SE Ranking Review

SE Ranking is in their own words 'All-In-One SEO Software made simple'. I would have to agree, they have got that tagline pretty much nailed, as I would say they have managed to get everything you might need onto this platform, even if some of it is a bit hidden or hard to find. 

More on that later.

SE Ranking is used by over 300,000 users worldwide, and focus simply on creating SEO software and tools for people to use everyday to build their businesses and brands. 

SE Ranking Tools

The tools and parts of the platform are broken down into a number of different sections, depending on where you are in your journey, though on the site they are bundled into more useful titles and areas. 

The internal one can be a bit sparse, especially if you try to research more obscure platforms or words. 

Using a pretty standard phrase, SE Ranking gave me 439 similar keywords or phrases, along with;

• the search volume,
• the current cost per click for that phrase (in Google),
• the competition (essentially the number of advertisers who are bidding for that keyword),
• the Keyword Effectiveness Index (how easy it might be to rank for it)
• number of sites that will be displayed for the different keywords

I must point out, I wasn't that impressed by all the information given by SE Ranking here, if you look at some of the stats above, they suggest that 'best ways to make money from home' has 2.3billion sites, but has a competition of 0. Which suggests its easy to rank for and I guarantee that would not be the case. 

The amount of variations and suggestions that they provide is pretty decent, but to get an idea of the competition you may need match this with UberSuggest or somethig similar. 

Keyword Grouper

Not a tool I have used, because you have to pay extra (at least using the plan I have). 

The grouper will help you group or plan out the grouping of your website or blog. For example you may want to build up a group of articles around the 'make money at home' this tool will help you decide on the keywords you should aim for and create articles about. Allowing you to interlink and grow that group of similar keywords and rankings. 

It's also useful for running your paid advertisement campaigns, as you can find other variations or groups to bid on. 

SEO Marketing Planner

If you are just starting out, or you are planning your next website, you can use SE Ranking Marketer Planner, which essentially provides you with a list of tasks to get you going.

I already had a website up and running, so didn't really need a marketing plan, but I went ahead and create one for the website anyway to see what steps they gave. 

As you can see it falls into 6 main steps or categories, that each have a number of tasks in side of them. 

The steps are obviously quite high level or generic, but for an agency or someone doing this professionally it could be a great checklist to hand to clients or even used by website owners who may be new to creating blogs and need the steps to get their site up and running and ahead of the game. 

Tracking Tools

These tools you are going to want to use most days, if not everyday (depending on how crazy you are about tracking your links!)

For me, I usually check a few times a week, especially the top ranking ones in competitive areas or niches just to see if there have been any big shifts or changes. 

Keyword Rank Tracking

The core of most SEO tools, is the ability to track and watch certain keywords or phrases against competitors. 

Without it, you are basically creating content without any direction or creating back links completely blind. This was one of the main reasons I originally got KeySearch, was just for its keyword ranking tool. 

SE Ranking keyword tool is actually pretty good, and they offer different pricing depending on how often you want it updated (more on that later). 

As with other tracking tools you can add your website, then either add your own keywords you want to track or hook up Google Search Console to let it fill SE Ranking with keywords. It also lets you try and find keywords it's thinks you are ranking for.

As you can see above, I used a random one of my niche sites to track a few keywords (Thanks Google updates for the -117 ranks). The layout is simple, but is actually really nice. 

I love how it shows you the last few days, as well as giving you a clear search volume per month. You can also see quite clear if you have gone up or down since the last time you checked. As you can see, I only currently check every few days, because A) it's cheaper and B) I don't need to know the daily changes for this particular site. 

One thing I really enjoyed about this, is the fact I can actually see how many of the keywords are in the Top 1, Top 3, Top 5 etc and I can easily click those tabs to see the keywords that rank in that section. 

I also loved how you can see the URL that is ranking for that keyword. So if you are unsure how you have ranked for it, it will tell you. Sometimes it shows you a blank link, which I believe means multiple or unsure. 

I can also do a mass update, so I can select all keywords and update. I could never do this with KeySearch and it used to drive me crazy!

As with most SEO Tools, you can get a graph showing you any changes, for example the keyword above has a pretty steady rank 6, but has dropped to 7 twice in the last month. 

Another cool thing you can do, is check multiple search engines, so if you are a local agency and want to know where you rank in USA Google then you can just look for that particular search. I obviously like to cater for both the UK and USA, so I usually run both search engines. And yes, they do differ.

SE Ranking also provides you with overviews of your domain, giving you different data on how visible your site is, overviews of rankings (up vs down), traffic forecasts.

I really liked this tool, much more user friendly and useful than KeySearch. 

Backlink Monitoring 

I probably don't use this as much as I should, especially as a lot of my niche sites don't use a huge amount of backlinks, but I have started to really focus on this a lot more with this site. 

The backlink monitoring section allows you to, well keep track of your backlinks, including how many, from how many domains, if any may have broken, what the total domain authority they have come from is, different anchor types and a daily graph of new and lost backlinks. 

Using the BBC as an example, you can see the type of information you are given from the reports (you can also get a report set to you every week with any changes). The report shows you just how many backlinks your domain has got, a decent break down of the types, especially big hitting ones such as EDU or Gov domains, the domain trust (out of 100) and page trust (out of 100). 

The domain anchors and pages then start to allow you to see the diversity and types of pages or anchors that are linking back to your pages. 

Having lots of backlinks with the same anchor text or possibly all to the same pages can potentially have a detrimental effect to listings, rankings and your whole site. Using this tool allows you to see in an easy to see fashion what is linking to you, why it's linking too you and if it's providing anything of use. 

As I said, I don't use this as much as I should, but the layout and the information given is useful, yes you can get a lot of this from Google using their search console and site tools, but the user interface with Google tools is confusing and annoying at best. This is simple and well laid out. 

Everyday Tools

If you are planning on building a website, keeping track of your site and it's pages is crucial to ensure everything is going smoothly and that you are actually going forward (as apposed to being stagnant and not moving)

If I am honest you don't need these tools everyday, but they are useful to run at least once a week to keep track of where things are going.  

Research & Competition Analysis

The ability to understand your competition, where they rank and what they rank for is imperative, I suck at doing this, because I am usually so focused on writing my own content I don't research to understand what competitors might be ranking for. 

Within SE Ranking, you can view two separate parts to help determine your ongoing strategy. 

PPC / SEO Rankings

As you may have guessed, SERanking does lean towards PPC and paid ad style information, and this is one of those areas.

This section allows you to add a competitor, either their domain or a certain URL will give you a list of keywords that whatever you searched for is ranking for.

Using our favourite website as a guinea pig, you can see the type of data you can get from SERankings competitor analyse tool. 

I will say, as I have said in the past, some of the data is off, for example there is only around $800 worth of traffic towards BBC.com, which I find hard to believe, but there seems to be a reason for it's 'confusion'. 

The BBC.com redirects over to the BBC.co.uk (the main website) so I have a feeling that SE Ranking can't quite pick up or understand what traffic is going where, especially with paid for traffic. 

You can scroll to the bottom of the competitor report to actually find out what ads and PPC keywords are being used. 

Each ad can be hovered over, giving you a view of the copy being used and of course what keyword they are using for that advert. In April they have been showing off their Drama shows, they currently rank number 1 for that keyword, promoting their Line Of Duty TV program. 

Of course, it's worth remembering, you are probably not going to be trying to go up against a behemoth such as the Beeb, so the ads you see or the keywords that appear will be different. 

For me, I care more about what organic keywords they rank for, and the pages that are ranking well for. 

Again, the layout is simple, easy to understand and gives you the information you need. As you can see, BBC.co.uk ranks for some pretty nice keywords, such as Amazon, Youtube, Football Scores and of course, BBC Sport. 

Keyword Competitor Ranking

The second part of the competitor research tools, is the ability to see where competitors rank against your own keywords. I.e if you are trying to rank for 'how to make money online' you can see if any of your competitors are ranking well for that keyword phrase, and more importantly, find out which posts are ranking for it. 

Now this is only massively useful if you are only looking at say out raking or bettering 10 or so competitors, or if you are in a super specific niche whereby you only ever have a few websites you are fighting against. 

For an authority site that might look to rank across multiple niches, products and keywords, then only trying to track 5 or 10 competitors might be difficult. 

All in all, it's useful to know where other websites and blogs are within search engines, and if you need to put in a little bit more work. 

I would definitely recommend checking out the pricing page to fully understand everything you get, as you can see even Optimum provides you with basically all the standard things you would want from a SEO Tool, such as keyword rankings, back links, SEO reports and competitor research tools. 

The Plus and Enterprise levels then open up the ability to run your own agency or the ability to sell SEO services, with white label reports, API access and even more. You do also get the ability to track larger amounts of keywords, with the Plus version starting at 1,000 (Optimum starts at 250) and then Enterprise starts at 2,500.

The pricing of course also increases, the standard cost (with no discount, that we will cover in a second) starts at £23 per month, and then raises to £53 and £112 depending on the level. 

SE Ranking Discounts

As I hinted too, there is a slightly confusing discount that can be applied to SE Ranking, heavily dependent on how often, or how much you are willing to invest in advance. 

The first SERanking discount you will see is the 'ranking check frequency' discount. If you are willing to have update your keyword rankings fewer types per week, or per month, then you are rewarded with a discount of up to 40% on your monthly bill. 

For example, let's take the Plus tier, normally, this would cost you £53 per month, with the ability to track 1,000 keywords updated daily and of course all the features you would get on the Plus tier. 

All in all, I really like SE Ranking, I probably don't use as many of the tools that are on offer, and mainly focus on the ones that I feel are most important to me, such as the keyword rankings and competitor research, but it's a well made package. 

The keyword research part is annoying, and does mean I have to double check with other tools such as UberSuggest to ensure I get ab accurate picture, but hopefully they will look at improving that data over time. 

If you are after a decent priced, all in one SEO platform with the ability to track a decent number of keywords each month, as well as understand backlink profiles, competitors and even page changes, then SE Ranking could be the one for you.

Be sure to check out their 14 day free trial to see if it can fit with your mission.