Google Search Console vs. SEOTesting.com

There are lots of tools and platforms that help us rank well on search engines. While that is helpful, we do need to know how those efforts paid off. This is where Google Search Console comes in. It is vital for every business or website trying to rank well on search engines to have Google Search Console so that they can track their performance and make necessary adjustments.

Incentivized

SEOTesting.com is great in monitoring the results of implemented SEO optimisations. SEOTesting.com also has extensive content analysis reports that make it really easy to find long hanging fruits for content optimisation. However, I would not recommend SEOTesting.com for rank tracking and it has no tools for technical SEO. But if you pair SEOTesting.com with some other SEO tools of your preference, you get a really valuable toolset with decent pricing.

• You can also submit your sitemap directly to Google and get it crawled.
• You can also index and crawl you updated and new webpages.
• It also displays errors that are preventing your site pages to get indexed in Google.
• You get a list of all the keywords for which your site is ranking.
• You can track its position, CTR and impressions.

Incentivized

• Visualization of data
• Tracking changes to website over time
• Provides p-values for change impacts, helping you to sort out whether your "result" is just random noise

• It can be a little difficult to navigate
• More training resources would be an asset. A beginner is given the power to completely destroy a sites search results at the push of a button. Likewise it is a powerful tool to enhance search results also.
• An option to take care of multiple versions of the same site simultaneously would be helpful. An option to use the same validation script across all versions and administer them simultaneously would be a time save (i.e. non-www, www, http://, and https:// versions of the same site).

Incentivized

• SEOTesting.com is NOT all-in-one SEO tool. But what it does, it does really well.
• Rank Tracking requires to fill landing page per keyword. That doesn't make sense as the desired landing page is not always the best ranking landing page for each keyword.
• Dashboards timelines should have some options to select only the desired timeframe. Then it would be sometimes easier to look at only the last two months for example.

It's easy to use, but some features are lacking a clear explanation. Somethings don't always match up. For example, the Core Web Vitals often doesn't match what you would see in the Chrome Lighthouse report or the Google Page Speed Insights tool. The tool itself is a little too basic and has to be used alongside other SEO tools and other Google properties such as Analytics

Incentivized

The account person is quick to respond, though issues reported required support of other teams with no SLA. The data is easily comprehensible and the platform is incredibly versatile. Sometimes scanning problems take weeks to diagnose and fix. The learning curve for SEOTesting.com is minimal

As with all Google software, your primary source of help is their forums, their knowledge base articles, or whatever tutorials you can find on the web. Often answers on their forums are not straightforward and may not address the actual issue you're experiencing. The KB articles are typically written like instruction manuals - for better or for worse. Tutorials on the web may vary, but the odds are good someone out there had the same questions as you and was kind enough to document their experience.

Incentivized

SEMRush is a supplementary tool we use to provide competitive analysis. While it does, or should, provide the same data that Search Console does, but I only fully trust Search Console when it comes to basic performance in Google for the sites we develop and own. SEMRush, and other products like it, does provide much more in-depth insights that can help drive business decisions, including site performance on other search engines, along putting organic and paid search performance in one spot. However, SEMRush costs money while Search Console is free.

Incentivized

SEOTesting.com is a very specific, focused too. It's not "better than" the other tools. It does something they don't do well: gets data from your SEO results out into an easily-read, easily-reported format so you can 1. learn from what's working and what's not 2. show your team what success & failure look like 3. demonstrate to your boss/client the short-run benefits of investing in SEO Search Console has all the data in it. In fact, SEOTesting.com gets its data from Search Console. But you are going to waste your time and your colleagues time if you try to monitor granular, week-by-week progress for different pages in Search Console. SEOTesting is awesome at that. Use Ahrefs and/or Semrush to get ideas on how to improve your website's content and tech SEO. Then make the changes. Then use SEOTesting.com to find out if it worked!

• Given that this is a free tool, the return on investment has been particularly high - we've identified and addressed a few site issues that could have meant a reduction in search traffic.
• Our organic search traffic has been on the rise in part due to the insights gained from the search traffic analytics provided within the console.

Incentivized

• I get more results
• I get results faster
• I get data to present the results to client