What’s the Difference Between Semrush and Google Analytics/Google Search Console?

Semrush and Google Analytics or Google Search Console are all digital analytics tools, however, their differences in the application are vast.

In broad terms, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are strictly internal analytics tools. Google Analytics is for understanding the user behavior on one website at a time (the site you own or operate). Google Search Console helps you monitor your website or the site you operate on how it is performing in Google Search.

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 and GSC 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 regularly.

Semrush is meant to complement your use of Google Analytics and Google Search Colse, not replace them. 

In fact, we encourage integrating Google Analytics/Search Console and Semrush in a handful of our own tools to enhance the data in Semrush. 

What can Semrush provide that Google Analytics and Google Search Console 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 AI writing tools to help you build out great content for your website, including keyword clustering for search intent 
• 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 Search Console provide that Semrush cannot?

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

• Reports on how Google is indexing your website's pages
• Ability to manually request indexing of a page or URL
• Data about the actual search queries that users entered to find your site on Google
• Notifications if Google has applied a manual action to your website
• Feedback on sitemap processing
• Feedback on whether Google recognizes and uses your structured data for rich results

What can Google Analytics provide that Semrush cannot?

Google Analytics is also 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

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. To learn more about Google Search Console, refer to our blog article Google Search Console: The Ultimate Guide for 2024.