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SEO marketing tools are difficult to compare on face value. Two hugely popular options, Moz Pro and Semrush, are strong contenders in boosting your site’s SEO capability. But how do they compare on some of the most crucial aspects of SEO performance?
Visit Moz Pro’s Website | Visit Semrush’s Website
| Moz Pro | Semrush | |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword Research |  |
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| Backlink Analysis | |
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| Competitor Analytics | |
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| Keyword Tracking | |
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| Pricing | |
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| Overall Winner |  |
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| Visit Website | Visit Website |
Keyword Research
Moz Pro and SEMRush have powerful keyword research tools that give you hundreds of suggestions (better than many of their competitors). Once you enter your seed phrase, both offer advanced filtering, including by broad phrase or exact match, difficulty, words it begins or ends with, and many more options.
When it comes to search volume accuracy, both companies have dedicated a lot of time and resources to make these reports as accurate as possible. We did not find a noticeable difference in the volume reports.
Moz offers a few more complex filters, so while Semrush has a related keywords report, Moz breaks this down even further by filtering closely or broadly related topics, “related to keywords with similar search results,” “a mix of sources,” among others. Innovative filtering options like these can make it difficult to get accurate enough results to be helpful with SEO.
Winner: Moz Pro
Backlink Analysis
Both Moz Pro and Semrush have comprehensive backlink analysis tools, but Semrush gets our nod in this category. Why? Semrush gives you charts that place each backlink type into categories based on percentages, while Moz does not. Semrush also lists backlinks that you’ve lost.
Semrush’s backlink categories include follow vs nofollow, source country, the percentage of links that are text, image or form, and more. These percentage differences can be helpful for large competitor sites looking to identify which posts and topics attract the most links.
Winner: Semrush
Competitor Analytics
Competitor analysis is Semrush’s tour de force — no other SEO tool matches Semrush in this category. This tool allows you to see how your competitors are ranking for tons of different keywords.
Semrush is particularly helpful for paid advertising. They give you a thorough picture of which keywords your competitors are bidding on and how much traffic they’re generating from their efforts. Semrush also shows you the percent of keywords that are branded searches.
Moz gives you the ability to track your competitors’ movement on SERP, which can be helpful to strengthen your strategies, but you don’t get deep insights into much else.
Winner: Semrush
Keyword Tracking
Moz specializes in tracking keyword rankings, and they do a good job of it. Still, Semrush edges them out of this category for one primary reason.
Semrush tracks keywords daily, whereas, Moz tracks them weekly. This factor may not be a deal breaker for you, but if you’re in a hugely competitive market, it could make a difference.
Winner: Semrush
Pricing
First, here’s a comparison of each company’s basic plan.
| Moz Standard | Semrush Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price Per Month | $99 | $129.95 |
| Annual Price | $950.40 | $1,299.95 |
| Free Trial | 30 Days | None (7-day money back guarantee) |
| Number of Campaigns/Projects | 5 | 5 |
| Tracked Keywords | 300 | 500 |
| Pages To Crawl | 100,000 | 100,000 |
If you need more than a basic plan, both Moz and Semrush offer more advanced pricing plans:
| Moz Medium | Moz Large | Moz Premium | Semrush Guru | Semrush Business | Semrush Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price Per Month | $179 | $249 | $599 | $249.95 | $499.95 | Contact |
| Annual Price | $1,718.40 | $2,390.40 | $5,748 | $2,499.95 | $4,999.95 | Contact |
| Number of Campaigns/Projects | 10 | 25 | 100 | 15 | 40 | Contact |
| Tracked Keywords | 900 | 1,900 | 10,000 | 1,500 | 5,000 | Contact |
| Pages To Crawl | 500,000 | 1.25 Million | 5 Million | 300,000 | 1 Million | Contact |
In our book, Moz and Semrush come out about even in the pricing category, especially for their basic plans. Although they offer about the same price per month, Semrush gives you more keyword searches, but Moz provides a free 30-day trial.
When you get into the higher pricing tiers, it’s hard to differentiate between the two, depending on what your individual needs are, i.e., whether you need more keyword tracking or pages crawled.
Winner: Moz Pro & Semrush (Tie)
Overall Winner
Semrush wins our overall competition for its more thorough data analysis, but both tools have their strengths and weaknesses. Semrush is simply better for obtaining specific, accurate and easy-to-decipher SEO data — and competitor analytics.
We are customers of SEMRush and use most of their features in our SEO marketing, and we’ve been quite happy with our results.
With that said, Moz is better at agency-focused client management and features. Semrush hasn’t fleshed out those features as much as Moz.
With SEO tools, it’s difficult to compare apples to oranges. Each tool has something unique to bring to the table. Your choice comes down to your site’s specific needs. We feel for most users, however, Semrush has the edge.
Winner: Semrush
Moz vs Semrush (Video)
A side-by-side comparison of Moz and Semrush by the podcast gurus at The Hustle.
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