When it comes to SEO tools, two main companies that influence the digital landscape are Semrush and Moz.
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing toolset that offers a wide range of features for SEO professionals and marketing teams.
Founded in 2008, it contains more than 50 different tools to boost a business’s online presence.
Moz is the other pioneer in SEO tools, operating since 2004. For the past two decades, its goal has remained unchanged—to assist website owners in improving their search engine rankings.
Both Semrush and Moz offer many features, but which one is better for you?
Below, I’ll discuss Semrush vs. Moz in terms of similarities, differences, pros and cons, and unique features.
I’ll share insights from my experience using these tools to help you select the most suitable one for your needs.
TL;DR Semrush vs. Moz
Let’s begin with a summary.
If you’re short on time, I’ve highlighted the main points in the table below. You and your team can refer to this table when deciding which tool to use.
| Feature | Semrush | Moz |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword Ranking Updates | Daily, Weekly | Weekly |
| Keyword Database Size | 22.3 billion keywords | 1.25 billion |
| Backlink Database Size | 43 trillion backlinks | 45.5 trillion |
| How Keyword Difficulty Is Calculated | The number of backlinks, the country, the word count of a keyword, whether a keyword is branded, and the search volume are considered | It’s a weighted average of Moz’s Page Authority of the top 10, and the other inputs, such as Domain Authority, homepages, query term use, etc |
| How Domain Rating Is Calculated | Backlinks, website traffic estimates, and spam factors | Linking root domains and the total number of links |
| Historical Data | Dates back to 2012 | Up to 5 years |
| Pricing | The cheapest plan is $139.95. You have access to all features covered by a chosen monthly plan | The cheapest plan is $49 monthly. However, it comes with limitations |
| Free Trial | 7 days | 30 days |
| Customer Support | Email, Live chat, Phone | Contact form |
| Unique Features | Advertising Research, SEO Writing Assistant, Toolkit for Outreach, Word Count Metric, Traffic Potential, SEO WordPress Plugin, ContentShake AI | Page Authority, Spam Score, Minimum Domain Authority |
| User Rating on Gartner | 4.4/5 | 3.6/5 |
| Pros | Wide range of features for SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media, Free trial | Sharp focus on SEO features and a 30-day free trial |
| Cons | Traffic estimates are not always accurate, Only one user can be logged in at a time | Issues with data accuracy and freshness. Confusing pricing policy and monthly report limitations |
Pros and Cons
With over a decade of experience in online marketing, I’ve used both of these tools pretty extensively. Buckle up because this Semrush vs. Moz review will provide exclusive and insightful details you won’t find elsewhere.
Semrush
Unlike many other tools, Semrush is more than just an SEO tool.
In addition to extensive features for SEO professionals, Semrush can help you plan, analyze, and improve ad campaigns, grow your brand’s visibility on social media, and understand what content performs best in your niche.
Compared to Moz’s Explore by Keyword 2.0, Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool goes much further in providing valuable information.
For instance, Semrush shows monthly global search volume with a breakdown of search volumes by specific countries. It even creates automated keyword clusters. Moz doesn’t offer anything similar.
Unlike Semrush, Moz’s Explore by Keyword 2.0 restricts you to analyzing keywords one by one. This can be very time-consuming, especially for giant websites. Imagine the inefficiency of researching keywords for a massive online shop, one at a time!
Although Semrush uses multiple clickstream data providers to estimate website traffic, these metrics are just estimates. Keep this in mind when analyzing your website and competitors through Semrush.
On a separate note, only one user can be logged into a Semrush account at a time. If you need additional users, it’s available for an extra fee of $45/month per user for the Semrush Pro plan.
Moz
Moz is a go-to tool for SEO contractors and small businesses who need help growing their websites in organic search results.
It has an extensive SEO toolkit for tracking website performance, keyword research, backlink analysis, and website audit.
Moz even offers a dedicated tool to help local businesses manage their online presence. This can be particularly beneficial if you want to improve local search visibility.
Even though Moz’s data isn’t always accurate (more on that later), you can use this tool to support your SEO activities.
It’s also worth mentioning that Moz is a relatively inexpensive tool. The cheapest Pro version costs $49/month, but it comes with many limitations and can only be suitable for small website owners.
On the other hand, Semrush’s pricing starts at $139.95 monthly, but it offers a significantly higher number of monthly reports.
In a direct comparison, Semrush might appear more attractive due to its wider range of features for the price. However, the best tool will always depend on your business needs and goals.
Key Features Compared
Even though Semrush’s and Moz’s features might seem similar, there are many key differences.
Keyword Research Data
I’ve already mentioned that Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool shows more information than Moz’s Explore by Keyword 2.0.
Some unique metrics and features you won’t find in Moz’s Explore Keyword 2.0 are:
- Search intent
- Global search volume
- Keyword volume split by country
- The number of search results
- SERP features
- The number of ads for a particular keyword
- Keyword clusters
While the Moz Keyword Suggestions tool identifies search intent for various keywords, this information seems missing from their more detailed keyword analysis reports. For me, it’s surprising that such valuable data isn’t included in other keyword research reports.
Although Moz’s Keyword Research toolkit has fewer features than Semrush’s, I want to highlight its Keyword Gap tool. This tool operates a bit differently than what you might get used to.
Rather than just displaying missing keywords, Moz shows the best-ranking keywords of your competitors that you also rank for. This allows for a direct comparison of your site’s rankings against competitors, helping you strategize your next steps.
Additionally, you can view your competitors’ top-performing pages and the keywords. Normally, this would be two separate reports with extensive data, but Moz has combined them for a quicker preview.
Overall, for SEO beginners, Moz’s interface might feel more intuitive. However, for in-depth keyword research, Semrush wins. It delivers a richer data set within its keyword reports and offers more diverse keyword research methods.
On-Page & Technical SEO Data
When comparing Semrush vs. Moz, you’ll see that both offer site audit features to help analyze your website’s performance. However, the insights you gain can differ significantly between the two platforms.
Let’s start with Semrush.
It has a dedicated Site Audit tool to identify technical issues.
Semrush’s website audit offers more than just a basic report. It provides six specialized reports that thoroughly examine your website’s strengths and weaknesses in areas such as crawlability and indexability, internal linking, schema markup, compliance with Core Web Vitals, and more.
What I particularly appreciate about Semrush is that the final site audit report presents a wealth of data in an easily digestible format, with primary issues highlighted at the top. This helps you prioritize them based on their potential impact on performance.
Unlike Semrush, Moz’s cheapest pricing plan only allows crawling 5,000 pages per month. To get more crawling capacity, you’ll need to upgrade to the Standard or higher payment plans.
Moz’s site crawler generates a list of URLs with highlighted issues, and you can filter this list by issue type if necessary.
Although Moz provides data similar to Semrush, I prefer Semrush’s site audit report. It’s easier to understand, and all technical issues are prioritized.
While both Moz and Semrush offer on-page SEO optimization tools, their approaches differ.
With Moz’s On-Page Grader, you’ll have to enter a specific webpage URL to receive optimization recommendations tailored to that page.
While Moz’s On-Page Grader is a helpful tool, it requires entering each URL individually for analysis. Imagine your website has over 100 pages. That’s a lot of work.
Additionally, most recommendations focus on keyword placement, which isn’t the only factor affecting rankings. I’d expect improvement tips related to backlinks, E-E-A-T, and more.
In my opinion, Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker is more efficient. It analyzes your entire website and provides recommendations for all affected URLs at once. This is very convenient, as you can quickly review the list of URLs and decide which to prioritize.
Semrush takes a more comprehensive approach to on-page SEO recommendations.
Their suggestions go beyond just keyword placement and delve into areas like SERP feature optimization, content quality improvements, strategic use of related keywords, technical SEO fixes, and even backlink considerations.
In my experience, this is a far more actionable list of tips that can help enhance on-page SEO and see noticeable improvements.
Overall, Semrush stands out based on its technical and on-page optimization features. I believe it does a much better job of identifying the problematic areas of your website and guiding you on what to address first.
Off-Page SEO Data
One of the most common off-page SEO strategies is link building, so I’ll outline the differences between Semrush’s backlink reports and Moz’s backlink reports.
Both tools offer a backlink analysis report that includes referring domains and backlinks, new and lost referring domains, backlink charts, anchor texts, and backlink types, among other features.
Additionally, both tools have a substantial backlink index—Semrush has 43 trillion backlinks updating daily, while Moz boasts an impressive 45.5 trillion backlinks!
Both Moz and Semrush measure backlink toxicity, identifying backlinks that might potentially harm your website’s reputation, which is a helpful metric to check regularly.
For instance, Moz shares a separate spam score breakdown report, where you can review each referring URL and see its toxicity score.
Semrush, on the other hand, includes the toxicity index in its backlink audit report. This report also allows you to track your backlink removal requests, disavowed links, and more.
If you actively engage in outreach for link building, I suggest using Semrush’s Link Building Tool. It helps you discover backlink opportunities for your website and connect with other site owners.
One of Moz’s most valuable tools is “Compare Link Profiles.” This feature lets you see how your website’s backlinks stack up against up to four competitors.
The report is user-friendly and offers valuable insights into your competitors’ link-building strategies.
While both Semrush and Moz offer strong backlink analysis, Semrush might be the better choice for an in-depth backlink audit. In my experience, Semrush is particularly useful when it comes to analyzing your backlink profile and developing link-building strategies.
Local SEO Reports
Semrush is a great choice if you’re looking for a comprehensive and user-friendly local SEO tool. Its Listing Management Tool allows you to effortlessly manage your listings on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, and Bing Places for Business, ensuring your business details are accurate and up-to-date everywhere.
With Semrush, you can view the top-ranking pages and ads targeting your keywords in specific regions or cities worldwide. This tool is particularly useful for small local businesses looking to broaden their semantic core.
Moz has a separate tool called Moz Local for managing local businesses. However, the tool isn’t part of the Moz Pro subscription. Therefore, you’ll have to purchase Moz Local separately, starting at $14 per month.
With Moz Local, you can:
- Manage your listings across various platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, and other local directories.
- Automate updates to your business information across those platforms.
- Track your local SEO performance with Moz Local’s reporting and analytics tools.
- Monitor reviews from various platforms and respond to them directly from the Moz Local dashboard.
- Post updates and special offers to your local listings.
- Add photos and descriptions to your listings.
- Track traffic and clicks driven by your online presence.
If you just need a tool for managing local listings, Moz Local is a good option. However, if you need a more comprehensive toolkit with local keyword research capabilities, I’d suggest opting for Semrush.
Paid Advertising Reports
If you run both SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, I’d recommend using Semrush.
In addition to its SEO features, Semrush offers a specialized PPC Advertising Toolkit. This toolkit includes reports and tools for display advertising, product listings, ad research, ad history, ad tracking, and the ability to export keyword lists to Google Ads-compatible .csv or .xls files.
Since Moz focuses primarily on SEO, it doesn’t offer dedicated features for paid advertising.
However, it can still provide valuable data and insights to enhance your paid advertising strategy, including:
- Competitive analysis: Moz Pro allows you to see what keywords your competitors rank for in search results.
- Landing page optimization: Moz Pro’s On-Page Grader tool can help you optimize your landing pages for conversions.
Overall Reporting
Regardless of your subscription plan, Semrush provides unlimited keyword, domain, and backlink analytics reports. This is a major advantage of Semrush compared to other SEO tools (I also covered report limitations and the credit system in my Semrush vs. Ahrefs review).
Unlike Semrush, Moz restricts the number of keyword searches you can perform each month. Their cheapest plan only allows 75 keyword queries, which might only work for small websites. But for more extensive keyword research needs, you’ll have to upgrade to a plan with more queries, like the Moz Pro Medium plan with 5,000.
Even with the most basic Semrush plan, you can crawl up to 100,000 pages monthly, enough for most websites. For giants, the Business plan offers a million pages per month.
Moz’s cheapest plan restricts crawling to just 5,000 pages per month. If you need more, you’ll need to upgrade to their Standard plan with 400,000 pages or purchase additional crawling capacity for $15/m per 50,000 extra pages.
I’ve included a dedicated section below explaining Moz’s pricing plans and their features. This will help you choose the Moz plan that best suits your business needs.
Content Marketing Features
Since Moz is a solely SEO-focused tool, it doesn’t have dedicated features for content marketing, but Semrush does!
With Semrush, you and your team can discover and analyze high-performing content across various industries. It also lets you monitor all mentions of your brand online, notifying you by email whenever your brand appears on social media or search results. You can even track competitor mentions to gain insights into their strategies.
Additionally, Semrush offers multiple tools to help you create helpful content faster, including an SEO content template, an SEO writing Assistant, and its latest AI writing tool, ContentShake AI.
Although Moz lacks dedicated content marketing features, you can still leverage some functionalities for this purpose. These include keyword research to identify topics your target audience searches for and competitor analysis to understand the type of content your rivals produce.
If you’d asked me which tool I’d choose for all my content marketing needs, I’d vote for Semrush here.
That’s because Semrush combines various features for all kinds of content marketing needs that an entire marketing team can use.
Social Media Marketing Features
Unlike Semrush, Moz doesn’t have features you could potentially use for social media marketing. The valuable keyword research and competitor information you find there apply to organic search, not social media strategy.
On the other hand, Semrush provides a Social Media toolkit to streamline your social media efforts.
Here’s what you can do with it:
- Schedule posts across major platforms to save time and ensure consistent content flow.
- Analyze performance to see what content resonates with your audience and adapt your strategy accordingly.
- Track competitor trends on social media to stay ahead of the curve and stay relevant.
Semrush also has a dedicated tool, Influencer Analytics, to help you find influencers for your brand and manage an entire influencer marketing campaign cycle in one place.
As you can see, Semrush has an extensive social media marketing toolkit and decent SEO, PPC, and content marketing solutions. It has the potential to become a universal tool for all your marketing needs.
Semrush and Moz Data Sources
Data reliability is one of the first things I consider when choosing an SEO tool. If data is inaccurate, what’s the point of using a tool? Therefore, I compared data sources for Semrush vs. Moz below.
Where Does Semrush Get Its Data?
Semrush leverages machine learning and data from external sources to approximate keyword metrics. They also analyze the top 100 results for both organic and paid searches to determine your website’s ranking.
However, keep in mind that the data provided by Semrush are estimates, not guaranteed figures. Since Semrush’s algorithms are constantly evolving, you might see slight variations in the data over time.
Where Does Moz Get Its Data?
Moz gathers its data primarily through web crawling, similar to how search engines like Google discover and index websites.
They have a massive Link Explorer index containing trillions of links that they constantly update to reflect the ever-changing web landscape.
This data fuels Moz’s SEO metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA), which you can use to analyze link profiles and predict ranking potential.
They’ve also acquired STAT Search Analytics to incorporate additional insights like keyword ranking data into their offerings.
Customer Reviews
I was curious to learn what users think about Semrush vs. Moz, so I checked their ratings and testimonials on Gartner Peer Insights.
Some users highlighted Semrush’s keyword research functionality:
“Semrush has proven invaluable for me and my team, particularly for in-depth keyword research. There are many tools out there offering gap analysis type services, but SEMRush provides a lot of very customisable options and filters, and also has the added benefit of not charging extra for downloads.”
Others highlight its extensive functionality, making it suitable for businesses of any size: “Undoubtedly an essential SEO tool for your arsenal, from SME to Enterprise-level.”
While the number of Moz’s reviews and overall rating might seem low compared to Semrush, with only 15 reviews, it’s difficult to draw a definitive conclusion. To gain a better understanding of user experience, I looked beyond review scores and explored what Moz users say about the tool.
Some users on Gartner commented that Moz is an easy-to-use and affordable tool for SEO beginners. One reviewer has shared their positive experience using Moz’s keyword research tools:
“My favorite feature is the Keyword Suggestions tool. As a small startup, we can’t afford to hire a digital marketing/SEO expert, so being able to use their keyword suggestions when writing blogs or creating new website pages is extremely insightful.”
However, many other users mentioned that “data sources are outdated and do not refresh enough.”
Even though this feedback comes from just a few people, I can conclude that Moz is a suitable solution for SEO beginners and small companies.
Pricing
Compared to Moz, Semrush is more expensive. Therefore, it’s crucial to determine your goals before selecting a pricing plan.
In my view, bloggers can get by with the basic Semrush Pro plan. But if you’re an SEO expert working with multiple clients, you’ll need the Guru or Business plan.
Since Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing solution, each pricing plan covers everything you’ll need to manage a website, including keyword research, content writing and optimization, backlink analysis, and technical SEO.
Moz’s tiers are somewhat cheaper than Semrush and come with a 30-day free trial, but Moz isn’t as feature-rich as Semrush.
Be sure to carefully review what each pricing plan includes, as Moz has many report limitations.
For instance, consider the Moz Pro Medium plan for comprehensive keyword research, which offers 5,000 keyword queries per month. The cheaper plans, with 150 and 75 keyword queries per month, are likely insufficient.
In my opinion, Moz’s cheapest plans are only suitable for beginners who don’t plan to use the tool extensively. For businesses seeking an all-in-one marketing solution, Semrush offers much better value for your money.
Which Tool Has the Best Support?
Semrush stands out for its accessible customer support.
Unlike many SEO tools, you can get help from their team even without a paid account. They offer email, live chat, and phone support for everyone. Existing users can also use the live chat and contact form within their accounts.
My experience has been positive—they’re responsive and helpful. I once mistakenly purchased the Business plan, and they processed my refund request quickly within the same business day.
The only way to contact Moz’s support team is by filling out the contact form on their website.
They usually respond within several business days, depending on availability. I couldn’t find other ways to connect with Moz representatives via chat or phone.
There’s also a “Leave us a message” option for registered users, but this is similar to submitting a contact form, where you have to wait for an email response.
Overall, Semrush provides more timely and diverse options for reaching their support team.
Semrush vs. Moz: Which Is Better?
In my SEO experience, both Semrush and Moz are helpful tools with lots of features. However, if I had to choose just one, it would be Semrush.
Semrush offers a wider range of powerful features, making it a better value for the cost. Plus, it caters to entire marketing teams, not just solo SEOs.
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