Ahrefs vs. Moz: The Ultimate Clash of SEO Tools | Craft Street | Checklists, Workflows, and SOP Software (2023)

look atprice pageand complex marketing materialsSaaS productsThat might be confusing enough, but comparing two similar products is a real headache.

Which one do you choose?

It's impossible to make a decision based on this information, feature list, and outdated reviews alone, especially when you have a very specific set of requirements.

After checking out the features of the major SEO tools, we decided to give it a try.Mozricewhat ifAt the same time, a comparable test is performed on the Medium and Standard plans.

What are our SEO requirements?

Litigation Streetis a young startup company focused on content. thanks for ourcontent marketing, we were able to grow the company through public relations, blog content, and guest posting—all without running out of money. Finding a robust tool to analyze the success of these efforts is imperative to reduce their unpredictability and shape our SEO strategy in the future.

Here are the tools we need:

Track keywords against SERPs.

Has a lot of content - on and off site - relative index rankingKey wordsThis is extremely important to us. That's because we don't just promote our own content, but anything that mentions us. We promote all guest posts, YouTube videos and articles on news sites.

once wecreate content, we operate with the keyword in mind. Of course, we check to see if we hit the target. not everyone? The problem is that ratings change over time. It may take a month or two for your content to start ranking for the keywords you want, and it may even appear on the first page for keywords you are not directly targeting. This is valuable information because you want to know the path your audience took before reaching your website.

High-quality keyword research.

For keyword research, I now usetrialPrepare mainly through extensive readingBrian Dean's Directory.The "meat" of this process isGoogle Keyword PlannerAs Brian often points out, he has a vivid imagination. Sometimes keyword research can take longer than necessary, so ideally the tools we use should be similar to GKP with common sense.

This way we can replace half of the process (which involves several tedious steps) with a more complete solution.

On-page optimization analysis.

To make sure we're on the right track, we want to make sure that's true when we assume we've fully optimized the page for a given keyword. It would be an added bonus to get keyword suggestions that best match your content or landing pages from within the tool.

Basically, we need a tool that tells us where we are, and where we should be going.

follow our backlinks

Tracking your website's leads allows you to capitalize on opportunities for more promotions and from "bad neighbor' before they hurt your site's rankings. Both Moz and Ahrefs offer great tools for tracking backlinks, but Moz focuses on who linked you (and offers more limited filters), while Ahrefs shows who linked and the overall trend, in the dashboard Shown as a graph above.

spying on competitors

We want to know how our competitors are performing, and more importantly, where they get their backlinks from and what keywords they rank for. Ahrefs determines who your competitors are and can get a huge list of all the keywords that your competitors pages are ranking for. Moz makes it easy to determine the authority of these sites by showing how likely you are to rank at the top.

Bring in new content ideas

Finding inspiration for content is something I'm selfishly excited about. Both Moz and Ahrefs have features that find the most popular content on any topic, bringing you verified titles and topics people want to read. Even the most popular content on the web is not exhaustive, so using this as research, you can write articles that resonate with your audience and add value.

How do Moz and Ahrefs meet our needs?

To test both tools, I compared our requirements to what the software does (rather than what seems likely in the landing page copy).

While Moz and Ahrefs are similar, the exact details of what they do are very different, as is the amount of data each can collect. See how they compare:

Track page rank on and off your site

Specifically, we want to see the keywords our content ranks for, whether they are on our domain or not. unfortunately we foundNeither Moz nor Ahrefs can achieve the scale we need.

However, there are several alternatives we can use in both tools.

Ahrefs Project Explorer

Ahrefs Rank Explorer allows you to check an exact domain, subdomain or URL to see how it ranks in Google. When we put process.st into Rank Explorer, it lists over 94,000 keywords we're scoring, including search volume and competition. You can export the file as .csv for actual analysis.

But what about guest posts or mentions on other domains? Unfortunately, Ahrefs can only do one thing at a time. It would be wrong to say he can't do it, but he does see it as a responsibility.

Moz Rank Report

As for Moz, they don't have a tool that can compete with Ahrefs' Positions Explorer.There is no way to give Moz a URL and get a list of keywords it ranks for.However, Moz takes a more targeted and less comprehensive approach to tracking its rankings. It can match your domain to a list of targeted keywords and generate a ranking report.

This means you can see how you're doing by giving Moz a list of all the keywords you're targeting in each blog post, and then comparing that to your rankings. Results can be downloaded as a CSV file or available from the dashboard.

While Ahrefs can (slowly and painfully) collect keyword ranking data from third-party domains, Moz cannot. This gives Ahrefs an edge over Moz in terms of this feature, especially since Ahrefs can also generate ranking reports in the same way as Moz.

Quickly find high-quality keywords

Both Moz and Ahrefs have built-in keyword tools. Moz has a keyword difficulty tool, and Ahrefs has a keyword explorer. They're very different, and each has great features, but which one finds the best new keywords?

Moz Keyword Difficulty Checker

Keyword Difficulty Checker doesn't do keyword research, but it can help you narrow down your list of potential keywords. This tool is especially useful to me because I used to do it the "old fashioned" way, by googling my terms and enabling MozBar to snoop around in PA/DA. Using Keyword Difficulty, I can enter a list of up to 20 keywords and get all their PA/DA scores (and how hard they will be to beat) with just one click.

To get a better idea of ​​your chances of ranking for a given term, you can run a SERP Analysis report and see exactly which pages you come across and how trustworthy they are.

If I target "saas price", if I have 2 backlinks and DA is greater than 36.3, I will have a chance to rank 2nd. Looks promising!

Ahref Keyword Explorer

The Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool is used to narrow down your keyword set to keywords that you have a chance to rank for, while the Ahref Keyword Explorer is used to generate new keywords. By giving an initial keyword, it provides a list of synonyms and related terms with their quantities.

Compare this to the old faithful tool (Google Keyword Planner) and you'll see that Ahrefs delivers much more targeted and relevant results:

All in all, both Moz and Ahrefs have great keyword research tools, but are best used together. If I had to flag one as more useful than the other, I'd say Moz's Keyword Difficulty would save me a lot of time checking PA/DA, so it's the most valuable tool.

Page optimization analysis

There's a ton of content out there that can teach you how to optimize your pages to increase your chances of ranking, but how do you know if you're doing it right? When checking how optimized a page is, there are many factors to consider. Of the two tools tested here, only Moz has the ability to see how well your pages are optimized. It also provides more information on how to improve the content, which is a way to develop good habits.

In the example I tried, the page got a perfect score, which means nooptimizationis required. I went back to some old posts we made before the actual SEO process to see what kind of guidance he could give me.

Find an old post from an earlier blog and see how it matches the keyword"business process management'.

Moz rated the site a B and has some tips on how to increase its visibility:

Ahrefs has no way to fix this, but I forgive you.

Backlink Tracking

Is your SEO strategy working? So, how many backlinks do you have? If you don't know, tools like Moz and Ahrefs can give you a detailed overview of everything.

Without SEO tools like these two, there's not much you can do other than Google your own keywords and see if they come up. This kind of work can quickly become redundant and tedious, so to understand how your SEO strategy is performing, you need something more powerful.

Moz open web browser

Moz Open Site Explorer helps you research backlinks, find link building opportunities and remove bad neighbor links. If you want to quickly see how many backlinks you (or your competitors) have, OSE Moz can fetch them instantly (though the metrics are very different from Ahrefs).

Listing your site's domain in OSE displays a list of backlinks, sorted by authority. Here, I've filtered them to show only the following backlinks:

If you want to see the newest backlinks instead of the most trusted (and maybe contact the author and build a relationship), you can use Just Discovered. However, it seems to be showing me something from 2014...

Ahrefs Web Browser

One big difference between Moz and Ahrefs becomes apparent when counting backlinks. As you can see in the Moz OSE screenshot above, Moz found a total of 1,320 links to the main Process Street URL. However, Ahrefs found 35,300!

I contactedsupportFinding out why this is happening, Moz says it's a difference in the algorithm and the various tools they use behind the scenes. Ahrefs said the same, but they probably found us more backlinks becauseAhrefs maLargest active backlink base.

A handy feature of Ahrefs Site Explorer is the ability to display only main reference content. If you guest post frequently, you can see which site provides the most reliable backlinks and plan bettercontent strategy.

eavesdropping on competitors

To spy on your competitors and stay ahead, you first need to know who they are. competitor analysis isone of the founding elementsAs with any SEO strategy, Moz and Ahrefs do it well, but in different ways. Here are the tools provided by each tool:

Moz Keyword Difficulty Checker

This tool is not a starting point for competitor analysis, but a tool to use at the end of the process. That's because it can't know who your top keyword competitors are, and it can't tell you much about them, but it can tell you how hard it is to beat them.

A search for "workflow software" using the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool shows us a set of competitors, as well as some generic and non-competitive domains. Highlighted in green is position 4 for that keyword - a page with 1 backlink on a domain with less authority than ours. This tells me that with some work we can get to position 4 on this page as well.

Keyword difficulty is useful as the final step in the keyword research process because it tells you whether you've selected keywords that are already used by real estate on the web, or if you can easily beat your competitors.

Ahrefs Project Explorer

Position Explorer shows the top 10 competitors and lets you check all the keywords they rank for. If you know you have a competitor with lower domain authority, you can use Rank Explorer to find out what keywords your competitor is ranking for on the first page. With a little creativity and writing skills later on, you'll not only gain more popularity, but more popularity than youcompetitors (Significant differences! ).

Sites listed as our competitors have built similar software to ours, so viewing their organic keywords in Positions Explorer shows metrics like this:

This is a feature Moz lacks that makes Ahrefs invaluable for SERP data, whether it's yours or your competitors'.

generate ideas for new content

Sites like BuzzSumo are great for finding buzz in your niche, but if you're going to pay for an SEO tool, you'll want to have it built in as a feature to avoid paying for two similar services. Moz and Ahrefs show trending content metrics for any keyword, but which is the best?

Devil's Claw Content

Moz Content is a separate product from Moz Pro, and we have limited access to it without paying. Still, we can learn a lot about the power of the free version.

You may see more results when you search for keywords in niches that your audience is interested inRecent Popular Postsin this niche market. Here's an example of the "task management" keyword:

As you can see, people in this space are writing about to-do list apps and task management systems. There are a lot of links to these pages, so you can assume there is a demand for it.

Moz Content also enables you to audit your existing content to see what has worked best in the past and understand what to write next.

How does Ahrefs connect?

Ahrefs Content Browser

Content Explorer is very similar to Moz Content, but built into the Ahrefs platform. It's not a standalone product that costs at least $59 per month, but it also doesn't have content moderation.

Here are the results of a search for "job management" in Content Explorer:

Not only did I get all 96,041 results, but they also seemed more interesting and relevant, with some posts getting thousands of shares and hundreds of backlinks than Moz's meager selection.

For further analysis, I can quickly download the first 1000 results and download them as a CSV file. This is great for data-driven content that involves looking at the most popular keywords in headlines or figuring out which headline formulas have the most shares.

I would choose Ahrefs over Moz when it comes to content ideas because you get more money for your money and the search is more relevant.

Moz vs Ahrefs: Which one will we choose?

As I said at the beginning, we were looking for a tool that would help us in 6 areas. I'll now summarize the 6 areas and tell you which tool I think "wins" in each area:

SERP Tracking for URLs and Keywords:hands down, that's itwhat if.Even if you can't mass search guest post rankings, neither can Moz.

Find quality keywords:This roundup has been updated since it was first published in 2016; at the time, we felt that the lack of keyword difficulty on Ahrefs made Moz a more valuable tool. However, Ahrefs has greatly improved Keyword Explorer since then and now surpasses Moz. Ahrefs provides richer data with metrics such as estimated backlink rank, cost-per-click, and traffic breakdown by country. another pointwhat if.

Page optimization analysis:Since Moz is the only one of the two that offers on-page optimization,Mozis the winner here.

Backlink Tracking:Without a doubt, the best tool for building backlinks is Ahrefs. Comparing Moz's backlink data to Ahrefs, it's clear that Moz doesn't have as much data, which makes the decision less thoughtful. gowhat if！

Look at competitors:While Ahrefs isn't a tool specifically designed to collect competitor data, it does a good job at it. Rank Explorer (star of the show) shows the top 10 competitors for each search domain and lets you see all the terms they rank for and where they rank. While Moz's Keyword Difficulty Checker provides great insight, Positions Explorer takes awaywhat ifTops in this category. again.

Generate ideas for new content:forContent Creativity. Integrated Content Explorerwhat ifIt's more powerful (for the reasons I need it) and cheaper than Moz Content (starting at $59 per month). While the content moderation provided by Moz Content is helpful, I'll continue to test the free version to see if I think it's worth the full price as my blog and business grow.

Do you use Moz or Ahrefs? Let me know your thoughts and why you picked them in the comments below! 🙂

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