Moz Vs SEMrush: Which is the Best Pre-Vetted SEO Tool?

Updated on :October 09, 2023
By :Nathan Sebastian

Introduction:

If you are looking for ways to improve the website’s search engine ranking, then you will need the best SEO tool! With these tools, you are giving an advantage to your business compared to your competitors. Any business striving to sustain online requires to perform an array of SEO tasks to boost their organic visibility. There are plenty of SEO marketing tools accessible in the market, and a suitable SEO marketing tool can provide your business with a new direction and boost the ROI. SEMrush and Moz Pro, the two top-ranked SEO tools, are useful for raising SEO competence of a website. But how to judge which one of these two competing tools is more suitable for your business? Which tool can provide a greater understanding of competitors and help analyze their strategies? Businesses that are looking forward to subscribing to a new tool must analyze shortlisted tools on parameters like insights on their offered SEO features,  which software is easy to use and cost. Based on the comparisons, they must pick the tool that best suits their requirements. 

With tools like SEMrush and Moz Pro, one can take their SEO game up a notch and come out with truly astounding results for their respective blog, business, and/or  clients. If you're reading this, you're probably pondering over the question on which SEO tool to invest. This guide will help you pick the best tool for your business. Or there are chances that you may have already undertaken the free version of one of these or both these SEO tools and are now contemplating whether it's worth getting the fully upgraded version. 

In this comparison article, we will analyze two of the most common SEO tools and see how they compete against each other on features, ease-of-use, and pricing.

Overview:

SEO tools enable website owners to dig deeper into their website, competitors, and search engines for valuable data. While each offers its own unique values, yet there are considerable overlaps between them as well. Once you decide to go with a SEO tool, then a dilemma you will come across is which SEO marketing tool to pick. Therefore, to get the solutions to the queries and a few others, the comparison done below will be more beneficial. Let's compare both of these tools before choosing the best SEO softwarefor business people or bloggers. 

About SEMrush:

SEMrushwas invented in 2008 by a small group of SEO & IT specialists united by an aim to make online competition fair and transparent, thereby offering equal  opportunities for everyone. Since its inception, and with years of trailblazing experiments and constant progress SEMrush has grown into the world's leading competitive research service for online marketing. Having traversed the path from a small startup to a big international organization, the team at SEMrush are still loyal to the fundamental values that earned them this status, which says - “Adapting to change over following a strict plan and always placing individuals over processes.”

Anyone working in the digital marketing industry would be surely aware about the SEMrush tool. It is an excellent tool for the experienced digital marketer who wants to find the data and convert it into insights. Recently, SEMrush made significant strides forward with its site audit tool, keyword magic tool, and a few others that enabled the professionals to find incredibly useful data which helps them optimize their sites or client sites.

Various tools offered by SEMrush are as below:

  • Organic research
  • Backlinks
  • Advertising research
  • Product listing ads research
  • Display advertising
  • Rankings
  • Domain comparison
  • Keyword analytics
  • Gap analysis
  • Topic research

To know more about SEMrush, one can have a look at the video:

About Moz Pro:

Two like-minded entrepreneurs, Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig founded Moz in 2004. Initially, it started as a blog and an online community named as SEOMoz Pro, in which some of the world's first SEO experts shared their research and ideas. The expert team launched the Beginner's Guide to SEO and its first Search Ranking Factors study. In short duration, it was a hub of industry expertise that gradually transformed into a small consulting firm and led it to create some of the primary SEO tools. 

At Moz Pro, the team is obsessively enthusiastic about its mission, which is - “Help people achieve their goals”. The group focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) and sees that as an opportunity, as it is one of the least understood and least transparent aspects of marketing. Moreover, the team is excited to simplify SEO for everyone through their software, education, and community.

Moz Pro begets some great tools, but they only work well for a specific type of client. Moz Pro is best for small to medium-sized businesses who need a semi-passive way to pursue their performance and want to be told a bit more precisely about what to do in order to improve their rankings. Moz Pro is also useful for solo consultants or small agencies who do not have many clients but want to keep their consumers in the loop with regular reporting.

Various tools offered by Moz Pro are as below:

  • Marketing research
  • Targeting location-based rankings
  • Pro campaigns
  • Backlink research tool
  • Keyword research tool
  • My Business Listing
  • Permission management

To know more about Moz Pro, one can also have a glance at the video:

SemRush vs Moz Pro Features Comparison:

Although Moz Pro and SEMrush are powerful SEO toolkits, SEMrush offers more useful tools than Moz Pro. So let’s first have a look at all the features of SEMrush and Moz Pro.


features

There are few more features of SEMrush and Moz Pro that varies from each other and which are mentioned as below:

SEMrush:

  • It gives domain vs domain comparison.
  • It provides the Keyword Magic tool which helps to find over 2 million keyword ideas for a particular website.
  • It allows brand monitoring.
  • The advertising research tool helps to find the competitors ad copies and strategies.

Moz Pro:

One of the key features given by Moz Pro is that it allows users to create custom reports. 

Executive Dashboards:

Both Moz Pro and SEMRush own an executive dashboard that affords an overview of how the search engine optimization efforts are working for a particular project. The most important differentiator between the two is the KPIs each considers as most important.

SEMrush Dashboard:

From domain summary to backlink gap to location tracking, one can find everything and do almost any SEO related task using SEMrush.

The image displayed below gives the clear idea as how the dashboard of SEMrush looks like and what it provides:

semrush dashboard

The new SEMrush Dashboard solidifies numbers and metrics and gives a graphical summary of various information for all the running tools used for a particular project.


semrush dashboard1

One can now track changes in organic and paid search for any database and any number of domains by summing them all to one widget. Managing more real-time data is not so tedious with SEMrush tool, as it gets agilely organized on a single page. If a marketer has launched several campaigns within a single project, then one can easily access the thing that needs attention the most and can solve the problems faster by checking how effective a campaign is simply by glancing at the Dashboard. 

The data one sees in each widget is originated from a tool or report in the SEMrush SEO toolkit. If a website owner wants to get more detail, then it can be obtained from the ‘View Full Report’ button at the bottom of a tab. The marketer will then be redirected to the corresponding tool or report.

One can even customize the design of the dashboard via changing places of individual widgets by merely hovering over the top of the widget that needs to be moved. Noticing an empty widget symbolizes that one of the SEMrush tools hasn’t been set up for a particular project. To resolve this issue, one can set up the required tool right from the dashboard. The image displayed below shows how  one can start a Position Tracking campaign directly from the panel.


semrush dashboard2

Moz Pro Dashboard:

It will present all high level stats and Insights like Search Visibility and Link metrics for a particular site. The Dashboard is here to draw the clients' attention to where it's needed most, as well as provide them with the important at-a-glance data for their campaign.

moz dashboard

To view all the information on the Dashboard, one can adjust the number of rows per page shown in each column employing the dropdown available or can move to the next page using the arrows. The managed-tracked markets, managed tracked competitors, managed tracked keywords, and links will take the marketers to their settings where they can add and eliminate Markets, Keywords, and Competitors.

Analytics:

SEMrush provides traffic metrics for almost any website on the Internet by setting benchmarks and spotting trends.

  • It enables the website owner to count numbers of visits, unique visitors, and user engagement metrics in dynamics.
  • It also notes down the desktop vs. mobile traffic ratio.
  • It can measure any website's direct, referral, search, social, and paid traffic. 
  • It helps to detect priority markets by looking at the countries and their traffic.
  • It collates the top rival's main info.
  • With SEMrush, it gets easy for one to break down the opponent’s strategy.
  • The companies can gauge their SEO efforts and take note of their rankings and SEO efforts.
  • Through Geo-distribution, the business people can determine the regions where most of their competitors' sites come from.
  • They can also compare their web traffic to regional versions of the site.

On the other hand, Moz Pro lets you trace your competitors’ activities on SERPs, but one can’t go deeper than that. 

  • Moz Pro's Local Market Analytics practices multisampling to help to cover what more searchers see when exploring from more locations. 
  • It provides local search volume to help contextualize and notify clients' strategic plans. 
  • With automatic, hyper-local SERP tracking and analytics, robust data visualization, and in-depth competitive insight, one can use Local Market Analytics to assess performance quickly and across markets in order to identify areas for improvement and expansion.

In-Depth Backlink Analysis:

One can efficiently conduct an in-depth backlink analysis using SEMrush. Backlinks play an essential part; the more you work, the more you will get it. SEMrush helps the clients to find a way to deeply analyze backlinks of their opponents. If you want to uncover a few link building strategies, here’s where this tool helps you!

One can conduct in-depth analysis and know what kind of links are pointed towards their respective website. It’s effective backlink checker helps to keep a check on incoming links, how reliable it is, and many more such reports.

With Moz Pro, one can know the location of the backlinks. This tool helps to recognize mentions of one's business anywhere on the web. Sometimes, the website gets mentioned in a blog post, but the blogger fails to link back to your site. However, with this tool, one can see all of the unlinked mentions on the web. One can even know how many people are talking about a particular blog. The brands & mentions section generates a visual graph of all site's mentions in one place.

Keyword Research:

Now, discovering profitable keywords is easy with SEMrush. The website owners can find a detailed list of all the keyword ideas and the monthly search volume by entering any word in the "keyword research" tab at the left side of the dashboard.

Moz’s new tool, Keyword Explorer, benefits in determining which keywords to target for SEO. For this purpose, Moz effectively created four metrics, namely, volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential.

Open Site Explorer:

SemRush provides special filters to narrow the results and find the links which would meet one's specific business criteria. One can conduct in-depth analysis and know what kind of links are pointed towards their website. The useful backlink checker helps to keep a check on incoming links, how reliable they are, and so on. SEMrush databases are updated very regularly, and that’s the one reason why one gets accurate data.

On the contrary, Open Site Explorer is one of the most common tools of Moz. However, to access the best peculiarities of it, one needs to be a paid subscriber. It shows spammy sites that link to one’s websites. Moreover, with this tool one can find suspended and unlinked link phrases on websites as well. Moz is worth your money if your goal is to take SEO optimization to the next level.

Pros of SEMrush:

  • It is the best SEO tool to boost one's SEO strategy with 128,000,000+ domains and 120,000,000+ keywords in its 29 databases.
  • SEMrush covers almost every feature that one requires for SEO; from finding keywords to backlink analysis. 
  • Moreover, it permits to check Domain Vs. Domain metrics that help track competitors.
  • It tracks competitors and consequently improves SEO ranking.
  • It presents more competitive data, and each keyword is backed by a long history like how familiar it is, who has used it, its value, and so on.
  • The AdSense Publishers Report enables to discover where precisely the competitors are advertising.
  • One can get an estimation of how much their competitor might be spending on AdWords in comparison to Product Listing Ads.

Cons of SEMrush:

  • SEMrush base plan allows only 1 user.
  • One can track only up to 3 sites with SEMrush base plan.

Pros of Moz Pro:

  • Moz Pro provides the analytics and results that are very detailed and helpful.
  • It also helps to improve search traffic, rankings, and keyword visibility.
  • Its spam score will help website owners to find potentially spam links on clients' websites.
  • It offers a 30-day free trial so that one can explore all of its features.
  • Moz Pro also uncovers lots of quality link building sources that can increase traffic to a particular blog.
  • Moz Pro proceeds to update their tools and add more extra features to their list. This will undoubtedly help SEO guys to promote their SEO rankings.

Cons of Moz Pro:

  • Moz Pro has many excellent features that are highly useful. It may take a while to figure out all of its functionality when first getting started with it. However, once done,  it proves to be a lifesaver.
  • It starts at $99, and at similar pricing, Moz provides many features compared to SEMrush for the same pricing.

Pricing:

SEMrush pricing plans start at $99.95 per month and rise to $399.95. On opting for their annual plans, one can save upto 16%.

semrush pricing

On the other hand, Moz Pro pricing plans start at $99 per month and rise to $599 per month. One can save up to 20% if opted for their annual plans.

moz pricing

Review Comparison:

Tons of features offered by SEMrush is a good reason to consider it as the best tool in the industry. Users find SEMrush to be very useful as it allows them to find and track their competitors. Most SMBs find it easier and quicker to use it as it provides a wide range of reports which are easy to interpret. 


semrush review

semrush review1

If there is one thing that stands out about Moz, it’s their blog. Moreover, users find Moz Pro to be extremely helpful in keeping track of the digital marketing campaigns. Whereas, many find it an excellent tool for keyword research as it offers one of the largest databases to help with link research.

moz review

moz review1

Verdict:

We know that selecting one tool between SEMrush vs. Moz is hard because both are great SEO tools. Both have their unique features and come at unique price tags.

Moz and SEMrush both are perfectly optimized SEO tools, giving unique features to their clients. SEMrush offers more features as well as mobile aptitudes to businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries. Moz provides services to individual freelancers as well as to the companies. This tool would be a viable choice for a freelance entrepreneur who is just starting or a small or medium-sized business that wants to advance and gain a competitive edge online. If you are a small business owner, Moz is recommended because of the peculiarities it has. If you’re a blogger and marketer, try SEMrush, as it helps to boost search traffic.

All in all, it’s essential to consider the features you need as well as your budget. Of course, each business has unique needs and desires and will utilize features in different ways. One can pick the best tool for their respective business by looking at the overview, features, pros & cons of each and authentic reviews provided by users on GoodFirms platform.

Nathan Sebastian
Nathan Sebastian

Nathan is a Content Writing Expert at GoodFirms, a dedicated research & review firm for software development companies, showcasing their genuine portfolio and clienteles to service seekers. Nathan has been in the content development of marketing & technical spheres for two years now. His focus stays occupied with SEO friendly content for the web to assist GoodFirms in making its IT research reach millions.

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