SEO Testing Review

SEOtesting.com is a tool built by Nick Swan in the UK, and is one of the best seo tools on the market.

SEO testing consists of experiments to find out how to improve your marketing strategies.

“As SEOs, it is our duty to test, adjust and repeat this process until we get an outcome that satisfies us”

By including testing in your comprehensive SEO plan, you can avoid unfortunate surprises, refine strategy, and scale faster.

The lack of SEO testing in your organic campaigns could be costing you a hefty amount of time and money.

SEOTesting.com helps you easily track the changes you make to pages, to see if they have an effect on Google rankings and clicks.

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The SEOTesting tool is designed to automate a lot of the SEO jobs with Google Search Console data.

Why Is SEO Testing Important?

What gets measured gets done!

Testing is an integral step to incorporate into your workflow when attacking new marketing projects and search engine optimisation tasks.

“Testing minimizes unpleasant surprises, helps you scale faster, refines strategy, and accelerates the approval process.”

It can be executed in a variety of ways and in this SEOTesting Review, we will show you all the features you can experiment with to run your tests.

The testing updates can help match current expectations while fixing potential errors on your website presented within a cleanly designed dashboard.

SEO testing is necessary to win high rankings and stimulate traffic.

The SEOTesting tool gives you exactly what you need to hone your strategy and create lucrative progress.

It debunks SEO myths, it shows you real-life examples of what is working and gives you power in knowing how the algorithm performs to certain updates.

Testing Best Practices

When executing your SEO tests, you want to make sure you are following SEO testing best practices in order to ensure reliability.

These best practices allow us to get directional data about our test results that we can act on with confidence.

A few to keep in mind are:

  • Forming a clear hypothesis
  • Segmenting your test groups in control and experimental groups
  • Sticking to your experiment duration
  • Making your tests repeated and reliable

The aim should be to make data-driven decisions and test them before any implementation is completed.

What is SEOTesting.Com?

SEO Testing is a product built on the back of those manually put together spreadsheets.

“No doubt we have all spent countless hours staring at the numbers in Google Search Console and Analytics – creating our own spreadsheets to track things and work out what changes to make to our sites” Nick Swan

Instead of doing all the number crunching and graph drawing manually – SEO Testing will do it automatically for you. Saving you time and giving you great insights on how to make your website better and get more organic search traffic from Google.

SEOTesting.com Features

Nick is consistently updating and creating new features from within the SEO Testing Suite.

Check out many of the amazing features seotesting.com has to offer:

Search Console Data Downloader

Google Search Console only allows you to download and export up to 1000 rows from your query data.

But as SEO Testing uses the GSC API this allows you to download up to 25,000 rows.

Google Search Console is the best source for queries your site is ranking and getting clicks for.

Google Search Console Data Downloader

Use this free tool to export to CSV format the maximum you are allowed to see via the API.

Thin Content Report

A huge proportion of websites online are suffering from panda penalties.

Thin content and low-quality pages can be pulling your site back from ranking big keywords.

SEOTesting.com allows you to test 1,000s of URLs in a sitemap.xml to uncover thin and low-quality content.

The thin content report can be the guide given to your content manager to carry out content pruning to your domain.

Remove Low Quality Content with Content Pruning
Remove Low Quality Content with Content Pruning

Regularly carrying out content audits to your website is very important in March 2024.

For more information on what to do with low-quality content check out the thin content guide.

Keyword Cannibalisation

Have you ever suffered from your rankings jumping around in the SERP results?

If that is the case it’s a good chance to be keyword cannibalisation.

An SEO Testing feature finds internal conflicts with keyword cannibalisation issues across your site where pages fight for the same ranking.

keyword-cannibalization

The keyword cannibalisation report takes the top 20% of queries that your site appears for in Google, and checks whether each keyword has multiple pages ranking.

If a query has 2 or more pages from your site being displayed in the search results this could indicate 2 or more of your pages are competing against each other. Fixing this issue could really improve your ranking for that particular keyword.

Keyword cannibalisation could be harming your efforts to rank specific keywords. Check out the SEO Testing guide on how to identify keyword cannibalization issues.

Striking Distance Keywords Report

The easiest way to driving more clicks from Google is working on your site’s striking distance keywords.

The striking distance keywords report shows high-value keywords just on page 2 or 3.

Optimising these queries is a great way to get an increase in clicks from a minimal time investment.

Check out the video on how to check your striking distance keywords:

By getting your target keywords on page 1 will get you a nice CTR improvement.

For more information check out the guide on how to identify striking distance keywords.

Content Ideas Report

The content ideas feature is amazing to find keywords at present you are not specifically targeting for at present but showing some impressions for.

As Google is already showing your domain for those queries unintentionally if you were to create a new piece of content for this it could meet the intent much better and start to rank on page one.

Check out the video on how to run the content ideas report of seotesting:

The query data Google Search Console/google Analytics has about your site is gold. Make sure you are making the most of it with our pre-configured reports to help you create, improve, add, and sometimes remove, the content on your site.

Content Decay Report

Content decay is a silent killer for your organic rankings and continuous decline traffic over time.

Content Decay happens because over time content loses its relevance and freshness of content is important to maintain high rankings.

SEO Testing identifies all web pages suffering from content decay and allows editors the chance to edit and improve old content to prevent content rot.

Check out the importance of content decay audits for your SEO strategies in March 2024.

Accidental Keyword Analysis

Accidental keywords are queries your site appears for in Google’s search results but you are not necessarily targeting, and are useful to find when doing keyword research.

Check out the guide to accidental keywords where it can assist your search engine optimization strategies for content expansion ideas.

If showing impressions for search queries you have not directly targeted on the page or it meets different serp intent then you can create new content to improve these rankings.

The feature in seotesting.com reports new keywords your site has just started ranking for over the past completed week.

Being alerted by these new search queries can allow you to progressively optimise your onpage to expand the volume of keywords you rank for. This is great feature of this keyword research tool.

new keywords on seo testing

As you review these new keyword ideas, you can click on the keyword itself to take you to the query details page for that particular keyword.

Here you can see the page that has been ranking for the keyword for the past week and make the decision to potentially include the keyword in the existing article in a new section, or create a completely new and separate article if different intent – often internal linking between the two.

For more information check out the new keyword idea feature on SEO testing.

Expanding Content with Questions Report

Find out which questions people are searching, that your site appears in Google for. This includes ‘People also ask suggestions’.

Often during keyword research, we focus on one or two-word phrases, but more and more people are typing specific questions into Google.

Google and more importantly users love to see these questions answered.

So which questions is your site appearing for?

Check out the video to show you all the questions your site appears in Google for.

A lot of these you might rank for by accident. You can find new questions to answer on your existing pages or find totally new content ideas. If you do accidentally rank for them – you can specifically target them and have a good chance of ranking well.

Keyword Usage

The keyword usage feature uses the most valuable data – queries, impressions, and clicks from Google Search Console.

It reads and analyses your page to provide you with information about the usage of keywords inside your content.

Allowing you to update your content better and faster than ever before!

In SEO you need to systematically upgrade your content according to what types of search queries generate impressions and clicks.

Showing for impressions for keywords and having this mentioned zero times on the page is an easy solution to upgrading your content because the distance between the keywords is an important ranking factor.

The relative placement of keywords in prominent areas of a Web page, including the distance between keywords in the visible text. Keyword Proximity refers to the distance between two words or phrases, or how close keywords are to each other within a body of text.

The keyword usage feature allows you to check pages keywords sorted by most impressions to see whether you have the specific phrase mentioned at all on the page.

If the keyword usage is zero then adding this will improve the keyword proximity which is the distance between keywords, or more importantly, how close together the keywords are within a section of text.

This video shows the step by step guide on how to find missing phrases you are ranking for using the SEO Testing Tool:

Being able to Identify Missing Keywords To Add Within Your Content is a great content expansion SEO technique.

New Keywords Report

As you grow your domain and Google improves the relationships between topics and keywords, your website will continue to rank for new keywords each day.

SEO Testing can alert you of all new keywords to allow you to regularly review these keywords that will help you find new topics and sub-topics that you can create content around.

When a full week of new data is available from Google Search Console you will get an email with the new keywords report.

Reviewing the new keywords will show up many that are already associated with current pages – but you’ll also find some keywords that make sense to address in new content.

Long Tail Keywords Report

Long-tail keywords are lower volume queries that make up for the majority of searches within the search engines.

Longer tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search.

As these phrases are more intent focussed and less competitive you really need to be optimising for all long tail keyphrases connected to your niche.

Check out how to identify the long tail keyword content ideas using SEO Testing Tool:

Do not underestimate the power for optimising with long tails in mind because many queries might show zero search volume in 3rd party tools like semrush or ahrefs. When actually they receive thousands of monthly searches.

Organic Click Through Rate [CTR]

The easiest way to drive more clicks to your website is to improve the click-through rate for existing queries your site appears in the search results for.

GSC API can report pages with the ‘Low CTR By Query’ ratio.

If you filter all your search queries with under 1% CTR, then order the results displayed by impressions it will present you with the queries that get the most impressions and therefore the biggest return if you can raise the CTR by one or two percentage points.

Another great way to look at improving your organic click-through rate percentages is running a report to check the top queries missing from titles and meta descriptions.

In the report that is output, it then shows a warning icon if the top query in terms of impressions is not included in the page title or meta description.

Simply by including this top query in your page title and meta description could improve both position and appearance.

Check out the guide on improving your websites organic CTR percentages and the Serpstat CTR Case Study.

Rank Tracker

Keeping track on your keyword rankings is included within this SEO software suite.

As you add new pages look to track new keywords to see how your website responds to the topic of the keyword.

Regularly checking your biggest winners and losers is good practice with rank trackers so you can find potential problems on your website.

Recently we had a couple of amazing examples of why rank tracking can be essential for your search engine optimisation efforts.

  1. We found a set of keywords drop off the rank tracking completely – consistently ranking on the first page for many of these keywords we knew something was wrong or we had been hit by Google penalty. After inspecting deeper we realised our new technical SEO had actually blocked the bots from crawling a section of our website which is a major issue. But as the rank trackers picked this up we were quickly able to isolate the problem and fix.
  2. Our biggest page dropped off page one rankings – dropping off the 1st page of Google can see a significant drop in traffic and revenue. Recently a big keyphrase of ours dropped onto page two and the famous saying is “you can hide a dead body on page 2 of google because no one looks there”. So what caused this drop in rankings? As we investigated we found two of our best backlinks pointing to that specific page had been deleted. So we reached out to the blog owners to investigate why this had happened and luckily it was a mistake from the guest post owner who added these back in and thankfully the results returned.
  3. Set of keywords all ranking #1 within a topic – the rank trackers showed a sub-topic section of our site all ranked in position one for many terms. As we analysed this in-depth we realised because of the relevance in our backlinks and expert roundups Google seen us as the most authoritative source for information. I like to call this bypassing authority wall and when this happens any articles you write about on this topic generally gets put into results 1-3 in the search engines. We created a full content roadmap of the topic cluster and realised we were not covering 7 pages with different SERP intent so added these and it skyrocketed out traffic stats.

How To Set Up Tests

Setting up the tests are made very easy in seotesting dashboard.

SEOTesting have an article on how to set up and run new SEO tests within their tool.

Check out the video on how to set up SEO tests:

For more information check out the complete guide to SEO experiments.

Split Tests

AB split testing in SEO is crucial to debunk myths or test ideas you think could improve your ranking, and is a great feature to have on any SEO tool.

At SEOTesting.com you can easily set up a control group and test group of URLs so you can SEO split test the results over the same time period.

To run an SEO split test you take a number of pages that are of the same type and split them into two groups – a control group and a test group. Each of these pages should be getting impressions and clicks from Google’s organic search listings.

Check out the video on how to set up AB split testing:

For more information check out the guide on how to run SEO split tests.

Pricing Plans

Costs to maintain and run the tool are not too expensive because the GSC API is free to pull all the information from.

So as these features utilise the Google Search Console API for the data the pricing matrix is super competitive in price.

Check out the pricing plans below:

SEOTesting Pricing Plans

What Others Say

It is always good to ask other online entrepreneurs their thoughts on a tool and here was feedback:

  • “SEOTesting.com is an essential tool in our stack for analytical SEO. We now use it for routines such as testing meta changes until we achieve significant organic CTR improvements.”
  • “SEOTesting.com has become one of my go-to SEO tools because it does so much with all the valuable data hidden in Google Search Console. It’s the only thing that gives us the ability to use that data for keyword tracking, SEO tests, and quality testing.”
  • “As SEOs, we have a duty to test and implement strategies by data-driven results. SEOTesting makes the whole process of setting up various tests easy which help minimise any unpleasant surprises. And its nice to see those ranking boner graphs when tests go positive”
  • “SEOTesting.com has enabled us to back up our hypothesis with hard numbers to prove the outcome we forecasted had the desired effect.”
  • “SEOTesting.com has changed the way we approach client work. We save a ton of time tracking results and clients are happy as they can easily see results from our work.”

Summary

In the SEO industry, research, analysis, and testing are vital to any successful organic campaign.

When budgets are tight, but there is a need to continue generating demand, testing your tactics on a sample of content provides the utmost clarity in decision-making.

When budgets are generous, SEO testing helps ensure that no dollars go to waste and you scale as far as possible.

Nick Swan consistently seems to be improving the seotesting.com tool and is very active in SEO communities.

You can find Nick on Twitter and LinkedIn, or drop him an email on nick.swan@seotesting.com

With the pricing plans so competitive and the ability to carry out many SEO tests within the dashboard, it is a no brainer for marketers to use.

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Finally, a tool which allows you to split tests SEO myths and check the results easily side by side.