Serpstat Review

Detailed Reviews

Serpstat is an SEO platform with all the usual SEO tools under its umbrella. It is a part of the Russian Netpeak group, which has several other companies related to the online ecosystem. Serpstat strives to provide a one-stop solution to the needs of all the SEOs and digital marketers out there. The secret sauce, in their case, seems to be the huge database they have got for different regions of the world. The SEO platform doesn’t hold any punches back while boasting about the volume of their continuously expanding database.

Pros

• Easy to do keyword research for different regions of the world.
• Thorough domain and URL analysis.
• Keyword research and backlink analysis help improve page rankings.
• Easy to identify trends with rank tracking tool.
• Website audit prioritizes the errors based on how much they affect rankings.

Cons

• Has databases only for Google and Yandex.

Introduction

The internet is flooded with tools and products claiming to help websites reach the top rankings on search engines. All these products would come with similar tools and would suggest the same strategies to climb up the ranks. It should be no surprise since all of them take cues from search engine algorithms.

But don’t you wonder why is it so that some SEO platforms are doing exceptionally better than others? Why is it that keyword research tools come up with different suggestions for the same research? Why is it that you get significant improvement in traffic on adhering with the suggestions of a tool as compared to the other?

The answers to all these questions point towards a single factor- database. It is the search engines that have the most accurate data when it comes to SEO. And Google is the uncrowned kind of these search engines, having the largest accurate dataset related to search queries.

The SEO tools we use need to rely on other data sources to predict what might be going on search engines. And this is where all the chaos creeps in. These data sources can only try to mimic what’s happening on search engines but can’t regenerate the same data as them.

The varying accuracy of this data affects the performance across SEO platforms. Serpstat boasts of having a huge database with a focus on different regions around the world. They have very proudly listed out their databases on the website along with the associated metrics.

Claims such as updating of 25,000 keywords every minute help them attract a lot of potential clients.

However, there is more to SEO other than just keyword information. It is the tools with more accurate keyword information and robust tools that make it to the top of the food chain.

This review will take you through all the sections and tools of Serpstat to give you a better idea of what this platform is all about. Serpstat has come a long way from being just a keyword research tool to one of the better-known full-fledged SEO tools.

So, let’s get right into it and see what they have got to offer us.

Website Analysis

We decided to follow in the footsteps of Serpstat and explore the sections as they come. One common theme across all the SEO platforms is that you will find the repetition of tools across different sections. For instance, there would be a backlink section in the website analytics module, and then there would be an entire section to deal with backlinks, as well.

It isn’t necessarily a bad feature, but things can get confusing at times. We will not explore a sub-section in detail if they have an entire tool dedicated to it in the later parts.

We have two parts within the Web Analysis tool. The Domain Analysis section will give you an idea of the state of the website in much broader terms. The URL Analysis section, on the other hand, is to allow you to look a bit closer. Let’s begin with the former.

Domain Analysis

Serpstat asks the user to pick between Google and Yandex data. The Yandex data might come in handy for analysts focusing on regions in and around Russia. There are furthermore options to pick the region once you are done choosing the engine. However, it gets more relevant during keyword research.

They will provide you with all kinds of data around the domain as you enter it. The overview section will give you the overall visibility of the domain, search engine traffic, organic keywords, ranking distribution, traffic trends, and so much more.

The overview section is a great avenue to know about the overall health of the domain and identify the areas that need improvement. If you don’t see a lot of keywords ranking in the top bracket, it is probably time to conduct a keyword research or review the content.

If you see the competitors far too ahead of yourself, you might want to assess the different strategies they are implying. The overview section allows you to map a plan of action and decide how you want to approach the optimization process.

There are dedicated sections within the tool to give you deeper insight into whatever is available on the overview screen. The SEO research and PPC research sections provide data from organic and paid traffic perspective.

You can see the keyword metrics for SEO and PPC campaigns, check out which competitors are doing well for organic and which ones are prospering in the paid ecosystem. Both SEO and PPC research campaigns allow direct comparison between domains.

The kind of stats remain the same for both the sections. It is just that the perspective switches between organic and paid elements.

The SEO research section has a section dedicated to top pages, and it shows the ones bringing in the most traffic. The PPC research section has an Ad Examples section in response to that, and it displays the ad copies that appear on the results page.

If your project is more on the ambitious side, then the Batch Analysis tool might come in handy for you. It would allow you to compare the metrics of as many as 200 domains in one go. Agencies and analysts won’t mind having such a trick up their sleeves.

The Infographics section at the end of Website Analysis packs and presents the entire information in a much more exciting and easy-to-absorb way. They update the section every two weeks. And once you have monitored the section long enough, it will take only a glance to ensure things are going the right way.

URL Analysis

The URL Analysis is akin to a zoomed-in version of Domain Analysis. There will be pages on the website that you feel are more important than others. The URL Analysis section provides you a way to inspect and scrutinize those pages.

You can see the ranking keywords on the page, for organic as well as paid traffic. There is a section that tells you all the keywords you can include on the page to elevate the organic rankings. There aren’t a lot of SEO tools that provide such insight.

You can have a URL vs. URL comparison as it was in the case of domains. One of the better learning methodologies is to heed lessons from the work of others. The competitor analysis section works somewhat along the same lines.

It would list out the worthy competitors for your URL, and you can then explore them further in the URL analysis section.

The Website Analysis segment is a great tool to know about the areas that need attention. Things get easier once you have identified what’s pulling down the website rank.

Keyword Research

Keywords lay down the foundation for the success of SEO as well as PPC campaigns. A carefully curated keywords list can bring you a lot of organic and traffic and has the potential of bringing in more visitors through the AdWords without breaking the bank.

Serpstat comes with individual sections for organic and paid keyword campaigns. You can combine the knowledge gained from these two sections and get some favorable results.

Overview

As it was in the case of the Website Analysis section, you get an overview of things in this case, as well. It will throw some numbers, trends, and examples at you to provide a better picture of how things are around that keyword.

One thing to keep in mind is that you need to pick an appropriate database when conducting some research. Serspstat allows the user to pick one from its many databases. Each database focuses on a single region and search engine. The two options available for search engines are Google and Yandex.

Change in the region can have a significant impact on stats. If you are not careful enough, the whole campaign can go south before you know it.

The segment begins with information such as search volume, competition, CPC, and keyword difficulty. Even though the method of calculation for these numbers are the same across all the stats, there can be a few exceptions.

You should always get a brief idea of what the metrics are about. In this case, the ‘competition’ refers to the relative competition you will have to face while bidding for the keyword. The ‘keyword difficulty’ is for how much effort you will have to make to appear in the top ranks of SERP.

There is a segment that gives the total number of organic and paid keywords around the one you have researched, along with a few examples. The number of keywords is for the ones which contain the phrase you mentioned in the search query.

There can be other keyword suggestions around that keyword, and you will get them in subsequent modules of the tool.

There is a keyword trend section which imports data from Google Trends. It will help you know if the people are getting more less interested in the keyword. The section can even be helpful in finding any seasonal trends. It will help you ensure you are spending your time and resources on the keyword at the right time.

There will be examples of top organic results and the ads appearing on the search engine. There are also listings for competitors in both organic and paid campaigns for the keyword.

If you wish to get into deeper waters, then the SEO research and PPC research sections will let you do so.

SEO Research

The first section in SEO research is keyword selection. It gives you all the phrase-match keywords for your query. All these suggestions will have the term you entered in the search bar.

The metrics associated with these keywords are volume, cost, CPC, PPC competition, difficulty, results, and so on. There is also an indicator of the SERP features in which the results appear.

The keyword difficulty stat would give you a relative idea of how difficult it will be to appear in the top 10 search results. It factors in the metrics associated with websites already appearing in the top results for that keyword. The other useful stat can be the search volume. It gives the average number of searches per month for the last year.

The keyword difficulty and search volume will let you weigh the effort and potential ROI for it. The other metrics, such as results, which gives the total number of results populated by the search engine, and social domains, which shows the social domains appearing in the top 100 search results can also come in handy. All this information will help you curate the perfect list for your SEO campaign.

You can filter and sort the keywords using the listed metrics along with the filters of misspelled keywords and filter toponym.

However, it is the ‘related keywords’ segment where you might some of the best ideas of your campaigns. This section comes up with suggestions that don’t necessarily include the searched keyword terms but are semantically linked with them.

It can be especially useful in the case of highly contested keywords that seem almost impossible to rank for. The related keywords are most likely going to have a comparatively lower difficulty. They can turn out to be a much easier way to get the target audience to your website.

The ‘search suggestions’ section will have recommendations to improve the quality of your research. It will have terms from the autocomplete section of the search engine. You can incorporate these terms to get better or more relevant results for your campaign.

Another benefit of this section is that as you include the suggested keywords in your search, the terms start getting longer, and we all know that longtail keywords are comparatively easier to rank for.

The ‘top pages’ section shows top pages appearing in the search results, and the ‘competitors’ segment will show you the websites appearing in the top 20 search results for related keywords. The tool displays the total number of keywords on the website, and how many of them are common with the related keywords.

PPC Research

PPC research follows along the same lines as SEO research, with the focus shifting from keyword difficulty to paid competition. You get to see the ad examples instead of top pages, and there is an ad research section instead of search suggestions.

There is nothing much else to sort between the SEO and PPC research sections. The rest of the metrics and customizability options are the same in both sections.

Content Marketing

We don’t know why they named this segment as content marketing when all it does is find out questions around a keyword. Apparently, there is only one sub-section in this tool, and it is named ‘Search Questions.’

Well, let’s not get lost in the nomenclature and appreciate its utility. People usually generate search queries in the form of questions. The section not only helps you find keywords matching to search query, there is a higher probability of converting the lead.

A search query in the form of a question shows more intent then the usual ones. There is more chance of a person buying headphones if they are looking for headphone prices. People formulate questions when they have clarity of what they want to know.

If you know the question, you know what exactly it is that the user wants to know. It allows you to create more relevant content, something that Google is focusing a lot on. Keywords in the form of question help you create superior content, and therefore, climb higher in search engine rankings.

They allow you to add more relevant keywords in the mix, as it was in the case of the ‘suggested keywords’ section of SEO research. It will help you come with more specific questions or keywords and a better understanding of what the user needs.

SERP Analysis

Instead of focusing only on the top 10 results, the SERP analysis on Serpstat brings in the top 100 search results for the user. It includes both organic and paid keyword results.

They will provide you some collective data for all the listings such as the total number of organic keywords, CPC, competition for these keywords, keyword difficulty, and so on.

You can see the metrics associated with the ranking URLs. It includes Serspstat trust rank, Serspstat page rank, number of backlinks on the URL, and the list of snippets. You can go through the data and form a relationship between ranks and metrics yourself.

Backlink Analysis

Acquiring new backlinks is among the tougher part of the job for most SEOs. Search engine algorithms rely heavily on backlinks to establish the relevancy of the URL or domain.

The situation makes the webmasters rummage through the web for relevant links. Since an irrelevant link can end up getting you penalized by the search engine, you need to be extra cautious while scouting for backlinks.

Serpstat follows the most popular strategy to come up with backlink suggestions for you. It would analyze similar domains and URLs and tell you all about the backlinks on them. You can then try to get them for your domain too.

They would also help you keep track of all the new and lost backlinks on the website. Let us go through the tools Serpstat has got to offer in this section.

Backlink Dashboard

This segment is analogous to the overview sections we encountered in the previous two cases. It gives you a rather long brief of the state of everything that’s happening with backlinks on the domain.

Serpstat hasn’t created a separate tool for users to analyze the backlink activity of competitors. You can utilize the same one for assessing yours as well as the status of backlinks on others’ websites.

The dashboard starts by drawing the bigger picture for you. It gives you the number of referring domains, referring pages, URLs indexed, linked domains, outbound domains, follow/no follows links, referring IPs, and the list goes on.

It will give the number of links coming from social websites, and the page ranks and trust rank from Serpstat. Once you have looked at this information enough times, you will be able to easily identify the difference between a domain with a great backlink profile and otherwise.

The graphs for Referring domains and Unique Backlink history tell you how things progressed in the two departments over the years. You can find out what happened around the time where you see sudden peaks or troughs. You can learn a lot about the dos and don’ts of the backlink business with careful analysis.

The following section gives a count for new and lost backlinks followed by an anchor text segment.

For a more refined analysis backlinks, you will need to go through the specialized sections.

Referring domains

This section lists out all the domains pointing towards the focal domain. The metrics associated with these domains are the number of backlinks and the flow metrics by Serpstat.

This is the kind of data that might turn out to be a gold mine for you during competitor analysis. The stat shows you which website is providing the greatest number of backlinks. It is suggestive of the fact that they are much likely to provide a backlink when if you try so.

The Serpstat flow metrics will tell you about the authority of the domain providing the links. So, if you see a website with high authority and high volume of links pointing towards your competitor’s domain, you know what the next step should be.

Keep in mind to go for only those backlink sources that have higher numbers for links and flow metrics. The next step would be to filter out the domains with higher authority but relatively fewer links. You would not want to spend much time on domains with very low flow metrics score.

Referring Pages and External Links

Serpstat now breaks it down to individual backlinks lost and acquired by the website. You can monitor all the lost and new backlinks on a timescale that you prefer. You can have a look at daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly developments for the backlinks.

Apart from seeing the number of links acquired or lost, you can analyze individual links. In case of lost links, you will be able to see dates when they were indexed for the first time, when they got indexed last, and when the link was lost. The new links come with the same dates except for the last one.

The other attributes associated with these sources will be page rank and trust rank of the page by Serpstat, numbers of pages linked to them, the type of link, and the target page for the link.

There might be a few rare situations when you need such a microscopic analysis of individual pages.

The external links section provides a similar analysis but for outbound links from your URLs.

Top Pages

This is one of the more critical sections if you are doing competitor research for Backlink Analysis. The section shows all the pages on the domain with the greatest number of backlinks.

If you have a website with similar content, then you can get a lot of ideas about the kind of domains that can be a help in the backlink section. You can analyze the backlink strategy for pages and implement some of the learnings on your website.

It is up to the user if they consider this one or the ‘Referring Domains’ section as a better source to find out backlink prospects. In our opinion, your strategy should include both sections.

Rank Tracking

Search engine optimization is all about taking measures that would put you in the top ranks of search engine results for different keywords.

Monitoring how the keyword ranking is changing over time is the best way to be aware of if you are making any improvements or not. The rank tracking tool of Serpstat allows the user to track selected keywords for their search engine ranks.

All you need to do is pick a project, select the keywords you want to track and put appropriate tags on them for easier tagging, and select the frequency of rank tracking.

You can also add more regions and search engine options in the rank tracker for comprehensive reports. Once you have taken care of the setting related to keyword tracking, you can proceed to subsequent sections on the tool.

The noticeable feature on Serpstat is that it not only assesses the ranks for domains mentioned in the project, but it does so for the domains appearing in the top 100 results for those keyword queries.

It gives them a huge data pool to work with and provides the user with a lot more useful data.

The first section within the rank tracker is ‘Positions.’ It provides you with keyword ranking data in different ways. First thing you get to see is a Rank Distribution Chart. It will give you the fraction of keywords ranking in different search engine ranking groups for your domain.

You will get to know what fraction of the listed keywords rank in top 1, top 3, top 10, and top 20 search results. You can see the fluctuation of ranks in numbers. You will get the numbers for all the keywords with no change, increase, and decrease in ranks. The tracker would keep a tab on the number of new keywords into the mix and the number of lost ones.

The tracker comes with enough filter options, so you can focus on keywords that you want. They would allow you to add tags to keywords while adding them to the tracker. Tags make it easier for the user to differentiate between the keywords at such a stage.

You can switch to the view where you get to see the ranking reports for multiple days in a single window. It allows the user to have a look at how the ranking for a keyword varied over the time period, thus making it easier to interpret if the SEO techniques are working or not.

Serpstat would even provide you a chart for easy monitoring of the ranks for a keyword in the past 30 days.  The charts allow one to get an idea of trends and sometimes even make predictions.

The ‘History’ section shows all the ranking data for keywords from the time since you set up the campaign. There is a ‘ranking distribution history’ section that shows how the percentage of keyword for the top 20 search results varied over time.

They have 5 brackets for top ranks, i.e., top 1, top 3, top 5, top 10, and top 20. The graphs would show you how the percentage of keywords in these brackets over time. The percentage is calculated out of the total numbers you added in the rank tracker.

The ‘history table’ gives you the ranks of keywords for every single day for the time period you choose. The table comes color-coded, giving you an idea about the general performance of these keywords. The tracker would only be able to give you information about rankings for the time period after you started the ranking.

We mentioned earlier that Serpstat collects data from all the sites appearing in the top 100 search results for the keyword queries. You will see results from all that data in the ‘Competitors’ section of the rank tracker.

The tool measures all the traffic that these domains might be getting from the search queries based on the ranks they got for keywords. It then arranges the domains in the order of decreasing order of the share of traffic they receive.

The table not only tells you about your standing in the system, but it also gives you an estimate of how much traffic you can be having on your website if it was the table topper. They would also show you the standings for traffic and visibility these sites are getting.

Finally, you can see the domains with improved rankings and the ones which experience a decline. If you notice that a domain has been in the section of improved ranking for quite some time now, then you might benefit a lot from checking out that website.

The ‘Landing Pages’ section shows you the pages that the viewer will reach on picking the result for your website from your query. There are a few metrics associated with pages, and it can help you keep things in order on the page.

Site Audit

Search engines care for user experience more than ever. They don’t want users to face any roadblocks while finding the most relevant website. As a webmaster, you need to make sure that both the search engine and viewers have a good time on your site.

It means that you need to accessible and friendly enough for search engine algorithms and keep it fast enough for website visitors. The ‘Site Audit’ section on Serpstat finds out all the possible errors and anomalies on your website.

You can work on the shortcoming and make the website inviting for both search engines and visitors. The ‘Audit Summary’ would tell you more about SEO issues. You need to provide the tool with necessary permissions and take care of crawler settings before you start the review. Once done, the tool will automatically populate the results for you to analyze.

The first metric you get on Serpstat is the SDO score. It is a score based on the number of pages that the tool analyzed in your domain and the volume and severity of issues found. The score will be a number between 1 to 100, with higher being the better.

The audit would give you a summary of errors and separate them into different categories based on the urgency. You would want to deal with high priority errors before you go out taking care of the less critical ones.

They do a neat job of making sure that the user knows about the errors that matter that most. Along with errors, you will also find listings for information and virus. We guess you already understand what the virus section refers to.

The information section is not necessarily about errors but points out all the room for improvement on the website. Once you have made sure your website is free from errors, you can make things even better by taking cues from the optimization section.

If you want to look at the categories of audited elements irrespective of if they are an error or not, then Serpstat has got you covered. You can go through categories such as HTTPS status code, meta tags, headings, content, accessibility & indexation, redirects, etc.

There are a few graphs at the end of the summary that would give you some idea about how many links it takes to reach the pages, the status code distribution for the pages, and canonicalization.

So far, we discussed how the site audit could help your website get better prepared for search engine crawlers. The flip side is that it needs to be prepared for visitors as well. One of the key factors for the search engine algorithm to decide ranking of a page is the loading speed.

There is an entire section dedicated to loading speeds on Serpstat. It would list out all the issues that are making it difficult for pages to load up. Once again, the issues are sorted by urgency.

You can switch between mobile and desktop modes while going through these errors. Since there are more people on more people on mobile devices browsing websites, the feature makes complete sense. You can ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices, as well.

Conclusion

When you get an SEO tool, you can’t expect it to transform your website into one that always ranks higher on search engine results. Even though it should be the case, ideally, a tool can only help you so much. It can tell you all about what you can do, but it is you who has to bring all the changes at the end of the day.

But there is nothing wrong with expecting the right kind of suggestions from your SEO tool. Examining the accuracy of the tool should always be one of your top priorities. You can check out both the quality and volume of data sources it has.

In Serpstat’s case, the volume of data is huge. Even though they do not have databases for sources other than Google and Yandex, they made sure they provide the most they can for the two cases.

You can easily switch between the regions for the search engines, making the tool very useful for local businesses. However, we would still like to see the inclusion of databases from YouTube and Bing.

Domain and URL analysis paint a very clear image of what the user should do with the website. You get to know about the state of SEO and PPC on the pages. The analysis would then take you through backlink, as well.

Once the analysis section has identified the areas for improvement, the keyword research and backlinks analysis tool come into play. You can find the appropriate keywords for both SEO and PPC campaigns. The backlink analysis would also assess the competitors to come up with relevant backlink suggestions.

We couldn’t help but notice that Serpstat doesn’t come with a content editor. Even though it doesn’t make a world of difference, the editor would’ve been a welcomed feature on the tool.

The rank tracking and site audit tools did what they are supposed to do. We liked how the tracker made it easier to see the trends in rank change for individual keywords. The focus on the priority of errors is one of the laudable features of the site audit tool.

We see Serpstat in the pool of better SEO tools. The database makes it slightly more favorable for regions around Russia. The service providers also seem to be coming up with new tools on the platform, which is a good sign.

Serpstat works on a freemium model. You should grab this opportunity and check out some of its features yourself.