SE Ranking is an all-in-one type of SEO tool. In this review, I will go through all the SE Rankings’ features and extract what’s good and what’s not. I’ll try to be as objective as possible.
Before you can do anything you have to add your first project. SE Ranking will walk you through this using their wizard. It’s worth noting that all settings like location, language and search engines are specified on a project level. You can’t specify different search engines for different keywords within the same project.
As you can see above, you can decide whether the tool should count map results as part of organic SERP or not. You can also enable tracking Google Ads rankings.
SE Ranking has a very wide set of features. It covers all aspects, from rank tracking, trough SEO audits to backlink analysis and monitoring.
The interface of SE Ranking is organized in a specific way. You have two levels of menus. One is nested in the other. In the top-level menu, you have five sections: Dashboard, Projects, Report builder, Users, and Tools.
Recently, the SE Ranking team introduced a new interface. Instead of two nested menus on the top of the page, you have one, more general menu, on the top, and the second one, the detailed one, on the left side. The side menu is a list of the available options for the selected top-menu item, so they are still kind of nested but the whole thing is much easier to navigate.
Rank tracking data is located in two places. The first one is the dashboard, and the second one is hidden under the Projects -> Rankings.
The dashboard shows you an overview of your rankings. SE Ranking checks the positions every day by default but you can switch to weekly or biweekly tracking as well. On the chart above, you can see the average position chart for all your tracked phrases. Besides the average position chart, there are a few others to see here.
Traffic Forecast – This metric shows you the estimated number of organic visits from the keywords you track.
Search Visibility – A percentage visibility value for all tracked keywords combined. It’s calculated using reported positions and search volume for each keyword. In general, the higher, the better. If you want to know exactly how it’s calculated there is an exact formula below. You can also read the blog post about it.
Percentage of tracked phrases in top 10 – This just shows you how high the percentage of your keywords is in top 10. Let’s say you track 10 keywords and 3 of them are in the top 10. The tool will display 30%.
Below the chart area, there is a table with summary data. You can see the number of keywords you have in top5/10/30, the number of keywords you track, last reported average position, number of indexed pages, and your last score from website audit.
Biased Note!
If you just need a simple, reliable and cheap rank tracker try MonitLabs.
• It offers a free plan for daily monitoring of 25 keywords.
• It is the lowest-priced solution on the market.
• It tracks all the domains and all the urls in Top100. You can spy on any competitor you want.
When you go to Project -> Rankings you will see a tabbed panel with three tabs – Detailed, Overview, and Historical. Detailed shows the table with your keywords. You can filter them by the last reported position and search engine.
Below the table, there is a chart area with mostly the same charts as on the main dashboard. The new ones are Selected keywords and SERP features. The first one is a chart where you can select one or more keywords and see their ranking history for the selected period.
On SERP features graph you can see on how many of your keywords various SERP features are displayed. SERP features are things like local Google reviews, videos, images, knowledge graphs, and so on.
The Overall tab will show you all the general metrics you need to quickly assess if your website is doing ok.
On Historical tab, you can compare your current rankings with the baseline for each keyword.
This is a place where you can connect your Google Analytics and Search Console Accounts and inspect this data from SE Ranking interface. The features not powered by Google data here are Snippets and SEO Potential.
Snippets panel shows you how the link to your site is displayed in the SERPs. This has a big impact on how often people click on it, so you can use that data for optimization. Of course, you could see your snipped by going directly to Google but it would take more time. This is just a time-saver.
SEO Potential is a simple dashboard with data describing the value of your organic traffic. All these numbers are based on estimates made from your rankings. Conversion into sales and Average income from the client are the values you need to put into the tool on your own. They aren’t taken from any 3rd party integration. The usefulness of this is limited. If you run an agency you may show this to your customer to prove the value of your services. Other than that, it’s just a fancy dashboard to look at.
Competitors panel consists of three tabs: My competitors, SERP competitors, and Visibility rating. The first one shows the rankings of competitors you defined. You can add up to 5 competitors for each project.
On the SERP competitors tab, you can see a complete top 100 ranking for any given keyword and date.
Visibility rating tab is the place where you can see your most important competitors. The importance is calculated as a total visibility score for all tracked keywords combined. SE Ranking uses the last two weeks of rankings history for that.
For all three sections above, you can generate a Guest Link. By sharing this link you will grant read-only access to the Rank tracking, Analytics and Traffic, and Competitors sections. I think it is more convenient than sending a pdf report each month.
Big name for a todo-notes feature. You can add & edit notes, and mark them as completed. There is a set of predefined todos like analyze your competitor keywords, perform on-site optimization, or prepare a content strategy. I’m not going to say it’s useless because it helps you organize your work and points you to useful resources. But if you expected that a Marketing Plan is some sort of secret SEO weapon then you will be disappointed. There is also a list of 37 trusted directories and catalogs where your business can potentially be listed.
Website audit
The website audit is like with many other SEO tools. You will have your website crawled and receive a number of suggestions about things you should fix. All important issues like missing titles or meta tags, duplicate content, things related to internal linking, and many others – you will them find here. I can’t say it’s better or worse than the audits from other tools. To me, it’s pretty standard.
What is interesting here, is a Compare crawls feature. SE Ranking allows you to schedule website audits. As soon as at least two audits are ready you will be able to compare them. If you have a team of people working on your site, you can see how fast they are making progress. It makes it also possible to identify the areas which are the hardest to make any improvements.
Another interesting feature is Page Changes Monitoring. An important note here is you can monitor changes on any page, not only your own. For example, if you want to monitor landing pages of your competitors in order to be notified when they change something in their offer this feature may come in handy. This feature is available only in plus plans ($89 per month) and above.
Using this feature you can monitor all the links you care about. Yes, only the ones you care about because you have to add them yourself. This feature will not discover your links automatically. The tool will only monitor them on a daily basis. It will verify if these links are live, monitor any changes in anchors, dofollow/nofollow attribute, destination url, MOZ DA (Domain Authority), and few other params.
Backlinks panel is also split into few tabs. The main one is the one from the picture above. The second one is an Overview tab. There, you can see where your backlinks originated geographically, what is their MOZ DA score, how many backlinks are from .com domains and how many of them are from different extensions. Plus a few similar metrics. All this data is presented in the form of nice-looking charts.
Anchors tab is basically a table with all the anchors that your backlinks have. It’s sorted by anchor popularity. The next tab is Pages. This tab lists all the urls from your website and sorts them by the number of backlinks. Remember – we are still talking only about the backlinks you added manually.
The last one is a Disavow tool. You can mark any domain or backlink as unwanted and the tool will generate a disavow file for Google. Remember, according to Google, this should not be used too often.
For the reason I don’t know, if you want to get complete backlink data about your (or competitors) website you have to navigate to a completely different place. In old interface it’s under Tools -> Backlink Checker. In the new interface, it’s under the Backlink Checker option in the top menu.
When you enter a domain you are interested in (can be any site, not only your own) the tool will present you its complete* backlink profile. This looks very similar to the data you can get with Ahrefs, Moz, or Majestic.
SE Ranking will show you following backlink metrics:
*I’m not sure if SE Ranking has its own database of backlinks or they use one of the popular ones like Ahrefs, Majestic, or Moz. Despite used database, the presented profile of backlinks (by any tool) is never truly complete as there are always some links that are not stored in the underlying database. I’m using a term complete backlink profile to differentiate it from other SE Ranking feature – Backlinks Monitoring. The latter one shows only the links you added to the tool yourself.
I haven’t found any info about the source of backlinks data that SE Ranking uses so I compared it with Ahrefs and Majestic. Given the fact that Ahrefs has the biggest backlink database on the market, I think SE Ranking is doing a pretty good job with their backlink tool.
Here is a sample comparison for one domain. The table below is comparing SE Ranking vs Ahrefs vs Majestic backlink data for the domain seranking.com:
SE Ranking data | Ahrefs data | Majestic data | |
---|---|---|---|
Total backlinks | 50.5K | 126K | 122.6K |
Referring domains | 3.2K | 4.36K | 3.1K |
Domain score | 76 (Domain Trust) | 75 (Domain Rating) | 23 & 45 (Trust Flow & Citation Flow) |
Dofollow links | 80.5% | 70% | 63.3% |
SE Rankings’ Report Builder is very flexible. You can build the report from scratch or use one of the predefined templates. All the template elements are editable. You can edit the title, logo, used widgets, and other elements. You can also create your own templates. Building a report is done by inserting available widgets into the report canvas. On the left side of the builder, there is a menu with a complete list of elements you can use. All the widgets from other parts of the SE Rankings’ user interface are there. On the right side, there is a canvas. You can place any element from the menu to the canvas using a simple drag & drop. Every report can be done as a one-time thing or you can schedule it. Supported report formats are PDF, XLS, and HTML. The whole thing is very easy to use.
Below, there is a picture of this menu from which you can drag the widgets to the report canvas.
In the Rankings view, there is also an export option available. You can export your rankings data in the Excel (XLS) or CSV format. The XLS format is limited to 10K rows per report.
This feature lets you spy on your competitors’ marketing strategies. Once you enter your competitors’ url, SE Ranking will present you with its organic keywords, top pages, paid keywords, total traffic share, estimated paid search spendings & clicks, and so on. The data is presented within the scope of the selected local version of Google. This data is probably based solely on SERPs analysis. This means that you won’t find out your competitors’ top referring sites & referral traffic. Also, you won’t know the amount of direct traffic the investigated website gets. This information can be very valuable sometimes. You can get it, to some extent for free, in SimillarWeb. But all in all, SE Rankings’ competitor analysis has a lot of useful data. If spying on other websites is not your primary need, it will be a nice bonus for you. Otherwise, I would look for better tools for that task (i.e. SimilarWeb).
The keyword research tool works in a standard way. You can enter the keyword and the tool will return the data related to this keyword along with other keyword suggestions. SE Ranking provides the difficulty score, search volume, and CPC data for the entered seed keyword. Although all of these metrics are a standard for such tools, the most useful one here is the CPC (Cost Per Click). It’s because CPC data is shown by country. If you sell something globally and CPC for your target phrase is significantly lower in some region then this feature makes it easier to spot that.
The suggestions you will receive with this tool are also pretty standard. I don’t consider this as an advantage. I think most of the keyword research tools on the market suffer from the same disease – limited data sources. They’re all getting the data in one of the two basic ways (or a mix of them): keywords database (either owned or third party), and Google Keyword Planner.
Own keyword database of SE Ranking is, I suppose, gathered mostly from the keywords they track. The problem with any keyword database I know is that no matter how big it is, it’s always too small. Obviously with the exception of the one owned by Google.
I believe SE Ranking is also using Keyword Planner data. The downside of KP data is that it’s focused on paid search. You will miss a lot of informational-phrases when you focus solely on KP suggestions.
Of course, I’m not neglecting the usability of the tools like this one, you can still find many good suggestions that will work for you. It’s rather that, I would not limit myself by relying on such tools as my one-and-only keyword research method.
So, what other methods are good?
The best way to conduct keyword research is…
…by doing it manually. Enter your seed phrase into the Google search box and wait for the autocomplete suggestions. Note down the interesting ones, add a space, and a letter “a” at the end of the phrase, wait for suggestions, hit search, note down all related searches, do the same for letter “b”, iterate. It takes some time but you can get killer keyword ideas this way! It’s actually partially automated by the feature I’m going to describe now.
Again the same story. We have two separate features that are accessible from two completely different places in the UI. Keyword Suggestions should be under one roof with Keyword Research. To access Keyword Suggestions you need to navigate to Tools -> Keyword Suggestion Tool.
This can operate in two modes. The first mode will serve the suggestions from SE Ranking keyword database.This is how you define your search:
Don’t ask me how it’s different from the Keyword Research feature – I don’t know. Both look very similar to me, but maybe there is some difference in returned suggestions that I missed.
The second mode is what is actually worth the attention. Let the SE Ranking team speak for themselves:
“To gather additional suggestions, tell the system to add various letters and symbols one-by-one after the analyzed search query. For example, if you select the [a-z]option for a search query like iPhone repair the system will imitate typing “iPhone repair a”, “iPhone repair b”, “iPhone repair c” and so forth, resulting in such suggestions as “iPhone repair Austin”, “iPhone repair Apple” and “iPhone repair Atlanta”“
This is basically the same as the manual keyword research method I described above. It won’t collect phrases from Google’s related searches but it’s still very powerful and it can save you a lot of time. You can enter a seed phrase and get suggestions from Google autosuggest. The only downside is that you won’t get search volume data for suggestions received this way. Also, you have a very limited number of such queries in your monthly subscription. You can pay an additional fee for running them but it can get costly pretty quickly. The cost for each research depends on the number of queries the tool has to perform.
Here is how it looks:
Using this feature you can see how well (or how bad) a certain page is optimized for the target search term. After running the report you will see a general summary with the number of passed and failed tests, and with scores for each section. When you scroll down you will be able to access more detailed info. This include H tags list, page URL structure hints, missing image alt attributes, keywords used on-page, link analysis, load speed, and more. These days keyword optimization is not as important as it used to be, so I have a limited trust for such tools. But some of the information it presents (like loading speed or images with missing alt attribute) still can be useful.
I think the name explains it all. This is the tool for bulk-checking search volume for any keywords you provide. You have to pay an additional fee of $0.005 for each checked keyword. If you have just a few keywords to check there are tools where you can do that for free, i.e. WordTracker.
Also pretty self-explanatory. Enter a URL and see if it’s indexed in the selected search engine. Each check will cost you $0.005.
Here you can check Moz DA and Alexa rank for any given URL. A certain amount of checks is included in your plan. How many – it depends on the level of your subscription. After exceeding the limit additional checks can be done for a fee of $0.001 per URL.
This is an interesting one. Contrary to what you may think it’s not about grouping your keywords for rank tracking and showing you average positions. It’s a helper tool when you have a big list of keywords and you need to cluster them by topic. The SE Ranking will take the phrases you provide and check the SERP for each of them. Next, they will group them based on SERP similarity. Two SERPs are considered similar when they have more than X (number defined by you) results in common. By setting up an X value high, you will get many groups with fewer keywords in each. If you set the X value low, you will get the opposite – fewer groups but with more keywords in each.
You can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to SE Ranking for basic social management features. You will have your stats available inside SE Ranking interface. The tool offers also basic post scheduling features. I didn’t test it, but I guess if you need just simple integration it may be useful. For more advanced managing of your social media campaigns, there are plenty of other tools on the market.
Lead generator can be a killer tool if you own an SEO agency. It’s a lead magnet for your potential customers. You can create your own online SEO audit tool and embed it into your website. SE Ranking gives you a wizard where you can define the branding and it generates an HTML code of the widget. Now, you just need to paste it into your site and that’s it! Every person who will perform an audit using your tool will land in your mailing list.
The audit tool itself can be configured to work as a button, a webform, a push notification, or a pop-up. Here is a more detailed description of how to set this up.
Given the fact that SE Ranking aims primarily at the SEO audience, I think integrations with Google Data Studio, Google Docs, Google Ads, or maybe a few others more SEO/SEM related tools would be a better choice than integrations with social media platforms.
It’s possible to add sub-users to your account. You can grant each user access to selected projects and define the list of sections of SE Ranking interface that the user will have access to. Here is a full list of sections you can enable or disable for each user:
Entry-level subscription costs $39 per month. If you don’t want to check the rankings on a daily basis you can pay $23.4 per month (your rankings will be checked weekly). For the number of features SE Ranking offers I consider this a fair price. The tool has everything you could expect from an all-in-one SEO platform. It doesn’t excel in all the areas but it’s solid.
However, if your primary focus is on the backlink research and you have a budget for that I would go with Ahrefs. It has the biggest backlink database on the market.
If your primary focus is just rank tracking then there are cheaper tools for that. First, let me show you a general price comparison based on the number of keywords you need to track on a daily basis.
SE Ranking | MonitLabs | RankTracker | AuthorityLabs | AccuRanker | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Free Plan | Free Trial only | 25 keywords | Free Trial only | Free Trial only | Free Trial only |
100 keywords | — | $6.90/mo | $14/mo | — | — |
250 keywords | $39/mo | — | $28/mo | $49/mo | — |
500 keywords | $54/mo | $19.90/mo | $39/mo | — | — |
1000 keywords | $89/mo | $29.90/mo | $69/mo | $99/mo | €99/mo |
2500 keywords | $189/mo | ($49.90/mo for 2000) | $169/mo | $225/mo | €279/mo |
5000 keywords | $349/mo | $109.90/mo | $239/mo | $450/mo | €389/mo |
Now, there is one caveat here. SE Ranking will track all your keywords in up to five combinations of search engine, region, and device. So if you need to track each keyword from multiple locations or search engines then take that into consideration. On the other hand, you should remember that some features are not available in the smallest plan. There are also a few hidden costs – for each usage of Search Volume Checker and Index Status Checker, you need to pay an additional fee of $0.005.
The short answer is – yes, like any other popular rank tracker. The long answer is that the whole concept of “accuracy” in the context of rank tracking doesn’t make much sense. For the most part, it’s just marketing fluff. I guess when you ask about the rank tracking “accuracy”, you have a depersonalized results in mind. You can read a full explanation here.
Although I’m a founder of a competing solution I can honestly recommend the SE Ranking if what you’re looking for is a comprehensive, all-in-one SEO platform. If you are more focused on rank tracking and don’t need most of the other features then give MonitLabs a try. I’m obviously biased as a founder, but it offers a free plan for 25 daily tracked keywords and it’s the lowest-priced solution on the market.