Search Engine Optimization is a mainstay of digital marketing because it is the most cost-effective traffic channel. But the other side of the coin is its high competitiveness – everyone wants traffic.
To beat the competition, you have to be equipped with the best tools. In SEO, one of the leaders is SE Ranking. Let’s see how it works and how it can help you excel in the organic search results.
What does SE Ranking do?
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The short answer is: it does everything. SEO is a complex process, including technical optimization, content optimization, link building, keyword and competitor research, and other tasks. That’s why the SE Ranking SEO platform offers numerous capabilities that range from keyword research and rank-checking to backlink analysis, as well as competitive intelligence, report building, and workflow rights and roles.
With SE Ranking, you can monitor your website health, set up and manage link-building campaigns, and get insights from your competitors.
What SEO Tasks Does SE Ranking Handle?
Let’s examine all of the capabilities of the SE Ranking SEO tool.
Keyword research and rank analysis
Website technical analysis and changes monitoring
Backlink analysis and acquisition
The benefits of using the SE Ranking SEO platform
Keyword research and rank analysis
Keywords are of fundamental importance to SEO. Good keyword research and tracking will show you the market potential of your current situation, allowing you to plan your actions with perfect precision.
SE Ranking Keyword Research
It all starts with discovery. SE Ranking has an immense database of over 7 billion search queries, so you need to know the criteria to select what is best for you.
Before we start, we should become familiar with the metrics SE Ranking provides for performing a discovery. You can do it in two ways: Keywords Suggestions and Competitive Research. Let’s examine both of them.
Keywords Suggestions Tool
- Go to Keyword Research
- Navigate to Suggestions
- Enter your main term
- Include: filter queries that contain each of the following words
- Exclude: excludes phrases with any of the following words
- Word count (from-to): set up the keyword length of words to omit too long or too short queries
- Characters (from-to): same as word count, but counts query symbols
- Search volume (from-to): filter queries with too low or too high search volume
- SERP features: select or un-select additional elements presented on the SERP
- Cost per click (from-to): make keywords fit your PPC budget
- Competition (from-to): filter keywords with lower competition to improve your ads budget
- Difficulty (from-to): exclude keywords with too high of an organic search competitiveness
In my example, I used “SEO” as the main term with “tool” to narrow the search to “SEO + tool.” After that, I excluded “google” to remove SEO tools from Google from the results. After it was done, I created a set of filters to filter difficult, too long/short, and unpopular queries.
Competitive research
In the “Organic traffic research” tab of SE Ranking’s Competitive Research, you can see top competitors by shared keywords or missing keywords. This is a good way to see topics that others are covering, and you aren’t – navigate to Missing Keywords.
The best practice is to examine common keywords of your top competitors to filter irrelevant keywords.
Here you have a table of keywords, similar to what you’ve seen in the keywords suggestions.
- The competitors’ positions and recent changes
- Keyword metrics
- Keywords filter
- Keyword selection: add selected phrases directly to your SE Ranking project
With this toolset, you will be able to fill the gaps in your content in no time!
SE Ranking Keyword Rank Tracker
Remember those keywords from the previous part we added to a project? Let’s see what projects are and how to work with them in SE Ranking before jumping into keyword tracking.
Projects in SE Ranking
Go to Projects -> Create a new project
1. In the first step, just enter a domain
2. Next, add the keywords:
a. From the keyword research or Google Search Console as a list
b. Or/and from SE Ranking’s suggestions
3. After it’s done, set up the search engine. You can select the search engine, country, city, and language.
4. The next optional stage is to select your competitors. The good news is that you can find them right here by pressing the “Suggest competitors” button.
5. The last step is also optional but expands the SE Ranking functionality even further. Connect through a simple Google authorization, which you’ve done a million times.
Congratulations! Your project has been created. Let’s move to the keyword tracking part.
Detailed Rankings Report
Once you’ve created a project and added keywords, you can use Rank tracking software by SE Ranking to see the daily changes in keyword positions. Here is what it looks like:
- The main area contains the positions by day and their difference from the previous day (the positions can also be compared by month, week, etc.)
- Assign a page to selected keywords
- Add selected keywords to a group
- Tag selected keywords
- Delete selected keywords
- See what pages are ranked by the search query
- If there are several URLs for a single keyword for a selected period, their count will be displayed here
- If the target URL you’ve landed the keyword to is not the same as the SERP URL, the icon and positions become red.
With this SEO ranking report software, you can manage keywords and URL ranking for those keywords and see problems with pages such as keyword cannibalization.
With filters, you can narrow the search to see queries by URL, tags, groups, etc. The most distinctive feature of SE Ranking rank tracking software is the filter by SERP feature: monitor how your pages perform in featured snippets, local pack results, map results, etc.
This aspect has become necessary because website speed, security, structure, mobile-friendliness, responsive design, etc., have become the lynchpin of many marketers’ SEO strategies.
We mentioned the website’s technical optimization, but what is it? Technical optimization is a set of best practices for website development to provide good UX and security and manage the crawling budget effectively.
Technical aspects of UX are all about Web.dev metrics, mainly loading speed and Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, Cumulative Layout Shift), among others.
To optimize the crawling of your website, you need to do more than creating a sitemap.xml. You also need to create a proper website structure via internal linking, so the Google bot can understand it and visit all the pages you need. This is also essential for users to be able to navigate through your website. Don’t forget that all pages should ideally have 200 responses or 301s if you need to change a web page URL.
Security is often overlooked until browsers start deeming a page “Unsecure” and block users from visiting it.
The good news is all those issues can be tracked via SE Ranking’s Website Audit tool!
SE Ranking Website Audit
Once you’ve created a project in SE Ranking, its bot starts to scan your website. It follows each link and checks what errors each page has. After it’s done, you will see all the issues on a dashboard in “Website audit” – “Overview.” Let’s review it part by part.
Core Web Vitals
This report shows a breakdown of the pages’ performance or CWV according to Google’s Web.dev’s metrics (formerly known as Lighthouse) for both desktop and mobile. From it, you can understand how the website is performing overall in terms of loading speed and accessibility.
Issue Report
This report shows the errors with the biggest amount of affected pages. Navigating to a detailed report will show you much more.
Let’s move to “Issue Report”, where you can see all the issues in detail, navigate between issue priority, error type, and affected pages, and download the result. Basically, SE Ranking generates a to-do list of how you can improve your website health.
Crawled pages
This report is similar to the Issue Report, but instead of expanding pages from issues, you expand issues from pages. This report helps ensure your important pages have no critical errors. Here you can also analyze your URLs using filters.
Found links
This report contains 2 tabs: internal and external. Both work great to check the response codes for both inbound and outbound links to fix non-200 links by fast navigation to the source URL.
In addition, there are two other tab-specific things you can do with this report.
The “Internal” tab works well for finding out what anchor texts are used for a page in internal linking. Filter the type of “Hyperlink,” export the results, and build a pivot table in Excel to see the most used anchors by page.
You can also export the results to build a pivot table in the external tab. From it, you can see what the most popular outgoing domains are and validate their quality. It is a fast way to check whether your site has been spammed or not.
Hint: use the Parameter Checker to identify low-quality domains quickly.
Monitor changes
With Page Changes Monitor, you can import pages you want to track to monitor their changes. SE Ranking can crawl added pages daily and store their changelog. It also sends you notifications if there are any changes on the tracked pages.
Crawl Comparison
So, we’ve seen how SE Ranking helps marketers with on-page optimization with Keyword Research and technical optimization in the Website Audit. Now let’s talk about off-page SEO.
Backlinks are the most important external signals that can help a website rise in search engine rankings. The two main branches of off-page optimization are backlink analysis and link building. Luckily, SE Ranking can help you with both of them!
SE Ranking Backlink Checker
SEO is all about being better than the competition. To be the best, you need to know your competitors’ strategies beforehand regarding backlinks. To do this, go to the “Backlink checker” and input one of the competitors you’ve found earlier.
In the first section you will see aggregated metrics in a macro breakdown of the backlinks profile:
- Domain trust is SE Ranking’s parameter to determine the quality of a domain (bigger = better)
- Similar to domain trust, page trust measures the page quality (main page in our case)
- Count of unique anchor texts. By dividing it by the total amount of backlinks, you’ll get how many unique anchors per backlink a competitor is using
- Dofollow/Nofollow ratio. Nofollow also includes “sponsored” and “UGC” tags.
- Statistics by destination pages for referring domains (one link per domain)
- Statistics by destination pages for backlinks
- Count of backlinks from domains with .edu TLD
- Same for .gov domains
- Unique IPs count. This is important because several domains can have the same IP (subdomains, for instance). This metric is important to consider when determining the number of unique domains.
- Several IPs can be placed in one subnet. A subnet is like a folder with a bunch of IPs: if its number does not dramatically differ from the IP count, it’s okay. Other ways may signal shady SEO methods (PBNs for instance).
A lot of insights from a single screen, right? But there are more:
Backlink dynamics to calculate how many resources you’ll need to ensure the same pace of link building.
Top anchors to understand the ratio of anchor types (brand, URL, keywords, other). From it, you’ll be able to know how aggressive you can be with your exact-match anchors.
Last but not least is a referring domains map (Distribution map). Here you can choose between CCTLDS or Countries modes. I recommend switching to countries since this report is based on IPs, not TLDs, which is more accurate to determine the domain origin country.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what links you need to build, let’s see how SE Ranking can help you build a precise link-building strategy.
Using the Backlinks report, you can see the exact referring pages your competitor has links from. From it, you will be able to form a list of potential donors to get links on your own. I recommend choosing one backlink per domain mode and filtering links by DT to work with high-quality domains; and dofollow type because those backlinks bring the most weight, so you should focus on them first.
Now that you have a strategy and donors let’s see how you can manage your link-building process in SE Ranking.
Backlink Monitor
First, you need to import the backlinks you want to track. You can do it several ways:
- Add the backlinks manually
- Import them from GSC
- Select them from SE Ranking’s Backlink Checker Tool
I recommend using all of these methods together to get the complete list of backlinks to track.
The managing window may seem complex at first, but it’s actually quite intuitive and easy to use:
- Check if the link to your website is presented on a page
- Check if Google indexed the referring page. SEOs stop working on a backlink after acquiring it, but a not indexed link is the same as no backlink. That’s why it’s crucial to monitor how your backlinks are indexed or, if they are not, perform actions to fix it.
- Domain Trust to see the quality of referring domain
- Link anchor
- Destination URL on your website
- Backlink type: dofollow/nofollow, text/image
- Facebook shares
- External links count
- Country of origin by IP
- Date when SE Ranking discovered the link. Note: it can differ from the published date
- The day when the SE Ranking bot verified that the backlink was presented on a URL.
- Indicate whether the URL or domain is disavowed.
- Price for a link, super useful for budgeting and bookkeeping. Payments can be set as one-time (e.g., forum link, guest post) or recurring (sponsored link).
- Save the manager responsible for a link to know who to ask if something happens to it.
- Other comments
With this toolset, you can keep track of how your link building is going and swiftly react to backlink issues.
Here’s what you can see. Let’s examine what you can do.
- Refresh the page’s status and index check
- Delete the link from the tracking list
- Add a link to disavow: select a backlink and a mode (URL or domain). Once it’s done, generate a file for the GSC Disavow tool import.
- Edit a link’s price, manager, or notes
- Move a page to a group. A great grouping example is by link type (profile, comment, guest post, etc.)
- Navigate through link statuses
The benefits of using the SE Ranking SEO platform
Many tools, one interface
SEO is a diverse yet unified process, where all branches can be developed separately and eventually connected. You can create a landing page, but it requires keywords. You can build a link, but you should know your priority landing pages. You need to optimize content, but it’s senseless if the page is closed from indexation.
With SE Ranking, you can consolidate all processes into a single environment. It creates a great synergy that helps you grow faster.
Accurate data
SEO is based on a lot of inbox data, so this data needs to be accurate. Using SE Ranking, you’ll never have issues with this, as all its data is 100% accurate, from SERPs and linked domains to indexed pages and used anchor texts.
Keeping pace with the search engines
Search engines are constantly evolving. With it, SERPs are changing all the time. SE Ranking spiders crawl SERPs and websites daily to provide up-to-date data to track the changes and their reasoning. The tool makes it possible to connect GA and GSC to see the real data in one place.
Automated and custom SEO reports
As SEO is a complex process, focusing on one thing makes it easy to forget another important part of optimization. Instead of trying to put a lot of data in spreadsheets and manually update them, use SE Ranking’s reporting feature to make this process faster and easier. With SE Ranking automated and custom reports, you can closely monitor all important parts of the website to fix any issues quickly.
Is SEO Software Required for SEO Success?
Of course, it’s not mandatory. But, as in any other competition, you need to have the best tools to be the leader. Imagine a racer with a slow car – he can compete, but he will never be the winner.
Being first is the whole point of SEO. To get to the 1st position, you surely need software of some kind. It can vary from MS Excel to online SEO software like SE Ranking.
The benefits you get from specialized tools improve your SEO and save you a lot of time, which is the most valuable resource not only for marketing but for business in general. So the answer is yes, you absolutely should use SEO software to reach success in organic search. The tools you decide to use are up to you, of course. This article is a showcase of one of those tools – SE Ranking. Try its free demo account to see if it suits your needs.
