Premium SEO tools are very expensive, over $100+ a month. For many of us, that’s more than we can afford to spend on a SEO tool. Here I review a mid-range SEO and Keyword Research tool from SE Rankings that’s surprising good considering it’s low price.
I use this tool daily for finding new keywords and auditing my site for SEO issues so this review is based on my personal experience.
Note this review is not an exhaustive list of features, just the most important features based on my usage.
SE Ranking Review – Table of Contents
- SE Ranking Free Trial
- SE Ranking Keyword Research
- SE Ranking Website Audit
- SE Ranking Competition Research
- SE Ranking On Page SEO Checker
- SE Ranking Blog
- SE Ranking Prices
- SE Ranking Essential Plan: Good for beginners
- SE Ranking Pro Plan: Good for SEO professionals or big sites
- SE Ranking Business Plan: Good for SEO agencies
- SE Ranking API
- SE Ranking Alternatives
1. SE Ranking Free Trial
First, before we begin reviewing SE Ranking, be aware that they offer a free trial for 14 days. No credit card needed.
The free trial gives you access to the Essential 250 plan, which I explain later, plus white label feature for 14 days.
This allows you to track up to 250 keywords. Run website audit on up to 40,000 pages and monitor 6,000 backlinks plus many other benefits.
2. SE Ranking Keyword Research
The most important benefit an SEO tool provides, for me at least, is keyword research. Without it, it will be very challenging to rank for content.
The image below shows the Keyword Research Overview page after running a query. You can run 100 queries a day on the Essential Plan.
SE Ranking keyword research tools allows you to:
- Thoroughly analyse a keyword
- Find keyword opportunities
- See the difficulty of ranking for each keyword
- See monthly search volumes for each keyword
- Find related keywords
- Find low volume keywords
Learning to do keyword discovery is a crucial skill. Targeting a keyword you have no hope of ranking for is a waste of time. Alternatively, targeting a keyword no one is searching for is also useless.
The trick is to find keywords that people are looking for AND, at the same time, you can realistically rank for. This is not easy so you want your keyword research tool to help discover keywords that match that criteria.
You can filter keyword results using the filter box above. Here I select a maximum difficulty of 30 so keywords more difficult than that will be excluded from the results.
Include and Exclude let you list words that should be included or excluded from the results.
I find the keyword research tool easy to use, and with the filtering above, I can just see the results I am interested in.
If I don’t find keywords I can rank for directly, I can click on the RELATED tab to see more suggestions.
“100% accurate keyword rank tracking
Real-time ranking positions of your website’s keywords across major search engines. Track your rankings on a country / region / city level as frequently as you want.”
Source: https://seranking.com/position-tracking.html
Keyword Rank Tracker
One important task when trying to get more views on your website is tracking your rankings in Google and other search engines.
SE Rankings has a Keyword Rank Tracker. It provides 100% accurate rankings for all your keywords across multiple search engines and countries.
Use this to ensure your content is performing well and troubleshoot any issues.
Check for keyword cannibalization – where multiple pages rank for the same keyword, this harms your ranking so needs to be addressed.
SE Rankings can be connected to your Google Search Console and Google analytics accounts. Save time by importing keywords from Google Search Console directly.
Implement a data-driven strategy by analysing all your keyword ranking positions to find and fix issues and improve your organic search traffic.
3. SE Ranking Website Audit
You use the Website Audit feature to provide a graphical report on your website. It gives you a quick overall of SEO issues you have over time. You can set a schedule for the audit, either weekly, monthly or manually.
The Website Audit report can be emailed to you.
You can easily see your progress as all metrics are graphed over time.
The powerful website audit tool has a huge number of metrics, much more than I show here.
In addition to the Overview page it also has the following menus:
- Issue Report
- Crawled Pages
- Found Resources
- Found Links
- Crawl Comparison
Some of the issues checked by SE Rankings tool are:
- Website Security
- Crawling issues
- Duplicate Content
- Title
- Description
- Usability
… and many other issues. It’s very comprehensive and can help you improve your site by addressing all the issues found.
The graphic above shows SEO issues horizontally with the number of issues found vertically. The colour indicates the severity of issue (red is error, yellow is warning, blue is notice and green is passed).
Check out the website audit for yourself, score your website for SEO issues in two minutes: Website audit
4. SE Ranking Competition Research
Check out the competition with some Competition Research. Type in a domain and SE Ranking will give you a detailed analysis of that domain.
Why spy on the competition?
- Expand keywords you are targeting by looking at what your competitors are ranking for
- Check their backlinks, useful for outreach to get inbound links or guest blogging opportunities
- How much are they spending on advertising?
Check out which countries your competitors are getting traffic from.
This is a very brief overview of the competition research you can do with SE Ranking. You can really drill down and find a lot of information about your competitor’s using this tool.
You can try it out for free using this widget below:
5. SE Ranking On Page SEO Checker
I only discovered this tool recently. It provides comprehensive on page SEO analysis for an individual page on your website.
In the above graphic, you can see in a glance, the SEO analysis of a page. The individual tests are grouped by topic and colour coded depending on how many tasks passed. Dark green meaning 90-100% pass with colours changing to light green, yellow, orange and finally red.
This graphic above displays the SEO tasks you need to complete to get a better score by priority. Clicking on the “View All Tasks” button will show all the tasks grouped by priority with a description of what needs to be done. A checkbox is next to each task so you can complete each task and then check it off.
The competitive comparison tool compares terms used on your page that you are trying to rank for against the top ranked pages on Google for those terms. You can see a detailed list of terms, where they appear (title, description, headings, content) and other metrics.
You can use this tool to get a detailed look at how your page compares with the best ranked content on Google. I haven’t used this tool myself yet but it looks like it could help you troubleshoot issues with keyword density or missing important keywords from headings etc.
6. SE Ranking Blog
SE Rankings runs a blog that has news and best practises for SEO people. Some of the topics covered are:
- Website Promotion
- SEO Analytics
- SE Ranking Tools
- Content Marketing
- On-Page SEO
- SEO Metrics
- Backlink Profile
- Website Audit
- Keyword Research
- Indexing
- Copywriting
It’s great for learning more about how to use SE Rankings and more generally about SEO and Keyword Research.
7. SE Ranking Prices
You have many options when paying for SE Rankings. By changing the frequency your keywords are checked from daily, every 3 days and weekly you can lower the prices by 20% or 40%.
You can make a big saving by paying annually or just pay month by month to start out with before making a bigger commitment.
You can also vary the number of keywords you want to track from 250 all the way up to 20,000!
There is also a custom payment plan where you can select different options and the price will be calculated on the fly.
Plans can be upgraded or cancelled at any time.
8. SE Ranking Essential Plan: Good for beginners
This is the plan I use. It’s great when starting out since you will not need to track large numbers of keywords. Eventually, when you have more content, you can migrate to bigger plans.
For customers with new websites you can select weekly ranking checks to reduce the cost even further. It takes a while to get ranked so no need to check your position every day.
9. SE Ranking Pro Plan: Good for SEO professionals or big sites
The Pro plan defaults to tracking up to 1000 keywords with an option for even more.
You can have an unlimited number of projects in this plan. You will usually have one website per project so this allows you to track many different websites with this plan.
You can have up to 3 users on this plan. It supports white label reports so you can use this service to provide SEO reports for clients if you wanted.
10. SE Ranking Business Plan: Good for SEO agencies
This is the top of the range plan and and defaults to tracking up to 2,500 keywords although you can go up to 20,000 keywords!
This plan should be enough even for SEO agencies. At the maximum of 20,000 keywords it will cost over $500+ per month. Still could be worth it if you provide SEO services for many clients.
11. SE Ranking API
For SEO agencies or businesses that have developers you can directly access SE Ranking API. You can use this to create custom reports or do analysis that isn’t currently possible with the SE Ranking website.
SE Ranking API provides programmatic access to the data gathered from the SE Ranking platform. The API can be used to manage large or complex accounts more effectively. Large companies with a vast number of websites in account can automatically create, set up or delete projects.
Source: https://seranking.com/api.html
12. SE Ranking Alternatives
Mid-range alternative SEO and keyword research tools are:
Final Thoughts
It’s worth trying SE Rankings free trial for 14 days to see if you like it.
You can customise the price to suit all budgets.
