SE Ranking Review, Pricing & Features

What is SE Ranking?

SE Ranking is a cloud-based, all-in-one SEO platform used by over 25,000 businesses to improve their online search performance. With features that support keyword research and ranking, backlink analysis, competitive analysis and site auditing, you can maximize your efforts towards optimizing your site’s visibility and traffic. Additionally, you can use SE Ranking’s social media management tool to maintain and improve your social media visibility.

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Table of Contents

Full Review

SE Ranking was founded in 2012 by Valery Kurilov. Today the company has around 90 employees, 300,000 users, and is based in Palo Alto, California. SE Ranking’s mission is to allow anyone to optimize their website for SEO, regardless of their level of expertise.

SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform created for entrepreneurs, small-to-medium businesses, agencies and enterprises. Its core features include keyword research and ranking, backlink analysis, competitive analysis and site auditing.

Starting at $39 per month, SE Ranking is offered at a much lower price-point than its competitors SEMrush and Ahrefs. At this plan, SE Ranking only allows you to track 250 keywords vs. SEMrush and Ahrefs with 500 keywords. However, you can upgrade SE Ranking’s minimum plan to track 500 keywords at $54 per month, which is still 50% cheaper than SEMrush and Ahrefs.

It should be noted that even if SE Ranking’s plan is cheaper for the same amount of keywords tracked, it is less powerful than its more expensive competitors. For example, it has a smaller keyword database, lacks some advanced features, and has reports that lack some key data points.

Overall, while SE Ranking advertises itself as an SEO tool for any size company, we found that its platform is better for smaller businesses who prefer an affordable, basic solution. We recommend larger companies with sizable budgets look into more advanced SEO tools that offer key features like backlink reports and the ability to crawl mobile sites.

SE Ranking Pricing & Cost

SE Ranking pricing ranges between $39 and $189 per month. They also offer a 14-day free trial and a demo account the user can use before purchasing.

  • Optimum: $39 per month, up to 10 sites, 37,500 keyword checks in total
  • Plus: $89 per month, unlimited number of sites, 150,000 keyword checks in total
  • Enterprise: $189 per month, unlimited number of sites, 375,000 keyword checks in total

They also offer discounts associated with the frequency of keyword ranking checks:

  • Daily: 0% total discount
  • Every 3 days: 20% total discount
  • Weekly: 40% total discount

SE Ranking Key Features

Below, we will discuss the key features of SE Ranking, and how they would benefit your search efforts. We will also include screenshots of the product to give you an idea of its design and architecture.

SE Ranking features:

  • Keyword Research
  • Backlink Analysis
  • Keyword Rank Tracking
  • Competitive Analysis
  • Site Audit

Keyword Research

Keyword research is critical to finding high volume, low competition traffic that you can target through paid search and content marketing. While effective, we found that the SE Ranking keyword research tool is not as advanced or intuitive as other more expensive tools.

SE Ranking keyword research

The keyword research tool allows you to find information on any keyword in over 40 countries. For each keyword, the dashboard includes the following information:

  • Keyword difficulty
  • Search volume trends on a basis of every 4 months (which cannot be adjusted)
  • Competition
  • Cost-per-click estimates
  • Related keywords
  • Performance for different countries and search engines

SE Ranking can help you locate keyword suggestions in two sections, under Keyword Research at the top and Keyword Suggestions under the More tab. If you want to filter or group the suggested keywords, you’ll need to use Keyword Suggestions. SE Ranking does not allow you to add keywords to a list for future reference.

Backlink Analysis

SE Ranking offers the ability to monitor your own backlink profile as well as your competitors. In general, the platform has the basic tools you need, but is not as advanced as more expensive alternatives.

Backlink Checker

SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker tool provides detailed backlink information on any website. You can also use this tool to identify competitors’ top performing pages in terms of backlink, which is a good indicator for the type of content that will perform best for your site.

While SE Ranking’s dashboard offers a clean layout, we found that it does not locate as many backlinks as more advanced tools such as Ahrefs. In addition, it doesn’t offer as much information for each backlink.

SE Ranking backlink checker

Monitoring your backlink profile is important to ensure that you are making progress in your SEO efforts. After you enter a domain or URL, the Backlink Checker returns valuable information including:

  • Domain and page trust
  • Total number of backlinks
  • How many backlinks link to the homepage verses other pages
  • Referring domains
  • Dofollow to nofollow ratio
  • Distribution map by country codes or countries

This tool can also be used to help you understand how much your competitors are investing in SEO, and track their performance over time. It provides all the same information for competitor websites as your own.

Backlink Monitoring

SE Ranking’s Backlink Monitoring feature is important for understanding and improving your site’s backlink profile. It allows you to upload a fixed number of backlinks, which it then monitors. SE Ranking shares information about these backlinks in its dashboard.

SE Ranking allows you to view which backlinks are active or have been lost. With lost links, SE Ranking lists which backlinks produce a 404 error. While this information is not always up-to-date, it helps you prevent losing valuable backlinks for your site.

SE Ranking backlink monitoring

Backlinks can also be analyzed by domain, anchor, page, IPs/subnet and disavow. While SE Ranking offers Alexa and Moz DA scores for sites that backlink to you, it does not provide its own score for your backlink profile. This can make it difficult to track your site’s progress.

Keyword Rank Tracking

Keyword rank tracking helps you monitor how well your site ranks for specific keywords. Tracking your keyword rankings will tell you whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. We found that SE Ranking’s keyword tracking tools are not as visually appealing as other tools.

SE Ranking Keyword Tracking

After you upload your keywords into SE Ranking, it begins tracking their rank in Google. The SE Ranking report comes with several useful features and information:

  • The ability to filter by device, SERP feature and tag
  • Ranking data for US and UK search engines
  • The ability to immediately recheck keyword rankings and volume
  • Rank change over time for individual keywords

While effective, there are limitations to SE Ranking’s rank tracker, which includes not being able to see how each keyword individually contributes to important metrics like Traffic Forecast and Search Visibility.

You can also track organic and paid keywords, and view them by list or by group. However, creating a group is not intuitive– it’s located within the Project Settings page.

Snippets Tool

SE Ranking also offers a featured snippets report, which is an advanced feature that helps keep track of which keywords and content are featured snippets. Featured snippets are incredibly powerful because they are shown at the top of Google’s search results.

SE Ranking Featured Snippet

SE Ranking’s featured snippet report displays aggregated keyword ranking information. Since it does not allow you to filter by specific keywords, it makes it difficult to interpret the individual contributions of each keyword. It’s also difficult to decipher whether a snippet was recently gained or lost.

The only specific information you can view is the actual featured snippet for a keyword and the date it appears on. If you want to view a featured snippet over a larger period of time, you would need to scroll. This is tedious, especially if you’re comparing specific dates that are far away from each other.

Competitive Analysis

Insight into your competitors’ activities can reveal your own site’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to your marketing campaigns. They can also help identify the best keywords for your own content marketing and paid search campaigns.

SE Ranking offers two views into your competitors – within the Projects tab and through the Competitor Research tab. We found that SE Ranking does not offer as much information on competitors as more advanced tools like SEMrush.

SERP Competitors Tool

SE Ranking allows you to study a keyword’s search results and view the top 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 competitive URLs for that keyword. You can also filter information by search engine, device, and by date.

SE Ranking Serp Competitors

This tool is helpful in identifying competitors who rank highly for specific keywords as well as new competitors to begin tracking. One of its most useful functions is being able to view position dynamics of your and your competitors’ sites. This information can help you determine if a change in your SEO performance has only impacted you, or your entire industry.

Visibility Rating Tool

Search visibility is the percentage of users who will see a certain site when using online search. Essentially the higher the percentage, the more likely that customers will find your website.

SE Ranking Visibility Rating

You can use this tool to evaluate your site’s position against direct competitors, help you weigh your chances of getting into the top search results, and understand how a position change can affect search visibility. However, SE Ranking only shows a domain visibility rating, which makes it difficult to track which keywords are working for you.

Competitor Research Tool

SE Ranking offers a Competitor Research tool that helps you identify and understand your top online competitors. SE Ranking identifies your competitors by finding the websites that perform well for the same search terms as your website. They do not organize competitors based on real-world analysis.

SE Ranking Competitor Research Tool

This tool offers key information including:

  • An overview of a competitor’s organic and paid traffic
  • The ability to adjust the geography of search engine traffic
  • Top 5 organic and paid competitors
  • Venn diagram displaying unique, missing and common keywords between you and your competitors
  • Competitive position distribution map of organic and paid competitors based on volume of traffic and number of keywords
  • Compare up to three competitors as well as their rankings for keywords

It does have some limitations including:

  • Timing is limited only on a four month basis
  • No traffic information based on social media channels or by device
  • No competitor demographic information
  • In their paid traffic research tab, you are only able to see competitors’ search ads

Site Audit

A site audit is a best practice for discovering and correcting important SEO errors, which boosts your overall SEO performance. We found that SE Ranking’s site auditing feature is effective, but its interface is a little challenging at times. In addition, it lacks the ability to do a mobile-only crawl of your website.

After you create a project in SE Ranking, it will begin to crawl. It takes about 30 minutes to complete its crawl. Once it is finished, SE Ranking shares key information on its dashboard. The information shared includes:

SE Ranking Site Audit Dashboard
  • An overall website health score
  • Labeling SEO issues as important or semi-important
  • Organizing issues based on categories such as health, images, and optimization
  • Number of pages crawled
  • Index status
  • Moz DA rank and Alexa rank

In addition, SE Ranking provides key information about crawled pages. This includes:

SE Ranking Crawled Pages
  • Status code
  • Whether a page is blocked by robots.txt
  • If the title or description is duplicated
  • Whether a canonical link is specified for a page
  • Depth (how many clicks it takes to get to a page from the homepage)

SE Ranking vs. Competitors

The top SE Ranking competitors are below. Serpstat is most similar in terms of pricing and functionality. Ahrefs and SEMrush are more robust, premium alternatives.

Is SE Ranking right for you?

SE Ranking is a basic all-in-one SEO tool that is ideal for smaller companies and businesses on a budget. Compared to SEMrush and Ahrefs, SE Ranking is much cheaper – for example, you can track 2-3 times the number of keywords for the same price. However, SE Ranking lacks many of the advanced features found in Ahrefs and SEMrush, which are critical to improving your site’s online presence.

If you are a business or entrepreneur looking for an affordable, approachable software tool that contains the must-have SEO features, then we would highly recommend SE Ranking. If you invest heavily in online marketing and have the budget to do so, then we would recommend looking into SE Ranking’s more advanced alternatives like Ahrefs or SEMrush.

To learn more about SE Ranking, try it for free today.

Amy Yang

Amy Yang is a Junior Research Analyst at SoftwarePundit, where she conducts in-depth analyses on software markets and products. Amy has expertise in content production and managing digital and social platforms. She has a Bachelor of Science in Communication & Media, and a Minor in Web Programming and Applications from NYU. You can connect with Amy on LinkedIn.

Amy is an expert in several software categories including:

  • Course creation software
  • Electronic signature software
  • Social media software
  • Website builder software

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