Monday 13 March 2017

Serpstat Review - The Best Website Analysis Tool

​If you are looking for a great site analysis tool but do not want to pay a fortune for it then Serpstat might be just what you are looking for. Serpstat is packed with all the features that you would ever want to analyse both competitor and your own websites.

In this Serpstat review we are going to:


Consider the features of this Serpstat Review
Go over the features and how they work
Explain how the various functions can help you achieve higher rankings for your websites.


​When you first use Serpstat you have to import your website and importantly you choose the region on where you want to get data from.

For example if I have a UK only based website I might choose Google UK to collect the data.

WEBSITE ANALYSIS - SERPSTAT REVIEW


Once you input your website you get an express analysis overview of your site There are several metrics that are displayed.

Firstly is the Visibility trend. This tells you how often your site is shown in the search engine due to the keywords that you may have in the top 20.  There is no minimum or maximum with visibility trend as it depends on the type of business and website as all have differing trends. So don't get too hung up on the visibility trend numbers.

However, it is useful to track the visibility of your site over a period of time and Serpstat provides a graphical format to analyse on a daily basis of required.

The next metric is SE Traffic. This shows you how much traffic your website is gaining in a month, just from organic search.

Then number of keywords that are being associated with your organic search and the final metric is for is you are using PPC.

The express analysis view also displays the Keyword Position Distribution this shows how many keywords you have in the various sub domains.

It then goes on to analyse your pages on your site and shows the top pages on your website and which are drawing the most traffic.

Another neat feature is the competitors analysis graphs. Here you can see who your competitors are and how they compete with you for various keywords.

One of the features I really like is the overview of backlinks that your site has and the various domain authorities that those backlinks have.

So all of this on the Express View but Serpatat is a lot more than that.

Let's start with competitors. Serpstat finds your common competitors based on the keywords that you are both trying to rank for. You can also add and delete physically competitors that you believe are not competitors of yours and add others that are.

A great feature of this comparison is that you can discover what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for that you do not have on your site. This means that you can add these also to your site to improve your rankings.

Next there is the level of relevant and thier visibility, this shows how similar or not you are with your competitors.

Another great tool is the Domain vs Domain function. Here you can compare two competitors and find the common keywords that they both share.

A similar function is URL vs URL. Here you can examine the exact pages and this helps you to find which keywords your competitor has for similar pages on their site. This gives you the ability to create similar pages on your site using the same keywords to try and rank against your competitors site.

Next is Positions. This shows the position of the domain your are analysing in relation to the keywords you are trying to rank for. Remember that these are updated every three weeks. Related to this analysis is the Tree View. Here you can find the structure of there website. This gives you access to look at what keywords are being used on specific pages of the website being analysed.

The Top Pages function of the software analyses and displays the top pages of the website being analysed and you can also discover what keywords are being used on each particular page by clicking the Organic Keywords next to the page.

Another way to use this  feature is to insert your target keywords say 'mountain bikes', it will then bring back the top pages in the particular search engine ( i.e.Google USA ) showing what keywords they are ranking for.

This function also shows you the popularity of these pages on social media as they display the FB shares, Linked In shares, Google shares and potential traffic you could get if you used these keywords.

Allied to this is feature of discovering missing keywords. If you take a specific page and analyse it under the Missing Keywords function you can discover the missing phrases and keywords that you may be missing on your site but are being used by your competitors on similar pages.

Where you see the word none next to the word or phrase this means that you do not have this at all on your site.

SERPSTAT REVIEW - KEYWORD RESEARCH

Lets now look at the Keyword research functions, that are really easy to use and give us some great information on what keywords we might want to go after and rank for.

Firstly, keyword selection shows us the most popular keywords related to the keywords you have selected in the search box above.
You also get the volume stats for each keyword for last year, last month. The approximate cost if you were to be using these keywords for PPC and the PPC number of results.

Secondly is the Cluster Research facility. This is a unique feature to Serpstat as it actually recommends what keywords you should use to connect with your target keyword. It shows something called Connection Strength  which is how many pages of your competitors that are actually using these keywords in connection with the target keyword you have specified.

The final function under the Keyword section is Search Suggestions.
This gives you all the long tail keywords and micro volume keywords connected with your target keyword and shows you which are the easiest to be ranked for and promoted.

There is another function Top By Keyword that shows you the top domains for your particular key words, the CPC and the level of competition for those particular keywords.

SERPSTAT REVIEW - CONTENT PRODUCTION

If you are looking for ideas for your content or what to develop on your site, then look no further that the Search Questions function on Serpstats.

Using this function you can find all the topics that people are interested in. These are the questions that people ask in relation to your target keyword.

 So taking our ' mountain bike' example we might come up with a whole range of topics that we could develop around our target keyword - the content you can provide from here would keep your writers busy for years!

Developing content from these topics give you direct access to traffic as these are the actual questions that people are searching for.

SERPSTAT REVIEW - PPC RESEARCH

For those of us that are using paid search functions such as Google Adwords then the PPC function will firstly analyse the domain and fins he keywords which are used in their promotions and advertising on Adwords. You get to see the list of keywords, their position, the approximate volume and CPC value and level of competition.

Secondly you can find who your competitors are in your PPC market place by using the Competitors function.

Something else mind-blowing is the Ad Examples. Serpstat actually pulls back examples of the current ads being run on PPC network. You can actually see who is using your target keywords and what specific keywords they are using in their campaigns.

SERPSTAT REVIEW - BACKLINK ANALYSIS

Here you insert the domain that you want to analyse and the Backlink analysis tool looks at two databases. Serpstats own database that is constantly growing and Majestic.

In the Backlinks overview you get the Referring Domains, the Referring Pages, Domain authority and page and trust ranks. You an also discover in detail the anchor text used in each of the backlinks.

You can qualify the links by using the page and trust rank scores.Where you find a zero then ignore that domain.

A great feature here is that you can discover the backlinks of your website competitors and approach them directly to see if they would link to your site as it may be similar to the target site. Something we will cover in a later post!

SITE AUDIT

This feature is probably the first one you should look at and use. Serpstat scans your website and your pages and returns a plethora of detailed information for you to work with on your website.

The scan will highlight all the errors on your website and will provide an actual link to the problem so you can click through  to your site and fix the problem. You will get a description of the problem and a recommendation on how you should go about fixing it.

The errors are ranked in priority so you will know which ones you need to fix first to give your site more of a boost in the search engines. As you fix the errors on your site the better the optimisation score will appear.

If you feel the errors are not that critical you can use the Custom Overview feature to downgrade the error. For example you may have created a page on your site but as yet it has no content. That is not a critical error and you can override that in the Custom Overview feature.

RANK TRACKER

Rank tracker is used to track your positions every day in any region in the world. You can track against your competitors. You can track in any region in the world and even down to local level. This may be good if you are working for a local business and you are tracking their progress against local competition.

The third step is to add your keywords. You can add these by using a CSV file or import them individually. These can also be grouped to ease analysis.

You can set up the data to be analysed everyday, every 3 days or every 7 days.

Using the Rank Tracker you can also find out the traffic share amongst your competitors for your tracked keywords.

Your tracking is archived under the History tab so you can see the progress of your efforts and trends over time.