Moz Tutorial: Track Rankings and Domain Authority

Moz is one of the longest-standing names in the SEO industry, having shaped how marketers think about search optimisation since 2004. Its flagship product, Moz Pro, provides an integrated suite of tools for keyword research, rank tracking, site auditing, and link analysis that makes it particularly appealing for beginners and intermediate SEO practitioners.

Singapore businesses looking for a straightforward, well-documented SEO platform often find Moz Pro to be an excellent starting point. Its Domain Authority (DA) metric has become one of the most widely referenced third-party authority scores in the industry, and its tools present data in a way that is accessible without sacrificing depth. Whether you are managing a single business website or overseeing SEO for multiple Singapore brands, Moz Pro offers the features you need to monitor and improve your search performance.

This Moz tutorial walks you through every major feature of the platform: setting up campaigns, conducting keyword research, tracking rankings, running site crawls, analysing links, and interpreting DA and PA metrics. By the end, you will have a complete working knowledge of how to use Moz Pro to drive SEO results. For additional context on how these tools fit into a broader search strategy, visit our SEO services page.

Getting Started with Moz Pro

Moz Pro organises your work around campaigns. Each campaign represents a website you are monitoring, and it consolidates data from rank tracking, site crawls, and on-page optimisation into a single dashboard. Setting up your first campaign is the essential first step.

To create a campaign in Moz Pro:

  1. Log in to your Moz Pro account and click “Create Campaign” from the dashboard.
  2. Enter your website URL and give the campaign a descriptive name.
  3. Add your target search engine and location. Select “Google – Singapore” to track rankings specific to the Singapore market.
  4. Add competitor domains — Moz allows you to track up to three competitors in standard plans. Choose direct business competitors who rank for similar keywords.
  5. Add your initial list of tracked keywords. You can type them manually or import from a CSV file.
  6. Connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts for enriched data.
  7. Click “Create Campaign” to finalise the setup.

Once your campaign is created, Moz Pro begins collecting data immediately. The campaign dashboard provides a weekly summary showing your search visibility score, ranking distribution, crawl health, and discovered links. Moz sends weekly email summaries automatically, keeping you informed even when you do not log in regularly.

The interface is clean and intuitive, which is one of Moz Pro’s key strengths compared to more complex platforms. Navigation is straightforward: the left sidebar provides access to all tools, and each section includes educational tooltips that explain what the data means and why it matters.

Keyword Research with Keyword Explorer

Moz’s Keyword Explorer helps you discover and prioritise keywords based on a unique blend of metrics. What sets it apart is the Priority Score, which combines search volume, difficulty, organic click-through rate, and your domain’s existing authority into a single actionable number.

To conduct keyword research:

  1. Navigate to Keyword Explorer from the main navigation.
  2. Enter a seed keyword or phrase. For example, a Singapore insurance broker might enter “life insurance Singapore.”
  3. Select “Singapore” as the location to get locally relevant data.
  4. Click “Analyse” to generate the report.

The keyword overview displays monthly search volume with a range estimate rather than a single number, which Moz argues is more honest given the inherent uncertainty in search volume data. Difficulty scores range from 0 to 100, with lower scores indicating easier ranking potential. Organic CTR estimates the percentage of clicks that go to organic results versus paid ads, SERP features, or zero-click results.

Below the overview, you will find keyword suggestions grouped into categories. “Keyword Suggestions” shows related terms based on your seed keyword. “SERP Analysis” displays the current top 10 results with their Page Authority, Domain Authority, and link metrics, giving you a realistic assessment of the competition.

The Priority Score is where Moz adds genuine value. A keyword might have high search volume but also high difficulty and low organic CTR — in that case, the Priority Score will be lower than a moderate-volume keyword with low difficulty and high organic CTR. This helps Singapore businesses focus on keywords where they have the best chance of driving actual clicks, not just impressions. Combine this research with insights from our content marketing services to turn keyword data into effective content.

Setting Up Rank Tracking

Moz Pro’s rank tracking monitors your keyword positions on a weekly basis and presents the data alongside your competitors’ rankings. While it updates weekly rather than daily (unlike some competitors), the weekly cadence is sufficient for most Singapore businesses and reduces the noise that comes with daily ranking fluctuations.

If you added keywords during campaign setup, your rank tracking is already running. To add more keywords:

  1. Go to the Rankings section within your campaign.
  2. Click “Add Keywords” and enter new terms or import from a file.
  3. Assign labels to organise keywords into groups — for example, “branded,” “product,” “informational,” or by business unit.
  4. Save the keywords and wait for the next weekly update to begin tracking.

The Rankings dashboard shows your tracked keywords with their current position, change since last week, search volume, and difficulty. The “Overview” tab provides a visual summary of your ranking distribution, showing how many keywords fall in positions 1-3, 4-10, 11-20, 21-50, and 51-plus.

Use the “Competitors” tab to see how your rankings compare against your tracked competitors for the same keywords. This side-by-side view makes it easy to spot keywords where competitors outrank you and vice versa. The search visibility score — expressed as a percentage — gives you a single metric that accounts for both ranking position and search volume.

One useful feature is the ability to track both “regular” and “local” search results. For Singapore businesses with a Google Business Profile listing, tracking local pack visibility alongside standard organic rankings provides a complete picture of your search presence.

Running and Interpreting a Site Crawl

Moz Pro’s Site Crawl feature identifies technical SEO issues on your website by crawling your pages and analysing them against a set of SEO best practices. It runs automatically as part of your campaign on a weekly basis, but you can also trigger manual crawls when needed.

To configure and review your site crawl:

  1. Navigate to the Site Crawl section within your campaign.
  2. Click “Settings” to configure crawl parameters. Set the page limit, crawl depth, and any subdomains or subdirectories to include or exclude.
  3. Review the crawl results once the crawl completes.

The Site Crawl report organises issues into categories with severity levels. Critical issues require immediate attention and typically include 4xx server errors, pages blocked by robots.txt that should be accessible, and missing or empty title tags. Warning issues include duplicate title tags, missing meta descriptions, overly long URLs, and redirect chains. The report also flags opportunities such as pages that could benefit from internal linking improvements.

Each issue type includes a count of affected pages and a clickable list to see exactly which URLs are impacted. This makes it easy to create task lists for your development team. The trend graph shows how your total issue count changes week over week, helping you measure progress as you work through the fixes.

For Singapore businesses with complex site architectures — such as property portals with thousands of listings or e-commerce sites with extensive product catalogues — the site crawl is essential for catching issues that would be impossible to identify manually. Broken internal links, duplicate content from faceted navigation, and thin content on auto-generated pages are common problems in these scenarios. If your site crawl reveals structural issues, our web design team can help address them.

Link Explorer is Moz’s backlink analysis tool. It provides data on any domain’s inbound links, linking domains, anchor text distribution, and authority metrics. While Moz’s link index is smaller than some competitors, it focuses on quality and accuracy, making it reliable for link analysis and prospecting.

To use Link Explorer:

  1. Navigate to Link Explorer from the main navigation (or access it within your campaign under “Links”).
  2. Enter any domain or URL you want to analyse.
  3. Select the analysis scope: root domain, subdomain, or exact page.
  4. Click “Analyse” to generate the report.

The overview shows the domain’s DA, total linking domains, total inbound links, and top-ranking keywords. The “Inbound Links” tab lists every known backlink with details including the linking page title, URL, anchor text, DA of the linking domain, and whether the link is followed or nofollowed.

The “Linking Domains” report is particularly useful because it groups links by the domain they come from, showing the total number of links from each domain. This helps you distinguish between a domain that links to you from one page versus one that links from dozens of pages — the former typically represents a more deliberate editorial endorsement.

Use the “Anchor Text” report to review the distribution of anchor text pointing to your site. A natural link profile has diverse anchor text including brand names, generic phrases (“click here,” “read more”), and keyword variations. If you see an unnaturally high concentration of exact-match keyword anchors, it could signal a penalty risk.

The “Discovered and Lost” tab shows backlinks gained and lost over time. Monitoring lost links is important because a sudden drop in referring domains can negatively impact rankings. If you notice high-value links disappearing, investigate promptly — the linking page may have been removed, or the link may have been changed to nofollow.

Understanding Domain Authority and Page Authority

Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are Moz’s proprietary metrics that predict how well a domain or specific page is likely to rank in search results. They are scored on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 100, meaning it is much harder to improve from 70 to 80 than from 20 to 30.

DA is calculated based on multiple factors, with the quantity and quality of a domain’s backlink profile being the primary input. It is important to understand what DA is and what it is not. DA is a comparative metric — it is useful for comparing the relative strength of different domains. It is not a Google ranking factor, and Google does not use DA in its algorithms. A higher DA does not guarantee higher rankings; it simply indicates a stronger link profile relative to other sites.

PA works similarly but at the individual page level. A page with PA 45 on a DA 60 domain has strong individual link equity. PA is useful for evaluating the strength of specific competitor pages you are trying to outrank.

For Singapore businesses, here are practical ways to use DA and PA:

  • Benchmark your DA against direct competitors to understand your relative position in the market.
  • Use DA to qualify link-building prospects — pursuing backlinks from higher-DA sites will generally have a greater impact on your own authority.
  • Track DA monthly to measure the long-term effect of your link-building efforts. Small fluctuations are normal; focus on the trend over six to twelve months.
  • Compare PA of your key landing pages against the pages currently ranking for your target keywords to assess competitiveness.

Moz updates DA periodically, and scores can shift even if your link profile has not changed, because DA is relative — it measures your domain against every other domain in Moz’s index. Do not be alarmed by minor DA drops after an update; instead, check whether your competitors experienced similar shifts. For a deeper understanding of how link authority affects your search strategy, explore our digital marketing services.

Managing Campaigns and Reports

Effective campaign management is what turns raw SEO data into actionable progress. Moz Pro provides several features to help you stay organised, report to stakeholders, and maintain a consistent optimisation workflow.

The Campaign Dashboard serves as your weekly check-in point. It summarises search visibility changes, new critical crawl issues, ranking gains and losses, and newly discovered or lost links — all in one view. Develop a habit of reviewing this dashboard every Monday to set your SEO priorities for the week.

Moz Pro includes a built-in reporting tool that lets you create custom branded reports. You can choose which metrics and sections to include, add your company logo, and schedule automatic delivery to stakeholders. For agencies serving multiple Singapore clients, this reporting feature saves significant time compared to building reports manually.

The On-Page Grader is another valuable campaign tool. Enter a target URL and keyword, and Moz analyses how well the page is optimised for that term. It checks title tag usage, meta description, heading structure, body content, image alt text, URL structure, and internal linking. The grading system uses letter grades (A through F) for each element, making it easy to identify specific areas for improvement.

For Singapore businesses managing SEO alongside other marketing channels, Moz Pro integrates with Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, pulling in actual traffic data alongside estimated metrics. This integration helps you correlate ranking changes with real traffic impact, providing a clearer picture of your SEO return on investment. If you are also running email campaigns alongside your SEO efforts, our email marketing services can help you nurture the organic traffic you attract through search.

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Is Moz Pro worth it for small Singapore businesses?

Moz Pro is well-suited for small businesses because of its intuitive interface and the way it simplifies complex SEO data. The Standard plan covers one campaign with basic features, which is sufficient for a single website. If your SEO knowledge is limited and you want a tool that guides you rather than overwhelming you with data, Moz Pro is a strong choice. The Priority Score in Keyword Explorer and letter-grade On-Page Grader are particularly beginner-friendly features.

How is Domain Authority different from Google PageRank?

Google PageRank was Google’s own metric for measuring page importance based on links, but Google stopped publicly updating PageRank in 2013 and the toolbar metric was fully deprecated in 2016. Domain Authority is Moz’s independent metric that serves a similar conceptual purpose — measuring link-based authority — but it is not used by Google and is calculated using Moz’s own algorithm. DA is a useful SEO benchmarking tool, but it has no direct influence on how Google ranks your pages.

How often does Moz update its keyword and link data?

Moz Pro campaigns update rank tracking data weekly. Site crawls also run weekly by default. Link Explorer’s index is updated regularly, with new links typically appearing within days of being discovered. DA scores are updated periodically — Moz announces major DA updates on their blog, and minor index updates happen more frequently. Keyword Explorer volumes are refreshed monthly.

Can Moz Pro track Google Maps and local pack rankings?

Moz Pro can track local pack appearance for your tracked keywords. When setting up your campaign, specify a local search location (such as “Singapore”) to get results that reflect what users in that area see. For more dedicated local SEO management including Google Business Profile optimisation and local citation building, consider Moz Local, which is a separate product from Moz specifically designed for local search visibility.

What is a good Domain Authority score?

DA is relative, so “good” depends on your competitive landscape. For Singapore SMEs, a DA of 20 to 40 is typical. Large established brands and news sites often have DA scores above 70. The important thing is how your DA compares to the sites currently ranking for your target keywords. If the top results have DA scores of 40 to 50 and your site has a DA of 15, you will likely need to build your link profile significantly to compete.

How does Moz compare to Ahrefs and SEMrush?

Moz Pro is generally considered the most beginner-friendly of the three platforms. Ahrefs has the largest backlink database and is favoured by link-building specialists. SEMrush offers the broadest feature set including paid search tools, social media tracking, and content marketing features. Moz’s unique strengths include the Priority Score, the On-Page Grader, and the widely referenced DA metric. Many SEO professionals use Moz alongside one of the other tools for a more complete analysis. For professional guidance on which tools are right for your business, consult our SEO services team.