As a company that relies solely on search traffic, we know firsthand how vital SEO tools can be for a business. And we understand how hard it can be to distinguish between them. If you’re serious about leveling up organic search efforts but don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars per month, SE Ranking may be the perfect solution for your business.
While SE Ranking isn’t what we use today, it’s one of the better options we’ve tried. Keep reading to learn who it’s for, what we like about it, and what we don’t.
Who SE Ranking Is For
SE Ranking is an ideal solution for anyone who wants a powerful SEO tool on a budget. Whether you’re a business owner, content creator, SEO specialist, or digital agency, SE Ranking gives you the features you need—keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis—at an affordable price.
It’s great for a wide range of users because it falls right in the middle of the pack in terms of price, ease of use, and complexity. However, if you’re after a different solution or something more specialized, our favorite alternatives include:
- Semrush – Best overall
- Ahrefs – Best for tracking backlinks
- SERPWatcher by Mangools – Best for daily rank tracking updates
- Wincher – Best for rank tracking on a budget
- Serpstat – Best for SEO campaigns
You can read more about all of our top picks in the full guide to the best rank tracking tools. Otherwise, keep reading to learn more about our experience with SE Ranking.
SE Ranking Pricing
SE Ranking offers several pricing plans to suit different needs and budgets. The right plan for you depends on factors like how many sites and keywords you need to track, how many competitor analyses you want to conduct, and whether you need advanced features.
Each plan has customizable limits, so you have room to grow without needing to upgrade to the next tier.
The Essentials plan starts at $44 per month and is ideal if you’re just learning SEO or have only a few websites you work on. It allows for one user, up to 10 sites, five competitors per site, and tracking of between 250 and 750 keywords. However, it lacks some useful features like historical data, extra user seats, and change monitoring.
The Pro plan, starting at $87.20 per month, is good for small agencies, growing businesses, and teams managing multiple sites. It offers three user seats, unlimited websites, 10 competitors per site, and 1,000 to 1,750 keywords. The Pro plan also comes with historical data, page change monitoring, and priority support, key items missing from the Essentials plan.
The Business plan, which starts at $191.20 per month, suits established agencies and companies with dozens or even hundreds of websites. It lets you have up to 10 users, unlimited sites, 20 competitors per site, and 2,500 to 20,000 keywords on your account. The main differences between Pro and Business are these higher usage limits, plus access to the API.
Add-ons like lead generation tools, content creation, and local SEO modules are also available at an extra cost. You can use these to customize the software further to better fit your needs.
How Does SE Ranking Pricing Compare?
Compared to major competitors, SE Ranking offers a lot of value at an affordable price. It’s a strong, budget-friendly alternative if you can’t afford premium tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.
The good news is that SE Ranking is significantly less expensive than both, with its top-tier plan costing about the same as Ahrefs’ and Semrush’s mid-tier plans. However, Ahrefs and Semrush offer higher usage limits, more features, and superior data accuracy for high-volume SEO needs. They are the industry gold standard, but they honestly provide more power than most individuals and small agencies really need.
Compared to SEO tools targeting more run-of-the-mill users and agencies—like Wincher, Serpstat, and Ubersuggest—SE Ranking falls in the middle of the pack for pricing.
However, SE Ranking typically has more features and allows more websites, keywords, and competitors before you must upgrade to a higher plan than these alternatives. Other tools often limit you to a single site or have stricter caps that force you into a costlier plan sooner than you’d like.
So, while SE Ranking may cost a bit more up front, it can save you money in the long run with its roomier, flexible plans.
Pros and Cons of SE Ranking
There are many SEO tools that strike a good balance between function and affordability, so finding the best option requires homing in on the pros and cons. We’ve done that for you to make it easier to see the daylight between SE Ranking and your other options.
So, let’s kick off our SE Ranking review with what we liked and didn’t like about our testing experience.
SE Ranking Pros
- Try (almost) everything for free: You can try any of its plans and add-ons before you buy. With that said, there are a few features you won’t be able to test without paying.
- High value per dollar: Powerful SEO features come at an affordable price for those serious about upping their SEO game.
- Covers all major engines: You can use SE Ranking to track rankings on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and even YouTube in one place.
- Flexible plan limitations: Choose a plan, then customize the usage-based limits as your needs change without upgrading to a higher tier.
- Strong core SEO features: SE Ranking’s keyword research, site audit, and competitor analysis capabilities balance beginner-friendly ease of use and serious power.
- Choose your scan frequency: Need to see daily SERP movement? You can easily choose how often the tool scans your rankings to gain timely insights when needed.
- Monitor ad positions: Keep an eye on your ad positions and spy on your competitors’ ad strategies at the same time.
- Customizable SEO reports: The drag-and-drop builder lets you customize nearly every aspect of your reports, schedule automated reports, and share findings via URL.
- Agency white labeling: Offer SE Ranking to customers under your own brand or customize everything so your SEO clients never know you use third-party software.
- Content and local marketing add-ons: You get options to add even more layers to your SEO toolkit, with local search, an AI writer, a built-in content editor, and more.
SE Ranking Cons
- Spotty backlink analysis: The backlink analysis tool doesn’t always catch everything, so you may have more (good or spam) backlinks than it appears in SE Ranking.
- Potential for outdated data: Volume and difficulty data is only updated once per month for high-volume keywords and every quarter for everything else. The tool is also not able to capture every long-tail keyword, especially for niche topics.
- Slow interface: Many of SE Ranking’s features (like the on-page SEO checker, for example) take a while to load, which can feel frustrating if you’re used to snappier results.
- It can be challenging to find what you need: With both horizontal and vertical navigation menus that each show different things, it’s not always easy to find the tool, report, or feature you’re looking for.
- No historical data on the entry-level plan: Even though it offers historical data, SE Ranking withholds it on the cheapest plan unlike some other SEO tools.
- Mobile app needs improvement: The mobile app needs significant improvements to its UI and functionality to be usable and reliable on the go.
SE Ranking Review: The Details
SE Ranking has a lot going for it, including a ton of useful SEO and content management features. Below, you’ll find an in-depth look at each one, including what it does, how it works, and how we felt about it.
Keyword Research
After testing SE Ranking’s keyword research tool, we were impressed with how much data it provides.
When you log in for the first time, you’ll find an intuitive interface that you can pick up quickly. Just enter a seed keyword or phrase and select your target country. Within seconds, you’ll get hundreds of related keywords, questions, and low-volume alternatives. You can then filter the results by difficulty, search volume, CPC, and other metrics to find the best keywords for your needs.
What really sets SE Ranking’s tool apart is how much detail you get for each keyword. Not only do you get the standard metrics like search volume and CPC, you’ll also see search intent, who ranks for a specific keyword, their estimated traffic, backlinks, and paid ad data.
For users on the top two tiers, you can also tap into historical data that shows how search interest for specific keywords has changed over time.
Alternatively, you can upload a CSV file of your chosen keywords if you’ve found them elsewhere, or paste your desired keywords directly into the tool to get data on all of them at once.
On top of all that, SE Ranking has one of the largest keyword databases, with over 3.5 billion keywords and 1.5 billion domains across over 100 countries and regions. And it is continuously expanding its database based on user submissions—if you have keywords you can’t find, simply request them and SE Ranking will add them to the database within 30 days.
Rank Tracker
If you’re serious about improving your search rankings, you need a way to closely monitor how your keywords and pages are performing in search results. SE Ranking’s rank tracking tool does just that by giving you a simple yet powerful dashboard to track your rankings (and those of your competitors) over time.
With it, you’ll get a clean snapshot of where all your important keywords rank in Google results and if they’re trending up or down. You can see your average position, search visibility, and organic traffic at a glance.
From there, you can dig into any keyword or competitor to analyze the data in more detail. The interface makes it easy to spot ranking drops quickly, so you can make changes to your content or technical SEO before you lose too much traffic.
SE Ranking tracks nearly every element in search results, including featured snippets, “People also ask” boxes, video carousels, and ads. You’ll know exactly where your content ranks in normal organic results and if you have any presence on other areas of the SERP. The metrics clearly show how much each ranking has changed over your selected time period, allowing you to stay on top of any volatility caused by Google updates.
Integrations with Google Search Console and Google Analytics provide additional insights into how people are finding and interacting with your site.
Perhaps the best part is that you can refresh SERP results for all your keywords once per day at any time you’d like, on top of the daily updates you get automatically. This means you can refresh results right before doing an analysis and rest easy knowing you’re always using the most up-to-date information.
While the amount of data SE Ranking gives you can feel overwhelming at first, the multiple visualization options make the insights easy to understand and allow you to analyze the data from different angles.
Website Audits
With SE Ranking’s rank tracking tool, you can run a technical SEO audit for your entire website or the website of a client or competitor. It only takes around two minutes to crawl 1,000 pages, and you can try it for free without even signing up.
If you have an account, you have full control over your audits. Conduct one manually or set up scheduled, automated audits of your digital properties. Use granular settings to limit the audit to specific pages, metrics, or parameters to make it faster, and create custom rules to understand anything you’d want to know about your site.
When the audit is completed, you’ll get in-depth descriptions and instructions on how to fix any SEO-related issues. You can also compare website audit results over time to track your progress and the impact of fixing issues, plus share reports with anyone via a unique link you can send to them.
The results also include the number of pages crawled, your overall health score, total number of URLs, your top issues, core web vitals (CLS, FID, and LCP), and a breakdown of problems by category. You’ll also see your total number of backlinks, domain score, and the number of pages indexed (and not indexed) by different search engines.
We were impressed with the depth of data provided in just a matter of minutes. It’ll help you understand things like:
- HTTP status codes
- Server response times by page
- Redirects and orphaned pages
- Link attribute distribution
- Heavy images
- Unoptimized code
- Mobile usability
- Load speed
- Localization and translation mistakes
It’s a versatile tool that lets you dive deep into individual pages and see how your site is performing overall. You can even use it to generate an XML sitemap.
Once you add a project, an audit automatically starts for the website you added. You don’t have to do anything but set up your account and you’ll be able to see audit results right away. We felt like all the details were laid out in an intuitive way that makes it easy to understand what’s going on with your site. It starts at a high level and as you scroll down the page, it gets more detailed as you go. Overall, it’s a nice experience.
On-Page SEO Checker
If you want to know more about individual pages and why they’re ranking (or not) for specific keywords, SE Ranking’s on-page SEO checker provides keyword-specific guidance you can implement right away. The data comes from industry standards as well as the pages that are already ranking well for a balanced comparison.
It includes a 94-point checklist with errors sorted by category, importance, and urgency, plus tips and guidance on how to fix them. You’ll see an overall SEO score, keyword density, backlinks, page structure, and other on-page metrics, like titles, meta descriptions, URL length, image sizes, and more.
It not only shows you these metrics, but also how your competitors are doing in every area so you can spot ways to move past them.
The guidance SE Ranking provides on fixing errors appears in the form of a list of prioritized tasks, with detailed instructions on what you need to do. You can check them off as you go to ensure you don’t miss anything. You can also add new tasks yourself, sort them, or export them.
The visuals you get with the on-page SEO checker are something we haven’t really seen elsewhere and the clear explanations on how to fix problems were also really helpful.
Competitor Analysis
SE Ranking offers two ways to analyze the SEO of your competitors. The rank tracker discussed earlier allows you to monitor your competitors alongside your own website to see how you’re performing for shared keywords. You’ll gain visibility into who’s overtaking whom in the SERPs and spot opportunities to improve your rankings.
For a deeper dive, SE Ranking’s competitor reports generate a wealth of data. See all the keywords a competitor’s domain ranks for (both organic and paid), their traffic and click estimates, current positions, recent ranking changes, backlinks, and even historical data showing how updates have impacted their performance.
This full picture of your competitors’ search presence is priceless information to use for shaping your own SEO and content strategies.
However, the reports provide more than just a list of keywords and stats. You’ll find out where your competitors’ audiences are located, what topics they care about, and how their content overlaps with your own.
Compare rankings side by side to see where competitors are outperforming you, then easily add high-potential keywords to your own rank tracker. Analyze their backlinks to uncover new link building opportunities. And, you can even go one level deeper to see the competitors of your main competitors, showing you who they are doing battle with in SERPs.
In our experience, the depth and breadth of data in SE Ranking’s competitor reports are fantastic. Competitor insights that would typically require several hours of research can be generated in seconds by simply entering a domain name. Whether you want a high-level overview or to drill down into the nitty-gritty details, the necessary information is at your fingertips.
Backlink Monitoring
You have multiple ways to add backlinks in SE Ranking, between manually entering them, importing from Google Search Console, or using their backlink checker. While the backlink checker missed around 100 backlinks when we compared it to the same backlink analysis with Ahrefs, it’s much better than starting from scratch. Plus, the tool will alert you by email if any added links change or drop off so you can stay on top of your profile.
For each link, SE Ranking provides insightful metrics to help you gauge its value, including the link text, target page, follow/nofollow status, if it’s marked as UGC or sponsored, and the linking domain’s authority. You can dig deeper into any link to see even more details.
At a higher level, charts show your backlinks over time, the ratio linking to your homepage versus other pages, distribution by country and TLD, recent link changes, and budget tracking if you pay for links.
Disavowing questionable links is simple, too. Just check the box next to any link you want removed, and the backlink tool will automatically generate a disavow file for you.
While there is also a backlink gap analyzer, we didn’t find it to be very useful. All it does is provide a list of backlinks and referring domains for the URLs you enter, which is very similar to what the backlink checker does but without all the extra data. Plus, it uses twice as many credits as a regular backlink check. So, you can just as easily run the regular checker on a competitor and see their backlink profile for half the credits—and get more data at the same time.
SEO Reporting
Create an unlimited number of custom reports using SE Ranking’s simple drag-and-drop report builder. Whether you want high-level overviews or granular detail, you can pick and choose the exact metrics and visualizations of data for your needs.
SE Ranking comes with 12 report templates that cover basics like rankings overviews, traffic analyses, website audits, and competitor research to get you started. From there, you have full control to customize reports to your heart’s content.
Under the hood, SE Ranking gives you access to a robust dataset to power your reports. You can view keyword rankings, organic and paid competitor rankings, traffic overviews, backlink profiles, website audits, and more. The data can also be exported to Google Data Studio for advanced reporting.
One of our favorite features is the ability to schedule automated reports. Build out from a template, set the frequency to daily, weekly or monthly, add recipients, and you’re done.
SE Ranking will automatically generate and email the report on schedule so you can keep your team, clients, and stakeholders up-to-date without lifting a finger. For agencies, scheduled reports are a huge time-saver and allow you to provide a key additional service to clients. Agencies will also appreciate the ability to fully white-label reports with your logo, colors, fonts, and more to present a polished, professional deliverable to clients.
Local Marketing Add-On
SE Ranking’s local marketing tool gives you insight into how your business ranks for local searches on Google and other platforms. It starts at an additional $7 per month on top of your SE Ranking subscription—and the price increases as you add more locations.
Choose which keywords and locations you want to track, and the tool shows you exactly where you rank for those terms over time. You’ll see whether you’re appearing in map search, image search, or regular search results. And, you’ll find out if people are finding you on mobile or desktop and what specific keywords they searched to discover your business.
The interactive charts and dashboards make exploring all of this data simple, allowing you to hover over elements for more details or click through to view full reports.
This add-on provides a wealth of useful data to improve your local SEO. For example, analyze all your online reviews to identify common themes you could leverage as new local keywords or to gain valuable customer insights.
Rather than spending hours compiling and analyzing reviews yourself, this feature gives you an instant overview of what people are saying about your business, broken down by star rating. You can even respond to reviews from within the platform.
You’ll also get alerts for issues with your business name, address, phone number, or URLs that could be hampering your local rankings. You’re able to edit and add new listings on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other locations within SE Ranking’s interface. The tool also checks for duplicates across platforms and tracks how often you respond to reviews—which Google considers an important factor in local SEO.
Content Marketing Add-On
SE Ranking’s AI-powered content marketing add-on is an affordable solution for creating high-quality blog content at scale. For an additional $29 to $99 per month, you’ll get access to an AI writing assistant, plagiarism checker, and content optimization tools to help you research, plan, write, and publish quality blog posts, guides, and articles.
Start with the idea-finding feature, which provides keyword and topic cluster suggestions based on your target search terms. While the keyword suggestions were hit-or-miss in our experience, you can easily filter out irrelevant phrases. Within a few minutes, the tool analyzes your top-ranking competitors so you can see what’s already ranking and get content gap insights.
When you’re ready to create a brief, SE Ranking provides guidance on optimal article length, headings, paragraphs, images, keywords to target, content structure, and an overall content quality score. The best part is that you can customize every aspect of the brief by adding or removing keywords, specifying internal links, choosing questions to answer, adding an outline, and including metadata. The end result is a comprehensive content plan.
In the content editor, the AI writing assistant will help you generate topic sentences, headings, paragraphs or even full drafts. You can specify the tone of voice and keywords you want to include. Then, you can check the AI-written copy for issues with grammar, SEO, and readability.
Overall, we were impressed with the content marketing add-on and feel like it’s a decent competitor to content optimization tools like SurferSEO.
The Agency Pack Add-On
For agencies and service providers, SE Ranking’s white label add-on is a game-changer. For an additional $50 per month, you get the ability to completely rebrand the SE Ranking interface with your company logo and colors.
Your clients will never know you’re using a third-party tool. You can even set up SE Ranking on your own domain and use your corporate email addresses to send auto-generated reports, creating a seamless experience for your clients.
One of the most useful features of the white label add-on is the lead generation widget. This lets your website visitors request an automated website audit that appears to come directly from you.
You have the option of a button, popup, push notification, webform or modal window. Choose the style, language, and search engine you want to target. You can also customize the copy, design, and placement of the widget to match your website’s brand. Implementing the widget is as simple as adding a few lines of code.
With the white label add-on, SE Ranking essentially handles the backend details while allowing you to maintain a professional appearance to your clients. You get 10 client seats, 100 monthly leads, unlimited scheduled reports, and the ability to completely customize the interface to reflect your brand.
How Does SE Ranking Stack up?
While we consider Semrush and Ahrefs to be the gold standard for all-in-one, enterprise-ready SEO software, that doesn’t mean we think everyone should use them.
The price tag alone is enough to make those options inaccessible to many.
If you’re wondering if SE Ranking is as powerful, flexible, and customizable as those two, the answer is easy—it’s not. However, SE Ranking is significantly cheaper and it delivers the perfect balance of capability and ease-of-use for everyday users who don’t necessarily need the most powerful SEO tool on the market.
On the other end of the spectrum, it packs a lot more punch than a simple rank tracker (like Wincher or SERPWatcher). If that’s all you need, though, you’ll save some money and appreciate the simplicity of one of those alternatives over SE Ranking.
To recap, our favorite rank tracking and SEO tools are:
- Semrush – Best overall
- SE Ranking – Best for real-time tracking of keywords
- Ahrefs – Best for tracking backlinks
- SERPWatcher by Mangools – Best for daily rank tracking updates
- Wincher – Best for rank tracking on a budget
- Serpstat – Best for SEO campaigns
Check out our full guide on the best rank tracking tools to learn more about each one and how to choose the right one for you.