Serpstat review

Affordable SEO research and keyword rank tracking

Serpstat
(Image: © Serpstat)

TechRadar Verdict

For the price, Serpstat does almost everything right. In particular, keyword rank analysis is presented in an actionable way and the user interface is seamless.

Pros

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    Flawless user interface

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    Keyword ranking includes day-by-day positioning table

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    Keyword analysis lets you see what visitors are searching for

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    Very affordably priced

Cons

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    Doesn’t draw in data from social media

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    Site audit tool isn’t particularly unique

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Serpstat started in 2013 as a standalone keyword research tool. But, it transformed into an all-in-one SEO platform in 2016 and now offers a variety of tools for search analytics, competitor analysis, and rank tracking. Serpstat doesn’t quite edge out its big-name competitors in the SEO research space. However, it’s incredibly affordable and provides almost all the tools you could want in a friendly interface.

So, is Serpstat the right SEO tool and analytics platform for your website? Let’s take a closer look at this software to find out.

Plans and Pricing

Serpstat allows you to try out the software for free without any artificial time limits. The number of queries that you can make is limited, but otherwise you have free reign to test drive the platform.

If you decide that Serpstat has what you need, the Lite plan starts at $69 per month or $662.40 per year. For that, you get up to 4,000 search queries each day, 15,000 keywords for position tracker each month, and 500 backlink queries per day. You can also create up to 10 different projects, but there are no team management features and you don’t get phone support from Serpstat.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

The Standard plan costs $149 per month or $1,430.40 per year and increases your software limits. You get 5,000 queries per day, 60,000 keywords per month, and 1,000 backlink queries per day. This plan also bumps your API queries from 1 per second to 10 per second and allows you to have up to 3 team members.

The Advanced plan costs $299 per month or $2,870.40 per year and once again increases your query and reporting limits. It also allows team management up to 5 users and adds phone support from Serpstat.

An Enterprise subscription costs $499 per month or $4,790.40 per year. The biggest added feature, aside from further increased query limits, is the ability to create white-label reports.

Features

Serpstat’s features are divided into five main categories: website analysis, keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, and site audits. Most of Serpstat’s analytics data is derived from Google, but results for Russian markets rely on Yandex.

 Website Analysis

Website analysis is at the heart of Serpstat. When you type in a URL, the platform will automatically turn up competitors, show the positioning for top associated keywords, and offer a tree view of all the keywords associated with the site. It’s also simple to view search engine visibility and track how that’s changed over time.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

What’s particularly nice about website analysis in Serpstat is that it makes multi-domain comparisons simple. You can select top competitors from the pre-populated list and quickly see what keywords you have in common and the cost of those keywords for advertising. Even better, you can see the exact search engine ads competitors are running and which keywords they’re using. That makes it simple to identify opportunities and gaps in your own marketing strategy.

 Keyword Research

Researching keywords with Serpstat is also straightforward. Enter any keyword, and the platform will return thousands of related keywords ranked by search volume. Helpfully, there’s a “Difficulty” score that gives you an idea of how hard it would be for a website to rank in the top 10 results in a country’s search market for each keyword.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

You can also conduct pay-per-click research around keywords just like you can for domains. Serpstat will display a list of all Google or Yandex ads using a keyword along with the cost per click.

Finally, Serpstat offers a very useful content marketing tool that breaks down how users are actually searching for specific keywords. This is an extremely important feature for understanding the audience around a keyword.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

The backlink analysis tool within Serpstat is simple but effective. At a glance, you can see how many domains are pointing back to your site and whether you’ve net gained or lost backlinks over the past week. You can also see which domains and individual URLs are referring to your website, as well as the anchor text that’s most commonly being used with your backlinks.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

Where the rubber meets the road on this tool is in analyzing competitors’ backlinks. Since Serpstat shows you lost referrals, you can quickly identify when a competitor has lost backlinks from a particular website. That offers a chance to reach out and establish your own new referrals in what was formerly a competitor’s turf.

Rank Tracking

The rank tracker is arguably Serpstat’s best feature. For any domain, it will automatically pull up the top keywords and show you a table of how the target website is ranking for those phrases on a day-by-day basis. That allows you to see immediately when a competitor is slipping on a particular keyword, which could be the trigger for creating a new ad campaign around that search.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

Another nice feature within the rank tracker is the traffic share tool. This shows you, in a simple bar graph, the percent of web traffic that popular domains are receiving around a specific keyword. This is actually easier to use than the keyword analysis tools for figuring out exactly which websites you’re competing against for all of your top keywords.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

 Site Audits

The Serpstat site audit tool helps you identify issues on your site such as broken links, missing meta tags, and less than optimal search engine indexing. However, the tool primarily repackages data from Google PageSpeed Insights. There’s nothing unique or exciting, so this feature of Serpstat is a little bit underwhelming.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

Interface and In Use

For the breadth of analytics capabilities that Serpstat offers, the user interface is impressively friendly. To start, the five modules that make up Serpstat are neatly organized into a menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard. The menu uses drop-downs to give you access to individual features, but there’s never multiple layers of menus to search through.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

Another thing that was nice about Serpstat’s interface was how it helps you organize your work. You can create not only projects, but also checklists to keep track of tasks that need to be done. Serpstat offers checklist templates for common applications like keyword quality control and link optimization, and you can also create your own custom templates for future use.

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(Image credit: Serpstat)

Support

Serpstat’s support is nothing short of excellent. The platform has created Serpstat Academy, an online knowledgebase and video library designed to help you get the most out of your SEO research. Paid users also get a dedicated customer service representative, available by Skype and live chat, for help with onboarding.

The company offers ongoing support via live chat and email during standard business hours. Advanced and Enterprise users can also call in for support as needed.

The Competition

Serpstat is an excellent tool for the price. But, it falls a bit short of competitors like SEMRush and Moz Pro when it comes to domain analysis and competitor research. Both of these platforms include data from social media in reporting rather than limiting you to Google search results. In addition, SEMRush has a “Backlink Gap” tool that makes it much easier to find competitive referral opportunities. However, you’ll pay a bit more for plans with either SEMRush or Moz compared to Serpstat.

Verdict

Serpstat has a lot of great tools for SEO research and pay-per-click analysis. The platform makes it easy to see what your competitors are doing and spot gaps in your own marketing strategy. The rank tracker is particularly useful because it gives you a day-by-day look at how your site is performing around your most important keywords. 

Serpstat does fall short of competing platforms in a few respects—for one, it only collates data from Google and Yandex—but it’s hard to argue with the small business-friendly price of this platform.

Michael Graw

Michael Graw is a freelance journalist and photographer based in Bellingham, Washington. His interests span a wide range from business technology to finance to creative media, with a focus on new technology and emerging trends. Michael's work has been published in TechRadar, Tom's Guide, Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, and Harvard Business Review.