Serpstat Review: The Best Semrush Alternative on a Budget

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Last Updated on November 13, 2020 by Content Team

I managed to bag Serpstat with an apsummo offer back in 2015 – it was an unsane deal.

Since then, I have found myself using Serpstat more and more, even though I have Semrush and Ahrefs accounts.

Why I love Serpstat

You can still pick up Serpstat for $45/mth on the Lite package if you pay yearly. That’s more than half the price of Semrush and makes a great cheap alternative if you are on a budget.  This price includes 15,000 keywords, 6,000 export rows, 10 projects and even use of their API.

To try Serpstat for free, simply click the link below and follow the sign up at the bottom of the page. Just avoid the pricing page as they don’t offer the free trial here.

serpstat free trial

For this review, I look at the thewirecutter.com website and compare Serpstats data with Semrush and Afrefs. For anyone who does affiliate marketing, you’ll know Wirecutter is a beast.

Competitor Keyword Research with Serpstat

Competitor keyword analysis is the main reason I use most tools. I spend most of my time researching profitable keywords for my portfolio of websites.  I want low competition keywords with decent search volume and a good potential click through ratio (CTR)  from the SERPs.

Serpstat found over 5 million keywords ranking

Looking at Wirecutter, Serpstat gaves me the ranking positions and data on 5,168,479 keywords – that’s huge. Semrush only gave me 2.6 million keywords and Ahrefs 3.5 million.  I never previously compared the data between the tools until I wrote this review and I’m surprised myself.

Identifying New Keywords for your existing content

Once you set up a project in Serpstat, sit back and let the software pull out all your keywords ranking in Google and their positions. I GUARANTEE you will find good buyer intent keywords that your content is ranking for, but never optimized the post for.  Tweak the article for those terms and you can x10 the traffic + revenue.

Have a look at this page from Wirecutter: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wireless-carrier/

Serpstat gives me 59,768 keywords this article is ranking in Google.com. And that’s just in the USA, they also have data from a whole host of other countries.

Serpstat Review: The Best Semrush Alternative on a Budget 1

The big negative in Serpstat’s data is the Keyword Difficulty measurement. You need to totally ignore this lol!  But, you also need to ignore Semrush’s keyword difficulty score – they are nonsense. They will tell you a keyword is low KD (under 60), with say 1000 monthly searches – affiliates and bloggers all rush in and compete on the term and it becomes a joke.  I have terms I targeted 3 years ago on my affiliate sites as they were ‘low KD’ and the score is still the same today …yet hundreds of new pages have started targeting them over this time period.

Anyway, I went on a rant.  Back to finding keyword opportunities with Serpstat.  The next stage is to look for keyword gaps – you are looking for keywords your article does not rank for but your competitor’s pages do.

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Comparing the Wirecutter article with Tomsguide and Cnets articles, shows a few Wirecutter are not targeting.  With all these keyword gap tools, you have to bear in mind they are not 100% accurate. You may find keywords you are not ranking for according to tools, but you know for a fact you are and you track them in your rank tracker!

Serpstat quickly shows all your potential new keywords to target in the ‘missing tab’. For example, it says ‘wireless service providers’ is missing from the article with a monthly search volume of 1600.  I double checked the page and this exact match keywords was not found.

Quick tip: How I checked the page for the KW – I use the Chrome extension Highlight This to quickly shows all  the keywords on a page that you ask the tool highlight.

Serpstat Rank Tracker

Serpstat also lets you rank track your keywords and they give you a huge amount – 5000 keywords! And that’s just on the Lite package.

If you compare this with a stand-alone rank tracker like Accuranker, they charge $99/mth for 1000 keywords.

The Serpstat rank tracker lets you track your keywords daily, weekly or monthly and by time zone. You can rank track in Google and Yandex, but Bing is currently not available – who uses Bing anyway 🙂

When setting up the tracking for Google you can select Mobile or Desktop, along with organic V PPC results.  Serpstat also lets you track your competitor’s keywords, without eating into your limits like most trackers.

Complete Guide to Serpstat — Part 6: Rank Tracking

Serpstat Backlink Analysis

As a freelance link builder, I love looking at backlink profiles – Serpstat is a great tool for this. Looking at the Wirecutters link profile in Serpstat, it gave me 17.39K linking domain with a total of 499.9K backlinks.

serpstat backlinh analysis

Ahrefs is the market leader in backlink data and they have only found about 5% more linking domains. Do you really need to find every domain they have? Serpstat will likely pick up the the strongest links anyway, the 5% will likely be the spammy scraper type links.

Ahrefs backlink data on wirecutter

Like other link analysis tools, Serpstat breaks the link profile into nofollow/dofollow and subnets so you can quickly spot networks.

Serpstat PPC Spy

We love Ad spy tools and have previously reviewed the best Facebook and Native Ad Spy tools.  Serpstat has its own built in PPC spy, which has huge amounts of data. I just looked at Capterra, who do software comparisons, as I know they are big ppc spenders.

Example of Serpstat PPC spy

Serpstat gaves me 34.6K ads along with all the keywords they are bidding on with the monthly search volume, CPC and competition.

Serpstat Audit Tool

The Serstatstat audit tool is great for finding potential onsite technical problems.

serpstat audit tool test on wirecutter websites

The tool pulled up 48 high priority problems on the Wirecutter. Most of these were old pages from 2012, returning 404 errors, probably from broken 301 redirects or some kind of conflict.

The medium priority issues were mainly related to titles tags being too long, meta descriptions being too short and a few duplicate titles.  Easy quick wins to fix.

All the low priority issues were to do with schema markup, but Serpstat did not state the problem.  I ran a few of the urls through Google’s structured data testing tool and they seemed fine.

A few more problems Serpstat found:

  • 18 images on pages broken and not loading correctly
  • 135 images too large. Serpstat counts any image over 100kb as too large – this is a really handy audit section for improving your page speeds. I found a couple on one of my sites nearly 1MB, probably caused by one of my writers (or my lack of SOPs in the early days).
  • 89 pages with ‘noindex’ tags on, mainly credit card pages like this one.  You can see how big sites managing their crawl budgets with this – are they noindexing categories for example.  You can also find any internal links that may have been ‘nofollowed’ by accident.

The Serpstat API

Serpstat lets you use their API even on the lite package, unlike most other tools.  Here’s a quick overview of how to get started with it.

How to start using Serpstat API and why use it?

serpstat free trial