If you’ve read some of my other posts, you’ll know that I am a big supporter of SE Ranking a more affordable alternative to the industry leaders such as Ahrefs and SEMRush – you can check out my review here.
After having a play around with the free trial and deciding that SE Ranking is the right choice for you, the next decision to make is which package to buy.
SE Ranking provides a fair bit of customisation to their plans so that you can find the option that fits your own specific needs best. In this post, I will explain which package I use, the reason that I chose it and some of the things to consider when selecting your own package.
I Use the Plus 1000 Plan with Weekly Updates
The Plus 1000 plan allows me track the rank of 1000 keywords across an unlimited number of websites. I received a 40% discount by opting for weekly updates rather than daily. I can audit 150,000 pages, monitor 25,000 backlinks, error check 450 pages and check the backlinks of 100 domains per day. I pay annually, which gives me an additional 20% discount (with all these discounts it is like having an SE Ranking coupon code!)
As well as increased limits, the Plus Plan also has a few extra features that the Optimum Plan does not. These include monitoring pages for changes, the ability to request the database to be expanded with keywords that are appropriate to you and white label reporting.
How to Choose Your SE Ranking Price Plan
When you visit the SE Ranking Pricing Plan page, there are a number of options that can be configured to create a balance between features, limits and price that is right for you.
Essentially, you have 4 choices to make:
- The level of the package (optimum, plus or enterprise)
- How many keywords you want to track (between 250 and 20,000)
- How often you want the rank of your keywords tracked (daily, every 3 days or weekly)
- The subscription length (pay yearly or monthly)
The choices you make will determine what you can do with SE Ranking and how much it will cost you. Let’s take a look at each of them in turn…
Optimum, Plus or Enterprise
The first choice you should make on the pricing page is whether you want the optimum pro or enterprise package.
Optimum
This is ideal if you just have up to 10 website and no more than 750 keywords that you need rank-checking. Backlinks can be checked for 50 domains per day and up to 60,000 pages can be audited. Features such as white label reporting, page change monitoring and database expansion* are not included but all the important features are available.
This package would be suitable for small businesses and website owners that are performing their own SEO.
Cost: £10.80 – £41 per month
*Database expansion provides the opportunity to request that SE Ranking updates its databases with keywords that are important to you and your business.
Plus
If you have more than 10 websites, need to monitor the rank of more than 750 keywords or require additional features such as white label reporting, then the Plus account is what you need. There are no limits on how many websites you can add as projects and up to 1750 keywords can be tracked. This package also increases the number of pages you can audit and backlinks per domain that you can check.
This package is ideal for small SEO agencies or individuals that are responsible for a large number of websites.
I chose the Plus plan because I needed to track less than 1000 keywords and do regular backlink checks. I also wanted the facility to be able to submit keywords to be added to the database for my niche websites.
Cost: £25.20 – £89 per month
Enterprise
Finally, the Enterprise package increases limits further and provides access to the SE Ranking API. Frankly, if you are at this level of professional SEO, you should seriously be considering moving to Ahrefs or SEMRush (or, ideally, both) because these are the market leaders and have better data and more features.
Cost: £53 – £535 per month
Number of keywords to track
Part of the decision when choosing a package would have been how many keywords you need to track. This varies between packages as shown below:
- Optimum: 250, 500 or 750
- Plus: 1000 or 1750
- Enterprise: 2500, 5000, 10000, 15000 or 20000
The less keywords you need to track, the bigger discount you will get. Therefore, it is worth spending a bit of time making a rough estimate of the number of keywords you will be using in the rank tracker (across all your websites).
When you have arrived at a figure, I would suggest adding 25% to it to give you a bit of ‘wiggle-room’ and then choosing the lowest option that provides this.
I calculated that I would want to track about 700 keywords, which fell in the ‘1000’ option of the ‘optimum’ plan, even after adding 25%.
How often keywords are rank-tracked
The next question is to decide how often you want SE Ranking to track the rank of your keywords. There are options for every day, every 3 days or every week.
To determine which option to choose, I would suggest thinking about how often you will be working on them. It is also a matter of personal preference. If you need to know your site’s ranking each and every day, go for the daily option – however this will cost more. Dropping it to 3 days will reduce the cost by 20% and dropping to weekly checks will reduce the cost by 40%.
I opted to go for weekly checks because I am not the sort of person to check my website’s rankings on a daily basis. I also have a lot of websites, which I work on sporadically, flitting between projects depending on my mood, so if I make a change to one of them, I probably won’t get back to it until a week or more later.
Subscription Length
Your final choice is how often you want to pay for your subscription.
The annual subscription offers a full 20% discount so this is the cheapest option, however funds (or lack thereof) may dictate how frequently you pay. You may also want to try the monthly subscription first to ascertain how useful SE Ranking to you is before switching to an annual plan at a later date.
I opted to pay yearly because I was confident that the software would create value for me and that I would use it, following my own evaluation with the 14-day trial.
Summary
Hopefully, this article has helped you decide exactly which subscription package you should purchase.