SEMrush vs. MOZ: What's Best for You?

Trying to choose between SEMrush vs Moz to support your digital marketing efforts?

Both of these SEO tools are useful and valuable for digital marketers focused on securing organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO). They both provide features that support content marketing and SEO in a subscription-based, Software-as-a-service business model and they’re both all-in-ones that cover all bases when it comes to SEO and content marketing tools.

While there is a significant overlap in features between SEMrush vs Moz, each one offers something unique that differentiates itself from its competitors. Still, it may be difficult for digital marketers to determine which option is most suitable for their needs.

In this article, we’re doing a deep review of SEMrush vs Moz to help you determine which one of these SEO tool kits is best to support your business.

Comparing SEMrush vs. Moz

We’ve created our very own scoring system to help facilitate our comparison between Moz and SEMrush. To make our assessment as fair and helpful as possible, we’re evaluating these SEO tools across five different dimensions that cover all the most important features and characteristics of a complete SEO tool.

With a total of 100 points up for grabs, we’ve weighted our five categories the same. While these categories may vary in their importance to individual marketers, we think they’re equally important when it comes to evaluating the overall performance and viability of an all-in-one solution for SEO. Our five categories are:

Keyword Research (20 points maximum)
Competitor Analysis (20 points maximum)
Link Building/Monitoring (20 points maximum)
Technical SEO Audit Capabilities (20 points maximum)
Pricing and Value (20 points maximum)

As with all rating systems, our organization of categories and allocation of scoring is open for debate – we’d love to know your opinions and whether you agree with our system!

Now, let’s go through each of our five categories and compare SEMrush and Moz to see how they stack up. On the way, we’ll assign points to each tool based on our rating system and calculate the total at the end.

SEMrush vs. Moz: Keyword Research

Keyword research is a starting point for many digital marketers when building a content marketing or SEO campaign. Marketers need to understand how to do keyword research for SEO.

Keyword research is also a core feature of any SEO software tool. A good keyword research tool offers insight into search volume, trends, competition and overall performance for a target keyword.

What’s the Same?

SEMrush and Moz both offer stimulating visual representations of the most important keyword research data. Here you can see what these results look like side-by-side. With the Moz keyword overview, you’re immediately seeing monthly search volume data, a “difficulty” score that measures keyword competition, and the search engine results page (SERP) analysis which highlights information about other domains that rank for that keyword.

Image: Moz Keyword Overview Results

You can see some of the same elements presented in the SEMrush tool: SERP analysis, a keyword difficulty assessment, and estimated search volume.

Image: SEMrush Keyword Overview Results

What’s Different?

The biggest difference between SEMrush and Moz is how they deliver keyword suggestions. Keyword suggestions are a very important feature, as they help digital marketers identify more profitable keywords to target with content marketing efforts and SEO.

Moz has a separate search tool with special filtering options for keyword suggestions. Users can customize the types of keyword suggestions they’re after, including specific searches for keywords that are questions or keywords that include all terms in the search query. There’s also a function that can group keywords by lexical similarity.

Image: Moz keyword suggestions

SEMrush has its keyword suggestions integrated into the main keyword tool, and they’re already broken down into keyword variations, questions and related keywords – and available by the thousands. There’s also some additional information provided through SEMrush, such as the average CPC and ad history for each keyword, that may be useful to digital marketers doing PPC ads.

Image: SEMrush Keyword Suggestions

Final Score

SEMrush: 18/20

Moz: 18/20

(The tools were basically equal, with each one offering something unique.)

SEMrush vs. Moz: Competitor Analysis

SEO is fundamentally a competitive discipline, as there can only be one website at the top of the search engine results pages for each keyword. Digital marketers use competitor analysis to help identify opportunities to capture the most organic traffic possible for the lowest cost.