SE Ranking Review: All in One SEO Software

Posted on the 03 April 2020 by Jyoti92 @Jyoti_Chauhan1

SE Ranking Review: Is it the best, all-encompassing SEO suite in existence? That’s what we’ll discuss throughout this piece.

Imagine this, a magic tool which gets you in-depth insights into projects of your own, as well as those of your competitors’. Their backlinks, traffic, keywords, rankings, real-time changes and everything else laid before you.

Additionally, the magic tool also offers near-perfect optimization covering every single factor even remotely capable of boosting your SERPs.

Well, that’s what SE Ranking SEO Software “claims” to offer. But obviously, why should you or I take their words for it. Hence, I acquired a SE Ranking package to put its claims to test.

SE Ranking Review

Here are all the factors/aspects that I’d be testing and bringing forth in this SE Ranking review:

  • Getting started
  • User interface
  • Competitors’ SEO and paid campaign monitor
  • Backlink checker
  • On-Page SEO audit tool
  • Keyword research and suggestions
  • Marketing plan
  • Other tools/features
  • White-labelled, integrated SE ranking access
  • Social media management
  • Lead generator
  • Report builder
  • SE Ranking support
  • Pricing plans and refunds

Let’s dive deeper into this SE Ranking review then?

SE Ranking overview

SE Ranking markets itself with the tagline “All-in one SEO software made simple”. Being honest, this is what I loved most about the tool, it’s “all-in-one” approach.

Here are some of the tools/features that SE Ranking boasts of. I’m pretty sure these cover most if not all bases:

  • Website Audit
  • Real-time keyword tracking
  • Backlink monitoring.
  • Competitor monitoring
  • Social media marketing
  • Keyword research
  • On-page SEO optimization
  • Search-volume checker.
  • DA/Alexa checker.
  • Index-status checker.

All in all, I believe I’ve got a lot to tinker and play with, so let’s get started?

Getting started

How hard is getting started on SE Rankings? We’ll see.

When you login for the very first time, you’d be asked to create a new project. Here’s what the interface looks like:

Simply add a domain you wish to monitor, specify the search-range (number of results you wish to monitor) and click on next.

Optionally, you can choose to monitor only the domain, or a specific URL excluding the subdomains.

The next page lets you enter or import a keyword list. And then it allows selecting a search-engine. You can select to monitor the following search engines:

  • Google
  • Google mobile
  • Yandex
  • Yandex mobile
  • Yahoo
  • Bing
  • And even Youtube!

Next you get to choose the exact geographic location you wish to monitor your project for. E.g. you can select not only a country but also the smaller states/cities/towns in it. Even postal codes can be used to pinpoint the exact location of your interest.

Moreover, you can specify a “Google interface language”. This makes sure that in countries where more than one languages are used, your rankings are tracked and monitored for the exact language you’ve selected.

Taking things further, SE Rankings is also capable of tracking Google Map rankings + Google Ads rankings.

And then finally you get to add a list of competitors. The rankings of the keywords you entered earlier are tracked for your primary site, as well as for the competitors you enter on this page.

It also features a “suggest competitors” feature. So in a way, you get a massive list of competitors you may wish to keep an eye on.

In a nutshell, even those completely void of any previous “SEO-tool experience” shouldn’t get lost using SE Ranking.

User-Interface

Once you’ve created a project, it’s about understanding the data that’s presented and using the other features of the tool. The top-bar is what serves as the navigational menu. You get to switch between your projects, control user-settings or head over to other available tools using the top-bar.

No rocket-science there eh? As far as understanding the data goes, here’s a sneak-peek of the dashboard:

As is evident, a list of the keywords, their URL, search volume, as well as the current exact ranking is displayed on the dashboard.

The data is colour-coded. So a tiny vertical line just in front of each keyword tells you its overall performance. You can instantly understand if a keyword entered top 10, left top 10, is in top 100 or entered top 100. 

Although a scale on top of this chart also breaks down the SERPs of your keywords in other brackets.

Three view-modes are offered:

  • Detailed
  • Overall
  • And Historical Data.

In the following screenshot, I switched to “overall” from “detailed” and here’s what it shows me:

So it’s the same data as earlier, but this time it’s an overall percentage of all my keywords.

SE Ranking is also capable of getting us a “traffic forecast”. It’s based on the keywords we’ve entered, their search-volumes and our rankings. You can select the time-period manually from a week, month, 3 months or 6 months for the forecast.

More importantly, this data doesn’t have to be static. SE Ranking offers the ability to manually “recheck” the rankings and all other factors at any time throughout the day.

Bottomline, the data is displayed in a well-organized manner, supplemented with charts and graphs making it extremely easy to understand.

Competitors’ SEO and paid campaign monitor

Following or copying successful competitors may not be the most “honourable” SEO-strategy, but it works. At the very least, it helps us get an idea of the tricks up their sleeves.

SE Ranking has this competitor monitoring feature which initially did overwhelm me with data. So I entered a website I consider to be my competitor.

And here’s everything that the tool came back with:

The screenshot above only captures a fraction of the data that’s available.  

For starters, there’s a country-wise breakdown of the organic traffic that the site is receiving. It’s followed by the number of organic keywords, as well as total estimated organic clicks/month. An estimated value of the traffic in monetary terms too is displayed.

Scrolling down you can find the top-competitors, and keyword-similarities with the competitors.  With just one more click on any competitors’ URL, you get detailed insight into their entire SEO blueprint as well.

You can get more in-depth reports for each country. This report includes all the:

  • Organic keywords
  • Their position (and changes)
  • Search-volume
  • CPC
  • Competition
  • URL
  • Total traffic received for each keyword.
  • Traffic share.
  • & traffic cost.

It even includes “Snippet” and “Google search console” data when opted for. Talk of being “detailed” huh?

 If you’re a stickler for details, each individual URL displayed can be analyzed further. It would then show the organic keywords, traffic and traffic-cost for that particular URL individually.

Backlink checker

It’s 2020, so what? Brian Dean in his 2020 SEO guide said backlinks hold the same importance that they did in 2020. Let’s not argue with Brian?

Fortunately, Backlinks are one of the simplest SEO aspects to replicate.

 This is what a report generated using SE Ranking’s backlink checker looks like:

Keeping the integrity of this SE Ranking review intact, let me be honest. The report looks almost exactly alike what most other tools would fetch you. There’s nothing extraordinary, but then nothing seems amiss either. It’s exactly the industry-standard.

You’ll get the number of referring domains, number of backlinks, the % of dofollow Vs. nofollow links, the total number of anchors, no. of the .edu/.gov links etc.

Scrolling down, you’d see a graph showing the new and lost backlinks. Further down, the top anchors are enlisted as well followed by a TLD-based backlink breakdown.

More in-depth research would get you the domain and page trust of the linking domains, target URLs, type of backlink etc.

In a nutshell, everything that there is about a backlink can be dissected to the core using SE Ranking, period.

ON-Page SEO audit tool

On-page SEO is important, it always has been and probably always will be. No matter which algorithm comes out or what century you live in, the overall SEO optimization of a page for a keyword isn’t going out of fashion.

Again, here’s what a SE Ranking on-page SEO report looks like:

As mentioned earlier in this SE Ranking review, “all-in-one” is the tagline the company believes in. Well this report clearly backs it up. It covers everything that you could ever imagine or need, some of which are:

  • Domain age
  • Moz DA
  • Backlinks
  • Title
  • Meta descriptions
  • URL
  • Images
  • Speed
  • Social media popularity.
  • Content data (length/ kw density /uniqueness etc).
  • Page load-optimization
  • And a lot more.

It even includes a mobile preview as well as improvement tips.

What I liked is it singles out the errors. Errors which are critical are marked in red, and less-urgent errors are marked as “warnings” in yellow.

So even if it’s your first day with SEO, you instantly know what to attack and improve.

Keyword research and  suggestion

These two have been enlisted as two separate tools, but are more or less similar. The K.W research tool lets us enter a keyword  and displays the CPC, KEI, Adwords competition, traffic cost assessment etc. Data about paid ads and campaigns is included as well.

As for the keyword suggestions, you can choose two sources to fetch suggestions from. Either the SE Ranking internal database, or search engine suggestions. If you go with the latter, you can specify exactly which search engine you’d like to use (Google / Yahoo/ Bing).

This gets you a long list of keywords, their CPC, search volume, completion, no. of sites already ranking for the kw, traffic cost and other details.

Also includes “Related keywords” and “Long tail keywords”. These would come in handy if you’re moving on with the zero-click searches which seem ripe for 2020.

Marketing plan

What’s the easiest way to get things done? Get them on a list. Well, the “Marketing Plan” section does just that. It displays a number of steps, tips, links, directories in a “to-do list” format.

Even “how to” guides on how to get the tasks done are included. Simply checking off things on this list (once done) I believe should win you half the battle.

Other tools /features

The tool offers a number of other features. Which I’m sure being on this SE Ranking review you’re already familiar with. These include:

  • Search-volume checker: Well obviously, it gets you the search volume for a keyword.
  • Index-status checker: Checks the indexation-status of the links you enter.
  • Parameter checker: Moz DA and Alexa rank are two of the simplest yet best-guesses to establish a website’s worth. (Although I personally do not believe in the Alexa rank). Anyway, that’s what this checker gets you, the DA and Alexa rank of the entered URLs.
  • Change notifications: Get a notification whenever there’s a ranking change, backlink change or other types of changes on your project. It needs to be configured individually for each metric, but really automates things.
  • Export data: Almost all the data in all the  reports can be exported to your local disks in a single click.

White-Labelled, integrated SE Ranking access

In the simplest of words, this feature lets you take SE Ranking with you to your own domain.

You can create a subdomain and let you visitors/employees/clients access reports and other data using the subdomain. They never know it’s SE Ranking, rather it appears as a complete, independent tool from you.

Social media management

Let me just say this, Social Media signals do seem to affect rankings. Then, social media search-boxes are literally search engines on their own. Social media is also a major direct traffic source. Point is, Social Media is important.

SE Ranking allows connecting our Facebook and Twitter accounts to the tool. Once done, it offers details including user-demographic, audience analysis, retweet/bookmark analysis and a lot more. You can also “schedule” your posts for automation.

Lead generator

Simply copy-pasting a bunch of HTML code can turn your website into a lead magnet. SE Ranking allows a “widget” which can be placed on your website.

Once done, visitors can download detailed reports about their websites. Makes your site look more professional, and gets you a bunch of leads. Each lead can even be classified into “categories” such as “open/closed/attempted to contact” etc. for further correspondence.

Report builder

Work in a Digital Marketing / SEO agency? Or maybe just have SEO-clients in general? If yes, you’ll love this SE Ranking review section.

So it lets you generate extremely detailed reports, full with charts, graphs and every bit of data that its tools are capable of extracting.

You get to white-label it, make it your own. You also control what data to include or exclude on the report.  Nearly 8 templates too are available to pretty-up these reports.

Save the reports as HTML/ PDF or XLS files and/or  send them over to your clients via e-mail.

SE Ranking support

If you’re a first-timer, or even for the veterans moments of confusion with a new tool are inevitable. Fortunately, the company does offer a live-chat support. The bad news is, it’s not 24X7. It seems to be functional only during working-hours.

Although there’s a very informative F.A.Q and help-centre just in case. Or there also is a phone number you can use to get in touch with.

Pricing Plans and Refunds

Now for the last section on this SE Ranking review, let’s see if it hurts your pockets? The company offers three primary plans to begin with.

However, the amount of discount you get on your package depends on two factors:

  • Automated rank-checking frequency (daily/  3 days /weekly)
  • And/or the “term” of your package.

The discounts start from a minimum of 5% and go all the way up to 60% depending on how you customize the above-listed factors.

Anyway, without any discounts the pricing plans are:

  • Optimum: USD $39.00/month
  • Plus: USD $89.00/month
  • And Enterprise: USD $189.00/month.

Each pricing plan has its own set of limitations and features. There’s even a “calculator” on the pricing page to help you find the plan which suits your needs best.

As for refunds, there are none. There sure are exceptions such as when “poor service” is provided by the company. But even then the clause uses the word “may”. So refunds aren’t completely denied, but let’s just say they aren’t big on those.

SE Ranking Pros and Cons

Every coin has a flip side, SE Ranking is no different. Here’s everything (in my humble opinion) which is impressive, and that which could use some improvement.

Pros:

  • Extremely feature-rich.
  • Suitable for both individuals and companies.
  • Easy to use.
  • Almost all reports are instant.

Cons:

  • A bit pricey.
  • Live-chat isn’t 24X7.

Final Verdict

So is SE Ranking worth it? I’d say yes, a big fat yes considering you can afford it. I’ve absolutely no complaints as far as its features go. The interface could maybe improved a bit, but it’s still pretty easy to understand and move around.

The flexibility of downloading the reports in multiple formats, installing the widget, and customizing the reports is commendable. The sheer amount of data it throws at us is overwhelming but I’d happily take that.

All in all, I doubt you’d be missing anything after a through scan with the tool. However, this has all been me. Why don’t you scribble down your two cents using the comments on this SE Ranking review? Afterall, this is for you, isn’t it?