the other is useful in a different manner.

Google Analytics Overview

Arguably, Google Analytics is the oldest and most known platform for website analytics. It is a Google service, so it can leverage the positive association with the brand, products, and features, as well as seamless compatibility with Google.

Key Google Analytics features include:

– Insightful analyses of how the users are getting to your website and mobile app, how often, how they are behaving, how many are converting, etc.

– This has to do with demographic and geographic factors that are characteristic of the visitors to your website.

– Ad hoc and analytical reports or Special reports.

– The integration with Google Ads to track the ROI for such projects.

– Content that is able to dig further to look at the page and campaign levels.

– Real-time activity monitoring

To a large extent, Google Analytics will give you very concrete and crucial qualitative and quantitative data on your own website, content, and traffic. It is best at informing you about activities on your specific business websites.

SEMrush Overview

However, SEMrush is a lot more centered on rivalry and the research on competitors.

Its core features include:

– Monitoring the ranking positions and the organic traffic of the sites, both yours and those belonging to competitors

– The identification of the keywords and sources that are most visited by any site

– Analyzing one domain against another on more than 100 indicators to define the level of activity

– This process involves an identification of the backlinks that link to any given website

– Unveiling the branding PPC ads and the brand’s PPC budget

– This involves looking at factors such as the site’s speed and security that determine its technical health on the Internet.

Therefore, whilst Google Analytics focuses on your own data and results (traffic and conversions), SEMrush focuses on competitors and the market to assist with activities such as market research and analysis, conducting SEO and PPC, and strategic planning.

The performance of numerous websites is monitored and tracked by world-class SEO tools, including Google Analytics and SEMrush.

This is highly beneficial when conducting competitive analysis and market research to ascertain how to enhance the competitiveness of your website.

With over a decade of experience as an SEO expert, we will examine the advantages and disadvantages of both platforms to assist you in comprehending their relative strengths and weaknesses.

A Brief Overview

• SEMrush provides a curated dashboard and a collection of SEO tools to facilitate the comprehension of the intricacies of SEO for novices.
• Google Analytics facilitates a more comprehensive comprehension of your website, enabling you to identify any necessary enhancements in content and marketing.
• Prior to effectively integrating Google Analytics into SEMrush, it is necessary to meet specific criteria established by Google.

What can SEMrush provide that Google Analytics cannot?

Enhancing Your Own Website

• Utilizing SEO tools such as Position Tracking, On-Page SEO Checker, and Site Audit to conduct SEO research and monitor campaign outcomes
• Link Building and Backlink Audit Tools to Enhance Your Backlinks

Competitive Intelligence

• Capacity to investigate the search engine keywords of your competitors (in the top 100 organic results and top 7 paid ad results of Google). In-depth market research instruments for the examination of any niche or website traffic analytics estimations for your competitor’s website
• Month-to-month analysis of the search engine positions of any domain that has gained or lost over time
• Research on the backlinks of your competitors Above and Beyond
• Content marketing and writing tools to assist in the development of exceptional website content. Social media marketing tools are available to analyze competitors and trends, as well as to manage your own content calendar and post across all of your channels.
• Customization of PDF reports is possible through the use of an API.

What capabilities does Google Analytics possess that SEMrush does not?

Conversely, Google Analytics is exclusively capable of furnishing you with an analysis of a website or property that you either own or manage.

Google Analytics can provide you with the following benefits after it is configured:

• Real-time metrics on each page of your website, including pageviews, bounce rate, and average session duration
• The ability to construct custom events on your website, such as downloads, link clicks, and form submissions, and monitor them.
• Audience insights, including demographics and geography
• Additional information

Although SEMrush is unable to provide information regarding the contents of your competitor’s Google Analytics, our Traffic Analytics tool can approximate these metrics for the majority of Internet domains.

With these estimations, Traffic Analytics is the closest you can get to glancing at another website’s Google Analytics.

Head-to-Head Feature Comparison

Now, let’s compare how some of the essential components line up between Google Analytics and SEMrush to understand which one is which.

Traffic Analysis

Organic traffic refers to visitors who arrive at your site through a search engine by clicking on a link in the search results – not through an advertisement. By source, page, campaign, geography, technology, and others, one can filter the data collected and analyze volumes; behaviour flows, conversion funnels, etc.

SEMrush also does not offer the same level of detail regarding traffic to your own site, however, you can use the tool to research the volume of organic search terms, paid keywords and traffic sources within any domain. This supports competitor research.

Winner: Google Analytics for own site; Using SEMrush to analyze the competitors

Keyword Research

With the help of Google Analytics, you can track your organic keyword rankings and volume for your site and negative keywords for PPC. Although it is excellent, it is not as comprehensive as the keyword data provided by SEMrush.

Through SEMrush, one gets to see monthly searches, historical trends, and how keywords rank in Google and other search engines. Keywords are the essence of any successful website, and it is one of the best platforms to research them.

Winner: SEMrush

Backlink Analysis

The main disadvantage is that Google Analytics has no backlink or domain authority. SEMrush offers a detailed backlink analytics page to track the total backlinks, the most used source domains, the anchor text used, and the quality of the links, among others, for a site, just as it helps with SEO-related competitor benchmarking.

Winner: SEMrush

Site Audit and Performance

Google Analytics offers plenty of data about the website’s performance, such as page loading speed, mobile responsiveness, technical issues, and so on; it can also identify problems related to the UX to determine specific areas that can be problematic for the users.

Another feature of the SEMrush site audit tool is that it not only examines the content SEO but also the technical SEO, security, speed, and mobile-friendliness. However, the reporting in Google Analytics is much more comprehensive for telling the story of your site and viewing it from an auditor’s perspective.

Winner: Google Analytics

Paid Search Tracking

Google Analytics is highly compatible with Google Ads to track website conversions down to paid campaigns and keywords or provide more detailed information about ad groups in Analytics. This eventually enables paid search performance analysis to be informed with transparent ROI reporting.

SEMrush shows estimated competitors’ PPC ad spend and bid costs, as well as the text ads and keywords that they are bidding for market research purposes. In fact, it does not even incorporate bid or cost data.

Winner: Google Analytics

Custom Reporting and Dashboards

The detailed reporting of Google Analytics is fully configurable, where the user has the option to develop custom reports, dashboards, segments, and visualization for any question that the business may have.

SEMrush gives limited report customization but has a much narrower set of reporting options than the GA.

Winner: Google Analytics

Which tool is more suitable for Competitive Analysis for SEO?

Without a doubt, SEMrush is the best tool to use when it comes to comprehensive SEO competitor analysis and best practices assessment.

Key advantages include:

– Keeping tabs on organic keywords and traffic for the leading domains in each market category

– Extrapolating the comparison of domains based on more than 100 web traffic, and the rank of SEO, back link, security and other factors.

– Identifying the factors that help competitors gain organic and paid traffic

– Studying competitor’s link-building and identifying the sources that they get the most valuable backlinks from

– Assessing and reviewing aspects of technical SEO that may impact the ranking factor

– Finding the keywords that give the most value and should be targeted

Despite the fact that Google Analytics is a handy tool, it does allow some comparison of competitor websites through the Benchmarking tool. However, what it gives you is merely the comparison of the metrics between businesses that also employ the use of Google Analytics rather than knowing the complete competitive scenario.

Thus, SEMrush offers more extensive and practical information when compared to developing an SEO competitive strategy. It helps with planning your content, backlinking, keywords, and the technical plan of attack in terms of SEO.

Which One Offers Higher Worth While Costing Less?

Google Analytics provides users with a compelling service for free and more features for $150 monthly via its Google Analytics 360 package. This is an excellent advantage as it allows for high value for money and is especially helpful for those companies with a small marketing budget.

In terms of pricing, SEMrush offers it as a subscription-based software with monthly costs ranging from $99 for the basic Pro version up to $449+ for enterprise plus accounts for large enterprises and professional teams. The rates could be relatively high, especially for solopreneurs or firms with a minimal number of clients. But it does so quite rarely, and when they do, you can save a good amount of money through SEMrush promo codes.

Conclusion

To recap the key strengths of each platform:

Google Analytics

– Making a detailed analysis of website and mobile app traffic and conversion

– Data requests and personalized analysis

– This model correlates user experience and behavior with the flow of a system.

– This involves complex paid search tracking and return on investment reports.

– Technical/Performance Auditoring – for your own site

SEMrush

– The analytic goals are to determine competitor’s SEO and PPC strategies.

– Writing benchmark domains across more than one hundred metrics

– Identifying missed keywords and backlink potential

– Experiencing competitor’s paid and organic traffic size and origin

– The technical SEO analysis of issues impacting competitor’s rankings

Therefore, while both tools provide outstanding analytical options, one tool saves your personal web traffic reports better than the other, and the other focuses on your competitors. Select Google Analytics for enhancing your website and other paid search promotions and advertisements. Turn to SEMrush for creating target-oriented SEO and content plans based on your industry and competitors. In combination with each other, using these platforms can give you a compelling intelligence to steer your overall digital marketing approach.