SE Ranking Review

Detailed Reviews

SE Ranking is a cloud-based SEO platform that helps users get more organic and paid traffic on the website. They cater their services to entrepreneurs, SMBs, agencies, and enterprises. The platform tries to cover all the stages of website management by providing useful analytics input from its tool. The company is headquartered in London and claims of having over 300,000 users in its clientele.

Pros

• Has dedicated sections for research and analysis.
• Allows Social Media Management.
• Gives a thorough website audit report.
• Provides a marketing plan
• Efficient backlink monitoring section.

Cons

• Not the most intuitive SEO tools.

Introduction

We won’t get into why online prosperity is the key to success for most businesses. But we would emphasize the fact that the search engine is the biggest source of traffic for the majority of websites.

Most of us are aware of the turmoil a webmaster needs to go through to rank well in the search engine results. One needs to conduct extensive keyword research, have a sound content strategy, maintain a robust and responsive website, build an amazing backlink profile, and so on.

Most of us found it unfathomable to take care of all the nuances on your own. But the influx of SEO tools, such as SE Ranking, made things slightly more manageable and easier. One can now take care of it all from a single platform and keep track of all the modifications.

The SEO tools vary in terms of quality and the extent of their services. This review will tell you all there is to know about the ‘all-inclusive’ SEO tool called SE Ranking.

We can see why they proclaim being an all-inclusive platform. The tool can accommodate most needs of webmasters. You can focus on both organic and paid traffic. SE Ranking would comb through your website to find out any errors that make it less search engine friendly.

They will help you keep a close eye on competitors, find out better keywords to rank for, get some backlink prospects, and so on.

However, these are the features that you would find on any SEO platform. All that matters is how accurate is the information provided by the tool. We will tell you if the recommendations by SE Ranking are worth your actions or not.

The ease of use and the variety of tools are also among the parameters we have used to gauge the platform. By the end of this review, you will be acquainted with the ins and outs of SE Ranking and have more refined thoughts about the tool.

Keeps it organized with Projects and the Dashboard

Websites contain hundreds and thousands of pages and often have tons of elements that a webmaster needs to manage. The sheer volume of everything makes it so much easy to lose track of what you are doing. And then you would be scrolling aimlessly through the pile of information without a clue of what to do with it.

It is equally hectic whether you are taking care of just one website or several of them. SE Ranking allows the user to categorically specify all the details and nuances related to a project. When you add a new website on the platform, the tool lets you control the extent of monitoring, specify the keywords you want to monitor, choose relevant search engines, list out the competitors, and much more.

When you specify all these details, you paint a very clear image for the platform and your future self as to what is that matters more. The platform lets you create groups of projects, making it easier to monitor a cluster or niche on the whole.

Once you have added the projects and created all the groups you want, the dashboard would give you a broad idea of the state of progress on all these projects. It shows you the variation in keywords rankings, forecasts traffic, tells you about search visibility, and other relevant details for all the projects at once.

 

You can have a quick look at the number of keywords in the top 5, 10, and 30 ranks of search engine results for individual projects as well as group. There is also some information about domain authority, average ranking, pages indexed by Google, and so on.

The dashboard makes it simpler for the user to keep track of changes without the need to spend a lot of time in navigating through the information or trying to interpret what the data means.

Once you select individual projects, there are a lot more details for you to satisfy your hunger for information. You can inspect individual elements of the website and find out ways for improvement.

Keyword monitoring and research

No matter how much Google or SEO experts tell you about the obsoleteness of keywords, the truth is that keywords are still relevant, and it seems that things will remain the same way for a long time.

We agree that semantics are necessary to create wholesome and relevant content for visitors, but if you are not ranking high for keywords, no one is maybe even going to have a look at your content.

You need to find out keywords that are easier to rank for and then monitor your progress around them. The keyword suggestion tool and the rank tracker on SE Ranking collectively provide you all the capabilities you need to have a strong keyword foundation.

SE Ranking has entirely different sections for research and monitoring parts. The ‘keyword suggestion tool’ is one among the array of tools present on the platform. But there are other tools in the list that can help you with finding the right keywords for your campaign.

Find the right keywords for your campaign

Let us go through the keyword suggestion tool first. It focuses on the keyword you are interested in rather than bringing a domain into the mix. All you need to do is mention a keyword, choose if you want suggestions from SE Ranking’s database or search engine suggestions, and pick the geographical region.

The tool will take no time to populate the results and show you all the keywords that can make a difference. The keyword suggestion tool displays the results under three categories- similar, related, and long-tail keywords.

 

Similar keywords are the ones that can ideally replace the keyword you are looking for, or they display fairly similar search results when compared to the keyword you entered. Similar keywords can be the ideal entries if you are going for semantics.

Related keywords are the ones that have the same pages ranking in Google’s top 100 search results for the analyzed keyword. And we all know what long-tail keywords are for. These have wordcount between three to five and are relatively easier to rank for. The fact that long-tail keywords often boil it down to specific topics and content can be both a pro and con for you, depending on the situation.

The keywords come with some metrics associated with them. There is search volume that gives the average number of searches per month for the keyword based on data from the past year. CPC (cost per click) is how much you will have to pay for each click if you decide to add the keyword in your Google Ads campaign.

The metrics ‘Competition’ and ‘KEI’ (keyword effectiveness index) tell how difficult it can be to rank for the keyword for paid and organic campaigns, respectively. And then there is a stat telling you how many websites Google displays within the search results for that keyword.

The numbers make it easier for the user to decide what keywords suit the campaign and are worth the efforts.

Another way of finding keywords on SE Ranking is by using the SEO/PPC competitor research tool. All you need to do is specify a domain competitor, and the tool will fish out all the keyword information from that domain.

This tool gives you more data than just keyword information, and we will discuss all of that in upcoming sections of the review.

The third avenue for keyword research on SE Ranking is the Search Volume Checker. The search volume for a keyword gives you a much clear idea of the kind of traffic you can expect on your website if you rank well for that keyword.

The search volume checker imports data from Google Keyword Planner and tells you the kind of rewards you might get after getting top rank for that keyword. SE Ranking charges for every individual keyword search. Therefore, don’t expect yourself to be carrying out volume research for a bulk of keywords.

Monitor the progress with rank tracker

Once you have collected the keywords, created content around them, and published it on the website, you will want to see how they perform on the search engine. The keyword tracking feature of SE Ranking gives you a regular update of all the modifications related rankings for the keywords under observation.

The feature is available under the projects section. They would ask you about the keyword you want to track when you provide website details for the project. If you can’t come up keywords right at the moment, then they can even suggest some to you. There is always the option of removing keywords from the tracker or adding new ones to the list.

The platform allows the user to create keyword groups while adding them to the trackers. If you have an e-commerce store selling clothing, then you can have different keyword groups for topwear and bottom wear, giving you a fair idea of which category is doing better.

There are three ways for you to get all this rank tracking data. The first tab is ‘Detailed.’ As the name suggests, it goes as deep into the details as possible. You can see the rank fluctuations for individual keywords, visit the URL for which they are ranking, and get a number for search volume per month for that keyword.

Apart from this, you get the collective information for the number of keywords in different rank brackets. The segment will tell you how many of the keywords are at the top position, in the top three, top 5, top 10, and so on. There are also indicators to show the increase or decrease in the number of keywords in the division.

If you are not much into the rankings of individual keywords and want to know about the overall state of things, then the next tab, ‘Overall,’ might be the one for you. It gives the user a sense of direction in which things are moving using metrics such as average position, traffic forecast, search visibility, etc.

The tab would provide you with timelines for all these metrics, thus giving you a clear idea if things are going the way you want them to. While the relevance of metrics such as average position and traffic forecast is self-explanatory, search visibility combines multiple factors.

Search visibility factors in the ranks of individual keywords against their search volume. It won’t make that much of a difference if you get high rankings for keywords with very little search volume. Metrics such as search visibility provide you much realistic information.

The final tab in the rank tracker is ‘Historical Data.’ It has almost the same metrics as the previous tab but under a much wider horizon. It will give you all the rank tracking information from the time you placed the keyword in the tracker.

We feel SE Ranking has got it all covered when it comes to keyword research and tracking.

Competitors and Research

The research and monitoring tools on SE Ranking are separate from each other, yet you need to use them to get the best results or most efficiency. We saw how keyword research and keyword tracking are related, and same is the case with SEO/PPC research and competitor analysis on SE Ranking.

There is an option to mention the competitors when you create a project. The comparison helps the user get an idea of how much room is there for improvement.

If you are unable to think of any competitors right from the top of your mind, then the platform can suggest some suitable ones to you. Once you have added some competitors in your project, you can compare your metrics against them to get an idea of how things are going.

Project competitors

The ‘Competitors’ section with projects will give you comparison stats under different parameters. The ‘My Competitors’ tab gives you the broader metrics for the sites you added in the section.

You can see the average keyword position, traffic forecast, search visibility, percentage of keywords in the top 10, and the number of keywords in the top 10.

The direct comparison is often enough to keep the user on toes. If you see one of the competitors doing exceptionally well, you can carry out separate research on them in the tools section.

SE Ranking would also show you the top competitors for individual keywords. The ‘SERP competitors’ section would show you the top domains for each keyword present in your project. It is up to you if you want to have a look at only the top 10 or all the top 100 domains.

It can be a handy section in case you want to get deeper analytics for high search volume keywords.

The third tab in the section is ‘Visibility Rating.’ It brings you the visibility ratings for the top 10 domains appearing in the search results for all the keywords listed in the project. It will then list out all these domains in the decreasing order of visibility rating to highlight the top players.

The other metrics associated with these domains are Alexa ranking, Moz Domain Authority, and number of backlinks. There is a high probability that you may discover some new opponents in this section.

SEO/PPC Competitor research

Let us now get into organic and paid research section on the platform. The difference between the competitor section in projects and this tool is that the research tool deals with one competitor at a time while the project focused on collective competition.

You can specify the search engine and region before getting into the analysis part. Once you have provided all the relevant details, you get to see all the paid and organic attributes for the website.

The overview section would tell you almost everything you want to know about the organic and paid campaigns of the website. The bar at the top shows counts for both organic and paid traffic on the website for different regions.

It would then show graphs and metrics for the two kinds of traffic. You can see the number of organic keywords on the site that show up in top search results. There will also be a number to tell you about the rise or fall of this metric. The other information would be the estimated traffic and estimated cost of traffic for all the organic keywords.

In the case of paid traffic stats, you get to see the number of paid keywords for the domain and the magnitude of increase or decrease in the number of keywords as compared to the previous month. There are similar stats for paid traffic and the estimated cost of that traffic.

The overview section then breaks down organic and paid traffic stats separately. It starts with organic traffic stats, and the first segment gives you a keyword report. You will see the number of organic keywords that the domain ranks for, the number of keywords with increased and decreased rankings, followed by the number of new and lost keywords for search engine results.

You can further expand the section and have a look at individual keywords and metrics associated with them. SE Ranking would give you all the usual details right from search volume and rank to KEI and competition for the keyword.

Moving forward, you will have the distribution for organic keyword ranking and a list of competitors ranking for the same keyword. A user is usually already in the competitor research mode, and another list of competitors can either make it or break it.

With this new list, you might find the websites which resemble more closely with yours, or you may fall down the rabbit hole of continuous competitor research without achieving anything substantial at all. We feel that you should proceed with caution in this section.

The subsequent segments deal with competitors only. There will be a Venn diagram for keyword share between the domain under observation and its competitors. It shows all the keywords common on the competitor websites, the keywords which the top competitors are ranking for but absent on this site, and the keywords that are unique to the website we are observing.

There is so much of information in this diagram alone that one might not need to look beyond it. One of the segments for organic keyword research shows the graph for organic traffic and the number of organic keywords for the competitor sites.

There will be instances when you find that a website with relatively lower keyword count is getting almost the same traffic as the other website with lots of keywords. It is from such examples that you can learn how to curate a campaign to get more traffic without flooding the website with keywords.

SE Ranking points out the top-performing pages and domains for a website, and it can be the right place to start if you are looking forward to getting some lessons from their campaign strategy.

The paid research campaign has all the sections the same as the ones for organic traffic. You get the top keywords, keyword ranking distribution, comparisons with competitors, and the top pages and domains for paid traffic.

The final section in the paid research part shows the most popular keyword ads for the domain. You can see how much traffic these ads received and get a look at them. The section can be a great help if you are trying to find out some better examples of how to put out paid ads.

The thing we liked most about the SEO/PPC research tool is that it can be as detailed as you want it to be and keep things relatively simple and short, at the same time. The tool seems capable enough of handling the needs of most users, and we found it very interesting.

Analytics and Traffic

You can connect Google Analytics, and Google Search Console accounts with SE Ranking to bring even more information under one umbrella. The Analytics and Traffic section would import data from these tools and give you additional information about how things are going on the website.

With the two tools connected with SE Ranking, you won’t have to switch from one platform to another constantly. We feel there is no need to get into the details of the kind of data you will have in your hand once you integrate the two platforms with this platform.

The Analytics and Traffic sections come with different tabs to make the analysis easier for you. The first two tabs are ‘Traffic’ and ‘Snippets.’ These contain data from Google Analytics and give you all the insight about the traffic you are having on the website.

There is an entirely different tab for Google Search Console Data. However, it’s the ‘SEO Potential’ tab that might get most of your attention. It gives you an estimate for the traffic, cost, and related attributes for your SEO efforts.

Even though it won’t make the most accurate predictions, you can definitely get an idea of how things may turn out because of your actions.

Website Audit

All the hard work and research won’t matter at all if your website isn’t optimized according to search engine standards. Search engines now care more about user experience. They not only want to find the most relevant results for the user but also want to make sure that the user doesn’t have a hard time after getting redirected to the search result’s website.

Another reason why you want to make sure that things are in order on your website is because it would help the search engine crawl and understand the website better. It can then result in more appearance in the search results.

The site audit section on SE Ranking points out all that is wrong or what can be improved on the website. The audit report would highlight all the issues that can bring down your ranking or make it difficult for search engines to index webpages.

The platform categorizes the issues based on how important it is to address them. It helps the user know where to begin after getting the report. The report not only points out the issue, but it provides the user with a detailed explanation of what it signifies and what can be the repercussion if it is not dealt with properly.

The knowledge helps the user avoid making the same mistake again and get better at website optimization. The audit goes through everything right from the usual health check for the website to page analysis, content analysis, image analysis, and so on.

The share of internet users on mobile browsers has already surpassed that of the ones using desktop browsers. It is essential that your website is responsive and performs well on both kinds of browsers. The audit report would update you on this topic as well.

SE Ranking would provide you with a list of all the crawled pages under the report and give you the status code along with other metrics related to the pages. You can see URL, URL length, title, title length, description, and so on.

The table would tell you if the page uses robot.txt files and tell you if the page prevents search engines from indexing it. There are separate tabs for external links and crawled images too. The ‘Compare Crawls’ segment lets you monitor the changes between two subsequent audits. It would help you find out whether the modifications are doing good or bad for the website.

You can keep a closer eye on all the important pages of the website using the ‘Page Changes Monitoring’ section. It would track all the changes on the monitored pages and keep you updated about all the modifications. The feature can turn out to be quite useful if there are multiple parties with access to page settings.

Backlink checker and monitoring

When a user enters a search query, then the search engine typically finds millions of pages that seem to have a possible explanation for the query. It is the job of the search engine to provide the most appropriate result at the top, so it uses different metrics to judge which result is more appropriate.

It would consider region, keywords, page and website semantics, loading speeds, images, and what not to sort the results in the order of decreasing relevance. But even after applying all these filters, there are often way too many websites that seem to provide the best answer to the user’s query.

To find out which of these should be a better response, the search engine turns towards other websites on the internet and sees what they have to say about it. It analyzes all the different backlinks coming from other websites to the particular page or website.

The search engine considers the one with more backlinks pointing at them as the more reliable or authoritative source of information, and therefore, pushes them up in search engine results ranking.

It is the reason why webmasters care so much about backlinks these days, and it is no joke to create a healthy backlink profile, especially for the relatively new websites.

The ‘Backlinks Checker’ tool assists you in gathering more backlinks by analyzing the backlink profiles of others. You can inspect domains, URLs, and domains without subdomains to find out all the backlinks pointing towards them.

There are multiple ways one can use this tool. You can find out the top competing website and URLs and assess their backlink profile, or you can go for pages with slightly lesser authority and get the easily convertible backlink prospects.

Another tool related to backlinks on SE Ranking is backlink monitoring sections. Unlike the backlinks checker, this one focusses on the backlinks already available on the page. However, you need to import the backlinks for monitoring.

Once you have added the backlinks you want to monitor, the tool would update you with all the changes related to them. You can monitor the Alexa rank of their sources along with Domain Authority from Moz.

You can also see the referring IP, anchor text, country, and other such information.       

Marketing plan and Social Media Management

SE Ranking takes care of those unfamiliar with SEO by providing them with a to-do list. The list has categorically mentioned all the steps you need to take to make it to the top ranks of search engine results.

It includes everything right from semantic core keyword research and content strategy to mobile optimization, onsite optimization, and off-site optimization. The tool would guide you through all these steps and help make the website better.

It also provides the user with articles linked with each step. It not only helps them realize why that specific step is critical but also tells the user how to go about it.

The ‘Marketing Plan’ section can turn out to be a boon for all those who feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks one needs to undertake for search engine optimization.

The other part of this section deals with business listings. It can be the key, for websites related to local businesses, to climb up local search engine ranks. For local searches, you don’t need to compete with websites with high domain authorities or with thousands of pages. Your competition will be the other local business, and you can easily get into top results with some smart work. The segment would point out all the directories where your business should be listed. It would not only help you out with getting more visibility on the internet, but also prevent others from claiming your business on the internet.

The projects section on SE Ranking has a ‘Social Media Management’ section. But don’t let the name fool you. The section deals only with Facebook and Twitter.

However, it is a surprisingly good social media management tool. You can view all the analytics details related to your posts and also schedule posts from within the tool. First, the Google tool and now the social handles, SE Ranking has done a remarkable job in making itself a one-stop solution for most webmasters.

Conclusion

SE Ranking provides you all the tools that you may need to get into the top rankings of search engines. The projects section lets you scrutinize all you can about a website, and then the tools section would help you carry out all the research you can.

SEO tools often mix up the monitoring and research sections, but that was not the case with SE Ranking. Be it keywords or backlinks, the user will always know where to find new ones and where to analyze the ones already there on the website.

They also did a good job in allowing the user to decide how deep they want to get into research. Somehow the PPC and CPC researches were not intimidating at all. Same goes for competitor research on the platform. It is entirely up to how much information you want about the competitor.

The site audit was detailed enough to keep the website optimized, and the marketing plan section made things so much easier for new users.

SE Ranking is one of the very few SEO tools that comes with social media management capabilities. Even though you can’t manage a whole lot of your social accounts from the portal, there was no dearth of features for the existing ones.

SE Ranking comes with a free plan where you can test out a limited version of the tool. In our opinion, it should be enough to give you a taste of what this tool is all about. We felt SE Ranking is right there on top with other awesome SEO tools.