Disclosure: This content is reader-supported, which means if you click on some of our links that we may earn a commission.
SE Ranking is hands down one of the best keyword tracking tools on the market. Aside from tracking your keyword performance, you can perform website audits, check the quality of your backlinks, and even get a sneak peek into your competitor’s marketing efforts. This excellent all-in-one SEO tool comes with awesome features at flexible prices for the solo administrator to a fully-staffed agency.
SE Ranking: The Good and The Bad
Here’s what I think is great and not-so-great about SE Ranking.
The Good
Easy to set up: SE Ranking makes it very easy to get started, even for SEO beginners. The platform will guide you through the five-step process. The process includes entering your website’s general information, selecting the keywords you want to monitor, and selecting your country and search engine preferences.
Next, choose up to five competitors to monitor and connect with an analytics service like Google Analytics to get the complete picture of where your traffic is coming from. You can set everything up in just a few minutes. Of course, you can also change your details later in case you need more.
All-in-one SEO tool: SE Ranking is an exceptional tool for checking how well you are doing on search engine results pages (SERPs). But, this all-in-one tool does much more than just check your SEO ranking. You can use SE Ranking to keep an eye on your competitor’s campaigns, generate new leads for your business, monitor search visibility and traffic, and detect SEO problems with your website.
There are few SEO-related tasks you cannot accomplish with this tool. In many cases, you’d need at least two or three more tools to get the combined power and features of SE Ranking alone.
Great value for money: Tacking onto the previous point, SE Ranking offers excellent value for money given its features and functionality. You can use this tool to monitor a personal website or manage marketing services for multiple clients. Its cheapest plan costs $18.60 per month and comes with surprisingly robust functionality.
Robust resource library: There is a slight learning curve when figuring out all of SE Ranking’s features. But the platform offers a vast resource library for reference. The resource center includes all of the platform’s features. The instructions are also very detailed, complete with screenshots.
The Bad
Lacks 24/7 customer support: You can reach customer support via chat or email. The team is responsive and very knowledgeable. However, there isn’t a dedicated 24/7 support feature. This can be a problem if you have an emergency or are in a different time zone.
Local SEO ranking is wanting: It’s great that SE Ranking lets you track ranking in your local area. But the tool’s local database isn’t as robust as it could be.
SE Ranking Pricing
SE Ranking offers three pricing plans. The pricing for each plan varies depending on how many keywords you’d like to track.
Essential Plan
The essential plan costs $18.60 per month for tracking up to 250 keywords. After that, the price goes up to $25.80 for tracking 500 keywords and up again to $33 for 750 keywords. In addition, the Essential plan lets you monitor up to 10 websites and perform website audits for up to 70,000 pages.
You will be missing some features with this plan. The features you don’t get with this plan include:
- White label
- Historical data on keywords/domain
- Keyword database expansion
- Lead generation
- API
I still think the essential plan has enough power and features for most small to medium-sized businesses. More features aren’t always a good thing, especially if you can’t or won’t use them. I recommend beginners start with this plan and master how to use SE Ranking before moving up to the higher plans.
The Essential plan is also good for the solopreneur running a handful of websites. It’s also scalable enough for people who occasionally handle SEO or digital marketing for clients.
Pro Plan
The Pro plan is SE Ranking’s most popular option. The price for this plan starts at $42.50 for rank tracking up to 1000 keywords. You can increase your keyword limit up to 1750 keywords if you pay $71.40 per month. You can check an unlimited number of websites with this plan, far better than the 10 you get with the Essential plan.
Also noteworthy are the user seats. These refer to how many people have access to the platform. The Essential plan only offers one user seat. So, only the administrator has access to the platform. The Pro plan increases users to three. This is an excellent choice if you’d like to give access to other users such as clients or SEO and marketing staff.
The only feature you don’t get with the Pro plan is the API. Otherwise, the Pro plan is a significant upgrade for more experienced administrators. You’ll be getting notifications for up to 100 changes to your web pages. You also have the option to expand the keyword research database with up to 10,000 keywords. You don’t get these two add-ons with the Essential plan.
Finally, the White Label feature lets you use SE Ranking to create your own SEO service. You’ll be free to use your branding on reports. You can also mail out reports using your SMTP server.
The Pro plan is perfect for anyone running a small to medium-sized agency.
Business Plan
Finally, we have the Business plan. It starts at $90 per month for rank tracking up to 2500 keywords. Again, you can pay more to track more keywords each month:
- 5000 keywords: $167 per month
- 10000 keywords: $263 per month
- 15000 keywords: $359 per month
- 20,000 keywords: $431 per month
The Business plan offers serious feature upgrades from the Pro plan. For example, you can perform website audits for up to 450,000 pages, up from 150,000 pages. Your daily backlink checks also increase to 300 up from 100 with the pro plan.
The Business plan is the only one that offers API. If you have developers, this feature is terrific for integrating your existing systems to SE Ranking.
I’d recommend the Business plan for large organizations that handle many clients and huge mounds of data. Otherwise, this plan may be overkill for most people.
Discounts
SE Ranking lets you check your rankings daily, every three days, or weekly. The platform rewards you for reviewing your rankings less often. This option is excellent for beginners who can get by with weekly checks. You won’t have to pay for a rank check frequency that you don’t need.
You get 20% off if you choose the three-day option and 40% off if you select the weekly option. In addition, there are more discounts depending on your subscription period. For example, you get 5% off for a three-month subscription, 10% off for a six-month subscription, 15% off if you pay for nine months, and 20% off with an annual subscription.
The discounts add up, so choose the combination that gives you the best price.
SE Ranking Offerings
SE Ranking has lots to offer while remaining easy to use.
SE Ranking Website Rank Tracking
SE Ranking’s key feature is its website rank tracking capability. At its core, SE Ranking lets you see exactly how your website is performing on search engine results pages (SERPs). This functionality is very well developed and is among the best in class.
Once you’ve entered the keywords you’d like to track, the tool lets you monitor your performance across multiple devices, geographic locations, and languages. In addition, you can check your performance across all major search engines, including:
- Google (including Google Mobile and Maps)
- YouTube
- Yahoo!
- Bing
You can also narrow down your search to a specific location, such as a city. You can do this for more than 40 countries. It’s an especially great feature for small local businesses trying to outdo the competition. But the local databases are a little wanting. SE Ranking is continually improving and updating its platform, so it’s only a matter of time until this problem is resolved.
SE Ranking also has a very clean dashboard for tracking the performance of all your keywords. You can also alter the settings so that you only see the information that matters most to you. There’s also more complex information, including search volume, suggested bid, dynamics, Keyword Effective Index (KEI), and the number of search results for all your keywords.
In short, if there is anything you need to track relating to your keywords, SE Ranking is already on it.
SE Ranking Website Audit
Another key SE Ranking feature is its website audit. Here, you can find out how your website is performing on search engines. Additionally, you can find out exactly why your website isn’t performing well in the SERP. SE Ranking uses a powerful page crawler capable of going through up to 1000 pages in just two minutes.
The bot monitors metrics, including domain metrics, page indexation status, and technical parameters like HTTP status codes, and page load time. Additional metrics include page resources such as JavaScript and CCS, and page breakdown, including links and meta tags. You can also choose which issues to monitor.
The cheapest plan lets you analyze 40,000 pages. This capacity is more than enough if you only have a couple of websites. You’ll also get all your information laid out in a simple dashboard.
Finally, the website audit doesn’t just tell you the problem. You get fixes for your issues. There really isn’t much to complain about this feature.
SE Ranking Backlinks Checking and Monitoring
Backlinking is a crucial SEO tactic. But it’s difficult to assess and monitor changes to your links. You can outsource this critical task to SE Ranking. The software periodically checks your backlinks to ensure everything is working as it should. You’ll also get notified in case of any changes to the links.
Additionally, SE Ranking lets you assess the quality of your backlinks. This quality check includes the tool’s own domain quality score. SE Ranking also monitors the link’s Alexa Rank and lets you see the geographical location for the website carrying your link.
Some of the other ways SE Ranking guarantees the quality of your backlinks include:
Page Trust: This is an SE Ranking aggregate score. The software uses metrics such as the quality and number of backlinks and referring domains on a page. These metrics allow the tool to rate the page quality.
Social Shares: You get a full view of the number of Facebook shares your backlinks receive.
External Links: This reveals how many other websites are using the same backlinks. As a rule of thumb, the more websites sharing a backlink, the lower their quality.
Overall, SE Ranking’s backlink checker is a valuable tool. But, it’s not as robust as some of its competitors offer. However, the feature’s relatively low performance isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. SE Ranking is a lot cheaper than the competition and isn’t expected to excel in all its offerings.
Still, this feature is handy if you need general information on:
- The total number of backlinks
- Domain and page trust
- Dofollow and Nofollow ratio
- Referring domains
SE Ranking Competitor Research
SE Ranking offers a nifty cheat sheet to help you get ahead of the competition. Simply enter a URL or domain name, and you’ll get full access to information about your competitor’s paid promotions and organic strategies.
Here, you’ll be able to see your competitor’s:
- Traffic estimates
- Specific keywords that are driving traffic to the website
- Traffic costs for their paid campaigns
You can also evaluate your competitors’ backlink profiles. This includes how many backlinks they have and the quality of these backlinks. The competitor research feature is incredibly advanced and will also let you track your competitor’s most profitable ads and keywords.
SE Ranking Lead Generator
SE Ranking’s lead generator feature is a most welcome addition. It’s not something you see every day from an SEO tool. You can tell that this product also has marketing in mind and not just SEO.
The lead generator is actually a widget. Visitors fill out a form on your website. Then, SE Ranking automatically assesses their website. The potential customer then receives a detailed report of their on-page optimization.
Essentially, potential customers exchange their contact details for a free on-page audit. You won’t have to waste any time chasing cold leads. You’ll also be sure that prospects who contact you are already warm leads. Finally, you can customize the widget with your brand colors and logo to offer a personalized touch.
SE Ranking White Label
The white label feature is available on the Pro and Business plans. This feature is perfect for independent web admins, SEO and marketing agencies, SEO service resellers, and SEO-related service providers.
You can create client accounts complete with custom:
- Tools such as backlink monitoring and keyword suggestions
- Analytics & traffic, including search visibility, average rankings, and traffic forecast
- Website audit
- Marketing plan
- Competitor comparisons
- Performance-based invoicing
You can also manually or automatically generate reports for your clients. You’ll be able to use your domain, custom header and footer, and company logo in your client reports. You’ll even be able to send out reports from your corporate email.
Additionally, you’ll be able to create a custom login page and interface for your clients. In short, you can offer your clients SEO and marketing services under your brand with the help of SE Ranking’s powerful tools and features.
Summary
SE Ranking is an incredibly scalable and flexible SEO tool. Its pricing structure lets you find the sweet spot for the power and functionality you need. It’s also competitively priced, considering it’s an all-in-one SEO and marketing tool. Unfortunately, these two functions are often treated separately. Combining both elements ensures you have everything you need to win the race to the top of the search engines.
It’s also not enough to know what’s keeping you from getting to the top of the search results. It’s equally helpful to know what the competition is doing right. SE Ranking’s competitor research gives you the edge you need to remain competitive in your niche. In addition, you can fix your own mistakes, as well as borrow a leaf or two from your most successful competitors.
Finally, the white-label feature is perfect if you handle SEO and marketing for clients. You can harness all of SE Ranking’s power, and your clients will be none the wiser. As a result, you can continue to offer exceptional services while retaining your brand and image. Overall, this is a terrific tool bound to change the way to look at and perform SEO.
