Semrush vs Moz Comparison: Which is the Better SEO Tool?

A good SEO expert needs a good SEO platform to work with. If you want to become the former, you need to find the latter.

Nowadays, there are a lot of different choices that you can pick from, including SEMrush, Moz, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, and so on. As a budding SEO aficionado, you may find it difficult to choose between these options, especially when they all purport to do the same thing and claim to be the best at it.

In this post, we’re going to be comparing two of the major choices that many can find themselves torn between: SEMrush and Moz. We will review their accessibility, affordability, features, and more.

This comparison has been created to help you understand both of these platforms in detail and understand which one is better for you.

What is SEMrush: A Brief Explanation

Before we dive into the SEMrush vs Moz comparison, let’s take a brief look at what former exactly is and what features it provides.

As per their own definition, SEMrush describes itself as:

“…an all-in-one suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights.”

This is quite a succinct definition. SEMrush is not just an SEO tool, although many of its offerings focus on it. It’s an online suite that serves to help digital marketers in general.

It helps in the creation of marketing content as well as tracking the performance of said content when it is published on a website or social media platforms. The “performance” of the content, in this case, refers to the traffic it garners for the web pages that it is published on. (This is one of the many things SEMrush can be used for. The use-case cited here doesn’t describe the sole purpose or capability of the platform.)

We will look at the tools and utilities this platform offers in more detail in the coming sections. 

What is Moz: A Brief Explanation

Let’s move on to Moz.

One of the main defining points of the SEMrush vs Moz comparison (which is important in understanding the definition of the former) is that while SEMrush is a marketing platform in general, Moz is an SEO platform. That is, it provides online tools and utilities that can be used by SEO experts to make their websites rank higher on the search results. Moz doesn’t provide marketing tools in general. Its offerings are fewer and more limited compared to SEMrush.

Some of the tools offered by Moz include a keyword explorer, brand authority checker, domain analyzer, and so on. We will look at these in more detail further in this article.

Something that a lot of readers may be wondering at this point is this: if Moz doesn’t offer as many tools as SEMrush, doesn’t that already make the latter better? What’s the point of the comparison?

Here’s the thing.

This comparison is to help readers decide which tool is better for SEO. As far as SEO is concerned, both tools are somewhat comparable, which is why this article is being written in the first place. If the comparison was for marketing in general, then yes, SEMrush would have had a great advantage over its rival simply on the basis of the variety it offers in tools.

Which Platform is Better in Terms of Accessibility

To get started with our SEMrush vs Moz comparison, let’s talk about which one of these tools is better in terms of accessibility.

When we say “accessibility,” we refer to the ease with which they can be accessed and used by everyone.

Here are some of the key points to understand about both of these tools.

• Both SEMrush and Mon have what is known as a “freemium” model. They both have premium subscriptions that offer the full experience, but they also provide a basic free mode to users as well. If one of these platforms would have been premium-only, then the “freemium” one would have had an advantage. But, as it is, both SEMrush and Moz are on an equal footing in this regard. They both offer limited attempts/queries per day for free users.

• Both of these platforms also offer some tools that don’t even require you to sign up. However, in this regard, Moz outperforms SEMrush. On both Moz and SEMrush, you can find the keyword research tool and website authority checker for free. Moz, however, offers one or two more tools than SEMrush, which is why it is better in this particular area of the comparison. The “MozCast” tool and the “My Online Presence” checker are both offered by Moz but not by SEMrush.

In terms of basic accessibility, Moz is better than SEMrush as it provides more free “no sign-up” tools.

Which Platform is Better in Terms of Affordability

As mentioned earlier, the best way to use these platforms and get their full potential is to buy the paid versions. That way, you can use all the tools as intended, without getting hampered by daily limitations.

But, when it comes down to the pricing plans, which tool is better in terms of affordability?

Let’s have a look.

Pricing Plans for SEMrush

To get started, here are the monthly pricing details for SEMrush:

Here are the annual pricing details for SEMrush:

You can save a little bit of money when you buy the annual plan instead of the monthly one.

Pricing Plans for Moz

Moving on, here are the pricing details for Moz. Both the yearly and monthly details are mentioned in these panels:

As you can see in the images, the prices for Moz’s premium plans are more affordable when compared to SEMrush.

It has to be remembered that SEMrush has a greater number of tools, perks, and offerings, which is why the higher prices are justified. However, when weighing these platforms purely to see which one is better for SEO (and discounting the other marketing-related tools), Moz comes out as the better choice because it gives you a limitless experience for a lesser amount.

Tool-by-Tool Comparison of Both Platforms

Now that we’re done looking at the basic elements of these platforms, let’s move on to compare SEMrush vs Moz in terms of their main tools.

The reason that we will not compare all of the tools offered by both platforms is due to their sheer number and variety. In the comparison below, we seek to only learn which platform is better for basic SEO tasks, such as domain analysis, keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor research.

The purpose of this article, i.e., finding the better tool for SEO, will be served by the comparison below. Perhaps in a more detailed article, we can delve into every tool there is on both platforms.

• Domain analysis

One of the most important tasks that you have to perform during your SEO campaign is domain analysis. There are many different purposes for domain analysis, the primary of which is to learn about your website and its performance.

Both Moz and SEMrush offer a Domain Overview tool. You can use this tool on both platforms as a free user, albeit with a daily usage limit.

Let’s compare the Domain Overview tool of both platforms.

Below is a table that shows the different details and metrics that both of the tools provide. After the table, you can read our thoughts on which one we think is the better one.

The verdict/result: All of the metrics listed above are very important for domain analysis.

• If we simply see the number of details that are provided by the tools, Moz comes out on top. It offers a very large variety of metrics and data. Some of them, such as the linking opportunities and keyword opportunities are extremely useful.
• That being said, one of the key disadvantages of Moz when compared to SEMrush is that it does not provide details about domain traffic. Domain traffic is one of the universally accepted metrics used to measure the performance of a website. Although Brand Authority and keyword data can serve that purpose as well, the complete absence of traffic metrics is a major downside.

In our opinion, the factor that weighs in Moz’s favor is the number of metrics that it provides as well as the sheer usefulness of them. On the other hand, SEMrush also provides useful data, but it starts off by showing domain traffic, along with country-wise distribution. This gives it an edge over its competitor.

In this particular tool, we consider it a tie between these two platforms. 

• Keyword research

Now let’s take a look at the keyword research tools on both of these platforms. We’ll first look at the various tools/functions that these platforms provide, and then we will compare them side by side.

Moz’s Keyword Research Capabilities

There are three different tools that are offered by Moz for keyword research. These tools include:

• Explore by Keyword: This tool is essentially the “keyword explorer”, as it is known on other platforms. This is the tool that you use to find the volume, difficulty, and CTR of a keyword to determine whether you should write content on it or not. There are a lot of other details that you can find as well, but more on that in a bit.
• Keyword Suggestions: This tool helps you find related keywords that you can target in your content. You can enter a particular keyword in this tool and find others that are similar to it. The tool shows you the keywords along with their metrics.
• Keyword Lists: This tool helps you easily compile lists of keywords and review their overall search volume, ranking difficulty, CTR, and so on.

SEMrush’s Keyword Research Capabilities

Moving on, here are the tools that you can use with SEMrush for keyword research research:

• Keyword Overview: This tool lets you find details and metrics for a particular keyword so that you can decide whether you want to create content for it or not. It shows you the volume for the keyword along with its difficulty, intent, CPC, etc.
• Keyword Magic Tool: This tool is used for keyword creation. You can find and create keywords similar to an existing one to use in your content.
• Keyword Strategy Builder: This tool is used to create entire content strategies based on specific keywords. You can enter a particular keyword, after which the tool creates an entire list of others that you can work on as well. The lists contain various metrics about the keywords, including their volume and difficulty. You can find different “pillar page” keywords along with secondary keywords to target in the smaller, linked posts.

The result/verdict of the comparison: When it comes to keyword research, both of these platforms are on a very equal footing. All three of the tools provided by both SEMrush and Moz perform the same tasks, including finding info about keywords, finding related keywords, and creating keyword lists. 

• Backlink analysis

Moving on with our SEMrush vs Moz comparison, let’s take a look at the performance and capabilities of both these platforms in backlink analysis.

Moz provides these three tools for backlink analysis:

• Link Research, which contains an overall backlink overview, details on linking domains, anchor texts, discovered and lost links, etc.

• Link Intersect, which lets you find websites that link to your competitors but not to your site.

• Link Tracking Lists, which lets you create link-building goals by compiling backlink opportunities, tracking their progress, and so on.

On the other hand, SEMrush provides the following tools for backlink analysis:

• Backlink Analysis, which is the same as the “Link Research” tool by Moz. This tool lets you find basic backlink details for a domain, including the total number of links, referring domains, and so on.
• Backlink Audit, which allows you to run a check on the overall health of your backlink profile. Moz does not provide a dedicated tool for this purpose, which is one of the reasons that we mentioned SEMrush is better.
• Bulk Analysis, which is designed to help you check the backlink profiles of multiple websites at the same time. It can be very valuable when used to check competitors to find backlink opportunities.

The verdict/result of the comparison: SEMrush is much better as compared to Moz when it comes to backlink analysis. SEMrush provides a more useful and comprehensive collection of tools for backlink analysis as compared to Moz. The audit and bulk analysis tools are very handy for SEO specialists.

Other than that, another reason why SEMrush is better than Moz (for backlink analysis) is that it provides a lot of different details and information that the latter doesn’t. For example, when viewing the overview of a domain, you can find details such as:

• Categories of referring domains
• Referring domains by Authority Score
• Backlink types (text, image, etc.)
• TLD distribution
• Country-wise backlink distribution

Competitor research

When it comes to competitor research, you may have already learned up to this point that both Moz and SEMrush provide various tools in backlink analysis, domain analysis, etc., that already serve this function. In other words, we’ve already covered competitor research separately in the sections above. There are features that you can use to find competitors in the Domain Overview tool as well as in Backlink Analysis, etc.

However, the reason that we’re making a separate section for it is that there are some tools offered by these platforms that are specifically geared toward conducting research on competing websites.

For example, the Domain Overview can be used on both your own website as well as on competitors.

SEMrush provides a number of tools in its “Competitive Research” suite, one of which we’ve already discussed, i.e., Domain Overview. Other than that, there are four tools that you can use to compare your website with competing websites.

• Traffic Analytics: This tool provides you with details on the traffic of competing websites.
• Organic Research: This tool helps you conduct research on your competitors’ organic traffic and keywords. The purpose of this tool is to help you find competitors that aren’t just being driven by ads.
• Keyword Gap: This tool helps you compare your website’s ranked keywords with those of your competitors.
• Backlink Gap: This tool helps you compare your backlink profile with those of your competitors.

Moz provides three tools in total, one of which it has in common with SEMrush. The Keyword Gap tool is classified in the Competitive Research suite, but it is present in SEMrush as well. The unique tools that you can enjoy with Moz are:

• True Competitor: A tool that lets you find and compare your website competitors and their metrics side by side.
• Top Competing Content: A tool that lets you find content on your competitors’ websites that outranks you. It is an important tool for improving your content strategy.

Pros and Cons of SEMrush and Moz

Now that we’re done with the tool-by-tool comparison, let us list the pros and cons of both these tools. This will help you get a comprehensive idea of their strengths and weaknesses.

We will compile the pros and cons of both tools together in one list so that they are easy for you to read and understand.

1. Moz is better than SEMrush in terms of accessibility. Moz offers a greater number of free tools that can be accessed without any registration. Although SEMrush provides various tools like this as well, they are not as many in number.
2. Moz is more affordable than SEMrush. The premium plans cost less. SEMrush not only is expensive in comparison to Moz, but it also has a general reputation on the internet for being quite costly. However, it provides a large number of tools to justify this cost.
3. One of the major cons of Moz is that it does not provide website traffic information. For many SEO experts, this is a very important metric. SEMrush, on the other hand, provides it along with many other useful related details.
4. In general, the number of details provided by SEMrush is overall better in comparison with Moz. For example, there is a greater number of details that you can find in backlink analytics and competitor research. The exception is domain overview, where Moz has an edge. In keyword research, they are both on an equal footing.
5. SEMrush is more user-friendly than Moz. While using it, we found that it had a much cleaner and more organized interface.
6. Lastly, although we didn’t delve deep into all of the tools provided by these platforms, the truth of the matter is that SEMrush provides a greater number of them as compared to Moz. There are various “On-Page and Technical SEO” tools that you can use on it, such as Site Audit, Listing Management, Map Rank Tracker, SEO Content Template, Log File Organizer, etc. Moz only provides an On-Page Grader in this category. There are also tools for creating content and conducting topic research that you can find on SEMrush. All of these tools weigh heavily in its favor.

Verdict of SEMrush vs Moz: Which Platform Should I Pick?

In a brutally honest and straightforward comparison, SEMrush stands out as the better choice than Moz. It is easier to use and it provides a greater number of tools to its users. The free plan, once you sign up, is quite generous and you can use it to do a lot.

However, this does not mean that Moz is useless. Here is our recommendation on which platform you should pick:

• If your needs as an SEO expert are basic and if you’re on a tight budget, Moz is the right choice for you.
• If your needs as an SEO expert are extensive, and if you have to manage multiple websites/projects at the same time, SEMrush is the better choice.

FAQs

Is SEMrush better than Moz?

Moz is better for SEO beginners due to its easy and intuitive interface. It provides basic information necessary for SEO without making things confusing. However, SEMrush is better than Moz for acquiring detailed insights and performing extensive content marketing tasks. SEMrush provides a greater number of tools than Moz, and in that regard, it can be considered better than Moz.

What is the Moz Rank in SEO?

The Moz Rank is an important metric that you can use during your SEO campaigns to understand the authority of a website’s link based on its backlink profile. The more numerous and high-quality backlinks a website has, the higher its Moz Rank will be. It is measured on a scale of 1 to 10.

Why is SEMrush so expensive?

There are different reasons why SEMrush is so expensive. One of the reasons is that it provides a range of different tools, which collectively require a lot of resources to be maintained. The company charges more so that it can break even and make a profit.

Another reason why the platform is so expensive is because all of its prices are localized for the USA, and are not adjusted for users in other countries. Since the USD is a stronger currency than most, people in other countries can find the costs quite high.

What are some other alternatives to SEMrush and Moz that I can use?

Ahrefs and Ubersuggest are two popular alternatives that you can use instead of SEMrush and Moz. They provide a similar number and type of features and are popular amongst SEO experts and beginners alike. Ubersuggest is the more affordable choice, while Ahrefs is an SEO powerhouse.