Moz vs. SEMrush vs. Ahrefs: Which SEO Tool is Best?

Moz vs. SEMrush vs. Ahrefs: which SEO tool is best? Well enough with the comparisons!

This article will put them head to find out which one outperforms the others. So enough talk!

But to feed your curiosity, here's what each of the SEO tools is best for:

Moz: Best All-around SEO solution for small businesses

SEMrush: Best for Keyword Research and Content Marketing

Ahrefs: Best for Backlinks Analysis

Moz SEO Tool Review

Moz offers two SEO products - Moz Pro and Moz Local. But for the sake of this Moz vs Ahrefs vs SEMrush comparison, the focus will be on Moz Pro.

Features of Moz Pro

1. Keywords Research Tools

To rank high on Google search results, your content must revolve around what people are actively looking for. This is where Keyword Research tool becomes important.

With Moz, you can identify what keywords people are searching for, how difficult it is to rank for a keyword, the popularity of a search term and other unique keywords. Moz also allows you to discover the strength of websites using a specific keyword.

Moz also offers you a unique keyword research functionality called Page Authority (PA). This feature tells you how high your page will rank on search engine results pages if you use a particular keyword.

With this feature, you can analyze and compare keywords to find out which one helps you to rank higher.

With Moz, you can also generate, save, and export keyword lists and suggestions.

2. Link Research Tools

Having other sites vouch for your content sends a clear message to Google that your page is legit. With that message being loud and clear, Google will show favoritism to your site when ranking sites on search engine result pages (SERP).

With Moz, you can get an accurate analysis of your website's link profile. This analysis will enable you to identify high-quality and low-quality site links that are pointing to your website.

Analyzing your site's link profile on Moz provides you with insight on the number of backlinks on your site and that of your competitors. You get to also see the number of broken, new, spammy, and lost links.

Moz also offers you a Link research functionality that enables you to compare your site's link profile to that of your competitors. And to supplement this functionality, Moz provides you with a link tracking list feature that enables you to set goals as you create multiple lists for building links.

3. Rank Tracking

Tracking your website's position on Google search engine pages is vital to understanding what better decisions can be made to elevate your site's ranking.

And thankfully, you can track your site's keyword ranking with Moz. Not only that, but you can also see each keyword's performance on Google SERP. With this functionality, you can make better decisions when choosing keywords.

Aside from knowing how well you rank on SERP, Moz also provides you with insight into how well your competitors rank. With this data, you can identify and cover up the loopholes in your strategy.

Using Moz also allows you to view and optimize your ranking on mobile and desktop devices.

4. Site Crawl Feature

Moz's website crawling tool has everything you need that ensures that your site passes Google's crawling and index test.

Here's an overview of the features offered by Moz Site Crawl Tool:

A. Finding and Fixing of Issues: Moz allows you to identify and solve any technical SEO errors that may prevent you from ranking high on Google SERP. It also allows you to fix site issues that hinder your page from getting indexed by Google.

B. Efficient Crawling of Site: Moz performs routine crawls on your site to keep track of any recent or recurring errors. It also presents you with a detailed overview of issues in colorful charts thereby making it easy for you to spot opportunities that lead to better SEO performance.

C. Provides Help and Support: When an error is discovered on your site, Moz alerts you of its existence while giving you a comprehensive summary of its impact on your SEO performance and how to get it solved.

5. On-page SEO

When visitors click on your site's content, what they think about your site matters a lot. If they can easily get the information they want, Google will assume that your site is worthy of a higher position on SERP and so it will rank you higher.

For this reason, Moz provides an On-page optimization tool that optimizes your site in order to give Google a better understanding of your site's content, and whether it is suitable as an answer to a searcher's query.

Moz also provides you with an SEO recommendation list and suggestions on how best to optimize your content for SERP.

6. Generate Custom Reports

This Moz feature enables you to generate custom reports of your site's performance over a period of time. This report could be about your site's ranking, website crawl data, backlinks data, and more.

This report, which can be converted to pdf or CSV, can be easily shared with your team and clients. In addition, you can decide how often reports gets sent to anyone.

Moz also allows you to customize your reports by offering you templates to choose from. You are also allowed to input charts and graphs into the reports.

To add to that, this Moz feature permits you to add comments to a report.

Pros of Using Moz

1. Ease of Use

If you are new to the world of SEO tools, using Moz might just be a great idea due to its many intuitive features.

Moz has a simple and easy-to-navigate interface that enables anyone to get the hang of what they are doing even if it's their first time.

Moz also provides you with a beginner guide manual that explains everything you need to know about SEO.

2. Free Plan

Moz offers a free plan that gives you free access powerful SEO tools. But you can only utilize these tools on a limited basis.

On Moz free version, you can conduct keyword research, find your competitors, make link research, and more.

Moz Pro premium plan also comes with a 30-day trial period that lets you see for yourself the powerful features of Moz.

Cons of Using Moz

1. Pricey

Moz's pricing plan which ranges from $99/month to $599/month can be a bit pricey for the small businesses it is supposed to cater for.

2. No Mobile Application

Moz SEO tool does not have a mobile application.

Moz Pricing Plan

Moz offers five pricing plans but with the fifth one being a negotiable plan, it will not be considered here.

Moz Standard Plan: This is the cheapest plan offered by Moz and it costs $99/month for one user. On this plan, you can have access to all of Moz's features except speed crawls, report templates, and branded reports.

But note that there are some limitations placed on the accessible features on the standard plan.

Moz Medium Plan: This plan comes at the cost of $143/month for two users when billed annually. The only feature absent on this plan is the speed crawls, but it compensates subscribers of this plan by increasing the limits placed on the number of keyword searches and lists to be used.

Moz Large Plan: This plan costs $239/month for 3 user seats when billed annually, and offers no speed crawls. But it offers an increased number of keyword searches and lists.

Moz Premium Plan: Users of this plan pay the sum of $479/month for five users. There's a speed crawl feature, and the number of keyword searches and links is greatly increased.

Note: All of Moz's paid plan offers a 30-day free trial period.

SEMrush Review

Features of SEMrush

1. Domain analysis

SEMrush allows you to check out the quality of your website and that of your competitors.

All you have to do when performing the analysis is to input the name of the domain into the Domain overview section.

SEMrush domain analysis feature provides you the authority score of the site you want, numbers of paid and organic search traffic per month, the total number of backlinks the site has, the site's top-performing keywords, competing sites, organic traffic and organic keyword stats, top organic keyword and their search intent.

There is a lot of other information provided in this overview section and it is good to note that the domain analyses feature is free.

With the data provided in the domain analyses section, you can know which sites to get backlinks from, and where your site is lacking.

2. Backlink Audit, Link building tool, and Backlink Gap Feature

As your site's position on Google search engine result pages depends on the number of backlinks you have, SEMrush offers you three backlink functionality that assists you in ranking higher - backlink audit, link building functionality, and backlink gap.

The backlink audit functionality allows you to inspect the external links pointing to your site in order to help you identify harmful links.

With the link-building tool, you can discover and reach out to strong sites for a chance to feature your site on their page.

The backlink gap functionality enables you to compare 5 domains at the same time.

This tools also gives you a platform to analyze your competitor's backlinks, find opportunities that could boost your ranking, and make better SEO decisions.

3. Keyword Research Tool

SEMrush's keyword magic tool, keyword manager, and keyword gap tool are keyword research tools offered by SEMrush to enable you to make the right decisions when choosing keywords.

The Keyword Magic tool comes with a database of more than 20 billion keywords thereby giving you the opportunity to build master lists of keywords, get fresh keyword data, and discover content ideas.

With the keyword gap functionality, you can analyze the keyword profile of your competitors. The keyword manager, on the other hand, gives you an in-depth analysis of up to 1000 keywords at the same time.

Aside from showing you data on how difficult it is to rank high with a keyword, SEMrush also provides you with keyword intent data.

The keyword intent functionality gives you data on your visitor's purpose for browsing through your site. It labels your keyword as informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional.

4. Rank Tracking Tool

This SEMrush position tracking tool helps you to discover your position on search engine results pages when you use a particular keyword. The data it provides gives you an insight into the areas you're lacking and the ways to overtake your competitors.

To discover and track your position on SERP, navigate the SEMrush interface to the rank tracker section. Then input your domain name and the keyword you will like to track.

You can also enter your competitor's domain name to find out how they are ranking for a particular keyword.

SEMrush also provides you with email notifications and alerts when a trivial or significant change is noticed in your ranking.

5. Website audits for on-page SEO

A site with crawl errors, overused keywords, SSL content, slow-loading page, and other technical SEO issues can't be considered by Google for SERP.

So SEMrush site auditing tool does well to help you discover and eliminate any vulnerabilities that may affect your site's health.

This all-in-one auditing tool offered by SEMrush frequently checks for over 130 types of website issues. When an issue is discovered, you'll receive an alert that tells you about the issue, why it should be solved, and how it can be solved.

SEMrush also sends you notifications on your site's crawlability performance, internal linking, page speed performance, International SEO, HTTPS, markups, and more.

6. Reports

With this feature, you can create a custom report of your SEO progress from scratch or you can select a SEMrush template to build a report with.

SEMrush reporting feature just like Moz allows for white labeling, scheduling of reports, and branding.

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PROS of Using SEMrush

1. Ease of Use

Although SEMrush isn't as beginner-friendly as Moz, its clean interface gives it a pass.

On the SEMrush interface, you can easily find any menu option since they are all placed in categories at the side of the interface.

In addition, SEMrush visualization of data makes it less overwhelming when interpreting data. The use of bright colors when presenting stats and data is relieving.

2. Value for Money

SEMrush isn't the cheapest SEO tool, but it offers you value that's worth the amount you pay. Every of its feature has no missing functionality.

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Cons of Using SEMrush

1. Hard to Use on Mobile Devices

The SEMrush interface isn't responsive and optimized for mobile devices. Users who log into SEMrush on a mobile device will have to zoom and pinch to get the most out of it.

When using SEMrush, it's best that you use a desktop device.

2. Provides data for only Google search engine

It's true that your main focus is on how to rank high on Google search engines. But Google isn't the only search engine people use.

Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Baidu are some popular search engines used by people. So when optimizing your site for search engines, your focus should not only be on Google.

Unfortunately, SEMrush only provides you with data from Google search engines.

3. Extra Costs

SEMrush's competitive intelligence feature that enables you to analyze your competitor's websites can only be accessed when you purchase the SEMrush Trend add-on that costs $200/month per user.

This is extremely expensive considering the fact that SEMrush's cheapest plan costs $119/month.

Additional user option costs $100/month, the agency growth kits also costs $200/month.

SEMrush Pricing

SEMrush comes with a Free plan and three other paid plans.

The PRO plan costs $119/month and allows you to track up to 500 daily keywords. It comes with a keyword, domain, and backlink analysis feature. The content management feature is unavailable in this plan therefore is only suitable for freelancers and small businesses.

The GURU plan costs $229/month and includes a content marketing platform as well as other features of SEMrush. This plan is more suitable for marketing departments, and larger teams.

The Business Plan, which comes at a hefty price of $449/month allows you to manage up to 40 projects, enables you to track up to 5000 keywords, and allows you to crawl your pages for up to a million times a month.

All plans offered by SEMrush come with a 30-day trial period and a 17% discount when billed annually.

Ahrefs Review

Founded in 2011, Ahrefs is among the new and few SEO tools in the market that have earned a top place in the SEO tools world.

As a tool that was originally created for the sole purpose of making backlink analysis, Ahrefs has evolved into a more advanced tool for SEO.

Features of Ahrefs

1. Keyword Research

Like the other two SEO tools in this article, Ahrefs has a keyword research feature that gives you relevant data about everything you need to know about a keyword.

It performs keyword research and shows you data on a keyword's difficultly level, average and global monthly search volumes of a keyword, the rate at which a user searches for the keyword again, and the cost per click that advertisers pay to appear for a keyword.

But it doesn't only stop there. Ahrefs also allows you to not only generate keyword data for Google but also perform keyword research in up to 10 search engines.

With Ahrefs, you can rank high on search engines like Youtube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu (China), Naver/Daum (South Korea), Yandex (Russia), and Seznam (Czech Republic).

You just have to switch from Google to any other search engines to see the monthly search volume for a keyword.

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