What’s the Difference Between Semrush and Google Analytics?

Semrush and Google Analytics are both digital analytics tools, however their differences in application are vast.

In broad terms, Google Analytics is strictly an internal analytics tool for understanding the user behavior on one website at a time (the site you own or operate). 

Meanwhile, Semrush is a suite of tools that handles both internal analytics (the site you own or operate) AND competitive research and analysis (your competitors’ sites).  

Semrush offers a lot of ways to study and improve your own website that GA cannot. While you analyze your competitors, Semrush lets you stack your site up right next to theirs to compare strengths and weaknesses.

Then, you can use Semrush’s tools to create campaigns, write content, track results, and even create custom reports and dashboards on a regular basis.

Semrush is meant to complement your use of Google Analytics, not replace it. 

In fact, we encourage integrating Google Analytics and Semrush in a handful of our own tools to enhance the data in Semrush with real-time stats from GA.
 

What can Semrush provide that Google Analytics cannot?

Improving Your Own Website

• SEO tools like Site Audit, On Page SEO Checker and Position Tracking to conduct SEO research and track the results of a campaign
• Backlink Audit and Link Building tools to improve your backlinks

Competitive Intelligence

• Ability to research your competitor’s search engine keywords (in Google’s top 100 organic results and top 7 paid ad results) 
• Market research tools to study any niche or website in high detail
• Traffic Analytics estimations on your competitor’s website
• Month to month analysis of any domain’s search engine positions gained and lost over time
• Backlinks research on your competitors

Above and Beyond

• Content Marketing and writing tools to help you build out great content for your website
• Social Media Marketing tools to analyze competitors & trends and also manage your own content calendar and post across all of your channels
• Custom PDF report building 
• API available to customize your own solution

What can Google Analytics provide that Semrush cannot? 

Google Analytics, on the other hand, is only able to provide you with analysis on a website or property that you own or operate. After setting it up, Google Analytics can give you:

• Real-time metrics on every page on your website (pageviews, bounce rate, average session duration, etc)
• Ability to create custom events on your website (downloads, link clicks, form submissions, etc) and track them
• Audience insights such as demographics and geographics
• And more! 

While Semrush can’t tell you what’s in your competitor’s Google Analytics, our Traffic Analytics tool can estimate these metrics for most domains on the Internet. 

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

For a thorough introduction to Google Analytics, read the Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics from our blog.