When you are out there, trying to zero in on that single SEO solution that aligns most perfectly to your needs, it gets tough to take a call. The market is full of options that range from mediocre to absolute best. And when we say the absolute best, there is not one solution that occupies that top spot - there are multiple options for you to conduct in-depth research on and then make a call after careful and long contemplation. After all, an SEO tool can make or break your website's fortunes, so you cannot afford to make a wrong move.
But with all said, it is quite impractical to assume that companies have so much time on their hands as to pick every single decent SEO solution and start evaluating it, to determine which one can provide good value and is suited to the given business' needs.
As their tagline goes, Serpstat is indeed an all-in-one SEO platform that gives you insights digging deep into the web presence of a domain you are seeking information about - whether it is your own or a competitor's. This tool covers all bases when it comes to tracking stats about a website, utilising the following features:
In this article, we are throwing light on all these features and other features they encompass.
Analyze backlinks to a website
What helps a site most concerning consistently growing traffic as well as building credibility is how well it fares on the organic traffic and ranking scale. And there is not a better method to make improvements on this metric than a backlink building.
Depending on the "link juice" your website enjoys, it helps you rank well on the internet. But before you even start to build backlinks, what you need is a top view of the backlinks that your website has grown organically, without you making specific efforts towards backlink building. And as and when you make the required shots, you need to track your progress regularly.
Serpstat has a smart backlink checker that lists down every single backlink pointing to your website. You can check the quality of those backlinks and even visit the sites they lead to. In addition to the metrics mentioned above, sometimes a business ends up building a lot of spammy backlinks. Serpstats lets you dig deep and analyse each link so that you can take the required action.
The Backlink Analysis tool of Serpstat divides the data into different metrics.
It is easy to see the sheer range and depth of the insight you can draw when looking at the metrics we just mentioned. The dashboard gives you a great at-a-glance view of the entire backlink performance of a website. It provides links to the other parameters. The referring domains feature highlights all the fields that have links pointing to your site placed on specific pages. The ranking and important metrics about that website can easily be looked into through this view.
You can click on the domains and see all the stats on them, regarding what are their backlink qualities, how well they fare in terms of organic traffic, what are their top keywords, etc. Because these domains have your links, there is a decent chance that they are from the same industry as you. How it further proves to be helpful is that you can run a more in-depth website analysis of this domain to see what the learnings are for your website.
Referring pages give you a solid idea on who on the web wants to link to your website pages and what is that specific thing that stands out on your page for others wishing to be tying their pages with it. The anchors used for backlinking tell you a great deal about the kind of keywords you should be targeting. Serpstats also shows you the pages on your website that have maximum backlinks pointed to them. Not only this means it is an accessible page, it also gives you a start - you can figure if you should be having a similar type of content or design across your website because, clearly, the top linked page is being perceived as very credible and worth relating to by a lot of people out there.
The referring domains or pages report also provides information in regards to which countries or cities are sending maximum traffic to a particular page or the entire website, which can further guide you to target a more narrow audience.
Analysing your competitors
When you enter a website's URL in the search box on the homepage of Serpstat and hit Enter, you are redirected to a page on which insights are divided into different sections or parameters. Under each setting, you get a detailed breakup of how a website fares and all the things you can learn from it to replicate the same on your site or, for that matter, avoid doing at all.
When you dig deeper, you are provided with a clear view of what are the most visited or top ranked pages on your competitor's website. This way, you can find out the web pages that attract maximum traffic - organic and paid - on that website. Considering they are your competitor and you have a lot of similarities in terms of the product and the prospective buyers, you can replicate the same strategies.
Now, these can be two types of pages - the website pages that list down the features, pricing or details about the company or the blog posts of the competition. Both contain massive insights for you to analyse and use for your website.
The design and content of the top visited website pages can tell you a lot about what customers and prospects like about a web page. Conversion optimisation and SEO work hand in hand, and competitive analysis can help you synchronise both these methods. You can use a similar strategy for your site's web pages and run CRO tests on them to see if the same thing works for you as well.
Taking inspiration from blog posts can help you to build the organic traffic for your website and eventually building credibility in the market. Of course, that doesn't imply you to rewrite the post on their site to be published on your site (though that won't be a bad idea), but you can surely use that content as a baseline. Writing long-form content, like blogs, white papers, and case studies, is a matter of a lot of research and hard work. But when you have right in front of you a piece of content that is successful in attracting the audience that you are targeting for your blog too, it is a great idea to pick the skeleton of that post and build your content around it. It depends entirely on you whether you want your blog post to be very similar to theirs or you want to add your spin on it; by giving your perspective and making your product's unique value proposition to stand out.
However, it is not just a blog post that you have to restrict yourself to while doing competitor analysis. Based on your review of the most successful blog posts of your competitor, you can also repurpose that content for your social media accounts.
All said, whether you are using insights derived from website pages or blog posts, you have to be entirely original in how you spin that data and produce something for your website. The most important thing that helps businesses on the web is how credible it is, and whether its content comes across as coming from someone who is a thought leader in the industry. There is where you can get the brownie points.
Keyword Research
When you enter a website's URL, from all the data you get, you can extract learnings around the given site, but that's not all Serpstats does. When you are out there optimising your website's organic ranking, and SEO metrics, one of the chief elements that you should pay particular attention to is keywords.
When you are using the Keyword research tool, enter specific keywords in the search box and hit Enter. The new page that appears starts displaying the keyword stats and ideas divided into separate sections. The Organic Keyword section shows all the variations, permutations and combinations with which that keyword is searched with by the online users. Each given keyword combination then provides the information on the keyword difficulty, the volume of search for that keyword, etc.
At the same time, you are provided with the combinations that are used for ads, and it proves to be of value to know what the volume is on these keywords ads, and the estimated cost per click one can get. Serpstat provides a very intuitive interface to manage the ads you are running to market your website. Their ad tools are significant assets that help webmasters to get measurable data on how the competition is using advertisements to attract more online users to their site using paid channels and what ads are giving the best returns. Armed with this information, website owners can get far better conversion rates on ROI on the ads they run because they have results of ads run on similar products for the same audience right in front of them.
Besides, making the feature even more valuable is the keyword trends insight that shows you how interested the audience has been around the topic or keyword combination over the specified time duration. This feature also helps you gain a lot of knowledge around how your competition is working around the keyword. It lists down the top competing sites for the given keyword and then in the Competitors graph; it displays the recall and precision values on the keyword for the top-ranked competitors. The information about competitors is also shown for the ads run on this keyword.
The Keyword Research tool of Serpstat enables you to boost the ranking efforts of your website by improving the keyword-focused approach. When you have an entire site up and running - with or without a blog - you have a fair knowledge of the kind of keywords you should be targeting. But this knowledge is only half the knowledge. What you need is to have a clear idea on the keywords that attract maximum search volumes or keywords that are useful but also have less competition. Serpstats provide this and an entire set of additional features.
Organic research is most definitely one of the focus areas of Serpstat, and the keyword research feature is a testament to that. While advertising can indeed bring in the riches by a significant degree, what truly perches your bran ahead of the closest competition is how its keywords are optimised for organic traffic and success, and this is where Serpstat indeed scores. The combination of all the features that are part of Keyword Research give you the intelligence to figure out and formulate the best possible keyword strategy and keep on enhancing it with time. It can help you cater to the right audience as when they intend to get information around a specific keyword; they can land on your website and start to know you better.
This keyword feature proves to be a great asset when you want to attach a value to some specific keywords, just in case you wish to run ads centred on those. You have the stats like cost per click, the search volume, the competition on a given keyword, etc. right at your disposal, which is what makes it easy to make decisions that perch your website for the best keyword-focussed results.
Rank Tracker
One of the high-end features that make Serpstat stand out from the competition is Rank Tracker. This feature adds new depth to the data you can get about a website's ranking for a specific keyword by displaying the top-100 positions for every monitored keyword. If you are adding to your rank tracking exercise a keyword and a region that has been tracked in the past by others, what you get is the full access to the data that was mined or collected by other webmasters before you for the given keyword.
Rank tracking also provides the keyword grouping feature. With this feature, a user can create a group of keywords to be monitored for their positions on the Internet. These groups can be formed as per the products they are associated with.
Serpstat Member perks
The users who pay for the Serpstat services have amazing perks to enjoy and take advantage of. To begin with, the paid users get a massive discount of 25 Dollars on the Ringostat call tracking tool. This tool proves to be instrumental in identifying the inbound phone calls attribution by multiple advertising channels, and it does so by narrowing it down to the keyword level. For businesses that are wanting to study the web traffic sources that have the potential to draw in more calls can mainly use this tool to perform a quality analysis.
Another part of Member perks is the Reply feature, by which you can automate the entire exercise of sending the personalised emails to customers. There is no doubt that personalised emails are critical to better conversion rates, and this feature makes the endeavour super easy and successful. The best part is that these automated emails look so authentic as if typed by a human operator that a customer cannot tell that they are pre-loaded in the system. What serves as a cherry on the cake is that your email always lands up in the primary inbox of the receiver instead of languishing in the social or promotions folder.
When you are launching a product, you cannot afford to make a single wrong move. Moreover, you need to spread as much word about your launch as is possible. The pr.co feature of Serpstat does precisely that for you.
Apart from those mentioned above, the other incredibly useful features of the Member Perks include Grasshopper, Cyfe, etc.
Serpstat Academy
Tons of features perch Serpstat right on top of the digital marketing cum SEO tools, but one feature that puts it in a league of its own and lets it win a lot of credibility and brownie points is Serpstat Academy.
Enrolling for the Serpstat academy means upping your SEO game in general. Serpstat academy is for beginners in the SEO realm or those who are looking to upgrade their SEO knowledge and skills through an array of courses that are centric to Serpstat as well as courses that educate you about general SEO.
Serpstat essentially has three courses - basic keywords course, Serpstat features course and long-tail keywords course. The first course gives a detailed understanding of how keyword research works, starting right from answering the basic questions like what a keyword is to explaining how a competitor can be analysed based on the keywords they are using. Concepts like PPC, types of keywords, etc. are covered in detail.
The second courses move on to explaining how Serpstat features work - this is an essential course in the sense that Serpstat has a myriad of features, and if one has paid to use them, it is imperative that one knows how to get the best out of this investment. The third course educates the enrolled about long tail keywords for those who know how they are good for a website.
Serpstat API
Data is the new fuel that modern day businesses are running on. As a website owner or a business owner who has a significant presence on the Internet, if you are getting access to a decent amount of data, more than half the battle for market supremacy is won. Serpstat API helps you precisely in this regard by providing valuable data to no end.
To be more precise, starting from the Plan B of Serpstat (as highlighted in the Pricing section), users get full access to the Serpstat API without having to incur any additional costs. Once you set up your account configurations with the API, you get to analyse Big Data and make decisions that are much more informed and help you give a sense of structure to your marketing endeavours.
You can accurately get the data that you want for domains and keywords, rather than having to mine from various unnecessary datasets. The reports generated using Serpstat API also list the particular keywords that the given URLs rank for in search results.
Pricing
Serpstat comes in different price packages - starting from very affordable to expensive (but for good reasons)
The four plans of Serpstat are as follows:
- Plan A: At a price tag of 19 Dollars a month, this plan is pretty basic but great for individuals and businesses that have just started, with no immediate plans of scaling up.
- Plan B: With a plan that costs 69 Dollars a month, the user gets access to even more data and is suitable for growing businesses.
- Plan C: The third plan costs 149 Dollars a month and is suitable for mid-sized businesses, particularly the ones that want to grow and expand fast but are still on a budget.
- Plan D: The most expensive Serpstat plan that costs 299 Dollars is for enterprises that can afford a hefty price tag and want the very best of Serpstat, in no half measures.
If you don't want to commit before trying out the Serpstat features, you can sign up for their free trial and take on from there.
Other Alternatives in the Market
Now that we have walked through the Serpstat features and have had an extensive look into how this platform works, let us also take a look at the alternatives and other serious players in the market, namely:
Serpstat vs. Ahrefs
One of the most popular SEO-based tools that are highly sought-after by digital marketers and SEO professionals is Ahrefs. There is little doubt over the fact that Ahrefs is a highly capable tool that provides a user with a whole array of features. Each feature is highly researched, with a lot of detail invested into it.
That said, how does it compare against Serpstat?
Ahrefs comes with the Site Explorer feature that enables a user to analyse a website through comprehensive reports of its top visited pages. But as compared to the site audit and backlink analysis features of Serpstat, Ahrefs keeps things pretty cosmetic.
Serpstat helps you uncover more data using the features like rank tracking, keyword research, site audit, etc. it helps you dig deeper into competitor websites in terms of which of their pages are most visited by the internet users, and the kind of SEO strategy they are using can also be figured out. You can also quite easily find how much organic traffic they are attracting, and you can go on to using this information to optimise your website for better organic rankings.
As for the pricing, Serpstat most definitely offers a better deal. It keeps its pricing flexible with the multiple packages that are tailor-made for different needs and budgets. Likewise, the Ahrefs packages are also diverse, but the amount of data for each plan, when compared with the correspondingly priced Serpstat plan, is considerably less.
Besides, Serpstat takes the cake by keeping a free plan that is nothing short of a goldmine of data for small businesses. It lets them run ten queries per day, displays ten results per every report, and also provides an in-depth analysis of the URL being reviewed and analysed.
Serpstat vs. SEMrush
Be it a website that represents a product company online, or an eCommerce website, or just a blog that generates revenue by producing content, SEMrush is a versatile tool that applies to all.
For analysing one's website or gathering data about a competitor's site, SEMrush has tools plenty and makes sure that you are not making decisions based on partial knowledge. Using this SEO tool, you can uncover your competitor's keyword research strategy, PPC strategy, backlink building efforts and so much more.
Now when we get down to comparing SEMrush to Serpstat, there are similarities as well as differences that we find. The backlink analysis features of both the tools have their own set of strengths, and it is honestly difficult to point out to one of these as a better tool. And the same goes for keyword research.
Where SEMrush, or for that matter Ahrefs, lacks is the depth of insights Serpstat can provide through its Rank Tracker feature and the enormity of data through the Serpstat API. Both these tools take Serpstat's game to the next level and create benchmarks for other SEO tools to follow. No other tool helps you channel your efforts and feature-coordination as well as Serpstat. SEMrush lacks in features like Serpstat Academy too
Now when it comes to pricing, if anybody has any doubts over which tool to pick, the pricing makes the decision super easy. The Serpstat plans start from $19 per month and go up to $299 per month, with $69 per month and $149 per month plans to go for medium-sized businesses with decent pockets. As opposed to this, the SEMrush plans start from$99 per month and go up to $399 per month.
So when two products provide certain comparable features, but at prices that are considerably different, it is easy to take a call.
Conclusion
The first SEO and marketing goals for any website can be reached through a myriad of tools, as we discussed in this post. But when it comes to taking the final call and zeroing in on that one SEO and marketing tool you want to purchase, based on the entire feature-set and pricing structure of Serpstat - especially when you compare the features it has shared with other similar tools - Serpstat emerges to be the winner here.
