SEO Tools Showdown: Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz vs SpyFu

Updated: July 13

Various pieces of evidence have shown the importance of SEO in the marketing industry. One of the reports by BRIGHTEDGE REPORT claims that 68% of online experience begins with  a search engine. Another report shows that 53.3% of traffic comes from organic search. 

SEO Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website to appear on the top page of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. People are more likely to visit your website for relevant services if it is more prominent. Increased website traffic automatically translates to increased revenue and profit. You can give it a go yourself. We all have the habit of selecting options from the first page of Google results rather than the second or third page, especially when the first page has the information we need. There are only ten slots in Google search, so you can see how important it is to enlist the help of an SEO expert.

SEO is not just about quantity, even quality plays a major role here. For better and value-driven traffic, your website has to be perfect on both ends.

The data-driven approach of SEO includes the following steps:

SEO requires accurate and reliable information  for stronger strategies. For that most of the SEO experts make use of SEO tools. SEO tools help you attain valuable insights about your own work as well as your competitors’ work. In this blog, we have laid some powerful points about the most effective SEO tools that you must know about. 

Here we go,   

Semrush

Semrush is one of the most popular keyword research and analysis SEO tools. It is a SAAS platform that offers assistance in the processes like keyword research, technical SEO audit, competitor analysis, backlink audit, and many more. It is an amazing tool that will help you increase your website ranking. 

Features

  • Keyword Magic Tool: It contains more than 20 billion keywords, which is the highest compared to other tools in the market. It summarizes all the major keyword metrics like CPC, search volume, and keyword difficulty score. 
  • Site Audit Tool: It is a tool to monitor, analyze and troubleshoot SEO issues of your website. 
  • Position Tracking: This feature allows you to track your competitor’s position for your target keywords. 
  • Content Marketing Toolkit: It includes 6 content creation tools that help you optimize your content in the best way possible and outrank your competitors. 
  • Competitor Research Toolkit: It incorporates tools that will help you keep track of your competitor’s movements on SEO and other PPC campaigns. You attain their exact traffic metrics with the help of Traffic Analytics and add-on tools to set a benchmark for your competitors. 
  • Backlink Audit Tool: You identify and remove all the risky backlinks for a better Google ranking.
  • SEO Reports: You can download personalized PDF reports to organize your SEO and PPC data better. 

Pros

  • It can be considered a remarkable competitive intelligence tool to identify your competitors’ SEO and PPC strategies. 
  • The SEO Ideas tool technically offers you multiple things to optimize your target keywords.   
  • Using the Site Audit tool, you can easily identify all the technical SEO errors on your website. This is a useful feature to maintain the overall SEO health of your website. 

Cons

  • The features are quite complex, and it takes time to understand them. 
  • The Backlink Analytics tool sometimes lacks accuracy. 

Semrush pricing

  • Pro level will cost you around $119.95/mo.
  • Guru level is around $229.95/mo.
  • The business level is $449.95/mo.

Rating

  • G2-4.6/5
  • TrustRadius-9/10
  • Capterra-4.7/5

Conclusion for Semrush

Semrush is the most profitable tool for keyword research that allows you to understand your competitor’s keyword research strategy for better results.

Ahrefs

If you are looking for a tool to create the best quality backlinks for your website, Ahrefs is the best tool. You can easily outrank your biggest competition with its link index tool. You can track your website’s Google ranking and perform extensive keyword research using Keyword Explorer. Although it’s a full-fledged SEO tool, it is still known for its backlink features. 

Features

  • Site Explorer: Have an in-depth understanding of your website’s organic traffic and backlink with this feature.
  • Content Explorer: The most effective way to discover and create ultimate trending content.
  • Alerts: This feature informs you about your lost or new backlinks, keyword ranking, or web mentions. 
  • Rank Tracker: Easily track your website’s ranking from any location.
  • Domain Comparison: You can make comparisons of around 5 domains. 
  • Content Gap: You can identify the keywords that work for your competitors but not for you. 

Pros

  • The accurate tracker offers exact and reliable results.
  • Perfect backlink analysis.
  • The email alerts help you keep track of all the lost backlinks and important keywords.
  • Keywords Explorer’s most recent version raises the bar for keyword research.
  • This tool works amazingly with other marketing tools like Ninja Outreach, Mailshake, and Buzzsumo. 
  • The user interface of Ahrefs is extremely user-friendly. 

Cons

  • Producing an audit report with its Site Audit tool takes a long time.
  • This tool lacks some of the major SEO features. 
  • The tool is a little expensive as you have to pay $7 a week in order to use this tool. 

Pricing

  • Ahref lite will cost you around $99/mo.
  • Standard is around $179/mo.
  • Advanced is about $399/mo.
  • Agency is $999/mo.

Rating

  • G2-4.6/5
  • TrustRadius-8.7/10
  • Capterra-4.7/5

Conclusion for Ahrefs

Ahrefs review: It is worth investing in Ahrefs because of its backlink analysis feature and strong ROI.

MOZ

Rand Fishkin started Moz in 2004. Moz is a popular SEO tool that relies on metrics like Domain Authority. It offers insights into on-page optimization reports, link equity, and keyword rankings. This software will assist your business in quickly increasing its website traffic and visibility. 

Features

  • Global Rank Training: This feature allows you to keep track of keywords for search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing in more than 200 countries. 
  • Keyword Research: Identify the best keywords for your website.
  • Link Profile Analysis: Analyze the most crucial links on the web with the help of industry-leading metrics. 
  • Site Crawl: Discover and fix SEO errors to improve the health of your website. 
  • Page Optimization: Identify all the top-performing websites and understand the winning strategies of your competitors. 
  • Reporting: Make all the necessary changes to improve the working of your website. 

Pros

  • Moz’s Site Audit tool contains a part called “Moz Recommends Fixing” that offers all the crucial steps to fix a total of 3 major website problems.
  • You can boost your website’s ranking by fixing on-page issues using the Page Optimization feature.
  • Remarkable customer support for all the plans.
  • Moz keyword explorer will help you identify the most common and high-volume search terms for your website. 

Cons

  • The search volume data of Moz is pretty complex.
  • Sometimes the site audit reports are not exact, which can cause trouble in your analysis.
  • Backlink reports can be inaccurate.
  • The user interface is clunky and outdated. 

SEO MOZ Prices 

  • The standard price for Moz is $99/mo.
  • The medium price for Moz is $179/mo.
  • The large price for Moz is $249/mo.
  • The premium price for Moz is $599/mo.

Rating

  • G2-4.⅘
  • TrustRadius-8.4/10
  • Capterra-4.5/5

Conclusion for MOZ

Despite its weak points, it has proven to be a useful tool for keyword research. It will produce remarkable content, but Semrush and Moz are still considered to be better SEO tools than MOZ. 

SpyFu

Mike Roberts launched SpyFu in 2006. You can easily attain better insights into both SEO and PPC. It is a competitive intelligence tool that will help your website rank higher on search engines like Google, Yelp, etc. 

Features

  • SEO Research: You can improve your SEO strategies after analyzing the techniques of your competitors.
  • PPC Research: Identify your competitor’s most profitable keywords that your website is missing. 
  • Competitor Research: This feature can bring out deeper insights into your competitors. 

Pros

  • SpyFu offers a free plan with unlimited searches. 
  • It is an economical tool that provides a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

Cons

  • The paid plans do not come with a free trial option.
  • The tool has not yet developed as compared to others.
  • The user interface of the tool is pretty outdated. 

SpyFu Pricing

  • The basic price is $39/mo.
  • The professional price is $39/mo.
  • The business price is $299/mo. 

Rating

  • G2- 4.6/5
  • TrustRadius-8.1/10
  • Capterra-4.5/5

Conclusion for SpyFu

If you desire to offer tough competition to your competitors, then this is the right tool for you. But like every other tool, SpyFu has certain limitations but considering its price and features; it is absolutely worth it.

Final Verdict

Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Moz vs SpyFu

Visibly, a brand tracking website did research in which they monitored the search volume of 150 keywords across all these tools for a month, as you can see in the above data. As compared to others, Semrush showed a higher search volume for these keywords. 

In another research, they took a different approach and checked the median keyword volumes of those keywords. Check out the image below.

Keyword Research - Search Volume

This data showed that the average keyword volume of these keywords is the lowest according to MOZ and the highest per Spyfu. So there is no single winner in this contest. If you are looking for the best SEO tool, it will mainly vary per your requirement. 

The user interface of Ahrefs is better, whereas Semrush offers the most accurate data and is a perfect tool for backlink analysis. MOZ’s link index is considered to be better and more reliable as compared to others. SpyFu is cost-effective and a remarkable tool for keyword research.

gurushuran webspero
Gursharan Singh

Co-founded WebSpero solutions about a decade ago. Having worked in web development- I realized the dream of transforming ideas sketched out on paper into fully functioning websites. Seeing how that affected the customers’ generation of leads and conversions, I wanted to delve deeper into the sphere of digital marketing. At Webspero Solutions, handling operations and heading the entire Digital Marketing Field – SEO, PPC, and Content are my core domains. And although we as a team have faced many challenges, we have come far learning along and excelling in this field and making a remarkable online reputation for our work. Having worked in building websites and understanding that sites are bare structures without quality content, the main focus was to branch into optimizing each website for search engines. Investing in original, quality content creation is essential to SEO success in the current search climate. Succeeding in this arena ensures the benefits of producing visitor-friendly content. Directing all our teams to zoom in on these factors has been a role that I have thoroughly enjoyed playing throughout these years.