SEMRush vs Moz 2021

SEMrush and Moz are two extremely popular SEO tools you can lay your hands on. They are the movers and shakers of SEo.

If you want to use a tool that gives you insights into how your site and competitor sites are performing use one of these tools.

But the question is not if these tools are any good. The question is which tool is better amongst the two SEMrush and Moz.

It’s hard to know and this post is all about helping you choose one tool over the other.

SEMrush and Moz are quite different tools based on where their focus is. If you’re looking for a quick and easy answer I believe SEMrush trumps Moz every single time and at all use cases you can possibly throw at it.

SEMrush

What can SEMrush be used for

You must have heard of SEMrush at least once. It’s a great tool in the right hands and can turn raw data into insights.

SEMrush made big strides with their site audit and backlink analysis tool which is better compared to almost any other tool. The keyword magic tool helps you find incredibly useful keywords at one go.

SEMrush tools

SEMrush offers you a number of benefits

  • You can conduct organic keyword research and track site rankings and trends
  • You can discover the backlinks of a site
  • You can look at the paid search results
  • You can look at the product listing ads
  • You can look at display advertising trends
  • Compare domains
  • Look at keywords data phrase wise, related keywords, and ad history.
  • You can add projects and track your site
  • You can do a gap analysis and compare several different keywords and their backlinks
  • You can conduct topic research

SEMrush as a tool is best for seos and agencies and consultants.

The SEMrush dashboard

With the SEMrush dashboard you can get an overview of the sites to track that can be set up on Projects and see how well they are doing.

The organic research tab and the backlinks tab are both ideal. You can also use the keyword analytics tool that is similar to what you may find on Ahrefs.

Research Tools

With the organic research tool you can add a domain to the search bar and get a bunch of actionable data. You get a good idea regarding how the site is performing.

Backlink Analysis

The backlink analysis module on SEMrush is great for understanding who is linking out to you and what anchor text they are using. Above all, you see the with the backlink tool which sites your competitors are getting links from. gives you a multi eyed strategy to understand how to acquire more links and get yourselves ranking higher.

Backlink Gap

When comparing sites together you can input them and use the Backlink gap analysis tool to see the links competitors have but you don’t. You see the strategies they are using to rank and ones you can replicate very well.

Keyword Difficulty

The keywordThe keyword difficulty tool lets you analyze a bunch of keywords and look at their competitiveness. You can click on each of these keywords to determine their search engine volumes and see the results for the top 20 ranking keywords. 

AdWords Research

In addition, another key thing to research is the paid ad keywords for a domain. You can see the keywords people are bidding on and their positional ranking for those keywords.

PLA Research

If you’re in eCommerce you can use the SEmrush tool for conducting PLA research. These are product listing ads and help you understand if your competitor is using any of these ads.

With semrush adding a competitor domain gives you ready access to the different keywords they are bidding on for PLA ads.

The tool is useful for eCommerce marketers and managers.

Other tools

Every year SEMrush keeps adding to the repository of tools expanding it further and further.

  • SEO Content Template tool
  • Lead Generation tool

SEO Content Template tool

The seo content template tool is where you can add a keyword you want to ideally rank for and you can see how it needs to be included on the page to get yourself ranking.

The tool gives you a list of sites to get links from, the braided search term competition and anything else that’s important.

Who Moz is best for

Moz has a number of great tools that work for a small to medium sized business.

You can track technical seo and keyword rankings and get information on what to do to improve your rankings.

Moz is great for consultants and small agencies looking to further their SEO efforts.

Moz Tools

Moz lists tools for mainly two types

One is for marketers and businesses who want to track site progress

The second is people running local businesses and wanting to track and improve local rankings with Moz local.

Moz offers the following tools:

  • For SEOs and business owners not operating location-based businesses, Moz offers:
    • Pro campaigns is a feature that can help track site’s metrics, its links and keyword rankings.
    • The opensiteexplorer is the backlink research tool with their link index
    • The mozbar is a chrome or firefox extension to show you the metrics of the website being tracked.
    • The keyword explorer tool is a great keyword research tool that can get you accurate keyword tracking.

For small local business owners the local listing audis feature can be used with My business listing.

  • With local listing audits you can set up your profile for My business listings

Moz is an excellent tool for SEOs and marketers who need specific recommendations to improve their sites.

Moz Pro Campaigns

Moz’s Pro research tools is for campaigns.

  • YOu get weekly crawl reports and metrics for site errors and recommendations to fix these.
  • You get the weekly rank for keywords
  • You get understanding regarding on page optimization.
  • You get to perform link research on the site compared to competitors.

Aa you enter the keyword you get a search visibility score and a brief overview of site rankings and how they changed over time.

You can click and see the individual progress of keywords and how they compare to competitors.

You can also understand search results better with ones with snippets, stars and videos.

Page Optimization

With Moz’s page optimization tool you are going to understand how well you can optimize a page for keywords as you will get multiple suggestions on what you can do to improve the site’s rankings.

Moz optimization tool can help you understand how well a page is optimized for ranking your keyword as well as giving you suggestions on how to improve the ranking.

The page reports only give you an idea regarding how well the current onpage seo factors are optimized. It doesn’t tell you what you need to do from a links perspective to rank higher.

There are content suggestions as well which can give you idea of which keywords to include that are around your main topic. THis helps improve rankings.

Site Crawl

Another selling point of Moz is that if you want to tell clients how healthy their sites are then you can use the crawl section within the campaign. The crawl updates weekly crawls the site and looks for all kinds of errors ranging from missing 404 errors to duplicate content to titles that are longer than usual and others.

A single interface highlights each of the errors.

This can prevent small problems from snowballing to bigger problems so you can put your focus on areas that actually move the traffic needle.

Links

The links section on campaigns gives you a good idea regarding all the links you are attracting to your site and how this changes over time and how does your link profile compare against competitors.

With this you’re going to understand in a deeper manner what is it you’re not doing when compared to competitors.

Moz Local

Moz local is for local businesses or SEOs who offer services to local businesses.

Other Tools

Moz has a lot of tools that can help. Some of these are Open site explorer, the keyword explorer, the crawl test, the on page grader, the rank tracker.

Open Site Explorer

Open site explorer is what Moz is know  for. It’s Moz’s index of the web. The OSE gives you a quick view of the links to your site and that of competitors.

With this you have access to the freshest links

Your top links

The domains linking out to you

The anchor text ratio

The competition against competitors.

  • Spam analysis
  • Link building opportunities
  • Advanced reports.
  •  

Keyword Explorer

The keyword explorer is a new tool and was developed to offer better option to people to research ideas.

There are lot of tools for keyword research and the keyword explorer tool is one of the best you can find.

Enter the keyword adn you will get metrics on it as well as related searches that you can use to expand the set of keywords you usually target. This helps determine if there’s chance to use these keywords or not/