When it comes to SEO, specifically keyword research and backlink analysis, I place all my trust in two tools: SEMrush and Ahrefs.
I thought I’d never find a tool which could match the incredible standards set by these tools — SEMrush in keyword research and competition analysis, and Ahrefs in backlink analysis.
Which is why I was reluctant to try out Serpstat despite reading rave reviews about it on various online forums and subreddits.
It’s not that I wasn’t on a lookout for promising new SEO tools.
It’s just that I was afraid Serpstat was going to fall way short of my expectations.
Poor excuse to create and insert a BoJack Horseman meme
But I was wrong.
Within a few weeks of using the tool, I discovered Serpstat is one hell of an SEO tool.
I was aware of Serpstat’s features before signing up, but I was blown away by how well it could do all these things and add value to my SEO and content marketing campaigns.
Before we proceed, let’s get one thing straight:
Serpstat is not as good as SEMrush. A few websites have already made this audacious claim, which is simply not true.
If I were to publish a comparison article of the tools’ key features, SEMrush would emerge as the clear winner.
Serpstat has a lot of catching up to do before it can be compared with the likes of SEMrush, Ahrefs, or even Moz.
That said, it wouldn’t be fair to compare a tool like Serpstat with SEMrush.
SEMrush is an industry heavyweight with over a decade of experience. The company has made significant improvements to their product after extensive research of different industries over the years. Furthermore, it has gained a deeper understanding of the different marketing needs and nuances of the market.
Serpstat, on the other hand, is a decent tool that exceeds expectations for an SEO platform with a starting price of $69/month.
You’re more likely to meet the monthly ROI you expect from this tool.
Keeping this in mind, let’s deep dive and analyze Serpstat’s key features.
If you haven’t tried Serpstat yet, I’d urge you to sign up for a free trial by clicking on the link below and test out some of the features explained later in this review:
Click here to try Serpstat for free
What is Serpstat?
In case this is the first time you’re hearing of Serpstat, here are a few key things you must know about the tool. Others can skip this section and move to the next section, where we explore Serpstat’s key features.
- Serpstat was founded in 2013 as a keyword research tool. Since then, it has slowly evolved into a full-fledged SEO & PPC analysis product.
- Serpstat’s statistics are constantly evolving. Serpstat’s database has more than 6 billion keywords, 63 million ads, and 3.9 billion search suggestions. Their keywords database parallels the database of major SEO companies like Ahrefs and SE Ranking.
- Serpstat provides data from 230 Google databases, including the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Lithuania, South Africa, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Bulgaria. It also provides data from Yandex.
- Serpstat is used by more than 30,000 online marketing practitioners worldwide: SEO and PPC professionals, marketing managers, agency owners, and copywriters. It’s also the best-selling SEO tool of all time on AppSumo and the most upvoted SEO tool on Product Hunt.
Now that you have some info about this product, let’s put the tool’s features and functionality under the microscope to see whether it’s worth investing in this tool.
Before we get started, make sure you sign up for a free Serpstat account to implement some of the action items discussed in this review.
This Serpstat review is divided into the following sections:
- Features
- Ease of Use
- Pricing
- Customer Support
- Customer Feedback and Reviews
Bonus Resource: Download the Ultimate Serpstat Playbook for free and learn 12 proven techniques to use Serpstat to boost your SEO.
DOWNLOAD NOW: The Ultimate Serpstat Playbook – 12 Ways to Use Serpstat to Boost Your SEO
Serpstat: Features
Serpstat’s features can be divided into 6 broad categories:
- Website Analysis
- Keyword Research
- Backlink Analysis
- Rank Tracker
- Site Audit
- Tools
Let’s take an in-depth look at each of these categories:
1. Website Analysis
Website analysis has two aspects — Domain Analysis and URL Analysis.
Domain Analysis
To quickly analyze your website, you can type in your domain and hit “Search.”
The overview report will provide a top-level view of your site’s estimated search traffic, organic keywords, paid keywords, and search visibility.
Serpstat will also show your top 5 organic keywords, alongside search volume and current ranking position.
You’ll also find surface-level data on keyword position distribution, traffic trend, keyword trend, top pages, and more.
It’s a handy tool when you want a quick overview of your own domain or any of your competitors’ domains. But for a deeper analysis, you’ll need to explore other sections in Domain Analysis.
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these sections.
SEO Research
From your Serpstat dashboard, navigate to:
Website analysis > SEO research
From here, you can view your site’s top organic keywords, alongside important keyword metrics:
Identify top organic competitors for your site:
Compare your domain with two of your main competitors:
See the top organic pages on your site and your competitors’ sites:
You can click on the organic keywords number against each URL here to open Serpstat’s keyword research tool and analyze your competitors’ best keywords. (But more on Serpstat’s keyword research features in a bit)
PPC Research
If you rely on PPC ads to drive traffic to your website, you’ll find this data invaluable.
Just enter your competitor’s domain in the search box and you’ll be able to analyze your top competitors’ PPC strategies, identify gaps in your own PPC campaigns, and then improve upon your ad copies and targeting to reach a wider audience.
Batch Analysis
This feature allows you to quickly compare metrics of up to 200 domains.
For the example below, I picked 12 domains to check key metrics such as traffic estimate, total keywords, new keywords, lost keywords, etc.
URL Analysis
As you might expect, URL Analysis allows you to get SEO data at the URL level.
To quickly analyze a specific URL, just enter the URL in the search box and you’ll get a summary of SEO data on that URL, including top organic keywords, keyword position distribution, and organic competitors.
Now let’s take a deeper look at the other sections in URL Analysis.
SEO Research
Navigate to URL analysis > SEO Research > Enter your URL
You’ll get a list of keywords and their rankings on Google for that specific URL.
Competitors
This report shows competitors to the URL entered in the search bar, along with their total number of Facebook shares and the total number of keywords in top 10.
Compare URL
This is where you can copy two of the competing URLs from the “Competitors” report and do a side-by-side comparison with your URL to discover common or unique keywords between the URLs.
Missing Keywords
This report shows you keywords for which your competitors’ pages rank in Google’s top 10, but are not present in your specified URL.
2. Keyword Research
Given the importance of keyword research, it’s no surprise Serpstat has a robust keyword research tool.
With Serpstat, you can generate thousands of keyword ideas, analyze their metrics, and discover what keywords your competitors are ranking for.
To get started, just enter your seed keywords in the search bar, and Serpstat will generate a quick overview report on your keywords. You’ll see metrics like estimated monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, competition, and CPC, alongside top 5 variations for your keywords.
For more in-depth keyword research, you’ll need to dive deeper into the tool.
Like Website Analysis on Serpstat, Keyword Research is divided into two categories: SEO Keyword Search and PPC Keyword Research.
Let’s first explore the reports you can generate with Serpstat’s SEO keyword research tool.
Keywords Selection
In this section, you can find keywords selection (phrase match keywords), related keywords, search suggestions, top pages, and competitors for your target keywords.
From your dashboard, go to Keyword research > SEO research > Keywords selection
Plug in your seed keywords in the search box, and Serpstat will return with a comprehensive list of phrase match keywords, alongside important keyword metrics.
Play around with the filters and the sorting options to arrive at the best keywords for your next campaign.
Next, navigate to the “Related Keywords” report from the sidebar menu. Here you’ll discover keywords that are semantically connected to your target keywords.
Serpstat’s keyword research tool also includes a nifty report on search suggestions. These suggestions are pulled from Google’s Autocomplete feature.
The suggestions in this report can provide more keyword ideas for your content.
Next, you can view the current top-ranking pages for your target keywords to get an idea of who you’ll be competing against. You’ll also see the total number of keywords they rank for and the monthly organic traffic they generate.
Navigate to “Competitors” from the sidebar menu to view all the websites you’ll be competing against.
Although you can generate a boatload of keyword ideas with this tool and get a vivid picture of your competitors’ top keywords, the keyword difficulty score isn’t always accurate.
In some cases, the keyword difficulty score is completely missing (as seen in the “Keywords Selection” screenshot above.)
Keyword difficulty is a super important metric because it indicates the level of competition for your target keywords. It plays a key role in deciding whether a keyword is worth targeting.
So it’s a major glitch in the software, and I hope Serpstat fixes it soon.
Sign up for Serpstat’s free plan
PPC Keyword Research
Serpstat’s PPC research tool is surprisingly good.
It generates a list of keyword ideas for your PPC campaigns and reveals top competitors who are bidding for the same keywords as you.
Serpstat’s PPC research tool also allows you to see the ad copies your competitors are using.
Serpstat’s “Ads landing pages” report shows you the exact landing pages your competitors are using for their PPC ads.
You can click on the keywords number against each landing page to see the keywords they’re bidding on.
3. Backlink Analysis
Serpstat also offers you the capability to analyze your link profile as well as your competitors’ backlink profiles.
This feature allows you to uncover your competition’s link building strategies and highlights new sources you can tap into to build your backlinks.
Serpstat’s backlink analysis tool includes the following features:
Backlink Dashboard
The dashboard gives you a brief overview of your site’s referring domains, pages, total pages indexed, referring pages, and so on.
You also get to see your site’s Trust Rank score, which is Serpstat’s own take on the Domain Authority (DA) metric developed by Moz.
You can also enter any of your competitors’ domains here and get a quick overview report on their backlink profile.
Referring Domains
Here you get to view the referring domains to your website.
You also get to see the Domain Rank of each of the domains linking back to your site.
Backlinks
An all-important feature, this is where you get to see new backlinks as well as lost backlinks to your site.
You also get to see whether the links pointing to your site are “dofollow” or “nofollow” backlinks.
Anchors
Though not as important as they once were, anchors are still crucial to understanding the keywords associated with your site. On Serpstat, you get to view an anchor cloud and a list of keywords used as anchor text to link back to your website.
Top Pages
This feature allows you to see the top pages on your website or your competitor’s site based on the number of backlinks.
Sign up for Sersptat’s free plan
4. Rank Tracker
Search engine rankings for keywords change frequently. So it’s important to stay ahead of the curve by keeping track of position changes in SERPs for keywords your site is ranking for.
Here’s the data you can obtain from Serpstat’s Rank Tracker reports:
- Positions – This allows you to see your site’s rank distribution in search results (top 10, top 20, etc.)
- History – shows you historical data on the domain’s positions for the selected keywords.
- Competitors – shows you the traffic share for the selected keywords among competing domains.
5. Site Audit
Site Audit on Serpstat gives you a comprehensive analysis of your site’s overall SEO score, highlighting all the errors that need to be fixed to have it functioning at its optimal capacity.
Here’s a quick summary of the sections you’ll find in your audit report:
- Meta Tags – allows you to see high, medium, and low priority errors with your site’s title tag, meta description, etc.
- Headings – allows you to see high, medium, and low priority errors concerning headings (h1,h2, etc.) on your site.
- Redirects – shows you the total number of redirects on your site and provides information on whether your site has any wrong or corrupt redirects.
- Accessibility and Indexation – shows you pages with canonical tags, flash elements on page, low word count, etc.
- Links – allows you to see if your content has any problem with external links.
- Server Parameters – shows HTTP/HTTPS issues on your site.
- Loading Speed – allows you to see and fix errors affecting the site speed of your website.
6. Tools
And finally, we arrive at Tools, which is a section where you can view the history of your queries on Serpstat. You can also view and export the saved lists of keywords and reports, upload, and check for quality a list of your keywords.
Depending on your plan, you’ll be able to add a list of projects to the Serpstat dashboard.
This is where you can access data such as site audit, rank tracking, backlinks data, keywords data, etc.
Sign up for Serpstat’s free plan
Ease of Use
Since Serpstat is loaded with features, there is a bit of a learning curve involved. This is especially the case if you’re a beginner, and this is the first SEO platform you’ve been exposed to.
Despite a somewhat steep learning curve, you’ll be dazzled by the impressive UI of the tool. Kudos to the team for developing a well-designed interface that is so intuitive and user-friendly.
And if you’re migrating to this tool from other tools such as SEMrush, Raven, and Moz, you’ll take some time to get adjusted to the interface.
That’s exactly what happened to me as well.
I was so used to the interface of SEMrush that I was reluctant to use Serpstat at first.
But after spending a day or two on the tool, I realized how much I enjoyed using Serpstat and saw myself spending more and more time with it.
Serpstat Pricing Plans
This is where Serpstat really delivers the sucker punch to other SEO tools.
Most of the well-known SEO tools in the market seem to have reached a consensus with respect to the monthly pricing of their basic plan, which is somewhere near the region of $100 a month.
Here’s the thing: These tools have earned enough market share and reputation to command a price like that.
But if you’re a blogger who’s just starting out, the pricing of these products can stop you from even trying them out.
You could always sign up for free trials, but they often come with restrictions that prevent you from using them to their full potential.
With Serpstat, you’ll have no such problem. All their plans are competitively priced, and you can choose a plan that best suits your current requirements.
There is even a forever-free plan where you’re allowed to perform 30 searches and audit 100 pages in a month.
The paid plans start from $69/month (as per the new pricing structure. More on that in the next section.)
Regarding the New Serpstat Pricing Structure
The evolution of a product always brings forth new challenges. The same is the case with Serpstat, which has evolved considerably since its inception in 2013.
As a result, I’m updating this section of the review to inform you of Serpstat’s pricing policy changes.
I see some of you frowning as I write this, but don’t be too bothered by these changes. They will only help the tool become even better than it was before.
The need to change in Serpstat’s pricing was caused by all the significant improvements the Serpstat team made over the past year.
Some of the major improvements included collecting keyword and competitor analysis data for all the databases in the world (over 230 Google databases), the release of a new team management mode, and the production of a ton of educational content for SEOs and small businesses.
In addition to these changes, Serpstat also released easy-to-use browser extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox so that you get quick access to Serpstat data in one click.
So here’s how Serpstat’s current pricing is structured:
Despite these changes, Serpstat continues to be one of the most affordable SEO tools on the market. While pricing plans of other popular SEO tools usually start from $99/month, Serpstat Lite Plan (formerly Plan B) costs $69/month.
Visit Serpstat’s pricing page for more details
Customer Support
Successful businesses have one thing in common – they provide great customer service. It’s a competitive advantage that needs to be earned.
Serpstat’s customer support team is helpful and provides resources so you can be an expert at using their tool in no time.
They even have Serpstat Academy, which is a free online learning center. This is where you can learn more about keyword research, competitor analysis, and SEO of various levels, from basic to advanced.
These are the pages you should refer to learn more about using the product:
- User Guide – Here’s you’ll find in-depth tutorials and walkthroughs on how to use Serpstat.
- FAQs – In this section, you’ll find answers to all the frequently asked questions about Serpstat. If you have a question about the product, check out this section first before you reach out to the customer support team.
- How-to Guides – Includes in-depth Serpstat tutorials, how-to resources, and actionable tips.
- Serpstat Blog – Not just good for increasing your productivity on Serpstat, but their articles will help you improve your overall SEO knowledge.
In addition to these resources, you can open up a chat box via chat icon on any of the pages and chat with a Serpstat expert who’ll respond to your query in under 5 minutes. Impressive stuff.
Customer Feedback and Reviews
Serpstat reviews and ratings are quite positive on popular review aggregators such as G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius. This is commendable considering Serpstat is a relatively new tool compared to search veterans like SEMrush and Moz.
Here’s how Serpstat is rated on these review sites (as of Oct 2020):
- G2 – 4.6/5 (396 reviews)
- Capterra – 4.7/5 (119 reviews)
- TrustRadius – 8.6/10 (17 reviews)
On their website, they have a few video testimonials on the home page, and they have an experts page where they have featured profiles of marketing influencers like Brian Dean and Ian Cleary, who use the product.
Serpstat Review: Final Verdict
When all is said and done, an SEO tool’s primary role should be to present accurate data for keywords, backlinks, and traffic.
The data obtained from the tool should help you create better content and drive qualified traffic to your website.
Serpstat does 3 things exceptionally well – keyword research, PPC analysis, and competitor research.
You can use it to find new keyword opportunities, content ideas, analyze PPC campaigns, and perform in-depth competitor research.
With plans starting from $69/month, it’s one of the most affordable SEO tools on the market.
If you’re seeking a reliable SEO tool that’s easy on your pockets, then you should give Serpstat a try. Sign up for their free plan and test the tool out yourself.
Sign up for Serpstat’s free plan
If you have any questions regarding Serpstat, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. Feel free to share your thoughts.
And if you’d like to learn more techniques to use Serpstat to improve your site’s SEO, then check out this detailed tutorial and how-to guide on using Serpstat.
If you liked this Serpstat review, please share it on Twitter using the link below:
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Feb 11, 2017. Since then, Serpstat has made changes, improvements, and added a few new features to their product. The last few post updates take all of these changes into account. I hope you found this updated Serpstat review useful.
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The post Serpstat Review: The Ultimate SEO & PPC Tool for Bloggers appeared first on 99signals.
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