SE Ranking Review 2023: Best SEO Tool For You? [Pros & Cons]

With so many SEO tools out there, how do you decide which is the best fit for your business?

Especially if you are a small business owner, entrepreneur, or blogger with limited SEO experience.

In this SE Ranking review, I will explain the tool’s features with several examples. Based on my experience, I will share the pros and cons of using it, to help you decide if this is the SEO tool you should use.

If you’re curious about if and how SE Ranking can help your business, read on for my full SE Ranking review.

What is SE Ranking?

SE Ranking is an all-in-1 SEO software that provides all the key SEO features, including keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, and competition tracking. It can be used by freelancers, entrepreneurs, small and big businesses, and agencies to improve their search engine rankings and grow their website’s traffic.

SE Ranking started as a rank-tracking tool in 2013 but has grown to become a powerful and complete SEO tool. It has over 600,000 users in 150+ countries and is even used by big brands like Zapier, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Trustpilot.

SE Ranking provides gives you insights into the performance of a website in order to make informed decisions about your marketing strategies; whether it’s your custom SEO strategy, link-building, or tracking the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

So if you’re looking for an SEO tool that can help get ahead of your competition and attract more website visitors, SE Ranking is definitely worth checking out.

Plus, the tool offers a 14-day free trial so you can test it out before deciding if it’s the right fit for your business.

SE Ranking features: What data do you get & how is it presented

Just like any other all-in-1 SEO tool like Semrush, SE Ranking offers a wide range of SEO/ PPC features. Here is a snapshot.

These are the key SE Ranking features:

• Projects
• Keyword Research
• Competitive Research: SEO/ PPC
• Keyword Rank Tracker
• Backlink Checker
• On-page SEO Checker
• Website Audit
• White Label
• Report Builder

I will go through all the features by categorizing them into 3 sections:

• Research
• Tracking and Analysis
• Reporting

SE Ranking offers 3 primary tools for research:

• Keyword Research
• Competitor Research
• Backlink Analysis

Keyword Research

When it comes to SEO, one basic feature you need all the time is keyword research.

If you search for a term say ‘wine tasting’ in SE Ranking Keyword Research., the overview of the dashboard shows you the difficulty level, search volume, and CPC, just like any other keyword tool.

Next to the metric headings, it mentions whether the data is recently updated. If not, it will give you the option to update it, to get the most recent data.

The keyword overview also shows you a few similar, related, and low-search volume keywords.

You can scroll down further to see more reports like the top 10 organic search results, and other websites that target this keyword for their paid campaigns.

If you click on the left menu in the dashboard, you can get the difficulty and volume levels for all the similar and related keywords.

Competitor Research

As a small business owner or entrepreneur with a brand website, it’s important to stay up-to-date on your competition so you can get your website noticed and improve your own website and SEO strategy.

The Competitor Research feature makes it easy to research them and find out their winning points in one place.

Simply enter the URL of your competitor’s website, and SE Ranking will provide you with an in-depth analysis. You will see detailed information about their traffic statistics, what keywords they’re ranking for, and what backlinks they have.

You can also see the dynamics of paid campaigns versus organic traffic.

Let’s see an example. I entered seranking.com.

In the overview section of your dashboard, you will see the key metrics for the website.

• Domain Trust: The authority of your domain as ranked by search engines.
• Page Trust: The power of your page as ranked by search engines.
• Organic Traffic: The monthly traffic received by the domain organically, through search engine optimization.
• Paid Traffic: The monthly traffic received through PPC campaigns.
• Backlinks: The number of domains linking to the website and the number of backlinks it has

As you scroll down, you see more snapshots of data:

• Traffic distribution by country
• Total traffic over a period of time
• Organic keywords and positions
• SERP features
• Organic competitors and keyword gaps
• Top pages in organic search and their share of traffic
• Top subdomains in organic search

You also see similar data for paid keywords:

• Paid Keywords and their rankings
• Paid competitors and keyword gap

Pro Tip:

You can either click on ‘View Detailed Report’ on any section to get detailed information or you can also click on the menu on the left of the dashboard to get more in-depth reports.

Backlink Analysis

Backlinks are an essential part of SEO, especially high-quality backlinks from related sites.

SE Ranking has two parts to backlink analysis:

1. Backlink Checker

One easy way to analyze which websites or which type of websites to target for links is to determine the links your SEO competitors, i.e., the pages in the top 10 of the SERPs have.

The SE Ranking Backlink Checker gives you a broad overview and in-depth data of all the domains and links pointing to a certain domain.

Backlink Gap Analyzer

With the Backlink Gap Analyzer tool, you can speed up your backlink analysis even more by checking which domains point to your competitors but not to you.

The 3 key features of website tracking and monitoring are:

• Project monitoring
• Website audit
• On-page checker

Project monitoring

The first step of monitoring your site is to add it as a project on SE Ranking.

On your dashboard, simply go to ‘Create Project’.

• Enter the domain you want to track
• Add the keywords you want to track (SE Ranking will also give you some keyword suggestions but they may not be very accurate, so I would suggest keeping your keywords handy)
• Add the search engines and the country. SE Ranking tracks data in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
• List the competitors you want to analyze
• Connect your site’s Google Analytics and Google Search Console

And that’s it! Your project is all set up.

I added the domain of a small business website in the UK, called All Clean Services.

You will not see any data immediately because now the project is set up to be tracked.

Over a period of time, you will start to see detailed performance metrics like traffic, search engine positions, and competition comparison.

Website Audit

The Website Audit feature of SE Ranking lets you know the health of your site and how much it is optimized for SEO from a technical and on-page perspective.

Some of the aspects it analyzes are:

• Security
• Speed
• Javascript
• CSS Mobile Optimization
• AMP

If you are not a technical SEO person, there are some elements that you may be able to fix by yourself for your website.

For many others, you might need the help of a professional SEO expert.

On-page SEO Checker

You can monitor the performance of any page with the on-page SEO checker. Simply enter your URL, the primary and secondary keywords, search engine, country, and depth of analysis.

I analyzed a recent post of mine.

You will be able to see the current performance of our page and get tips to improve it.

The reporting tools of SE Ranking are also quite comprehensive.

If you have an SEO business and are helping businesses on this topic, you can get White Label features, Report Builder, API, and Lead Generator.

Go to the Report Builder feature and build the report interface you’d like.

You can choose a format of a prebuilt report, or create a customized one from scratch.

You can set your report to be generated daily or weekly and send it to 3 recipients.

Additional SE Ranking tools

Besides these key tools, SE Ranking also includes some additional tools which are not integral for your SEO, but can definitely give it a boost. Especially if you are not an SEO expert.

Marketing Plan

If you’re new to SEO, the Marketing Plan is a great feature to begin with, because it leads you through the SEO process with a step-by-step checklist.

You can see all the tasks you have to do for keyword research, website optimization, off-page SEO, and social media.

SERP Analyzer

The SERP Analyzer does exactly what it says: analyzes the top pages in the SERP for a given keyword.

So you can evaluate data of these pages like their content, keywords, backlinks, traffic forecast, and others. It will help you decide what kind of content you need to create to beat these top-ranking pages.

This is a fantastic guide to help you in content creation as it saves you a ton of time analyzing your competitors manually with spreadsheets.

Additionally, you can also use the Content tools like the Content Editor and Content Idea Finder to get content ideas and create content briefs.

Expand Database

It could be that you don’t find all the keyword data you need in the keyword research tool. Maybe it doesn’t cover your niche in detail, for example.
Then you can expand our database with your own list of keywords to get a more thorough analysis.

Index Status Checker

The Index Status Checker lets you check whether a website is indexing properly in Google and other major engines.

Search Volume Checker

The Search Volume Checker tool is a great way to see the search volume for specific keywords like high-intent keywords based on the data from Google Keyword Planner.

Keyword Grouper

The Keyword Grouper tool is fantastic for researching semantic keywords. This tool analyzes how certain keywords match the website’s URL with the top 10 SERP results, and groups them together based on criteria that you set.

Page Changes Monitoring

This feature detects changes in your website pages and notifies you, so you are better informed while working on your SEO strategy.

Social Media Monitoring

The Social Media Monitoring tool lets you connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can use the tool to schedule your posts and analyze their performance.

SE Ranking Pricing: How much does it cost?

One of the aspects I love most about SE Ranking is its flexible pricing.

There are 3 core plans with different features and pricing.

• Essential Plan: Starts at $23 for annual plans with rank tracking of 250 keywords.
• Pro Plan: Starts at $52 for annual plans with rank tracking of 1000 keywords.
• Essential Plan: Starts at $114 for annual plans with rank tracking of 2300 keywords.

However, what I absolutely love about this tool is that it is not a one-size-fits-all scenario.

You can choose how many keywords you want to track, how often you want the rank frequency checked, how often you want to pay and get semi-customized pricing just perfect for your needs.

Look at the image below to see how price changes with your preferences.

If you have a small website and have basic SEO needs, the Essential Plan will be enough.

If you have a larger website, are a blogger or freelance writer, or are a business focused on improving your SEO and growing your traffic, the Pro Plan may be more suitable. This plan gives you access to advanced features like organic SERP history and Keyword Database Expansion.

The Business Plan is more suitable for SEO experts or agencies who have multiple clients to handle and need the whole reporting suite.

Regardless of which plan you think is best, SE Ranking offers a 14-day free trial so you can try it before you buy.

SE Ranking Free Trial

In my opinion, you should never commit to and buy an SEO tool before you try it out.

The same goes for SE Ranking.

SE Ranking offers a free trial for 14 days. You just have to enter your name, email, and password, and you’re good to go. You can also choose to log in through Google.

You don’t even need to enter your credit card information, so you don’t even have to worry about getting upgraded to a paid plan in case you forget to cancel your trial.

The SE Ranking free trial will give you access to the Essential Plan which doesn’t include some features. You will still get a feel of the tool, to decide if you want to try it out for a month or not.

SE Ranking Support

If you are a business owner/ marketing manager who wants to run an efficient website, you might not know all the ways to use an SEO tool and occasionally need help.

If you are an SEO expert helping your clients, you might need to get things done in a certain way.

That’s why the support system of an SEO tool is very significant.

SE Ranking offers you the option to contact them by chat or email.

In my experience, the customer service of SE Ranking is very prompt and helpful. They answer emails relatively quickly and take the time to help you through your questions.

Any time I’ve had a question or needed help, the team at SE Ranking has been quick to respond and provide clear instructions.

They even followed up with me after the issue was resolved to ensure everything was working properly. I would definitely recommend SE Ranking to any small business owner or entrepreneur who is looking for a reliable SEO tool.

SE Ranking Review – Pros & Cons

Just like any SEO software, SE Ranking has its pros and cons. In full disclosure, I use Semrush, but have used SE Ranking before.

And as a user, these are some of the things I love about SE Ranking and some things that are not so great.

Pros of SE Ranking

• All-in-1 SEO tool: One of the best aspects of SE Ranking is that it has plenty of features, at least the most essential ones.
• Easy to use: The interface and the data presentation is very visual and clean, which makes it very easy to use this tool.
• Beginner-friendly: Even if you have no experience with SEO tools, you will quickly understand how to use the tool and get the information you need. The learning curve is relatively flat.
• Affordable: You get all the features at an unbeatable price, a price that you choose based on your needs.
• Supportive customer service: As mentioned, the quality of customer service is top-notch, making it very easy to find solutions if you are stuck on any aspect.

Cons of SE Ranking

• Less in-depth data than competitors: It simply doesn’t have the extent of data like its pricier competitors like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz. That’s also how they can offer you a lower price.
• Social media monitoring is limited: Even though SE Ranking has this feature, all social media platforms are not included in it and the analytics is not great. But then, this is meant to be an SEO/ PPC tool, not a social media tool.

Who is SE Ranking best for?

SE Ranking is an useful tool for website owners and marketing professionals who want to build or improve their online presence.

This could include but is not limited to:

• Small business owners
• Solopreneurs
• SEO specialists
• Marketing managers
• Digital marketing agencies
• Bloggers

SE Ranking is especially well-suited for you if you’re a small business owner, solopreneur, or blogger who wants an SEO tool but has a tight budget.

It’s affordable and easy to use, and it provides all the data you need to improve your ranking in search engines.

For more extensive, in-depth data, Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz are better suited. But they are also almost 3x the price!

So if you want an all-in-1 SEO tool that’s easy to use and doesn’t break the bank, SE Ranking is the best choice.

SE Ranking vs Semrush

An often-asked question is how SE Ranking compares to its competitors, especially Semrush.

SE Ranking and Semrush offer similar features, such as auditing and tracking various website metrics and keyword research capabilities, making them both great tools for SEO.

However, the biggest difference is that while Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing tool and includes features like content marketing, SE Ranking is only an SEO tool.

Besides, Semrush has a much more extensive database of keywords and backlinks, and is a much more powerful tool, SE Ranking is more affordable with good SEO features.

SE Ranking Review – Final Verdict

SE Ranking is an excellent, user-friendly SEO tool for both small and big businesses that gives you excellent value for money. It offers a really wide range of features to help you boost SEO, and it has a flexible pricing structure you can customize based on your needs and resources.

It may not have as extensive databases as its more premium competitors, but it provides enough features for a business to make impactful SEO improvements.

Try out SE Ranking now with a 14-day free trial.

Have you used SE Ranking? What do you think are the pros and cons? Would love to hear about your experiences.