If you are launching content marketing campaigns you need SEO tools to rank better on search engines. It assesses the potential of site pages if it has the ability to rank high on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Let’s first go through the meaning and use of SEO tools to better understand how it works.
SEO tools help content rank higher on search results by assessing it for backlinks, keywords, and other SEO elements.
Keywords
Keywords Analysis is used to identify the most common search terms related to the site and the competitors ranking for the particular keyword.
Backlinks
Backlinks are an element to rank high on SERPs. They are links coming from another website to your site.
If a site has a high volume of traffic, they can drive more traffic to your site. If more sites are linking to your site, the better is your ranking.
Content
Every content must be properly optimized for the readers and search engines. It must have relevant keywords to match the queries of the users.
Search terms must be used in the headline and must not be excessively used in the content. Search engines like Google don’t like abusing keywords in the content. It could end up getting your site penalized if used it too many times.
Your content must be read as natural as possible. It must not sound or look like keywords are forced within. To make it interesting for the readers, it must be optimized with images or videos.
These visual elements make the content unique, interesting and compelling. People will be encouraged to share it on social media. The more it is liked, shared, the more it ranks higher on the SERPs.
Social Media
SEO tools analyze information on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It can tell the frequency that the web pages or articles are linked on social media or how much users have accessed the blog. Tools can also identify trends on these networks through the use of commonly used keywords.
Domain
It is important that URLs contain keywords. It tells the search engines what the site is all about. When a user types a certain keyword, the domains suggests that they have found the right site.
Traffic
SEO tools measure the number of visitors to your site coming from external sources and within the site. It evaluates data like where the visitors come from, how often they visit the site, and how they use it. The keywords used by a visitor on the site can also be determined by the tool.
Ranking
The majority of SEO tools are ranking tools for sites. It measures the ranking of pages and sites based on their comparison with other sites. To boost your site’s ranking, write valuable and unique content, use relevant keywords, and have backlinks.
Now that you know how SEO tools function, let’s discuss two of the most popular SEO tools in the industry today: SEMrush and Moz.
SEO is continually changing, Google provides updates on its algorithms over 500 times yearly. It equates to 1 to 2 updates everyday that can impact your site search traffic.
However, not all of us are SEO professionals or experts who know how we can improve the site’s rankings. Fortunately, there are a lot of SEO tools that can help boost your ranking on SERPs.
SEMrush and Moz are great SEO tools that can assist you in coming up with the changing algorithms of the search engines, improve your rankings, and avoid penalties.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO platform that identifies relevant keywords and watches your competitor’s keywords, backlinks, strategies, and traffic. Users said that it is a great tool to get on top of the competition.
It is an effective tool that helps sites evaluate their keywords and grow their traffic. Since it is updated on a regular basis, users can get relevant and precise data.
It is ideal for sites that want to know how their competitors rank and how much traffic they are receiving.
SEMrush’s Features:
-Select the most effective keywords.
SEMrush is best when searching for the most profitable keywords. When you use the platform, you can access its dashboard and proceed to the “keyword research.” When you enter the keyword on the search bar, it provides you a list of related search terms and their monthly search volume.
It gives you information including the best keywords for your niche, match keywords and phrases, related keywords, and region-specific keywords.
-Analysis of backlinks.
You need to analyze backlinks of your competitors including their link building strategies. The tool is a great backlink checker because it monitors the upcoming links, its quality (is it authoritative or not), and other factors.
It is useful as it can uncover new referral traffic sources and enhance the quality of your backlinks.
-To keep track of your competitor’s keywords.
The tool is best used for tracking your competitor’s keywords, traffic, and backlinks. By analyzing the data, it helps you understand your position in the competition. It also helps you better understand your target audience and niche.
-To find out your competitor’s techniques.
It assists you in analyzing and identifying your competitor’s strategies. You can plan your campaigns better, identify opportunities as well as threats.
-To find advertising opportunities.
SEMrush scans the keywords that you are ranking for and selects the companies that make adverts based on those search terms. The tool shows the data on its charts, such as the domain, Ads keywords, common keywords, Ads traffic, and Ads traffic price.
-It provides a site audit.
SEMrush is an all-around tool that can help you in checking out the health of your site. It can identify and address the issues of your site.
-It tracks your position in the ranking.
The tools not only help you monitor the keywords but also point how it works. It works best when you want to check your keyword performance.
-It can create projects.
SEMrush’s Projects feature can help you build projects on your site or blog’s domain. It can collect and provide you reports daily regarding the position of your keywords, search traffic, and more.
Pros and Cons of SEMrush:
Pros:
It offers a lot of features that can help boost your SEO.
It has wide resources with its 128, 000, 000+ domains and 120, 000, 000+ keywords in its 29 databases.
You can monitor your competitors and boost your rankings.
It permits you to track Domain Vs Domain metrics that serve very useful if you want to get on top of the competition.
It offers AdSense Publishers report that provides information on where your competitors are doing ads.
It offers more detailed and competitive data.
The audit feature lets you analyze your site’s performance on Google.
You are able to know how much your competitors are spending on AdWords.
Cons:
The price is too steep for startups and small businesses.
SEMrush ‘s backlink data are not always accurate.
Now let’s take a look at Moz:
Moz
Moz is an SEO tool that highlights on-page recommendations, link-building opportunities, keyword metrics, crawl errors, online mentions, and many other factors.
It is a basic and advanced SEO software that offers keyword research, SEO keyword generator, and link analysis. It provides information such as the quality of your links and inbound links.
Moz’s Features:
-Keyword research.
Moz’s keyword explorer feature lets you identify the best keyword that will improve your SEO. It analyzes four metrics: keyword volume, difficulty, opportunity, and potential.
It analyzes how your keywords work. It pinpoints what keywords work best and works the least. What’s good with the tool is that it provides valuable insights on your keyword performance.
-Link analysis.
This feature helps you find where your backlinks are coming from. It tracks mentions that you are getting online whether it is linked or unlinked. It gives you an idea of how often your brand is mentioned on the web.
-Open site explorer.
You can experience this feature once you paid for the membership fee. It provides the following information:
It detects spam sites that link to you.
It targets the best pages for link building.
It identifies the keywords that your site may rank for.
It analyzes broken and unlinked phrases on your site.
-Moz Analytics.
It helps you gain insights of your own site including rankings, search traffic, and keyword visibility. It enables you to assess and know where your site is in terms of keyword ranking and the competition. It is perfect for bloggers who want to promote their visibility.
-To find link opportunities.
It helps you keep track of unlinked mentions, competitive link opportunities, and broken links. It can provide site contact information on your competitor’s website. It provides you information on high-quality links that can boost your site ranking. You get information including the Page Authority, Domain Authority (DA), and page link metrics features of any domain.
-It monitors your competitor’s rankings.
It is a tool that helps you identify keywords ranking across 200 countries. It helps you discover your competitors in the niche and assess and compare your site’s performance against their performance.
-Mobile rankings.
It is one of the newest features offered by Moz that helps you track your mobile rankings. This feature provides information including the comparison of your ranking on mobile vs desktop and mobile-friendly tags.
Sites must be optimized for mobile. Otherwise, it impacts both your traffic and search rankings.
-It is a crawl test tool.
It works as a crawl test tool to find HTTP status codes, errors, and other useful data. You can find up to 3, 000 links on a URL. It is the right tool when you want to identify your site’s problems including missing headlines and duplicate content.
-Rank tracker.
Before you make any movement on your rankings, you need to know your ranking performance. You need to know where your site is presently ranking on so that it would be easy for you to set your ranking goals.
-It offers Fresh Web Explorer feature.
You need to acquire more links to boost your ranking. One way to do this is to track your competitor’s keywords and links. By doing this, you can track opportunities to build authority links.
-Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis Tool.
When writing content, you need to use relevant keywords that would help you to rank on SERPs. You want to avoid those search terms that are highly competitive. It can help you choose the right keywords that will help improve your rankings.
-Page Optimization Checklist.
Moz offers a Page Optimization Checklist that recommends steps to improve your rankings.
-On-Page Grader
This feature helps you audit your on-page SEO. It provides insights of your page so that you can improve it to boost your rankings. There are more than 30 criteria to rank your web pages. It then provides recommendations.
-Spam Analysis.
It’s a newly added feature of the tool that helps you identify potential spam links on your sites. When you identify the links, your traffic is going to improve.
Pros and Cons of Using Moz
Pros:
There is a 30-day free trial that provides users more time to think if the tool is right for their business or not.
It provides detailed and useful analytics and results.
It assists in enhancing a site’s rankings, traffic, and keyword visibility.
The Spam feature easily identifies spam links on your sites.
It continually offers updates and developments to help improve your site’s rankings.
It helps you discover quality link building sources to boost your traffic.
The forum is very useful and effective to get an issue addressed.
Cons:
You may feel overwhelmed with its many features.
Check out the comparison of SEMrush Vs Moz based on their basic plans:
As a smart marketer, you need to check out the features and plans that each SEO tool can offer. Your goal is to boost your SEO rankings. You need to ensure that you are using the best tool that can help your business achieve higher rankings on SERPs.
Both Moz and SEMrush are popular and great SEO tools in the inbound marketing industry. Compare the two before shopping for the best SEO tool in order to maximize the results.
They are both useful and effective. However, you need to remember that they both serve different purposes. Weigh and identify which one can help provide the best benefits.