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Which tool gives better Keyword Difficulty data: Ahrefs or Semrush?
I was searching for Crypto related micro niche keywords and that’s when I noticed that keywords which show 20-30 KD on Ahrefs show 50-60 KD for the same locations.
So which tool gives more accurate KD data: Ahrefs or Semrush?
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12 Replies
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Keyword difficulty data is always imprecise and of limited use. It is helpful to filter a list of 100,000 keywords down to 100 interesting ones. It is not a relevant metric to evaluate individual keywords.
No SEO knows how to accurately measure keyword difficulty, so no tool can build a perfect solution. Both SEMrush and ahrefs give a good-enough estimate of KD, which is right more often than it is wrong. Neihter can be trusted blindly.
And unless you have knowledge of the internal workings of these scores from ahrefs and SEMrush, who is to say 20 KD in ahrefs isn’t exactly the same as 50 KD in SEMrush? There are different ways to scale a score from 0 to 100.
Source: I worked on this topic at an ahrefs/SEMrush competitor (Searchmetrics).
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Ahrefs is better, I use KW finder
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I’ve found keyword difficulty data to be meaningless in practice. We’re ranking top-3 for a few keywords rated over 90 difficulty with 6 figure search volume, and not even ranking top 10 for other keywords with <50 difficulty and much lower volume. Same content strategy and quality across these articles.
If you think you can fulfill search intent better than available top results, publish an article for that query and ignore KW difficulty.
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Ahrefs is an SEO tool that will provide you with accurate and reliable search rankings.
The only downfall is that Ahrefs isn’t a free tool. However, it is worth the price as it helps you to perform several activities with multiple SEO tools, including website audit, discovering relevant keywords, targeting competitors’ links.
SEMRush is a paid Google Keyword tool that offers a variety of features. It not only allows you to check your search engine position but also enables you to research relevant keywords, optimize backlinks, check algorithm updates, and so much more.
One of the most fantastic things about SEMrush is that it allows you to go beyond SEO by offering tools for paid social media marketing, advertising, and more.
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Research has shown that Semrush gives an accurate KD report than Ahrefs and other SEO tools.
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Theyre both inaccurate. But not as much as any other tool that gives exact numbers.
I pay some attention to the KD and ranges in GKP.
That wat for me its less of a crap shoot. But not much
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It’s expensive but I use both. semrush is great for keywords and topic research and their keyword difficulty is pretty spot on. Semrush just added search intent to their keywords which is huge. I used to only use ahrefs for keyword research but now days I mainly use ahrefs to check backlinks and use their broken backlink tool.
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they are meaningless mostly.
I would only ever use it when comparing closely related keywords from the same tool. So like “best crypto wallet” and “top crypto wallet.”
I think that would give you a good idea of how two related or close match SERPs are performing.
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SEMrush is more accurate in this purpose.
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Any tools doesn’t give accurate numbers, so you can research and analysis that keywords from the different tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Ubersuggest etc.
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Hey u/HelloWorld1122, good question – that’s no news that every tool has their own KD calculation method and they take into account different weighing factors.
We recently updated our KD metric, it is now more accurate than ever. Our formula is more robust and factors in way more parameters than any other metric. You can find details on how we calculate it now in our blog post titled **Semrush Keyword Difficulty: Now More Accurate Than Any Other Tool.**
Hope it makes it a little bit clearer!
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regards.
