Looking for the best Moz alternative? Read on.
Moz is a quality all-in-one SEO toolset.
It allows you to perform keyword research, run site crawls and audits, analyze backlinks, track rankings, manage local listings, clean up citations, and bring data directly into the SERP via its SEO Toolbar.
But it’s not the perfect tool for everyone.
Some may think Moz is too pricey and want a more affordable or free alternative.
Others might feel the data limits for things like audit, keyword and backlink reports are too low on certain plans.
Others might prefer the UI and functionality of other standalone tools or all-in-one platforms.
In this guide, we’re going to look at the top 10 free and paid Moz alternatives, highlight their key use cases, and discuss how they compare to Moz.
For easy navigation, we’ve broken out the alternatives in the table of contents below:
Disclaimer: This article does contain affiliate links. If you purchase a tool through one of my links I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks in advance for the support!
Best All-in-One Moz Alternative: Semrush
Semrush is a leading all-in-one SEO platform that has over 55 tools for Competitor analysis, Keyword research, Rank tracking, Content and Technical audits, On-page and Backlink analysis, white-label reporting, and in-depth PPC analysis.
Semrush is used by over 10 million users, including top brands such as Amazon, Tesla and Walmart.
Semrush provides an immense amount of data (aff) comprising 23B+ billion keywords, 142 geo-locations, 808 million domain profiles, and the fastest backlink crawler and largest database (43 trillion backlinks) on the market. That’s more than enough firepower to blow most other standalone SEO tools out of the water.
Editor’s Note:
Semrush is an essential part of my SEO and PPC toolset for personal and client projects that I’ve been using for over 8+ years.
In addition to SEO and PPC, Semrush also provides a range of other Toolkits – Advertising, Content Marketing, Competitive Research, Campaign Management, and Social Media – to support other areas of your digital marketing campaigns.
And, most of the Toolkits integrate with each other.
Traffic Analytics
The Traffic Analytics (aff) tool lets you discover which marketing channels – organic, paid, referral, or social – drive traffic to any site. Plus, you can check estimated bounce rates, average visit duration, and other engagement metrics.
Enter any website, and you’ll discover:
- Which channels drive the most traffic.
- The categories of interest and brand preference of visitors.
- Which websites drive the most referral traffic.
- Which subdomains or subfolders get the most visits.
- Which pages/posts pull in the most organic traffic.
- Which keywords generate the most organic traffic.
- Which regions and countries drive the most traffic.
- The desktop vs. mobile traffic ratio and user engagement.
- The other websites that your visitors are also visiting.
The Semrush Traffic Analytics report also allows users to check the traffic stats for up to 200 different websites in a single report. This bulk analysis is a huge time-saver for agencies and businesses trying to quickly identify key traffic channels, and referral partner sources in new or existing markets.
Editor’s Note:
The Traffic Analytics tool provides an all-access backstage pass to your competitor’s entire traffic strategy, which is something that Moz doesn’t provide.
If you’re interested in trying the Traffic Analytics tool, use this free 14-day trial (aff).
Keyword Research
The Semrush SEO Toolkit (aff) provides access to a massive database of 23B+ different keywords with accurate search volume data that you can use to find new keyword opportunities or analyze those of your competitors.
You can use the SEMrush SEO Toolkit to:
- Find your high-value existing keyword opportunities.
- Unearth competitor keywords and top traffic pages with advanced filters.
- Perform URL, subfolder, and subdomain-level keyword gap analysis.
- Uncover question-based topics.
- Compare up to five competitors and uncover keywords they rank for, but you don’t.
- Use SERP metrics – search volume, search intent, estimated traffic, referring domains etc – to more accurately qualify keyword opportunities.
- Find untapped featured snippet opportunities.
Editor’s Note:
There’s a reason that Semrush was voted the best keyword research tool by over 130 SEO experts; it provides the largest, and arguably, the most accurate keyword database of any tool on the market.
That said, while the Moz keyword database (500M) is much smaller than Semrush’ (23B+), it does still provide one of the better keyword research tools on the market.
One of the top features is the SERP analysis breakdown. Similar to Semrush, users can view link data next to each ranking URL to better gauge competition, and more accurately qualify keyword opportunities.
Rank Tracking
The Semrush Position Tracking (aff) tool lets you accurately track mobile and desktop keyword rankings from country level, all the way down to the zip code.
This level of granularity has made Semrush a top-rated rank tracker, and a popular choice for agencies who need to monitor rankings for a range of clients targeting international markets all the way down to local businesses.
You can use the Position Tracking tool to:
- Get daily keyword ranking updates (including your competitors) across tags, devices, and locations.
- View historical ranking performance from the last 7, 30, 60, or 90 days. You can also set custom **** ranges.
- Monitor SERP feature movements, such as snippets, images, videos, carousels, and ads, to quickly spot new opportunities.
- Track ranking movements against competitors over time.
- View ranking data in white-label SEMrush reports, or integrate with third-party reporting tools like Google Data Studio.
- Import ranking data from other tools.
Editor’s Note:
The accuracy of Semrush’ desktop and mobile ranking data is the #1 reason I’ve been using the platform to track all the rankings for my personal projects, and agency clients over the past 8+ years.
I also really like having the ability to track SERP feature movements, and easily integrate ranking distribution data into third-party SEO dashboards.
You can track a larger number of keywords with Semrush (500) compared to Moz (300) on the respective starter plans.
That said, Moz does provide mobile and desktop ranking data across multiple search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Google. Right now, Semrush provides accurate ranking data that is updated daily for Google and Baidu (China).
Backlink Analysis
The Semrush backlink database contains over 1.6 billion referring domains to help you find all the domains linking to your website, and your competitors.
You can use the Backlink Analytics tool to:
- Check your backlink profile to identify and reclaim any lost backlinks.
- Analyze your competitors’ backlinks at scale and unearth their most powerful links.
- Uncover which content types and topics attract the most links for your competitors.
- Find your competitor’s recurring backlink sources.
- Discover unlinked brand mentions.
- Prospect for links and run outreach campaigns from directly inside the SEMrush application.
You can use the Backlink Gap tool to:
- Compare the backlink profiles of up to five of competitors and quickly find backlink opportunities that you’re missing.
You can use the Backlink Audit tool to:
- Examine your domain’s backlink profile for any suspicious or toxic links, and automatically create a disavow file to send to Google.
Editor’s Note:
The Semrush link building tool set has come a long way in recent years. The Backlink Analytics and Backlink Gap tools provide quality competitor link insights if you don’t want to pay for a dedicated link building tool.
In fact, the Semrush link database (1.6B domains) is now larger than Moz’ database (718M domains), and many other dedicated link building platforms.
The Backlink Audit tool is also a handy feature that makes it easy to quickly spot potentially harmful links across sites of any size.
Finally, Semrush’ Link Building Tool enables users to not only prospect, but also run outreach and track new links all within the Semrush platform. This feature means that you don’t have to pay for separate tools for prospecting and sending outreach emails.
Technical SEO Audits
The Site Audit (aff) tool is a powerful website crawler that allows you to quickly analyze any website’s health. The audit produces a prioritized list of issues, including duplicate content, thin content, orphaned pages, crawlability, and broken links, so you can see precisely where a website is struggling.
You can use the Site Audit tool to:
- Inspect the desktop or mobile version of a site, plus include or exclude specific pages.
- Compare crawls side-by-side to see how errors, warnings, and notices have changed over time.
- Run on-demand audits and schedule auto re-crawls on a daily or weekly basis.
Editor’s Note:
I prefer to use the Semrush Site Audit tool, and currently use it to run monthly site crawls and technical audits for personal and client projects.
You can run technical site audits from one central SEO project dashboard, which is especially useful when managing multiple clients.
Semrush will give you an updated “health” score after each re-crawl.
One of the best features of the Semrush Site Audit tool is the ability to compare audits side-by-side to show progress over time, and send action items to external tools like Trello.
Moz also provides a site crawl and audit tool that identifies a range of technical site issues, and similar to Semrush, breaks them down into categories.
Local Listings Management
The Local Listing Management (aff) tool is an integration between Semrush and Yext that helps local businesses upload and maintain NAP listings.
Simply enter your NAP details once, and the Listing Management tool maintains the correct information on your website, Google Business profile, social networks, and important industry/niche directories.
- Manage and publish local business information (NAP) to the major data aggregators, and dozens of authoritative directories, including Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Alexa.
- Correct or adjust your NAP any time to make it more consistent across the web.
- Monitor and reply to all your customers’ reviews in one place and manage your ratings.
Editor’s Note:
Moz provides an industry-leading local SEO solution, especially when it comes to citation building, audits, cleanup, and review management.
Semrush integrates with Yext, which is handy if you want to get NAP data pushed out to the leading aggregators and directories.
That said, Moz is a top-rated local search tool, and would be the preferred option if you’re looking for a dedicated solution for managing local listings.
White Label Reporting
Semrush’s white-label Reporting tools (aff) enable brands and agencies to present a competitive analysis, and clearly show the performance of SEO and PPC campaigns.
You can also use the drag-and-drop widgets to build branded SEO performance reports that combine Semrush analytics with other third-party data, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google My Business.
- Generate reports from pre-existing templates or create your own custom template.
- Build, save, and manage all your reports in the tool with a user-friendly interface.
- Send regular reports automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Editor’s Note:
Similar to Semrush, Moz provides a quality drag-and-drop report builder that enables users to create custom-branded and/or white label reports from scratch, or using pre-built templates.
One feature that helps Semrush stand out is the ability to not only pull data from each of its toolkits, but also third-party sources such as Google Analytics, Search Console and Google My Business.
For many businesses and agencies, this functionality removes the need to invest in a dedicated SEO reporting tool.
Semrush also provides an integration with Google Data Studio on its higher paid plans.
Best Moz Alternative for Beginners: Mangools
Mangools (aff) is a user-friendly and affordable SEO toolset that makes it easy for any SEO (beginner to advanced) to extract valuable insights.
The easy-to-navigate 5-in-one toolset is used by big brands such as Airbnb and Adidas to perform keyword research, analyze SERP data, track rankings, analyze backlinks, and run top-level site analysis.
It has one of the nicest user interfaces of any tool on the market.
Here’s how you can use the Mangools SEO toolset:
- KWFinder (aff) helps you identify long-tail keywords with low SEO difficulty, either using seed keywords or your competitor’s domain. You get a list of keywords with search volume and a Keyword Difficulty (KD) “traffic-light” rating so that you can target the quick-win keywords.
- SERPChecker (aff) lets you run localized SERP simulations for any country or city on desktop or mobile. You can see all your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, use 45+ different data points to evaluate SERP competition, identify the impact of rich snippets on SERP CTRs, and compare your website metrics against the competition.
- SiteProfiler (aff) lets you check the SEO metrics and authority of any website. You can check the health of a backlink profile, spot the most popular content, benchmark your website against other sites, and discover similar websites based on audience demographics.
Editor’s Note:
Mangools is an affordable, user-friendly Moz alternative that provides a ton of data in an easy-to-digest format.
LinkMiner contains 9.5 trillion backlinks and pulls in Majestic’s trust and citation flow metrics. And SERPWatcher provides daily rank updates across 52,000+ locations on any device.
The tool makes it incredibly easy to find high-value keyword ideas, and use several SERP data points to accurately qualify each opportunity.
Best Free Moz Alternative: Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free, easy-to-use SEO toolset with access to over 6 billion keywords and 1 billion pieces of content. Users can perform keyword research, topic research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and run SEO audit reports.
The free version provides limited data, but is still very handy if you’re looking for a free alternative to Moz. For example: you are limited to 100 keyword results per search.
You can use Ubersuggest to:
- Discover which content is getting the most engagement – social shares and backlinks – in your niche.
- Generate keyword suggestions, questions, comparisons, and prepositions based on what’s working for your competitors, plus what people are typing into Google.
- View link and traffic estimates for each keyword inside the SERP report.
- Monitor your backlinks and find opportunities for getting new high-quality links for your website.
- Check your site for SEO issues, and get detailed instructions on how to fix them.
Editor’s Note:
While Ubersuggest won’t do everything or give you access to nearly as much data compared to Moz or Semrush, it’s still a fantastic free alternative.
Ubersuggest also has some paid plans ranging from $29 – $99/month, plus some special lifetime deals that offer more features and reports/queries per day.
Best Single Purpose Moz Alternatives
So far, we’ve looked at the best all-in-one, beginner, and free alternatives to Moz.
But, you might not be looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one SEO toolset like Semrush, and only want to invest in a tool for a specific use case, like local SEO, backlink analysis, SERP tracking, or site audits.
So, here are the best single-use case alternatives to Moz.
Best Moz Alternative for Backlink Analysis: Ahrefs Site Explorer
Ahrefs has the largest index of live backlinks and is the second most active web crawler after Google. Ahrefs is a clear leader when it comes to backlink analysis and link prospecting. That said, Ahrefs is also one of the top Moz alternatives for keyword research, technical site audits and competitor content analysis.
You can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to:
- Analyze competitor link profiles to see which pages, content types, and topics get linked to the most.
- Use advanced filtering to find the best competitor link prospects.
- Find backlink gaps and also identify your competitors’ recurring link sources.
- Analyze anchor text distribution, spot PBN activity, and potential malicious SEO attacks.
- View traffic estimates for backlink sources.
- Monitor the growth in backlinks, plus page and domain ratings.
- Spot the source of broken, new and lost backlinks.
- Use the Batch Analysis tool to pull link metrics for up to 200 URLs at a time.
- View link metrics inside SERP reports and more accurately qualify keywords.
- Identify which websites link to your competitors the most.
Bonus resources:
Ahrefs Review
21 Actionable Link Building Strategies
10-Step SERP Analysis Guide
Best Moz Alternative for Keyword Research: Semrush
Semrush gives you access to an enormous database of 23B+ billion keywords through several integrated keyword research tools. One unique feature is that you can add keyword ideas to your master list (inside SEMrush) from various places, including the Keyword Magic Tool, SEO and PPC toolkits.
You can use the Keyword Magic (aff) tool to:
- Get loads of related long-tail keywords divided into subgroups and question-based topics from your seed keyword.
- Use keyword filters such as best, top, software, versus, and competitor to find higher intent opportunities.
- Find keywords that trigger SERP features.
- View SERP overview reports with integrated backlink, intent and trend data to more accurately qualify and prioritize keyword opportunities.
Bonus resources:
19 Practical DIY SEO Tactics
Targeted Keyword Research Guide
Keyword Gap Analysis: 5 Advanced Tactics in Under 10 Minutes
Semrush vs. Ahrefs: Which is the Better Toolset?
5-Step Competitor Keyword Research Guide
Best Moz Alternative for Rank Tracking: AccuRanker
AccuRanker (aff) is the world’s fastest (on-demand) and most accurate standalone rank tracker used by over 25,000 agencies, SEO professionals, and brands.
Not only does this platform allow you to gain granular real-time ranking data across all the major search engines, but it also enables users to tie ranking movements back to traffic and conversions.
You can use AccuRanker to:
- Evaluate market penetration with its unique Share of Voice (SoV) metric.
- Run accurate on-demand updates of ranking data.
- Track keyword rankings across all major search engines, including Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and YouTube.
- Map ranking data to Google Analytics traffic, goal, and revenue data in the Landing Pages report.
- Monitor 50+ SERP features, such as featured snippets, knowledge panels, images, videos, carousels, ads, and local packs, for all of your keywords.
Bonus resource: AccuRanker Review
Best Moz Alternatives for Technical Audits
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a versatile tool for performing in-depth technical and on-page SEO audits.
The powerful site crawler quickly gathers data on almost every on-page and technical SEO element, including indexation, titles, headings, meta descriptions, site speed, UX, content length, duplicate content, broken links, file sizes, and more.
Screaming Frog can crawl any type of website. Users can configure the spider to crawl specific sections of a website, and only pull in certain metrics.
You can use Screaming Frog to:
- Evaluate page titles and meta descriptions that are too long, too short, missing, or duplicated across your site.
- Find internal and external broken links (4xx), redirect errors (3xx), server errors (5xx), and issues with blocked resources.
- Discover duplicate and thin (low) content pages.
- Pinpoint large image files that cause slow site loading times.
- Analyze internal link structure and uncover orphan pages.
- Crawl and analyze JavaScript websites and frameworks, such as Angular, React, and Vue.js.
- Use API connections to pull performance data – engagement, traffic, links and conversions – from third-party sources, such as Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz and Pagespeed Insights, and map them to all the URLs in a crawl.
Sitebulb
Sitebulb is a user-friendly website auditing tool. It’s ideal for those who are less technical, as you can use the color-coded visual graphs and easy-to-navigate UI to quickly spot issues. Plus, you can follow the helpful hints to understand why it’s an issue and how to potentially go about solving it.
You can use Sitebulb to:
- Find and fix duplicate content, titles, meta descriptions, and URLs.
- Spot on-page issues, such as thin content and missing elements.
- Discover problems with broken links or internal links to redirects.
- Unearth crawling and indexing issues.
- Use maps to visualize the internal link structure of a website.
- Compare audits over time to see which metrics have improved.
- Crawl and render Javascript websites just like the major search engines.
- Build custom PDF reports that can be used to showcase results to a client, support sales prospecting, or highlight opportunities for the C-suite.
Editor’s Note:
Sitebulb has quickly become one of the leading website auditing tools on the market. It provides extremely actionable insights inside an easy-to-digest user interface.
If you find that Screaming Frog is a little hard to navigate, but Moz doesn’t provide enough data, then Sitebulb is a great alternative to consider.
Best Moz Alternatives for Content Analysis
Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO (aff) is a data-driven on-page SEO analysis tool. It’s the latest addition to my SEO arsencal, and a tool I now rely on daily across personal and client projects.
The Content Editor is ideal for optimizing existing assets, and the SERP Analyzer makes it easy to create detailed content briefs for writers.
Surfer SEO integrates with Google docs, and has a free chrome extension (aff) that pulls estimated search volume data directly into the SERP.
You can use Surfer SEO to:
- Build data-driven content briefs based on 500+ ranking factors.
- Pinpoint the perfect keyword density, common words, precise copy length, page structure, headers, and more for your content.
- Discover topical questions that potential visitors have and answer them within your content.
- Find quick wins for your content and boost rankings immediately.
Editor’s Note:
I use Surfer SEO almost daily to optimize existing assets and build detailed content briefs for clients and personal projects. I cover it all in this review.
Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is a great tool for discovering which content types for a competitor or an industry get the most traffic, social engagement, and/or backlinks.
It’s also integrated with other SEO tools in the Ahrefs platform, making it possible to view traffic, backlink, and engagement data for different content.
You can use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to:
- Find the most popular content on any topic, sorted by traffic, social shares, referring domains, and more.
- Delve deeper into any content to see whether a page is gaining or losing backlinks and organic traffic over time with the in-line charts.
- Reverse-engineer your competitor’s content marketing strategy.
- Find broken link building opportunities with the live/broken filter and referring domains filter on a given topic.
- Find unlinked brand mentions.
- Identify high-traffic keywords that don’t require many backlinks to rank.
Best Moz Alternative for Local SEO: BrightLocal
BrightLocal (aff) is a leading all-in-one local marketing platform that can build, clean up and remove citations, generate and manage online reviews and reputation, audit Google My Business (GMB) information, and track local search rankings.
It’s trusted by thousands of marketers from agencies, small businesses, and multi-location businesses, including IKEA and Valvoline.
You can use BrightLocal to:
- Grow, monitor, and respond to customer reviews on the sites that matter most to your business.
- Track local search rankings in organic, local packs, maps, and mobile.
- Audit and expand your citation profile.
- Run SEO and GMB audits to improve local search performance.
- Integrate with Google Analytics to track changes to traffic and conversions.
- Generate white-label reports for clients.
Bonus resource: Best Local SEO Tools
Which Moz Alternative Are You Going to Try?
Moz is a top-quality all-in-one SEO toolset that allows you to:
- Research keywords
- Run technical SEO audits
- Analyze backlinks
- Track rankings
- Manage local listings
- Clean-up citations
Depending on your business requirements, you may want to buy a specialized standalone tool, like AccuRanker (aff) or Screaming Frog.
But if you want to invest in an all-in-one SEO toolset that has a similar price point to Moz, then Semrush (aff) is the best alternative.
