
Choosing an SEO tool is a big decision. After all, it’s an investment that will shape your SEO and content strategy.
You’ve narrowed your search to Semrush and Raven Tools, but which one is right for your needs? Most importantly, which one will help you reach your goals?
It’s hard to know without rigorously testing each tool firsthand. (And who has the time and budget for that?)
Here’s the good news: I’ve used both Raven Tools and Semrush to manage SEO campaigns for years. I know where each tool shines and where they fall short—and I’ve packed everything I’ve learned into this guide.
By the end of this article, you’ll have all the information you need to decide which tool is the best fit for your site (or your client’s).
Before we dig into the details, here’s a quick snapshot of what sets these two tools apart:
- Semrush: Tailored for SEO professionals and marketing teams, Semrush provides a complete suite of tools for SEO, social media, content marketing, and paid ads
- Raven Tools: Good for small- to medium-sized businesses, Raven Tools combines SEO analysis with budget-friendly reporting features
Semrush vs. Raven Tools: TL;DR
If you’re short on time, here’s a quick rundown of each tool:
Feature | Raven Tools | Semrush |
Keyword rankings updates | Daily, weekly, or monthly | Daily and weekly |
Keyword database size | 1.4 billion keywords | 26+ billion keywords |
Backlink database size | Unclear as it uses Moz and Majestic for its backlink data | 43 trillion backlinks |
How keyword difficulty is calculated | N/A | Uses a formula based on factors like referring domains and Authority Scores |
How website authority is calculated | Pulls Domain Authority directly from Moz | Authority Score is calculated using a proprietary formula based on backlinks, website traffic estimates, and spam factors |
Pricing | Starts at $49/month | Starts at $139.95/month |
Free trial | 7 days | 7 days |
Customer support channels | Email, contact form | Email, live chat, phone |
Unique features | WYSIWYG customizable and drag-and-drop reports, publishing content to WordPress, social media monitoring and posting | Topic clustering, advertising research, SEO writing assistant, backlink audit, toolkit for outreach, word count metric, SEO WordPress plugin |
Pros | Affordable for website owners and small businesses, pulls in data from multiple sources, including Google Ads, Moz, and Majestic | Wide range of powerful SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media features |
Cons | Some features can be confusing to navigate, and capabilities are limited to SEO, PPC, and reporting | Traffic estimates are not always accurate, and only one user can be logged in at a time (unless you pay for extra seats) |
Best for | Small businesses and budget-conscious users looking for fairly straightforward reporting capabilities | Marketing teams and professionals seeking comprehensive SEO and content marketing tools with advanced analytics |
Key Features Compared
Every SEO tool claims to do it all, but the real value lies in how well they execute the features that matter most to you.
Let’s dive deep into what sets these platforms apart—from their keyword research capabilities to their reporting prowess—so you can make an informed decision.
Keyword Research Data
While Semrush can also help with PPC keyword research, it really shines when it comes to SEO keyword research. In fact, it’s a far better organic keyword research tool than Raven.
Here’s why:
Semrush’s keyword research toolkit offers more metrics and features for in-depth keyword research than Raven Tools.
While Semrush can show much of the same PPC-relevant data (like CPC and competitive density), the Keyword Overview tool also provides unique metrics that Raven Tools lacks, such as:
- Search intent
- The number of SERP results
- The number of ads for a keyword
- Keyword clusters
- Keyword difficulty
On the topic of keyword difficulty, Semrush also provides AI-powered personalized keyword metrics for your website. This includes your own site’s personal keyword difficulty and topical authority.
You can use these metrics to find keywords your site is likely to rank for. Forecasting metrics like potential position and traffic can help you plan your keyword strategy far more effectively.
Then, you have the Keyword Magic Tool, which makes it easy to uncover new ranking opportunities.
By entering a seed keyword, the tool generates thousands of suggestions, including long-tail keywords and question-based keywords. It also lets you filter the list of keywords it finds using lots of handy metrics.
(You’ll also be able to get personalized keyword difficulty and traffic metrics here.)
Unlike Semrush, which uses a proprietary database of keywords, Raven Tools aggregates keyword data from Google Ads and Majestic.
Its Keyword Research Central report provides various metrics, but not the same ones provided by Semrush.
Firstly, the search volume data primarily comes from Google Ads, meaning you get rough estimates based on a platform designed for PPC advertising.
You’ll notice a search volume figure from Majestic, too. But this appears to be a scale, rather than absolute figures (as I’m fairly sure “digital marketing” gets more than 63 searchers per month).
You’ll also see lots of other metrics from Majestic, like the number of times the keyword appears in titles and URLs.
I’m not sure how useful this data is though—I’d much rather just see accurate search volume data so that I can understand the potential traffic impact if I ranked for this keyword.
Like Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, Raven Tools can also generate keyword suggestions. But confusingly, it’s under the “SERP Tracker” feature in the Rank Tracking section of the tool.
This includes search volumes for your target country and competition level, which indicates how tough it is to compete for a keyword in paid search (not necessarily organic search).
Overall, Semrush is the clear winner when it comes to keyword research. While Raven Tools could be useful from a PPC perspective, Semrush’s Keyword Overview and Keyword Magic Tool also provide much of the same PPC data anyway.
On-Page & Technical SEO Data
Both Raven Tools and Semrush offer valuable insights into your website’s technical performance. However, their approaches and feature sets differ slightly.
Raven Tools provides a solid foundation for technical SEO analysis through its Site Auditor tool.
This tool covers key technical categories, including:
- Visibility
- Meta (like titles and descriptions)
- Content
- Links
- Images
- Semantic issues
By organizing these issues, Raven Tools helps you tackle SEO problems systematically.
Note that you can view the results in the “Classic” format (like above) or in the “Studio” format (which lets you tick things off as you go):
Raven Tools lacks a dedicated on-page SEO tool.
But its audit reports still offer valuable insights for some on-page improvements, highlighting elements like H1 tags, metadata, duplicate content, and canonical tags.
These features provide basic on-page guidance, even if they don’t offer the deeper recommendations found in more comprehensive tools.
Semrush’s approach to technical SEO goes further, with its Site Audit tool covering over 140 potential technical issues (from keyword cannibalization to orphan pages), many of which are beyond Raven Tools’ scope.
You get a straightforward dashboard like the above, but you can also click into each thematic report for a detailed breakdown of all the relevant checks.
This is where you’ll find advice on how to fix each issue.
Another standout feature that Semrush offers, which Raven Tools lacks, is the On Page SEO Checker.
This tool analyzes your site and provides actionable recommendations to improve your rankings with specific on-page SEO tips. (Rather than bundling on-page and technical SEO together like Raven Tools.)
It’s particularly helpful for those new to SEO or anyone looking to optimize their pages but unsure of the best next steps.
For example, it provides insights into content structure, keyword usage, and metadata optimization:
This feature fills a gap left by Raven Tools, offering not just technical insights but also step-by-step suggestions to enhance your on-page elements as well.
Off-Page SEO Data
A major component of off-page SEO is building and analyzing backlinks.
The good news? Both Semrush and Raven Tools can help you tackle this crucial task.
Raven Tools’ Backlink Explorer is a solid choice if you’re looking for straightforward insights into your own backlink profile or your competitor’s.
It gives you helpful metrics like:
- Total backlinks
- Referring pages
- Destination pages
- Anchor text
- Citation Flow (a Majestic metric that scores backlink quantity on a scale of 0-100)
Raven Tools also offers a filter option. This allows you to view nofollow links or image links so you get a more targeted analysis.
While it’s decent for identifying link sources and spotting patterns, Raven Tools relies on data from Majestic, and it can take several minutes to run the analysis. This is especially noticeable on larger sites with potentially hundreds of thousands of backlinks—and you’ll only be able to see 50,000 of them.
Contrast that to Semrush’s backlink analysis tools, which can show you ALL of the backlinks pointing to a given domain almost instantaneously.
Semrush combines proprietary data with robust metrics, giving you a more detailed and strategic view of your backlink profile.
Beyond just counting links, Semrush helps you evaluate their quality and potential impact, making it easier to prioritize the ones that matter most for your link-building campaigns.
The Semrush Backlink Analytics tool lets you:
- Analyze any site’s backlink profile, like Raven Tools, but with Semrush’s proprietary database instead of third-party sources
- Track backlink trends over time to monitor growth
- Identify toxic backlinks that could harm your rankings or reputation
Once you have the big picture, you can dig deeper with Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool.
This tool offers more detailed features compared to Raven Tools’ Backlink Explorer, allowing you to:
- Assess the toxicity of each backlink
- Move harmful backlinks to Disavow or Remove lists
- Search for specific words in URLs and anchor texts
- Filter backlinks based on nofollow, sponsored, and UGC backlink types
- Discover new backlinks and monitor lost ones
So, Semrush definitely wins when it comes to backlink analysis. But what about the “building” part of link building?
When it comes to identifying backlink opportunities, both tools offer helpful solutions.
For example, Raven Tools’ Link Spy identifies potential backlink prospects by analyzing websites that already rank for your target keyword.
Link Spy prioritizes websites linking to the top 10 Google search results for that keyword. This gives you a list of prospects you can save for further analysis.
Link Spy offers a list of backlink prospects, but Semrush’s Link Building Tool goes further, offering a dedicated platform to manage the entire link-building process.
It lets you find prospects, add them to lists, reach out to them, and even monitor your results—all in one place.
Local SEO Reports
Semrush offers a comprehensive suite of local SEO tools to help you manage your Google Business Profile, monitor online reviews, automatically post business listings, and access precise local rankings data.
You can use the Listing Management tool to update data across all of your listings in one place and even see where your business ranks at the street level with the Map Rank Tracker.
Raven Tools doesn’t offer dedicated features for managing local SEO campaigns.
Paid Advertising Reports
Both Semrush and Raven Tools offer useful features for managing paid advertising campaigns.
Raven Tools connects directly to Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads, letting you monitor campaigns and generate performance reports for clients. It’s ideal for managing multi-platform campaigns.
Semrush’s paid marketing tools focus on Google Ads, providing advanced tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, and campaign optimization.
This includes the Advertising Research tool for analyzing your competitor’s paid marketing efforts.
And the PLA Research tool for understanding how your rivals market their products in Google search.
Semrush’s advertising tools provide a great way to analyze your competitors’ PPC campaigns and find opportunities to improve your own return on investment.
But if you just want a way to track your Google, Bing, and Facebook ads in one place and provide clients with intuitive reports, Raven Tools is a good choice for you.
Social Media Marketing Features
For social media management, Semrush goes beyond simple performance tracking. Its Social Media Toolkit contains various powerful tools designed to help you manage your social media campaigns effectively from start to finish.
It lets you post and schedule content directly to social media channels like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, and you can track their performance all in one place.
Raven Tools’ social media features are much more limited. It offers a few traffic reports to assess social media performance on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but that’s about the extent of its social media analysis capabilities.
While neither tool is specifically built for social media management, Semrush clearly stands out.
Rank Tracking
Tracking keyword rankings is key to measuring your organic performance over time, and choosing the right rank-tracking tools makes all the difference.
Raven Tools’ SERP Tracker lets you manually add keywords, set the tracking frequency, and choose search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu.
Simple but not flawless, Raven Tools works best for basic rank tracking.
Raven Tools’ Rank Checker lets you view keyword rankings for any domain. This is particularly useful when analyzing competitors’ top-performing keywords.
I prefer Semrush’s Position Tracking tool for its user-friendly interface and extensive data and reporting capabilities.
When you open the Semrush Position Tracking Overview report, you immediately see a chart showing your website’s search visibility.
This is a great visual representation of how visible your (or your client’s) domain is for the keywords you’re tracking.
Below the chart is a detailed list of tracked keywords, their rankings, and position changes over time. Unlike Raven Tools, Semrush also tracks whether your website appears in any SERP features for your target keywords.
Another key difference is that you don’t need to manually specify competitor URLs in Semrush. It automatically detects websites competing with yours for traffic based on the keywords in your campaign.
You can easily add these competitors to your tracking campaign with a single click.
Overall Reporting
Both Semrush and Raven Tools offer generous reporting capabilities, but the best tool for you will depend on what you want to track.
For example, Semrush provides unlimited keyword, domain, and backlink analytics reports across all subscription plans. It’s a solid choice if you focus on comprehensive site analysis.
In contrast, Raven Tools has limits on link-building reports. With the Small Business plan, you can generate only 20 reports in the Backlink Explorer and 10 reports in the Link Spy tool.
Here’s everything both tools offer at a glance, from a reporting perspective:
Tracking Feature | Raven Tools | Semrush |
Backlink Analysis | Uses Majestic and Moz, Small Business plan limits to 20 Backlink Explorer and 10 Link Spy reports | Proprietary backlink database with unlimited reports across all plans |
Keyword Tracking | Tracks up to 1,500 keywords for two domains (Small Business), supports multiple search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu). | Tracks up to 500 keywords for five domains (Pro plan), supports only Google SERP but includes daily updates |
PPC Campaigns | Tracks PPC data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads, but lacks campaign planning functionality | Focuses on Google Ads but provides advanced campaign planning and competitor analysis tools |
SEO Reporting | Generates pre-made, client-friendly reports but lacks deep customization options | Offers customizable, detailed reports with broader data access and analytics capabilities |
Site Crawls | Crawls 50,000 pages/month (Small Business plan), scales up to seven million on advanced plans | Crawls 100,000 pages/month on the Pro plan, Business plan supports up to 1 million crawls/month |
Rank Tracking | Tracks rankings across multiple search engines with better keyword limits for lower-tier plans (1,500 keywords/month). | Tracks rankings primarily on Google; Pro plan supports 500 keywords, scaling to 5,000 on Business |
Raven Tools vs. Semrush Data Sources
One of the most important factors I consider when choosing an SEO tool is data reliability. After all, if the data isn’t accurate, the tool’s value takes a serious hit.
Let’s break down how Raven Tools and Semrush stack up when it comes to their data sources.
Where Does Semrush Get Its Data?
Semrush combines machine-learning algorithms with trusted third-party sources to gather data. It estimates keyword rankings by analyzing the top 100 Google results for millions of search terms.
For backlinks, Semrush relies on its proprietary crawlers, offering unique insights independent of external tools.
While Semrush does get some data from third parties, like Google Ads data for some of the PPC metrics, its proprietary keyword and backlink data truly set it apart from Raven Tools.
Where Does Raven Tools Get Its Data?
Raven Tools gets its keyword data from Google Ads and Majestic.
The backlink data from Majestic and Moz is useful, but it might feel redundant if you already use those tools.
Pricing
Semrush’s Pro plan starts at $139.95 per month and is ideal for individual website owners and small businesses who want to grow their online presence through SEO and/or PPC.
Agencies managing multiple clients can opt for Guru or Business plans with expanded features and data limits.
Semrush offers a trial of their Pro plan, and there is a free account with basic access to tools like keyword research (10 searches/day), site audits (100 URLs), and position tracking (10 keywords). While great for beginners, advanced features require a paid plan.
Raven Tools provides five pricing plans, starting at $49 per month for beginners and startups. As your needs evolve, you can upgrade to the pricier plans to access more advanced features and increased limits.
Semrush is more expensive than Raven Tools, so budget will be a deciding factor for many. However, as an all-in-one platform, it offers strong value, covering keyword research, content optimization, backlink analysis, and technical SEO.
The extensive proprietary data makes it a strong choice, not just compared to Raven Tools but many other SEO tools as well.
Support
For many people who are stuck choosing between two SEO tools, support can be a deciding factor.
Semrush offers support via multiple channels, including email, live chat, and phone.
If you’re an existing user, you can also access live chat directly within your account—a feature that Raven Tools doesn’t provide.
Support for Raven Tools is available through email or via a contact form within your account.
They do have links to their social media accounts on the website, too, but they haven’t been active on any of them in several years.
Which Is Better: Semrush or Raven Tools?
Both Raven Tools and Semrush are robust SEO tool suites, each catering to different needs.
Raven Tools provides budget-conscious, user-friendly reporting, ideal for small businesses or agencies focused on streamlined analytics and client reporting.
Semrush offers a comprehensive array of features, making it ideal for individuals and multi-functional marketing teams seeking extensive PPC and SEO tools.Ready to try Semrush out for yourself?
Start your 14-day Semrush pro trial today.