Originally designed as a keyword research tool, Serpstat is now an all-in-one SEO tool similar to Semrush or Ahrefs. The tool comes with a number of features, including:
In this Serpstat review, I’ll cover everything from functionality to Serpstat’s user interface; I’ll also compare Serpstat to its main competitors to give you a better idea of its strong and weak points. Let’s dive right in!
Here’s my reasoning behind each score I gave Serpstat:
Price: Serpstat’s pricing model is reasonably close to its main competitors, Semrush and Ahrefs. The Individual plan, in particular, is quite affordable and might be a good fit for small agencies or businesses looking to do their own SEO. The problem with Serpstat’s pricing model is that it’s too close to its main competitors to be seen as a budget option—and it doesn’t offer the accuracy and features I’d need to consider using it at such a similar price point.
Accuracy: The accuracy of Serpstat’s suite of tools varies pretty dramatically from feature to feature. The Keyword Research tool is particularly accurate, and its Site Audit tool is fantastic. The Organic Keyword tool, on the other hand, is pretty hit-and-miss. The lack of accuracy on some tools brought the score down to a 3.
Features: Serpstat is feature-dense and offers basically all the features you could want from an all-in-one SEO software suite. Some are more accurate than others, but they’re basically all useful. I can’t give it 5/5 because there’s nothing particularly remarkable about its suite of features—no killer app that brings it above and beyond—but for an all-in-one tool, it does the trick.
Serpstat is an all-in-one tool, so it’s good for all of the basic tasks you’ll want to run, from site audits to keyword research and competitor analysis. You’ll be able to run most SEO-related tasks right from Serpstat.
I particularly like its keyword research, too—it offers suggestions you won’t find in most other tools, and it even scrapes Google’s autocomplete. This is a useful all-in-one SEO tool that’s probably best for small agencies—you’ll learn more about that as we go through my full review.
Serpstat has a lot of features, a number of useful integrations, and an excellent price for its Individual subscription.
Conversely, the price points for the higher tiers are near what you would pay for Semrush or Ahrefs (though slightly lower). That would be fine, but Serpstat is less accurate than those tools, and its credit system is overly complex.
Serpstat has one of the best keyword research tools in the game. For the examples below, I’ve used the keyword “world news” for my hypothetical client, NPR. Here’s what “world news” brings me initially:
There’s a lot of information here, from keyword difficulty (and PPC difficulty) to SERP features that pop up for a given keyword. One of the most powerful functions is the filter, which gives you the option to sort by any combination of keyword difficulty, search volume, and more:
I recommend using this filter to find long-tail keywords that suit your needs; the ability to include or exclude certain terms, keyword difficulties, and SERP features from your searches is incredibly handy when you’re trying to find niche keywords to rank for.
Serpstat also has a related keywords report:
A tool that scrapes Google for search suggestions and search questions:
And tools that show the top pages and competitors for a keyword (though this starts to fall into the domain of Competitive Research):
There’s a lot of really interesting stuff to do with its keyword research tools, and I highly recommend playing around with the filters. If there’s one thing that leaves me wanting more, it’s that the scraped search suggestions and queries don’t come with data like keyword difficulty automatically—you have to go and look up those keywords manually.
In order to use the rank tracking tool, you need to set up your project (in this case, npr.org). Serpstat works on a credit-based system—your rankings update as often as you like, but each time you update a given keyword, you lose a credit. This means that if you’re tracking one keyword, updating every day, you’ll lose 7 credits in a week. Moreover, it takes credit for each type of keyword you want to track. Want to track desktop and mobile organic searches? That’s considered two “regions” (like Canada and the United States); each update for a given keyword will cost 2 credits.
Things get really weird, here. Some of the top recommended keywords to track for NPR on Google’s U.S. site are:
Not exactly what I would call high-quality keyword suggestions—that’s okay, though. We can use the keyword research tool to find better ones. For the purposes of this example, we’re going to use very generic keywords:
You can tag these keywords, add the URL that you’re expecting to rank for them, and more. Once you’ve got the data you want, you can click “Start Updating” to update your keywords and get a graph of their performance:
Personally, I prefer line graphs to bar graphs, as they show progress over time—but this still works perfectly well, and gives you a good idea how each page is ranking for the URL you care about. All in all, this is a pretty decent rank-tracking tool!
Serpstat has a pretty comprehensive backlink analysis tool. Here’s the report from the overview page of the tool:
There’s lots of information available at a glance here, from the average domain rank of the websites linking to our domain to the most common anchor texts used to link to our domain. We can click on the 30 malicious domains to disavow toxic backlinks, find nofollow backlinks to request dofollow status (if we want), and more.
You can also run a backlink analysis on your competitors. Using the backlink analysis tool, you can also do a sort of backlink gap search, finding all the domains that link to your competitor but not you. I’ll talk more about competitor backlink analysis in the competitive research section.
The Site Audit tool is pretty impressive—I got an audit for the thousands of pages on NPR in minutes, and it found a ton of issues that can be easily addressed. The main site audit report also gives you info on how many pages were canonicalized, how many pages are indexed, and more:
You’ll also get a list of issues, as well as their priority:
Moving into the “All issues” tab, you can sort by high and medium priority issues. Here’s a list of NPR’s highest priority issues:
Clicking on any issue expands to show you which pages have been affected by that issue.
The site audit is pretty intuitive—you can create custom reports, do individual page audits, and more. I’d like it if there was a more detailed graph of the issues, but that’s not the end of the world. This feature is detailed and gives you a lot of suggestions for both on-page and technical SEO fixes. I like Serpstat’s site audit report a lot.
Domain analysis gives you the highest-level overview of your project. The overview page gives you a ton of data, including your estimated search traffic, how many keywords you’re ranking for, how well your subdomains are performing, and more:
You’ll also get graphs that show visibility, traffic, and keyword trends:
As well as your top pages by keyword and main competitors:
Further in, you can take a look at which keywords you’re ranking for:
As you can see, these are the “organic keywords” I was talking about earlier—we’re ranking for exciting keywords like “NPR s”. Not exactly the most powerful tool—it’s riddled with somewhat useless keywords (that, admittedly, you can filter out). You’ll find this pattern recurs in other keyword analysis tools that Serpstat provides.
You can also do a domain-to-domain comparison and delve deep into competitive research—but I’ll talk more about those features in the next section.
There’s nothing mind-blowing here—you’ve probably seen similar domain summaries on other all-in-one SEO tools. Most of the data and graphs I’ve just shown can also be pulled for a specific URL if you want to track data for a single page instead of a domain.
I find all the information is well laid out; the ability to filter a domain by top pages is really handy if you want to find where your “money pages” are. The tree view is also convenient, giving you a breakdown of which pages rank for which keywords. I highly recommend using the filters here so you can hone in on which pages are getting the most searches, find which pages are ranking for which keywords, and more.
There is no “Competitive research” or “Competitor analysis” tab in Serpstat’s interface: these tools are found scattered about in places like the “Domain analysis” and “Keyword research” tab.
With a little elbow grease, you can find most of the data you need about your competitors—though the lack of a backlink gap tool makes it a little more laborious than other all-in-one SEO tools. Here, for example, are the top competitors for the keyword “World news”:
Then, there are the top competitors for the domain NPR:
You can use the top domain competitors “missing keywords” tab to find the keywords your competitors have that you lack—effectively acting as a “keyword gap” tool. You can also directly compare domain to domain:
As you can see, however, the keywords get…pretty strange. What’s worse, there’s no easy way to filter them—not the best tool I’ve ever used for competitor analysis.
When it comes to backlink comparisons—for large sites like NPR and CNN, you literally can’t. The tool won’t let you. For small sites, you’ll use the “Links intersect” tool. Here’s a comparison of two gaming sites you might have used in the late 2000s:
You can use this tool as a kind of backlink gap analysis, finding domains that are linking to your competitor’s site but not yours fairly quickly. The filters are helpful here—I recommend using them to find any domain that you have a low number of backlinks from.
There are a ton of additional tools available through Serpstat, including Local SEO, a content marketing suite, YouTube video transcription tools, and more. These tools cost either money or credits. To be honest, I haven’t played around very much with any of them because I have my own suite of tools for both local SEO and content creation.
While Serpstat is a pretty solid SEO tool, there are a few drawbacks that make me reluctant to recommend it over some of its competitors:
Semrush and Ahrefs are the two most popular all-in-one SEO tools on the market; they’re the best alternatives to Serpstat.
Both tools are more accurate than Serpstat, and their pricing is quite similar. You’ll also need to fuss around less with credits—as I’ve mentioned, I find Serpstat’s credit system fairly unintuitive.
I’d recommend either of these alternatives over Serpstat—you can read my Semrush review and my Ahrefs review for more info.
Here are Serpstat’s pricing plans. Different plans give you more or fewer credits, access to more tools, white-label reporting, and more:
The individual price point is particularly interesting—it’s a good option for a one-person agency with a small number of projects. You’ll still get most of the tools that make Serpstat worthwhile, and that’s the main reason I might recommend Serpstat.
Integrations may actually be Serpstat’s “killer app”—though it doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics (GA4) or Google Search Console (GSC), which is a real pain. Fortunately, it offers a number of very useful integrations, including:
These integrations can make Serpstat an even more effective all-in-one SEO tool, helping you visualize data, create reports, monitor KPIs, and more.
Serpstat’s customer support is quite good, especially at the Agency level—you can recommend features to the dev team and talk to support over Skype. There are also a lot of helpful resources, from onboarding calls to a video library teaching you all about Serpstat.
Customer support isn’t available 24/7, which is a drag, and message support for the Individual plan can take up to 18 hours. The support you receive is amazing, but the wait times and lack of 24/7 support can be a pain on occasion.
Serpstat is good, but not amazing. It’s an SEO tool I might recommend to smaller agencies who are okay with a low number of credits and a small number of projects—its Individual plan is hard to beat in terms of price. For larger agencies, I’d almost always recommend using Semrush or Ahrefs—I find those tools to be more accurate.
What do you think of Serpstat? Let me know in the comments—and until next time, keep moving up the ranks!
