Serpstat Review: The Next Best SEO Tool in the World

Last Updated on 4 months by Christopher Jan Benitez

My favorite SEO tool, Serpstat, is the perfect tool to conduct effective SEO research at an affordable price. Think of this tool as SEMrush but with fewer features.

You’re left with a tool that provides endless amounts of data to crunch so you can make the most of your SEO efforts, whether you’re a freelance or an SEO agency owner.

It also offers more search query limits and projects to track compared to other tools of its kind. Serpstat is the perfect alternative to SEMrush and Ahrefs if you’re short on the budget.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Find thousands of keyword ideas for your topic or look for search terms your competitor is ranking for, but you aren’t with a few clicks of a button.

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

Analyze your website and determine your top competitors based on ranking keywords and backlinks. You can also review your competitor’s PPC ads.

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

Its auditing tool allows you to conduct site-wide or page-specific analysis to check their respective SEO health and see issues and problems you must fix and improve.

LINK BUILDING

Find your new, lost, and existing backlinks and identify which ones to prioritize based on different SEO metrics. Also, see the type of links to copy from your competitors.

Serpstat review: Introduction

If you’re looking for a search engine optimization (SEO) platform that rivals SEMrush and Ahrefs but costs less, this Serpstat review is for you!

SEO tools are a dime a dozen. The number of tools to choose from has prevented people from making the right decision.

To help you decide on which tool to use, you need to understand what you want to achieve by doing SEO for your website.

Below is an easy-to-understand infographic summarizing the details I shared in the post.

SEO for Dummies - Serpstat Review

While not all tools will be able to help you do all the things mentioned above, below are factors that you should prioritize with your SEO strategy:

  • Keyword research – Find the best keywords for site pages you want to rank for Google organic search and group them according to topic
  • Competitor analysis – Measure your site up with similar ones in your industry to determine factors that you can improve on
  • On-page optimization – Analyze your site pages and see if they are optimized for search engines
  • Link building – Find link building opportunities to help boost your off-page optimization strategy

The purpose of tools is to make your job easier by assisting you in producing your desired result.

Therefore, you want to choose a tool that provides all the data you need based on the tasks above.

From here, you can focus on interpreting them and creating actionable items to round out your SEO strategy.

If you want a solid SEO tool that lets you do all these, Serpstat is one of your many choices.

In this post, I provide an in-depth review of Serpstat based on how you can use them to develop and implement a fully-formed SEO strategy. I will use the factors above as a basis for the tool’s effectiveness.

What is Serpstat?

Serpstat claims to be the “Swiss army knife when it comes to automating SEO processes” that offer these five core features:

  • Rank tracking
  • Backlink analysis
  • Keyword research
  • Site audit for SEO analysis
  • Competitor research

From the onset, Serpstat offers more than enough features to formulate and run an SEO campaign for your site.

We will delve into each feature based on how helpful and valuable they are.

Domain Analysis

If you want to research your competitors or analyze your site, enter it on the search bar to see an overview.

serpstat domain analysis overview

Like Ahrefs and SEMrush, you can see everything you need to know about a website here.

Serpstat shows you how visibility it is on search engines. High visibility means the site is found for hundreds of keywords with thousands of search volumes.

You can drill down the keywords by clicking on the Organic keyword section.

Scrolling down the page, you can see the yearly visibility trend of the site.

serpstat visibility trend for year

From here, you can determine periods of the site when it peaked or still is and times when it lost traffic.

You can see the traffic and keywords trends below to help you make further sense of this section.

serpstat keyword trend for year

Next, you can see the top pages of the site and the competing domains that share the keywords for which people can see your site.

A cool feature is the competitor graph to help you visually see where your site stands against competing sites.

serpstat competitors graph

Finally, you will see the backlinks overview of the site that drills down your link profile into different variables.

serpstat backlinks overview

You can get deeper into these features by checking out the features below.

URL Analysis

Serpstat also makes it possible to analyze URLs if you want to research pages in a domain.

serpstat url analysis

Similar to the Domain Analysis, you will see here the keywords the page is optimized for and competitors in organic search, among others.

What’s cool here is you can also see keywords that other pages are optimized for but the URL in question isn’t.

serpstat url analysis

This feature is helpful if you want to rework your old pages and include these search queries in the content. This way, you can potentially rank the pages for the newly inserted keywords and generate more traffic.

Keyword Research

Researching target keywords for your site is arguably the most critical part of building your SEO campaign.

The type of keywords you will use will determine the success of your SEO strategy, whether it’s finding a niche or finding search queries with the right intent.

Serpstat’s keyword research tool offers a wide range of features to help you find the best.

What’s even better is Serpstat offers over 230 Google databases and counting. That’s an impressive number to rival that of its top-tier competitors.

Once logged in, type the keyword that you want to extract data.

serpstat keyword research - serpstat review

You will see basic information such as search volume, organic keywords, ads keywords, and others. Most of these can be found on Google Keyword Planner, but Serpstat curates all information in one place to make it easier for you.

The unique feature of this initial keyword search is the keyword competition in which the tool provides an aggregate score on how easy or hard it is to rank for the right keywords on organic search.

This is an excellent basis for whether or not you should choose the keyword for your SEO strategy. The higher the score, the more unlikely you will rank for it.

Therefore, find keywords with low keyword difficulty (hovering from 0-40), so you can easily rank for each.

Below are other unique features that will help make targeting keywords to optimize your site more accessible.

SEO Research

To expand your keyword analysis, SEO Research allows you to drill down on your seed keyword to find search phrases to optimize your site.

This is a great complement to the data gathered from Google Analytics.

Instead of looking at overall traffic data provided by the latter tool, this feature on Serpstat shows you how your SEO efforts have resulted in organic traffic on your site.

Below are the different features under SEO Research that help you achieve this goal.

Keywords

Serpstat has a keyword tool that helps you identify the best search queries to optimize your site with. If you’ve outgrown the best free keyword tools available, it’s time to update to Serpstat.

Clicking on the Keywords shows you the different search queries for the keyword you entered.

serpstat seo research

Aside from the usual data, you will see how challenging ranking for each keyword is from the keyword difficulty feature.

You can arrange them from ascending to descending order and vice versa. This allows you to determine keywords with the lowest difficulty and target those to rank much more straightforwardly on Google.

The data also shows social domains that appear for that keyword. If many social domains rank for a keyword, you may want to move on to another keyword.

The idea is that you want to optimize for a keyword with little to no resistance. If a keyword has authoritative sites like Wikipedia, Youtube, and others optimizing on top of SERPs, it’ll be much more difficult for you to get to the first page, let alone the top spot.

With this feature, you can see how closely related each result is to your keyword based on the score provided by Serpstat.

serpstat related keywords

From here, you will find more keywords to unearth based from your initial search.

What’s cool is it shows you the connection strength of the keywords with the seed keyword you entered. The higher the connection score, the stronger their affinity is.

So, if you’re looking to include keywords in your content aside from your target keyword, then consider including the related words with at least a connection strength of 10.

Also, if you scroll on top of the page, you can find a section where you can filter the results using words you can associate with the keyword.

serpstat related keywords filter

You can show keywords based on their search volume, competition level, CPC, and more.

The goal is to narrow down the related keywords that meet your criteria.

Search Suggestions

If you weren’t able to find related keywords from the previous feature, then the Search Suggestions is your last-ditch effort.

From the page, choose modifiers and words that you want to add to your seed keyword to extract more ideas.

serpstat most popular words

If you click any of the words from the list, the results below will populate to include the word you chose.

serpstat keyword suggestions

Click on the keyword that interests you so you can analyze it further.

However, the problem here is you also get to see the keyword ideas. It doesn’t show you information keyword data like search volume and others unless you click on the search phrase.

Top Pages

The Top Pages show you the pages related to the keyword with the most FB shares and organic traffic.

serpstat top pages

Think of this section as Buzzsumo lite. You can determine the best pages about your keyword and create a much better article that them combined. From there, implement the Skyscraper technique so you can get more links from your killer content.

Competitors

Now the fun starts.

This section shows you the top domains found for the keyword you entered and its variations.

serpstat competitors

If you’re a brand new year, this is a goldmine of information.

You get a backstage seat of keywords the sites are ranking for, the common keywords each of the sites have, and how visible they are on SERPs.

PPC Research

Looking at the Keyword section, you will see pages running PPC campaigns that are optimized at the top of the ads section of Google search.

It also provides the average monthly search volume. CPC, and competition for your reference.

serpstat ppc research - serpstat review

Content Marketing

You should be aware of how important content is in SEO. Developing content based on the best on-page SEO practices will help you rank it for your chosen keywords in the best position possible.

Since part of developing content is to optimize it for a target keyword, you need to find the best keyword possible using various SEO research and writing tools. For blog content, the best possible keywords to use are long-tail ones.

A blog post is meant to answer specific questions that your audience asks. You want to provide the most useful content based on their queries to increase your search rankings.

This reason is why you should find long-tail keywords for your blog posts.

Most questions contain more than five keywords and are considered long-tail search queries. Optimizing for long-tail keywords is much easier due to less competition.

Unlike other content marketing tools, Serpstat’s Content Marketing features let you search various questions online based on the five W’s (who, what, why, when, where) and one H (how).

serpstat content marketing - serpstat review

Content marketing tools like Social Animal, a tool that allows you to discover content and influencers to engage with. Serpstat’s is more on the SEO side of things, which is always good.

Suggestion: While this feature will return hundreds of potential long-tail keywords to use, I feel it would be better to show the organic search volume and keyword difficulty from here. Both data will make it easier for users to evaluate from there which keywords to use.

SERP Analysis

If you want to analyze the top 10 pages in an organic search for a plan keyword, you must use the aggregated SERP Analysis feature.

Enter the keyword on the search to see something similar to this:

serpstat - serp analysis

Looking at the top 10 pages, you will see each broken down into different variables.

There’s the Serpstat Trust Rank and Page Rank. They are similar to Ahrefs’ Domain Rating and URL Rating, respectively. A higher score for both means a more authoritative domain or page.

What influences these scores is the site’s link profile, which you can also see under External Backlinks and Referring Domains columns. Since links are arguably the most influential ranking factor, you want to see the kind of links the pages have acquired thus far.

Using this information, you want to look into pages with a low Trust and Page Rank.

The fact that they’re optimized on the first page of Google means they’re doing something right regarding on-page SEO.

Therefore, you want to check out the elements pages and see how they are published on the site. Maybe there’s a way you can replicate them on yours.

The SERP Analysis also shows you information about the keyword: monthly search queries, related keywords, difficulty, and others.

Keyword Clustering

When researching keywords for your site, you need to organize similar and related terms. Because it’s now about targeting topics and not just keywords.

By optimizing your website for a topic, you hit on different but semantically related keywords to help your pages rank for multiple keywords simultaneously.

In this case, Keyword Clustering will automatically group them for you.

serpstat keyword clustering

Extract the keywords you want to cluster. Serpstat will then ask you to set how it will group the keywords together (linkage strength and type of clustering).

From here, you will have the keyword groups that you can use for your content marketing efforts.

For example, you have a site about wrestling boots. Using Serpstat’s Keyword Clustering will show you which keywords you need to use for that site and how you want to divide the groups into categories.

This way, you increase the semantic relationship of your site with wrestling boots in general.

Verdict: Serpstat offers multiple ways on how to research target keywords for your site. You can use the keyword difficulty index to gauge how easy or hard it will be to rank for your site. 9.5/10

Competitive Analysis

Enter the domain you want to track and analyze for an overview.

serpstat domain analysis overview

My favorite feature of Serpstat is the organic keywords that the domain is optimizing for its pages. It allows you to dive into the data immediately without looking for them individually. Showing all the results lets you see the exact pages that the domain ranks for the keyword.

serpstat positions - serpstat review

You can do this on your site to see which keywords your site is ranking for on search results. Use the data found here to identify low-hanging fruit keywords so you can optimize your page further to boost its position to the top.

Competitors

You can also pit the domain with competitors by clicking on the Competitors feature.

serpstat competitors

From here, you can compare common keywords for which your site and others are optimized. You will also see missing keywords (those that one is optimizing for and the other isn’t) to understand your SEO further compared to others.

If you click on he Common keywords of a site, you will see which pages are optimized for which keywords.

serpstat competitors common keywords

You can use the info here to understand the pages that are getting the sites the most traffic from Google.

Also, you can analyze the ranking pages and see how they crafted the content so you can create your own version!

Now, if you run this feature under Domain Analysis, you will find missing keywords or search terms your site isn’t ranking for but your competitors are.

serpstat missing keywords

If you click on a site’s missing keywords, you will get access to keywords to create content and optimize for your site!

serpstat missing keywords research

Let’s ignore the fact that the interface of this section is terrible. You can filter the keywords properly, and the results don’t show enough information to justify including them in your content strategy.

As it stands, this is a great way to unearth new keywords to optimize your site! Just click on the keyword to reveal more information about it.

Domain vs. Domain

If you want to zero in on a specific competitor, then you can compare it with yours and see more information about each.

To access this feature, go to Domain Analysis > SEO Research > Domain vs. Domain.

This also means you must enter your site as a project in Serpstat.

From here, enter the domain or two you want to compare with your site.

To give you ideas, check out the sites found in Domain Analysis > SEO Research > Competitors.

Once you have found a maximum of two sites, enter them in the Domain vs. Domain page.

After clicking the Compare button, you will see something like this:

serpstat - domain vs domain

It show you a chart of keywords each site is ranking for and the intersect where you can find keywords both sites are optimized for.

Scrolling down the page, you will see the keywords each page is ranking for and their position for each of the search queries.

serpstat - domain vs domain keywords

On-page Optimization

The Site Audit feature performs a website analysis on your desired domain URL based on different SEO factors. You need to create a project to activate this feature. Below is a site audit report example on Serpstat.

serpstat site audit

It shows the site’s aggregate score based on factors such as meta tags, loading speed, social media, and more.

Verdict: Serpstat’s Site Audit tool helps assess your site’s SEO. However, I personally feel that it puts too much weight on meta descriptions. Also, it would be great to have actionable items for issues found under Loading Speed so people will have an idea on what to do to fix them. 7/10

If you need help with developing your link building strategy, then the Backlink Analysis Serpstat feature will be of good help to you.

You can manage your link profile or compare yours with competitors to see how they acquire links to their sites.

Below are some of the things you can do with this platform for your link building needs.

Enter your domain or your competitors’ to get an overview of your or their link profile.

serpstat backlink dashboard

From here, you will see the referring pages and domain, new and lost backlinks, and anchor texts that you have used to link to your site.

Referring Domains

On this page, you will see domains with the most links to your site.

serpstat referring domain

From here, you can analyze which sites are linking to you, which pages in the site where your links can be found, and why they linked to you in the first place.

Also, you can see the Serpstat Page Rank and Trust Rank, both of which indicate the site’s quality. You’d want to get links from sites with high PR and TR, so both metrics will help you analyze which those sites are.

This feature is good enough for competitive link building, making it one of the must-use link building tools in the market. Simply enter the URL of your competitor to peek into the site linking back to it.

You can then learn how to acquire links from these sites, such as guest posting, blogger outreach, relationship building, and more.

Conversely, people may not put too much equity in Serpstat’s Flow Metrics. For one, they aren’t established compared to Moz’s DA and PA.

As a result, we don’t know how Serpstat’s Trust Rank and Page Rank compare with more popular metrics.

At this point, it would be good to have third-party metrics to help make sense of the backlinks. Also, doing so will help establish Serpstat’s metrics to a broader audience.

You can also see a breakdown of your site’s new and lost backlinks. You can use the data here to build relationships with sites that recently linked to it and reclaim the lost links.

Anchors

The data in this section lets you know how to distribute your anchor text for specific pages on your site. It should help you understand why you’re not ranking for a keyword – probably because you don’t use it as an anchor text when building links.

serpstat anchors

Verdict: Serpstat’s backlink analysis tool provides easy ways to track your link building campaign as well as opportunities by spying on your competitors.  It could probably use more actionable advice to help people make more sense of the data. 8/10

Rank Tracker

An SEO tool is not complete without the ability to monitor your keyword rankings on SERPs.

serpstat keyword ranking

Scroll down the page to see the keywords you want to track. You can add more if you wish, depending on your plan.

serpstat keyword positions

Click on Position Dynamics to check the activity of your page on SERPs.

serpstat keyword dynamics

The Keyword Dynamics is a great way to visualize the SERP rankings of your keywords.

Serpstat’s Rank Tracker is solid and reliable enough to provide you with accurate information for your keywords on search engines.

Pricing plans

For comparison’s sake, Serpstat compares favorably with tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs, considered one of the best and most popular SEO tools in the market.

Like Serpstat, SEMrush and Ahrefs offer a wealth of features to supercharge the SEO strategy of your site or clients’.

However, pricing is where Serpstat shines. It is a much more affordable SEO tool for the things you can do with it, similar to what SE Ranking is.

Below is the Serpstat.com pricing for premium subscriptions:

serpstat pricing 2020

At first glance, the pricing is not as cheap as you’d expect. Its lowest plan is $30 lower tha Ahrefs’ and SEMrush’s basic paid plan.

However, Serpstat compensates its price for the wealth of daily and monthly queries made available to you:

serpstat features pricing

Below is the monthly limit for its Position Tracking:

serpstat position tracking limit

It provides you with more than enough limits and queries per day and month to satisfy your needs!

Plan A is perfect for site owners and intermediate SEO tools knowledge. It gives you enough juice to conduct SEO research to help you come up with strategies and campaigns for your site.

Plans B to D are ideal for SEO specialists and agencies who want to get the most information from Serpstat to help power their client sites.

More importantly, signing up for an account on Serpstat is free! The free account will give you access to the platform at a limited capacity. The purpose of having it in the first place is for you to test it and make an informed decision to buy it.

Verdict: Very affordable, perfect for SEO beginners – 10/10

Serpstat review: Verdict and personal opinion

Video summary created using InVideo.

SERPSTAT REVIEW: The Next Best SEO Tool in the Market

Christopher Jan Benitez

KEYWORD RESEARCH
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION
LINK BUILDING

Summary

Based on the features above, Serpstat is a legitimate be-all-end-all tool for all your SEO needs.

You have your hands complete with Serpstat as you research for keywords, find competitor backlinks, and improve your site’s SEO.

At the same time, its seamless interface and self-explanatory data allow you to focus on executing your SEO tasks and delivering results.

Serpstat also expanded its databases through the years, making it much more helpful for people doing local SEO for their sites and clients.

It’s strong enough to power your digital marketing strategy if you correctly use its powerful features.

As it stands, I cannot recommend Serpstat high enough, whether you’re an SEO beginner or an expert.

4.4
Serpstat Review