First of all, before jumping into the features of both SEMrush and Moz, it is essential to understand what they are and why they are important for businesses to utilize.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. An SEO tool is a software or an online platform that can assist companies and websites in ensuring that their online content is perfectly optimized for search engines.
The main objective of SEO is to exemplify the visibility of a website in the search engine results pages. These pages are called SERPs or search engine results pages. An effective and successful SEO tool analyzes, tracks, and implements many strategies to elevate businesses’ search engine ranking.
SEMrush was launched in 2008 and boasts nearly half a million users worldwide. Moz was launched in 2004 and has around 35,000 users.
What Are the Key Features of SEMrush?
Keyword Analysis
One of the most important elements of good SEO practice is collating a comprehensive list of keywords tailored to the business’s specific industry and niche. Utilizing SEMrush, companies can easily identify pertinent keywords related to their industry. This critical information is extracted from assessing valuable information such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and other related keywords in the niche.
The functionality of SEMrush extends beyond keyword suggestion and evaluation; the software provides users with a universal comprehension of the competitive marketplace and informs data-driven optimization of a company’s online footprint.
Competitive Analysis
A great benefit of SEMrush is that it equips users with a robust competitive analysis tool, enabling companies to take a deep dive into their competitors’ online presence.
A tool allowing companies to evaluate multiple aspects of their competition’s online strengths and weaknesses can garner valuable insights for strategic planning. The information gathering evolves beyond basic evaluation and provides comprehensive information regarding paid and unpaid strategies.
Through leveraging these insights, users can make data-driven and informed decisions regarding their online strategy and arguably gain a competitive advantage.
Backlink Analysis
Firstly, it is essential to understand the importance of a backlink regarding SEO. In the context of SEO, a backlink is a hyperlink from one website to another. Backlinks are vital within the SEO world as search engines use them to evaluate credibility, authority on subject matter, and the overall relevance of a website; obviously, this is very important within SERP results. In contrast, if a website features spam backlinks or questionable content, the site will see dramatically reduced Google ranking.
SEMrush provides value to its users by enabling them to manage and monitor their backlink profiles actively. Alongside this huge asset, SEMrush allows them to identify potential paths for new cross-functional links to other verified online sources.
The multifaceted tool doubly provides understanding and optimization of current backlink strategies and further gleans insights from competitors’ approaches. This approach allows businesses to stay ahead of the game and grow their online presence.
Site Audit
Another excellent feature of SEMrush is its powerful site audit feature that can evaluate the website’s SEO health. The audit capability can identify potential issues that might hinder SERP performance.
The comprehensive audit feature evaluates deeper than a mere surface-level analysis; the audit can assess the intricacies of website structure, content, and technical elements.
The audit feature provides users great value by providing key metrics and information, prompting them to take advantage of possible optimization opportunities.
As outlined earlier, the technical performance of websites leads to greater search engine rankings, which is key.
Keyword Positioning
Keywords are linked according to their SERP inquiry ranking throughout the initial optimization and refinement of businesses’ websites.
The ability to assess keywords according to their SERP ranking is vital; however, it is also very important to continually evaluate their popularity and reorder online material accordingly.
On-Page SEO Checker
SEMrush features a dynamic tool that evaluates on-page content and offers suggestions to enhance SERP rankings.
Users will receive insights and suggestions to tailor the content to target greater SEO appeal. The insights are based upon meticulous analysis and will offer actionable recommendations.
In essence, SEMrush’s On-Page SEO Checker serves as a comprehensive guide, assisting users in fine-tuning their on-page elements to achieve optimal SEO outcomes.
Social Media Tracker
A neat feature of SEMrush is that it includes a social media channel tracker – it is not just a tool for websites. This alone adds to its value as an efficient and effective tool.
SEMrush monitors and assesses social media content and performance. The tool can then report on engagement metrics and follower growth and assess other popular content of competition sites.
Interestingly, SEMrush can also provide ‘listening’ across the web. Social media management tools typically use this feature, so it is excellent to include this capability within an SEO tool. Listening across brand channels allows companies to ensure that any negative press is immediately addressed and remedied.
SEO Writing Assistant
In the age of AI and the rush towards AI assistants, SEMrush has embraced the curve and developed an AI writing assistant.
The assistant can review content before it is posted live and suggest how it could be tailored more effectively to SEO-friendly language, links, and structured content.
Website Traffic
Another interesting social media management/SEO hybrid item is the capability to assess website traffic via the SEMrush tool. The platform offers a holistic view of website performance by highlighting website traffic patterns, user behavior and habits, and the traffic source.
Interestingly, SEMrush can also offer deeper traffic analytics, review data from multiple websites, and comprehensively evaluate online presence and audience interaction and engagement.
Evaluating traffic and their habits is incredibly beneficial for companies always looking to improve their user interface and ultimately drive sales.
What Are the Key Features of MOZ?
Domain Authority
When comparing different software tools, many share the same features, as that is what users need and expect. However, Moz starts strong with a proprietary tool based on domain authority (DA). This tool is designed to forecast where a website will rank on a SERP.
DA is based on Moz’s specialized algorithms and analytics and provides a predictive evaluation of the domain’s authority and influence within the chosen niche.
The tool forecasts by evaluating factors such as quality and quantity of backlinks, content relevance and accuracy, and overall content and website structure. These aspects of online publishing can be evaluated for SEO ranking purposes.
Obviously, these metrics are insightful and very helpful to site owners. With these key snippets, business owners can assess and tweak their content to improve rankings and increase traffic, visibility, and revenue.
Page Authority
Like its counterpart DA, page authority (PA) serves as another proprietary metric created by Moz. The specific focus of PA is much more granular than DA and focuses on the ranking of individual web pages.
This tool is a helpful add-on when users have received their larger-scale analysis of the domain authority results; page authority should help them when tackling individual pages.
The metric assesses each page on the site and evaluates content relevance to title, backlink quality, and overall page structure by SEO preferences.
This is a beneficial tool that supports digital marketers in honing their content; through evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of online content, the material can be tailored to reach SEO needs and ultimately increase their online visibility and footprint.
This is the perfect accompaniment to the DA tool to break down the results and remedy the initial issues identified.
On-Page Grader
As a nice add-on to the robust and comprehensive DA and PA tools, Moz goes two steps further and provides an On-Page Grade (OPG) system, which assesses the edited work completed after the PA and makes further suggestions to refine content to grow engagement.
The OPG is another tool in the users’ toolbox to continually assess and edit their content to ensure optimal SERP rankings.
Keyword Explorer
Moz also features a keyword explorer program, which should be included within all SEO tools. As outlined earlier, keyword research and usage is the cornerstone of strong SEO practice.
Keywords that are popular and relevant to the niche and content should be continually assessed for their popularity ranking. These results should be frequently refreshed and evaluated, with all online content updated, as rankings fluctuate.
Link Explorer
Link Explorer is a powerful tool in Moz’s digital arsenal; it allows users to analyze all backlinks associated with their online sites comprehensively. This versatile feature goes beyond a surface-level evaluation and can assess all linking domains and meticulously scrub the quality of inbound links. Robust, safe, and relevant linking is essential within good SEO practice.
With Moz’s robust tool, users can delve into the intricacies of their website’s link profile, gaining valuable insights into the source and nature of these links. By providing a nuanced understanding of the linking landscape, Link Explorer enables Moz users to make informed decisions in optimizing their link building strategies and fortifying their website’s authority in the dynamic digital domain.
Site Crawl and Rank Tracking
A great feature of Moz is the time and effort that they have spent on their software’s maintenance and monitoring aspects. Obviously, the upfront work ensuring that the search engine optimization content is essential; however, the continual maintenance and tracking of content is also imperative for continued success.
Moz analytics features two great tools for this maintenance:
- Site Crawl: This tool routinely crawls through online content and flags anything that might be an SEO-impacting issue, such as broken links or questionable linking to other domains.
- Rank Tracking: Rank tracking continually evaluates the popularity and keyword ranking over time to ensure that content is still ranking within SERP.
Custom Reporting
Another excellent feature of the Moz tool is the ability to produce custom reports based on website and SEO metrics. This is a beneficial feature for digital marketing teams who might be supporting an outside client or internal content marketing teams just looking for performance indicators.
However, this is another hybrid feature typically encompassed within social media management applications, so it’s a nice bonus feature to include within an SEO tool.
Learning Resources
Many smaller businesses or start-ups might not have the luxury of an outside third-party content marketing team, and their internal resource might not even be an SEO expert; this is perfectly typical for smaller businesses. However, Moz offers a great support system for non-professionals by providing an online library of resources perfect for picking up a new skill set. This is an excellent benefit of the Moz toolbox of resources. The guide includes a breakdown of all the basic terminologies and step-by-step guides on utilizing their software effectively.
FAQ
What are the costs of each software?
Moz features four different software tiers based on the amount of online content: the monthly plans range from $99 to $599 for Moz Pro.
SEMrush features four monthly coverage tiers, starting from enterprise at $129 to business at $499. The software also features an enterprise model customized to the large corporation’s specific needs.
Do I also need a social media management tool if I have an SEO tool?
Some of the more robust features of the SEO tools incorporate some aspects of social media management. However, each tool has more specific features geared towards their fortes. It is not advisable to rely on one, but rather select a pair complementing one another to build a robust online footprint.
