Buzzsumo vs. Ahrefs: Which is best for you?

There are myriads of SEO and digital marketing tools available in the market. All of them seem to have amazing features, upgrades, and competitive pricing, making the process of selecting the right tool for your business time-consuming and challenging.

Two standout tools amidst these mountains of tools are Buzzsumo and Ahrefs. Though both these tools have great features, choosing the wrong tool can cost you precious time and money.

Also, you do not want your competitors to get ahead of you in SERP because you can’t make up your mind.

In this article, we will explore the features of these two tools and will help you decide which one is the best for you.

What are these tools used for?

Ahrefs and Buzzsumo are some of the best tools in the market for SEO and content marketing. These all-in-one platforms help businesses and digital marketers with various tasks like researching, content planning, optimization, site monitoring, and analyzing competitors.

As they are extremely useful in finding the popular and relevant topics that people are searching for or discussing online, they are also referred to as social insight tools.

Both tools offer features like social media monitoring, content explorer, keyword research, and many more.

Both Buzzsumo and Ahrefs also share a range of similar features and functionalities, including:

• View all backlinks and referring domains for a specific piece of content or website.

• Analyze trends and topics.

• Find keyword ideas and assess ranking difficulty.

• Receive alerts for new content.

• Save advanced searches for websites, top authors, and keywords for future reference.

• Refine search results based on top-level domains.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the uses and specific features of each of these tools.

Buzzsumo

Content marketing is a very competitive realm. There is a plethora of content available online, making it very difficult to find a topic that gets the most shares, links, and comments.

But Buzzsumo will make this task easy for you.

This content marketing tool will analyze billions of data points, find high-preforming content, and find the most trending ideas for the topic, thus helping in improving marketing strategy.

In addition, it will help marketers connect with influencers, keep track of brand mentions and competitors, and monitor the latest trends.

Buzzsumo features

Buzzsumo is very straightforward. It provides the following features that will skyrocket your marketing game.

Content Discovery

If you have ever taken the road of digital marketing, you might have encountered writer’s block at some point. It’s like hitting a wall and not being able to come up with any unique and creative ideas.

Buzzsumo is the right solution for this content discovery roadblock.

With Buzzsumo’s content explorer, you can discover trending content and topics, browse the latest trends and forums, and come up with ideas to kick-start your marketing strategy.

Its built-in keyword research tool allows users to find high-traffic keywords that your target audience is searching for. With the tool, you will be able to see the monthly search volume of specific terms and phrases, which will help you understand the popularity of certain keywords.

You can then rank for these keywords and come up with high-demand topic ideas that have a better chance for engagement.

Buzzsumos’ content discovery feature has yet another cool aspect.

Questions.

They will compile questions from platforms like Quora or Reddit. Users can then answer these questions in their content, thus helping readers clear their doubts and understand the topic better.

Content Research

Research is an indispensable part of any content marketing strategy. BuzzSumo has a huge database that will enable users to analyze billions of data points consisting of numerous articles, sites, social media posts, and more.

In addition, you will also be able to access information such as the social engagement index, most engaging content formats, and other competitor benchmarks.

BuzzSumo’s content research tool can also be used for finding the most shared content on social media. It will also provide you insight into Facebook and will tell you what posts are working for the competitors and what are the most trending posts. It will then provide you with page/post analysis data, which you can use to improve the engagement of your social posts.

Another note-worthy aspect is their backlinking feature, which provides real-time notifications for new backlinks.

This functionality allows you to promptly express gratitude to other brands and foster relationships with them. Additionally, this feature enables users to gain insight into the type of content that is most successful in attracting backlinks.

Outreach Influencers

Influencer marketing platforms is a highly effective way to gain trust and authority and more audience for your brand. In fact, about 49% of consumers will place their trust in recommendations by influencers.

If you want to publish great content that will attract your targeted audience and perform well, influencers, top content creators, and thought leaders are great choices. When they vouch for your brand, users will start to trust you and consider you as an authority in the niche.

If you want to work with influencers who can boost your brand, BuzzSumo is an excellent choice.

The tool will enable you to find individuals who have fans and followers you want to target. You can search for niche blogs based on their size or language, conduct top author searches in any field, and determine who gets the most likes, links, and shares.

You will be able to find the most influential voice in social media and find the most suitable influencer for your campaign.

We are not referring to fake influencers who have bought their followers.

You can analyze many metrics and profiles on Facebook and Twitter to find influencers and reach out to them.

All you need to do is enter a keyword to get access to influencers with a large active following.

Brand Monitoring features

If you want your business to grow and succeed, you need to monitor your brand on a regular basis.

You will have to know what your targeted audience thinks of your product, website, and content.

Do they love your brand? Or do they talk smack about it? What do they think of your competitors? You need to know these things to build rapport with your targeted audience and also to be a genuine business.

BuzzSumo makes this task easy for you!

They will allow you to monitor your competitors, notify if your brand is mentioned on social media, and provide industry updates.

Through the alerts, you can stay updated on significant events and remain ahead of the curve when it comes to social media trends.

You can get real-time alerts for keywords, brands, and topics that are relevant to your business. This enables you to respond instantly, solve customer support issues, and more.

Lastly, you can track new backlinks in real time. See which content is attracting fresh links, transform mentions into valuable links, and gain insight into strategies for growing your business.

BuzzSumo Pricing

BuzzSumo currently has four plans for you to choose from: Content Creation, PR & Comms, Suite, and Enterprise plan.

You can choose to pay monthly or yearly. However, if you choose to pay annually, you will receive a 20% discount.

For instance, a content creation plan is $199/ month, but when billed annually, you will have to pay only $159.

Content creation plan ($199/month)

Unlimited searches can be used by one user, two alerts, unlimited exports, unlimited projects, two trending feeds, and two years of historical data.

Content ideas generator, content analyzer, backlink analyzer, topic explorer, keyword tool, question analyzer, monitoring, chrome extension, self-serve help Center.

PR & Comms ($299/month)

Five users, Unlimited searches, five alerts, unlimited exports, unlimited projects, 15 trending feeds, and three years of historical data.

All content creation plan features plus coverage report, slack integration, Media database, 20 journalist media list, journalists’ profile, and self-serve help Center.

Suite Plan ($499/month)

10 Users, Unlimited searches, 10 alerts, Unlimited Projects, 30 trending feeds, and 5 years of historical data.

It consists of all the features of PR & Commos along with building a media list 100 journalists per list), finding Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok influencers, discovering the most influential Facebook pages, and YouTube and Facebook analyzer.

Enterprise plan ($999/month)

30 users, unlimited searches, 50 alerts, 50 trending feeds, 5 years of historical data.

In addition to all the features of the Suite plan, you can build a media list (600 journalists per list) and receive tailored customer support.

You can sign up with your name and email id.

Pros and Cons of BuzzSumo

Ahrefs

If you are looking for an all-in-one tool for all your SEO needs, then Ahrefs is the right solution.

Want to do a broken link-building campaign? No issue.

Want to find keywords with low competition? They’ve got you covered.

In addition, they will help marketers conduct comprehensive research, analyze competitors, increase search traffic, and attain higher rankings in the SERPs.

SEO experts turn to Ahrefs for backlink profile analysis and keyword research as it has the most extensive live index of backlinks and keywords. Moreover, it will update its algorithms to deliver the most precise and up-to-date data available.

Ahrefs features

Here are the main features of Ahrefs that will help you in skyrocketing your content and SEO performance:

Site Explorer

If you want to create an efficient SEO strategy, the first and most important step is to understand every nook and corner of your website.

Without this understanding, your SEO efforts will be similar to taking shots in the dark.

This is where Site Explorer comes in.

If BuzzSumo provides a valuable in-depth backlink analysis feature, the Ahrefs site explorer tool delves 100 times deeper into the website’s profile.

This includes:

• Organic traffic research: You can analyze what keywords contribute the most to the traffic, both for your own website and for your competitors.

• Backlinks: Uncover the websites that are linked to either your site or your competitors’ sites, which can help boost your link-building strategies.

• Paid traffic research: Find how your competitors are leveraging paid traffic and where it is directed. Additionally, assess the performance of your own paid advertising efforts to identify opportunities for improvement.

The site explorer also includes features like keyword rankings, top-performing pages, and insights into competing domains.

Content Explorer

Content Explorer tool features one of the most noteworthy features that will enable marketers to discover and analyze top-performing content in any niche. It is extremely beneficial in finding the most impactful article.

Ahrefs content explorer will allow you to delve into billions of webpages and filter them based on SEO and social metrics, such as:

• Organic traffic

• Reffering domains

• Domain rating

• Traffic Value

• Number of social shares

You can filter results with advanced options to find topics with low competition, potential link-building opportunities, and more.

Further, users can analyze every piece of trendsetting content by individual metrics to understand why they are performing well.

While Content Explorer shares some similarities with BuzzSumo, it distinguishes itself by providing deeper analytics, trends, and content insights.

Keyword Explorer

The backbone of any SEO strategy is keyword research.

If you are targeting the wrong keywords, all your effort will go to waste, resulting in your traffic going nowhere.

However, if you are using Ahrefs keyword explorer, you will be able to analyze keyword difficulty, uncover thousands of quality keyword ideas, and assess their potential traffic.

Ahrefs’ keywords database has about 19.2 billion keywords and is still growing!

They also support about 243 countries, so you will be able to find keywords in almost all the languages.

Moreover, Ahrefs will consider various search engines like Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and many more for your keyword needs.

You will get insight into metrics such as click per search, return rate, and other SEO metrics that other tools cannot provide.

This advanced research tool also offers the capability to generate a SERP overview report, which will enable you to see what traffic your highest-ranking page is attracting and the specific keywords they are ranked for.

Site Audit

Another factor that can influence the success of your SEO effort is auditing. Ahrefs site audit feature will help marketers understand the inner workings of their website and get a comprehensive overview of its performance.

With Site audit, you can access and monitor over 100 SEO issues. It will offer information such as:

• SEO health

• Inbound links

• Outbound links

• Quality of content

• Crawling problems

• Backlink data

• Traffic metrics

• Social tags

• HTML tags

• And more

They will allow you to analyze the on-page SEO issues that are affecting the optimal performance of your website.

Additionally, the site audit also has a data explorer tool that allows for in-depth analysis of your website. You can move beyond predefined issues and tailor the specific data points you want to assess using filters and parameters.

This feature will provide you with a personalized perspective of any URL.

Rank Tracker

With Ahrefs rank tracker, you will be able to monitor your rankings, set up report schedules, and evaluate your performance in comparison to your competitors.

In short, this tool will help you monitor the progress of your keywords and receive regular reports for both desktop and mobile websites.

The rank tracker will provide a visual representation of the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. It offers insight into data like traffic, total search visibility, lost or new positions, etc.

You can also get data for your competitors and use the keywords that are working for them for your campaign.

Based on this information, you can determine which SEO tactics are working and which one is lagging behind.

Ahrefs Pricing

Ahrefs has four pricing plans to fit all types of business needs: Lite, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise.

• Lite ($99): 1 user (500 credits), unlimited verified projects, five unverified projects, and basic features such as site explorer, keyword explorer site audit, alerts, rank tracker, and SERP comparison.

• Standard ($199): All Lite features plus 20 unverified projects, position history charts, SERP updates, competitive analysis, batch analysis, reports sharing, and web mention alerts.

• Advanced ($399): All standard features plus 50 projects, historical data of 2 years, looker studio, dashboard folders, and web explorer.

• Enterprise ($999): customized to fit your team’s needs, 100 projects, all advanced features plus access management, pay by invoice, directory listing, and audit log.

You have the option to make monthly or annual payments, but selecting the annual payment plan offers cost savings.

Ahrefs Pros and Cons

Ahrefs vs. BuzzSumo Wrap UP

BuzzSumo and Ahrefs are both amazing tools that will enable digital marketing professionals to find relevant content, interact with influential individuals, generate keyword suggestions, examine and track on-page SEO metrics, and assess backlinks, keyword performance, and website traffic.

But when it comes to Ahrefs vs. BuzzSumo, the choice will mostly depend on your specific needs.

BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for content research and discovery. It will prove to be a great tool if you don’t require a large amount of SEO data.

For SEO geeks who want to know all the fine details about search performance, Ahrefs will be a more suitable option.

FAQs

What are the benefits of using Ahrefs and BuzzSumo together?

Combining Ahrefs and BuzzSumo will provide a holistic approach to content and SEO strategies. BuzzSumo will assist in identifying trending topics and evaluating content, while Ahrefs will provide an extensive backlink analysis and aid in keyword research.

Together, they will boost your content creation, aid in finding link-building prospects, and optimize SEO strategies to improve visibility and engagement.

What is the difference between BuzzSumo and Ahrefs in terms of content marketing?

BuzzSumo and Ahrefs are two widely used content marketing tools that can assist marketers and businesses with their content strategy. Though both these tools have some similarities, there are some differences between them:

BuzzSumo serves as a content discovery tool, enabling users to search for sought-after content using specific keywords or topics. It showcases the number of social media shares received by each content across various platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. The tool will help marketers identify trending subjects, top-performing content formats, and top influencers within their industry.

On the other hand, Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that has incorporated a content analysis feature. It will provide all the information regarding the websites’ content, including organic search traffic, keyword rankings, and backlinks. It will help content marketers identify content gaps, discover backlinking opportunities, and monitor the content performance of the competitors.

In short, which tool is best for you depends on your business needs and goals.

What are some BuzzSumo alternatives?

Though BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for content marketing, you can have a look at some of the following options:

• SEMrush

• Social Animal

• Content Studio

• Curata

• NinjaOutreach

• Feedly

• Shine Ranker

• Sprout Social

• Oktopost

• Mention