This review is part of the SEO tools comparison report.
This article was updated in February 2019 to cover Moz Pro replacing an older review which covered the older Moz Analytics product toolset.
Introducing the tool
MozPro is the flagship SaaS product from SEO giant, Moz. It’s an all-in-one website SEO toolset, with features for keyword research, link building, site audits and on-page optimisation.
The big advantage MozPro has over its forerunners is that is bundles the excellent measurement-focused capabilities of earlier tools like Moz Analytics with additional features geared towards direct actionable insights, such as website auditing. These new additions make Moz’s offering significantly more attractive for marketers who prefer to use a single SEO toolkit that covers all their needs.
Setup & Interface
The first thing you’ll notice when you open up Moz Pro is the interface. It really does look fantastic: easily the best looking tool we’ve looked at in this report.
A few years back, in a review of the old Moz Analytics, we complained that Moz’s top-notch presentation was going to waste, given the lack of a report export feature. We’re glad to see Moz Pro has thoroughly addressed this point through the addition of a custom reporting feature, enabling export of PDF or CSV reports covering search rankings, links and site crawl data. Interestingly, there’s also a report on how the subject website compares to others using Moz Pro. You can even add your own modules and branding to a report. We would advise any user to take full advantage of these options by creating plenty of reports for senior stakeholders in your projects.
Rank Checking
Moz Pro lets you monitor your rankings using scraped data through Moz’s analytics software. Some competing tools lack this functionality, so we would class it as a key competitive advantage.
The layout is user-friendly, with high visibility given to topline stats such as organic ranking moves up/down across all keywords and organic search share-of-voice vs. key competitors. Users get a daily quota of ranking checks, allowing for a targeted investigation into whichever keywords matter in the moment.
Moz Pro only monitors rankings in the top 50 results of Google whereas other tools let you run deeper ranking results, pinpointing the position of keywords which rank on low pages. If you want to report on deeper results to see how your rankings are moving on deep pages, you might be better off using an alternative tool, such as Advanced Web Ranking. However, Moz makes a good point on this angle in their FAQ’s on this point which we thought was worth sharing with you.
“Ranking results beyond the top 50 positions tend to fluctuate to such a large degree that they make any actionable insight hard to interpret. Also, traffic gained beyond the first couple pages of search results is usually considerably less than the top few positions.” Given its hard enough sometimes to see the wood from the trees in a forest of SEO data, we think their approach may have great merit.”
A great feature of Moz Pro keyword tracking is the capability to track keywords by location – down to a town/city level – as well as nationally. This opens up lots of interesting measurement opportunities, such as gauging the effect of geo-targeted ad campaigns on brand-related searches in a certain location.
The top minds at Moz treat mobile and desktop, along with voice search, as two distinct touchpoints in the customer journey, rather than two facets of the same thing. This thinking is borne out in Moz Pro’s functionality, with dedicated tracking available for mobile and desktop search rankings. In practical terms, this makes it easy to focus your analysis on the type of search that matters most on a case-by-case basis.
Link Management/Analysis
Moz Pro boasts a significantly more compelling link analysis offering than its predecessors. As we’ve said in previous versions of this guide, the main reason for taking out a Moz subscription is to access Link Explorer (formerly Open Link Explorer) – and signing up to Moz Pro is now the only way to access the full functionality of this exceptional tool, but the free version does provide you with a limited number of searches each day if you want to just check the odd link potential you are exploring.
The link data Moz uses in its link analysis has long-since set the industry standard in SEO, with their domain and page authority metrics being the default measurement for link quality used by most SEO agencies. Link checks via the tool now take place daily – a key improvement on earlier Moz products.
Another great addition has been Link Intersect – a tool you can use to find out which websites are linking to your competitors, but not to you. This is a handy way to find big link-building opportunities that may currently be passing you by.
One thing we would like to see added to Moz Link Explorer would be notifications of new backlinks. We’d also love to see an enhanced link management offering, as Moz Pro’s offering in this department is pretty much limited to list-making.
Onsite Optimisation
Moz Pro has two tools dedicated to on-site optimisation: site crawl and on-page optimisation. The on-page optimisation grading tool gives you a “grade” for each page on your site based on onsite ranking factors.
Moz Pro’s crawl diagnostics tool is pretty similar to those offered by Raven, AWR and AnalyticsSEO. It takes a little longer to run than the others, but it does a good job of identifying issues and providing succinct recommendations for resolving them, with critical crawler issues such as 5xx server errors highlighted and placed in a dedicated category for urgent attention.
With this crawl tool, as with all the crawl tools we’ve looked at, we are increasingly thinking that the tool builders are wasting their energy continuing to develop this part of their toolsets, when Google Webmaster Tools is now doing a much better job of giving accurate and up to date crawl data than any of the paid tools we’ve looked at. Nonetheless, Moz Pro does offer a worthwhile spin on this functionality, and beginners may well find it more accessible than Google Webmaster Tools.
The other side to Moz Pro’s on-site offering is its on-page optimisation tool, which scores each webpage and suggests improvements from an SEO perspective.
A particularly useful aspect of the tool is content suggestions: recommendations of relevant topics to cover in the page content, in order to achieve better search rankings. Above all, we think this is a great way to check you’ve actually got your keywords on your pages. Basic, but totally valid and actionable.
The grades could definitely be useful. They’re based on the frequency with which a target keyword is used in different parts of your web pages so in that respect they’re fairly basic but if you’re analysing a relatively large site this would be a good way to check you’ve actually got your keywords on your pages. Basic, but totally valid and actionable.
Moz Analytics also has a crawl diagnostics tool, similar to Raven, AWR and AnalyticsSEO. Moz’ tool takes a little longer to run than the others but it does a good job of identifying issues and providing succinct recommendations for resolving them. With the crawl tools in all the tools we’ve looked at I’m increasingly thinking that the tool builders are wasting their energy continuing to develop this part of their toolsets when Google’s Webmaster Tools is doing a much better of giving accurate and up to date crawl data now than any of the paid tools we’ve looked at. None the less Moz Analytics has this functionality and beginners will likely find this far more accessible than Google Webmaster Tools.
Price
Moz Pro pricing ranges from $79 to $799/month based on yearly payments, or $99 to $999/month if you pay monthly. Whichever plan you choose – Standard, Medium, Large or Premium – you’ll get full access to Moz Pro, plus 1-on-1 customer support and access to MozBar Premium.
Where the plans differ, is in the volume of data you can process via the toolkit, whether that data by keywords ranked, pages crawled or backlinks analysed. We advise starting out with a relatively affordable plan, then upgrading if you find it necessary.
Conclusions
One of our criticisms of past Moz products has been that they felt a bit “style over substance”. With Moz Pro, that issue has been remedied to a significant extent, through the addition of practical features to supplement Moz’s long-standing data analytics prowess. Some of the tools offered here are excellent, and the content is really useful for keeping you up to date on your site’s search performance.
Another issue we’ve had with previous Moz products has been a lack of innovative features, relative to competing tools. This problem has also been addressed, with additions such as keyword tracking by location and mobile vs. desktop rank tracking providing a level of differentiation that Moz’s action-oriented SEO tools once lacked.
Moz Pro is the most comprehensive Moz product we’ve seen to date, offering an all-in-one SEO solution with the excellent Link Tracker at its heart. Its strong suit remains analytics, particularly link analytics, so it might not be for you if you favour an all-action approach to SEO. It’s also pretty costly.
Go back to the SEO tools comparison report.