Table of Contents
Optimizing your content for search engines is a must if you want organic traffic. And that’s why doing keyword research and backlink analysis is so important.
However, performing keyword research and backlink analysis is something that you could do without the right tools by your side.
Most of the marketers use SEMrush and Ahrefs for keyword research and backlink analysis but that shouldn’t stop you from trying new tools.
And in this article, you’ll be exploring a tool that can be used for both these purposes. We’ll be talking about Serpstat, its features, and how it can help you with your SEO strategy.
Starting with what it is.
What is Serpstat?
If you haven’t heard of Serpstat yet, here are a few points that you should know about.
- Founded in 2013, Serpstat was initially built as a keyword research tool and now it has evolved to a complete SEO and PPC analysis tool.
- The tool has a database of over 6 billion keywords, 68.89 million ads, and 3.9 billion search suggestions.
- Over 200k professionals from around the world use Serpstat as of now.
So now that you know enough basic details about the tool, it’s time to explore more.
Features of Serpstat
The tool provides you with six major features:
- Website Analysis
- Keyword Research
- Backlink Analysis
- Rank Tracker
- Site Audit
- Tools
Let’s dive into some more details about the features.
Website Analysis
Website analysis includes two sections namely, Domain Analysis and URL Analysis.
Under Domain Analysis comes-
SEO Research- This can be used to track positions, compare two different domains, find the top competitors of your website, explore top organic pages of any other website, and lastly find the keywords that are bringing organic traffic to your website.
PPC Research- If you want to leverage PPC to bring traffic to your website, this feature is a goldmine for you. All you need to do is enter your target keyword in the search box and the tool will provide you with a plethora of details like data related to the keyword, top competitors for the keyword, ad samples, as well as ad research data.
This is how you can easily analyze how your competitors are using PPC for their website and then create or strategize your PPC strategy accordingly.
Batch Analysis- This is the quickest way to compare metrics of 200 domains in a go.
Infographics- This feature allows you to check several charts for your website’s visibility, organic keywords, ads, etc.
Keyword Positioning- Just type the URL of any competitor website and it will show you a list of keywords they rank for along with the rank details.
Competitors- On typing any URL, it shows the competitors along with the total number of Facebook shares.
URL vs URL- This allows you to compare a specific URL from your website with 1 or 2 competing URLs, and shows common or unique keywords of that URL.
Missing Keywords- Provides you with all the keywords for which your competitors rank under the top 10 and aren’t available in your specific URL.
Keyword Research
With Serpstat you can easily find the common keywords that you as well as your competitors are ranking for. In addition to that, it also provides a bunch of new keywords that your competitors are already targeting but you don’t.
Here are the features of Serpstat keyword research-
Overview: Includes the overall metrics of the targeted keyword along with the links to in-depth reports.
SEO Research: Shows Keyword Selection, Related Keywords, Search Suggestions, Cluster Research, top pages, and competitors based on keywords.
PPC Research: Provides the list of paid keywords, competitors targeting the same keyword, ad samples, and ad research reports.
Content Marketing: Shows all the search questions related to your targeted keyword.
SERP Analysis: Provides a list of top 100 results on Google in organic as well as paid search for a specific keyword.
Backlink Analysis
Another powerful feature that Serpstat has is backlink analysis. With Backlink Analysis you can analyze your as well as your competitors’ backlink profiles. And this can help you to explore what strategies are your competitors using to build backlinks. Moreover, it also highlights new sources that you many use to build more backlinks.
Here are the six sections of the Backlink Analysis menu-
Backlink Dashboard: The dashboard provides you with a little information about your website’s referring websites, pages, linked domains, percentage of follow and nofollow links, etc. Also, you can see Serpstat’s Page Rank and Trust Rank here.
Referring Domains: It shows the list of referring domains to your website. And you can also the Alexa rankings of all the domains that are referring to yours.
New/Lost Backlinks: What else do you want? This feature helps you to check all the new as well as lost backlinks to your website. Furthermore, you can also see if the links to your website are dofollow or nofollow.
Anchors: It shows an anchor cloud and a list of all the keywords that are being used as anchor text to link back to your website.
Top Pages: This feature helps you to check all the top pages of your website based on the number of backlinks.
Rank Tracker
The search engine algorithms keep changing and so your website’s ranking for different keywords also keeps changing. So it’s imperative to keep a track of position changes in SERPs for your target keyword.
First, you’ll have to create a project for your website to track the rankings. And after doing it, you need to click on the ‘Start Tracking’ button.
Here’s what you see on the Serpstat’s Rank Tracker page-
General: You can edit the project name and add or change competitors to keep tracking the rankings alongside.
Search Regions: Here you can add or change search engines, and SERP type (desktop or mobile). Also, you can change demographics like Country, Region, City, and language that you prefer to use.
Keywords: You can either import the list of targeted keywords from a CSV or TXT file or else you can enter the keywords manually.
Schedule: Set up tracking to daily, 3 days, or weekly.
Rank Tracker has three tools-
- Keywords
- URLs and
- Competitors
Keywords
The keywords report had two sections, Position, and History.
The Positions tab provides you with the ranking details for the specific keyword you enter. The details include the current position, search volume, and position dynamics.
The History tab shows the performance of your keywords in the SERP since the start of the project. However, it only shows the keyword ranking movement within the first 20 positions in the SERPs.
URLs
On this page, you can check which page ranks for the target keywords you’re tracking and also, the current position and organic traffic volume.
Competitors
This one shows you traffic share for the targeted keywords among competitor websites.
Site Audit
Serpstat’s Site Audit provides you with a comprehensive analysis of your website’s complete SEO score, highlighting all the issues that you need to try fixing to have a fully-optimized website.
Here’s what you can find on the page-
Meta Tags: Helps you to uncover high, medium, and low priority issues related to your website’s title tag, meta descriptions, etc.
Headings: Helps you to see high, medium, and low priority issues related to your website’s headings.
Redirects: Allows you to see the total number of redirects on your website. Also, it provides information regarding corrupt redirects.
Accessibility and Indexation: Allows you to see pages with canonical tags, flash elements, iFrame Tags, low word count, etc.
Links: Helps you to check pages with external linking errors.
Server Parameters: Shows errors related to HTTP/HTTPS and WWW/non-WWW issues.
HTTPS Certificate: Helps to check if your HTTPS certificate is valid or not.
AMP Pages: Allows to check if AMP is used or not.
Markup: Helps to check for schema markup, open graphs, and Twitter cards.
Loading Speed: Helps you to fix the problems that are causing slow website speed.
Hreflang Pages: Helps to check the multilingual settings of your website.
Tools
And here comes the ‘Tools’ section that allows you to see the entire history of your queries on Serpstat. Here you may also see or save the saved list of keywords and reports, and check the quality of all your target keywords.
Based on the plan you have, you will be able to add the list of all the projects to the main dashboard.
This was all about the features of Serpstat and now it’s time to explore some more details about the tool.
SerpStat Pricing Plans
One of the most important things that everyone considers while buying a tool is its pricing. And that’s where Serpstat gets brownie points.
Most of the SEO tools out there are very expensive and if someone’s just starting, they rarely buy such premium tools. They most prefer using trial versions of some tools. However, every trial version has its restrictions and that affects the entire blogging and marketing strategy.
So what to do?
Get a tool that is both useful and cost-effective. And that’s what Serpstat is.
All the plans are competitively priced and provide the right set of features that you would need based on the experience level.
The basic plan costs $69/month and allows users to perform 30 searches and an audit of 100 pages in a month.
So the best way here is to try the basic plan and then decide whether it’s worth spending more money or not.
Interface Overview
The tool is a boatload of features but you still need to learn before using it fully if you’re a newbie and don’t have any previous experience with some other tool.
However, thanks to the friendly interface and intuitive navigation, you can still use a few features easily without any experience. And with the time you’ll understand how to use the rest of the features as well.
Customer Support
No matter what kind of business you run– having good customer service is crucial to thriving in the current scenario.
Thankfully, Serpstat provides the users with good customer service which is ready to assist you at any point in time. Whether you want to know how to use a tool or feel stuck somewhere, you can easily contact the customer support team and get your issues fixed. Also, it provides you with tons of useful resources that you can use to understand the workings of the tools.
Some of the useful pages include-
User Guide: a comprehensive guide to help you explore how to use the tool and its features.
FAQs: As the name suggests, it shows all the recently asked questions from the users about the tool. Also, if you have any questions or concerns you can raise that here.
How-to Guides: Some in-depth guides about the tools are curated here.
Serpstat Blog: Articles related to the tool and SEO are here to help you master the craft.
Last but not least, Live Chat support is also available to help you resolve your queries within a few seconds by talking to a customer support agent in real-time.
Final Words
When doing SEO, tools are really important. However, not every tool is worth using and so choosing the right tool is crucial.
Now you can hop from one tool to another to finalize the right one but that would require a lot of time, money, and effort. And so choosing that tool that already has a good reputation is the right choice. Serpstat holds a great reputation and is considered to be in the level of tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
Some of the features that make the tool amazing are-
- Fast and reliable support.
- Amazing SEO audit tool.
- Daily rank tracking.
- Solid PPC analysis.
However, just like any other tool, this tool too has some shortcomings like no extra marketing tools and less unique features in comparison with other popular tools.
But in the end, this tool has more advantages than disadvantages and so it’s worth giving a serious try. So get the tool and use it and then you’ll know how beneficial it is for your online business.
