Moz Review: Our Months of Testing Reveals if It’s Worth It

You’d think picking the right SEO tool would be straightforward, especially with 91% of marketers reporting positive ROI.

It’s not.

Look at the options:

Ahrefs charges $129/month, SEMrush wants $140/month, and Moz asks for $99/month.

Each promises to be your SEO savior, and each makes the choice more overwhelming than it should be.

So I decided to put Moz through its paces.

Not just another surface-level review, but a deep dive into their core promise of “simplified SEO workflows.”

I wanted to answer two questions:

1. Can their AI-powered insights help you understand your audience better?
2. And does their 20+ years of expertise translate into real business value?

In this review, I’ll break down exactly what makes Moz different, where it falls short, and most importantly—whether it’s worth your money.

What is Moz?

Moz Pro is a platform that helps marketers get more traffic from Google without drowning in SEO complexity.

Before we dive deeper, you should know that Moz isn’t just one tool.

They offer three distinct products:

1. Moz Pro for comprehensive SEO
2. Moz Local for managing local business visibility
3. And STAT for enterprise-level SERP tracking.

Each has its own pricing structure. They also maintain a suite of free tools. But in this review, we’re focusing on their flagship product: Moz Pro.

Instead of adding more complexity, Moz Pro focuses on removing it. You see this philosophy clearly in their keyword research tool.

While other platforms bombard you with every possible metric, Moz shows you just three things:

• search volume
• difficulty
• and potential reach.

Then their AI groups keywords by search intent, turning hours of manual work into minutes.

The same thinking shapes their site analysis. Instead of dropping a 100-page audit report in your lap, you get a prioritized list of what to fix first.

I’ve noticed a pattern in successful companies: they don’t just solve technical problems – they solve human ones.

SEO’s technical problem is getting ranked on Google. But its human problem is feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about what to do next.

Moz gets this.

That’s where their AI comes in, not as a buzzword, but as a genuine solution to information overload.

When you’re staring at a keyword list, it doesn’t just tell you what people are searching for – it tells you why they’re searching.

Want to know if people searching “coffee machines” are looking to buy one or fix one?

Now you know. This is the kind of insight that shapes content strategy.

Moz’s bet on simplicity aligns with how humans work: we don’t need more information – we need better ways to use the information we have.

What We Like About Moz

• They’ve nailed cognitive simplicity. You get limited metrics that matter for decisions.
• Their AI groups keywords by user intent, not just volume. This saves hours of manual analysis trying to guess why people are searching.
• Brand Authority metric shows real intelligence – they understand Google now cares more about brand strength than technical perfection.
• On-Page Grader gives you actionable fixes, not just an endless list of problems. Each suggestion comes with clear priority levels.
• Reports focus on insights over data dumps. You get visualizations that help spot patterns.

Where We Wish Moz Did Better

• 3,000-page crawl limit feels restrictive for larger sites. Yes, you can upgrade, but it should be higher by default.
• Link index updates every 3 days while competitors do it daily. This lag can matter during time-sensitive campaigns.
• Local SEO tools being separate creates unnecessary friction. Integration with the main suite would make more sense.

Getting Started with Moz (Pro)

Moz has designed its onboarding to make it effortless for anyone to get the ball rolling as soon as possible.

Click on this link to activate your 30-day free trial of Moz Pro.

You should land on this page:

From there,

1. Choose between Standard ($99/month) or Medium ($179/month)

2. Complete your profile setup

3. Add billing info (they won’t charge until the trial ends)

The trial gives you full access to all the pro features for 30 days which we will discuss soon enough.

Create your Free Moz account here →

Interface and User Experience

Moz’s interface is built around a clean, whitespace-heavy design with a left sidebar for navigation.

This isn’t just aesthetics – it’s about cognitive load.

When you’re trying to figure out why your traffic dropped 30% last month, the last thing you need is to navigate through three nested menus.

Next is Moz’s contextual help system.

Every feature page has a “How to use this page” button prominently placed on the right. When you’re staring at a link profile and wondering what to do next, help is one click away.

They’ve also built comprehensive tutorials on each feature page. These tutorials sit at the bottom of the page, out of your way until you need them.

For newcomers, they’ve created specific onboarding paths for different SEO disciplines – keyword research, link building, technical SEO, and more.

I’ve seen too many great SEO strategies die because the tools were too complicated to execute – that’s not a problem you’ll have with Moz.

Moz Features

Moz Pro offers seven core features to take your SEO game to another level:

1. Domain Overview
2. Competitive Research
3. Keyword Research
4. Link Research
5. On-Page Grader
6. On-Demand Crawl
7. Rank Checker

Let’s discuss each one in detail.

1. Domain Overview

Domain Overview is like a doctor’s checkup for your website. It shows you whether your site is healthy or needs attention.

Instead of drowning you in data, it first answers the questions that matter:

1. Is your site healthy?
2. Are people finding you?
3. Who’s linking to you?
4. What are you known for?

Using it is dead simple. Type in a URL, pick your market and click Analyze. That’s it.

Immediately, Moz use AI to tell you what your site is about.

Think about it:

Knowing your site’s Domain Authority (a score from 1-100) is useful. But knowing that you’re seen as an authority on “home gardening” rather than just “gardening”?

That’s gold.

The clever part is how they handle link tracking. Moz shows you which ones you gained and lost in the last 60 days. It’s like having a profit/loss statement for your website’s relationships.

I’m particularly impressed with their Brand Authority metric.

While everyone else is still obsessing over just backlinks, Moz realized something important: in today’s SEO, your brand strength matters as much as your technical setup.

The real power comes from the data visualization. Instead of making you dig through spreadsheets, they show you everything in clear graphs.

You can see exactly how your authority has changed over time, which is crucial for understanding if your SEO efforts are working.

2. Competitive Research

Moz has three features to perform solid competitive research:

1. True Competitor tells you who you’re competing against (which often isn’t who you think).
2. Keyword Gap shows you what your competitors rank for that you don’t.
3. Top Competing Content reveals why certain pages outrank yours.

They focus on what they call “Rivalry” – a single 1-100 score that combines domain authority, keyword overlap, and rankings.

This turns out to be incredibly useful in practice. In Google’s eyes, you get a clear picture of who your actual competitors are.

The interface reflects this focus on clarity. Type in your domain, pick your market and click a button. That’s it.

Moz does the heavy lifting, analyzing millions of keywords to find your true competitors.

But the real power comes from what happens next.

Once you know who you’re competing against, Moz shows you the exact keywords where they’re beating you – and more importantly, how much traffic you could gain by outranking them.

They call this “Traffic Lift,” and it’s basically a priority list for your SEO efforts. Instead of guessing which keywords to target next, you can see exactly where the biggest opportunities are.

Instead of just showing you keywords you’re missing, they categorize them into actionable groups:

• Keywords to improve (where you’re close but not quite there)
• New opportunities (keywords you don’t rank for at all)
• Winning keywords (where you’re ahead and need to defend your position)

I’ve seen too many businesses waste months targeting the wrong keywords simply because they didn’t understand who they were competing against.

Moz solves this problem elegantly.

3. Keyword Research

Moz’s keyword research tool helps you find and prioritize search terms that’ll bring you traffic.

I’ve spent years doing SEO, and I’ve noticed that keyword research usually boils down to three questions:

1. Is this keyword worth targeting?
2. Can I rank for it?
3. What’s the searcher trying to do?

The Keyword Explorer’s interface reflects this simplicity. You type in a keyword or URL, pick your market, and click analyze. That’s it.

What happens next is interesting. Moz uses AI to group keywords by intent. This is more valuable than it might sound.

Think about someone searching for “AI tools.”

Are they looking to buy one?

Or to learn how they work?

The intent matters more than the search volume.

The most powerful feature isn’t even the most obvious one. It’s something they call “Explore by Site.”

Instead of guessing what keywords you should target, you can see exactly what’s working for your competitors.

Moz does something else that’s subtle but important:

It shows you only the metrics that correlate with actual ranking success. When you’re looking at a keyword, you see its difficulty score, monthly volume, and organic click-through rate.

4. Link Research

When someone links to your website, they’re telling Google “this is worth checking out.” The more respected the site linking to you, the more weight their vote carries.

That’s essentially what Domain Authority measures – how much weight a site’s vote carries.

Here’s what matters about link research:

Your goal isn’t just to get more links. It’s to get better links. And “better” means two things:

1. more authoritative sites
2. and more relevant ones.

Moz’s Link Explorer helps you find both. It works by crawling the web constantly, using an AI called Dotbot that prioritizes high-value pages. New links show up within about 3 days.

But raw data isn’t enough. You need to know what to do with it.

That’s where Link Explorer’s four core tools come in:

1. Inbound Links show you who’s linking to you right now. Think of it as your current voting record.

2. Linking Domains tells you how many unique sites are voting for you. Ten links from one site count as one domain – because Google cares more about diversity than volume.

3. Anchor Text reveals how people describe your site when they link to you. This matters because it tells Google what you’re known for.

4. Top Pages identifies which of your pages attract the most valuable links. These are your star performers.

The genius is in how it handles spam. Instead of just flagging “bad” sites, Moz looks at 27 different signals – things like whether a site has real contact information, or if it uses suspicious domain names.

A high spam score doesn’t automatically mean “bad.” It means “investigate further.”

Just like you wouldn’t immediately trust someone just because they’re wearing a suit, you shouldn’t immediately distrust a site just because it has some spam signals.

The real power comes from comparing link profiles. You can put your site next to five competitors and see exactly where you’re falling behind or pulling ahead.

The key to using Link Explorer effectively is to focus on domains that matter in your space. Don’t chase every possible link. Chase the ones that could move the needle.

5. On-Page Grader

The On-Page Grader is Moz’s way of telling you if your page will make sense to Google and humans. Not in a complex way, but with a simple score out of 100.

I’ve always thought most SEO tools make a simple thing needlessly complex. They throw endless metrics at you without telling you what matters.

Moz takes a different approach.

The On-Page Grader looks at 27 specific things about your page and tells you what’s working and what isn’t.

Using it is simple:

1. Type in your page URL
2. Enter the keyword you want to rank for
3. Click Analyze

That’s it.

What makes it different is how it presents information. It breaks down every issue into three categories: things hurting your score, things helping your score, and potential improvements.

The genius is in the prioritization.

Critical issues get a red exclamation mark.

Important but not urgent issues get a yellow one.

Nice-to-have improvements get a blue info bubble.

And things you’re doing right get a green checkmark.

Each issue comes with a plain English explanation of why it matters and how to fix it.

I second the fact that great things happen when you run it on your competitors’ pages too.

Seeing how they’re optimizing (or failing to optimize) their content can reveal opportunities you might have missed.

It’s worth noting that while it gives clear suggestions, you shouldn’t follow them blindly. Every website is different. What works for an e-commerce product page might not work for a blog post.

Use the suggestions as guidelines, not gospel.

6. On-Demand Crawl

On-Demand Crawl shows you everything wrong with your website’s SEO in about 15 minutes.

Technical SEO is about finding problems before they become disasters.

I learned this the hard way.

Years ago, I had a site suddenly drop in rankings. Turned out my developer friend had accidentally added no-index tags to our main pages. A crawl would have caught that in minutes.

Here’s how Moz Pro’s On-Demand Crawl works:

You give it a URL, and it acts like Google, visiting every page it can find. But instead of ranking your pages, it looks for problems.

The crawler (they call it Rogerbot) visits up to 3,000 pages on your site.

It doesn’t just list problems – it prioritizes them. Critical issues get a red mark. Important but not urgent ones get yellow. Nice-to-haves get blue.

One subtle but important feature:

When the crawl finishes, you get an email. This means you can start a crawl, go do something else, and come back when it’s ready.

If you’re working with larger sites, you’ll want to know about the Campaign feature. It lets you crawl more than 3,000 pages and runs weekly checks.

Think of it as moving from annual checkups to having a fitness tracker.

The data export options are comprehensive, but I won’t list every field here because that would miss the point.

What matters is that you can get exactly the data you need in a format that’s easy to work with.

7. Rank Checker

One of the hardest things about SEO is knowing if the work is working.

Here’s what matters about rank tracking:

You need to know three things:

1. Where you rank right now
2. How that’s changed over time
3. How you compare to competitors

The genius of Moz’s Rank Checker is how it handles all three without making you think about how it works.

Enter a keyword and URL, pick your search engine and location, and click Search. That’s it.

The result is the rank of that URL for that keyword in the SERPs, monthly volume, and difficulty.

When you want to see how things change over time, just click refresh. You get one refresh per keyword per day – which is enough for most purposes.

The history view shows you trends going back a year.

You can check either a specific page or an entire domain. The domain check tells you if any page on your site ranks for that term – even ones you might have forgotten about.

Thanks to Moz’s Rank Checker, I’ve found pages ranking for valuable terms that I didn’t even know about.

Moz’s Free SEO Tools

Moz’s free SEO tools help you measure website performance in ways Google won’t tell you about directly.

Let me walk you through each tool and what matters about them.

Brand Authority

This is the most interesting free tool Moz offers.

It measures something Google cares about but won’t quantify: how much people trust your brand.

I’ve been into SEO long enough to know that brand strength often matters more than technical perfection.

One founder I know spent months optimizing his site’s meta tags while his competitor focused on getting mentioned everywhere.

Guess who ranked better?

The one people recognized.

This matters because Google’s job isn’t just to find relevant pages – it’s to model how humans think about brands.

When you type “apple,” you expect to see computers, not fruit. That’s brand strength at work.

Keyword Explorer

NOTE: This is a part of Moz Pro’s suite of tools.

It shows you intent, not just volume. Lots of tools can tell you how many people search for “AI tools.”

But knowing whether they want to buy one or learn how they work?

That’s what matters for your business.

Link Explorer

NOTE: This is a part of Moz Pro’s suite of tools.

You already know more links isn’t always better. What matters is getting links from sites that have influence in your specific field.

Link Explorer helps you find these.

Free Competitive Research

NOTE: This is a part of Moz Pro’s suite of tools.

The real value of competitive research isn’t in seeing who your competitors are – it’s in understanding why they’re beating you.

This free tool helps you see the gap between where you are and where you need to be.

MozBar

This is probably the most immediately useful tool (aka Chrome extension). It shows you SEO metrics right as you browse.

When you can instantly see the authority of every site you visit, you start to understand what Google values.

My Online Presence

It focuses on local SEO, and it reveals something interesting: in local search, consistency matters more than optimization.

Having your address listed exactly the same way across the web is more important than having perfectly optimized title tags.

Free Domain Analysis

Instead of showing you every possible metric, it focuses on the ones that correlate with actual ranking success.

This is rare in SEO tools, which usually suffer from what I call the “more is more” fallacy.

MozCast

Perhaps the most unique tool in the SEO space. It tracks daily changes in Google’s results. It’s real value in showing you how often Google changes happen.

Moz Pricing

The smallest tier (aka Moz Local) starts at $14/month. This is for local businesses. If you run a pizza shop or a dental office, this is probably what you need.

It handles the boring but critical stuff like making sure your address is correct everywhere online. Getting this wrong is like having the wrong phone number on your business card.

Then there’s the $99/month tier (aka Moz Pro). This is for businesses that live and die by their website traffic. You get a 30-day free trial on Moz Pro.

The $720/month tier (Moz STAT) reveals something fascinating about enterprise SEO: big companies don’t just need more of the same tools – they need fundamentally different ones.

At this scale, you’re tracking thousands of keywords daily because a 1% change in rankings might mean $100,000 in revenue.

If you have a physical location, start with Local ($14). If you rely on web traffic, start with Pro ($99). If you’re tracking thousands of keywords or need API access, then look at Enterprise ($720).

Create your Free Moz account here →

What Do I Really Think About Moz?

Most SEO failures I’ve seen weren’t from a lack of information. They were from paralysis by analysis. Teams spent so much time gathering data that they never got around to acting on it.

Moz helps you think less and act more.

So here’s who should use Moz:

If you’re a small business or startup that needs SEO to work without becoming a full-time job, get Moz Pro ($99/month).

The AI-powered insights and simplified workflows will save you hours of head-scratching over metrics.

If you run a local business like a restaurant or dental practice, Moz Local ($14/month) is enough.

If you’re tracking thousands of keywords and need serious horsepower, STAT ($720/month) makes sense. At this scale, even small ranking changes can mean big money.

But Moz isn’t for everyone.

Don’t get Moz if you’re the type who needs to see every possible metric. Tools like Ahrefs or Semrush might suit you better. They show you everything; Moz intentionally doesn’t.