This Moz review takes an in-depth look at the “proven” solutions offered by the SEO tool, which include keyword research, backlink analysis and site audits, and how it helps businesses to improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic.
Moz advertises itself as “marketing analytics software for SEO” and its core feature set is bundled with its main product, Moz Pro. While Moz does offer several free tools, including Keyword Explorer and Link Explorer, these are limited in functionality. Moz Pro should therefore be viewed as the baseline offering for business usage.
How can Moz help my business?
Every Moz feature is geared towards improving SEO visibility and rankings. So, you can expect everything from comprehensive crawling and auditing, and tracking search rankings, to optimising on-page elements and finding link building opportunities. Because Moz is an all-in-one SEO suite, it can be deployed for a variety of use cases.
In its own words, Moz says it can deliver “higher rankings”, “quality traffic” and “measurable results” in a way that removes the “complexity” of tasks which often overwhelm marketers. There are a number of different tools that can achieve these objectives. Moz’s data, metrics and scores are respected and an industry standard, so you will have peace of mind that you are buying into an industry-leading platform.
How much is Moz Pro?
To cater to the demands of different users, Moz Pro has four different pricing tiers on a monthly basis: Standard for $99, Medium for $179, Large for $299 and Premium for $599. Each of these plans has a near identical toolset but scales according to the needs of a business. This sees allowances increase with each tier, which affects features including campaigns, keyword rankings, keyword queries per month, backlink queries per month and pages crawled per week.
Due to some of the limitations of Standard, the Medium plan is arguably the best fit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If you need access to higher tiers but are unable to justify the outlay, partnering with a SEO agency can unlock higher allowances to increase the scope of your campaigns. Premium is the most popular tier for larger agencies and corporations.
While Moz Pro is the primary product, businesses can now also subscribe to Moz Local for local SEO from $14 per month, and a more advanced Moz STAT from $720 per month, the latter of which is built for “experts” and offers granular, high capacity tracking and features. If you are just focused on effective content marketing and SEO, Moz Pro is the best value option to get started with.
What are Moz’s strengths?
Keyword research
There are numerous tools within Moz Pro, each of which can be wielded to perform a specific function and support your SEO objectives. If you have been struggling to get a grip on how people are searching for your products and what sort of content they need, the Keyword Explorer can lift the veil and enable you to conduct research and then strategically target specific phrases based on volume and difficulty. Keywords can also be saved in a list, tracked and then updated.
Virtru director Sean McVey says Moz “makes complex analysis easy” by blending together research and metrics and moving the focus away from combing through spreadsheets in favour of putting campaigns in motion that generate organic traffic.
To start using Keyword Explorer, all you need to do is navigate to the tool on the main dashboard and then enter a search query. You will be presented with a results page with a rundown of useful metrics such as average monthly search volumes and scores for “potential” and “opportunity”. The latter two are great for determining whether a keyword or phrase is worth pursuing.
Finding links
Building a robust link portfolio is critical for SEO and Moz’s Link Explorer can find new linking opportunities and maximise your current prospects. SEOs rely on metrics such as Domain Authority and Page Authority within Moz Pro to explore competitive link opportunities. These are presented within your own link profile. This profile enables you to compare your current performance with rivals and strategically target new URLs while keeping tabs on key metrics over time.
Hubspot also says Moz Pro is “one of the top” tools for backlinks due to its intuitive dashboard and useful data, which includes a “Spam Score”. This handy metric highlights links that may be actively hurting your SEO. Meanwhile, a “Discovered and Lost” section lists every linking domain you have recently won and lost. If you need to get more backlinks, which are links from other reputable domains that point to your web pages, and track those you have, Link Explorer is invaluable.
Site crawling
Getting your pages indexed and crawled by Google is critical for visibility in SEO. Moz is on hand here again to guide you through all the important aspects of website monitoring and optimisation so you don’t run into any problems that can undermine even the best laid search plans. The Site Crawler tool is vast in its scope, crawling every one of your pages for issues and then categorising them so they are easy to see and act on. The five main categories include content issues, metadata issues and crawler warnings.
Moz Pro goes beyond simple testing, though – it actually offers advice and recommendations on how to fix issues. That means if you have broken links, duplicate content or unoptimized images and title tags among other issues, you will be able to address them before they drag your SEO campaigns down. There are even low and high priority tags so you know what you need to act on immediately. Finally, a “recrawl my site” feature scans the problem pages again to ensure everything is fixed and ready to go.
Moz is always ready to serve up valuable metrics that you can use to build better SEO campaigns and tie them to business outcomes to prove that your efforts are driving meaningful results and return on investment (ROI). If you need assistance with Moz or any of the tasks that are central to SEO, such as outreach services for link building or content creation for greater visibility in search, we can help. Contact us today to find out more about our services.
