Getting Started with SEOTesting.com

Thank you so much for trying out SEOTesting.com.

This post will give you a quick intro to all the areas of the tool to get you up to speed quickly.

If you have any questions please use the chat/message widget in the bottom right of your screen or drop an email to hello@seotesting.com.

Launchpad and Site Dashboards

Upon registering and adding your first site to SEOTesting, or logging back in again, you’ll see the Launchpad.

This gives you an overview of the clicks per day for each of the sites you added to SEOTesting.

You'll also see Google algoritm updates marked on the graphs. The default display setting for these algorithm annotations can be changed within each websites configuration settings.

On the Launchpad, if you click on the site name above the Clicks Per Day graph you’ll be taken to the Dashboard for that site. Here you’ll see clicks, impressions, average position and click through rate for the site.

You'll also notice when you click into a site the left hand navigation expands so you can view tests, reports and other functionality specific to that site.

How to run SEO tests and record changes you've made to your site

When you've made a change to your website you have 3 different options on how to mark the change, and track the results:

1. Setup an SEO test
2. Run an SEO split test
3. Record site, page or query changes with annotations

SEO tests and annotations are recorded in the site's changelog - which can be used for reporting (and remembering) what has been changed over the history of the site.

Reports

We spend a lot of time in the Reports section of SEOTesting when working on a site. On a day to day basis we are looking for new content and click through rate opportunities. On a longer term basis, for example once a quarter, we use a number of the reports as part of an SEO content audit across the site.

Whenever you see a query or a url in the reports you can click on them to see more details.

Winners and losers

See improvements and drops in the number of clicks and impressions generated by individual search queries and web pages over the last 7 days.

Find click through rate opportunities

Low click-through rates By Query/Page - How to find click through rate optimization opportunities.

Top Queries Missing from Titles and Meta Descriptions - Improve your click through rates by making sure a page's top query it in it's title and meta description.

How to get new content ideas and improve existing content

The content reports in SEOTesting are designed to highlight new content ideas and ways to expand existing content.

By using the data from Google Search Console, SEOTesting suggests queries your site already ranks for but you may not have considered yet. Some of these can be really valuable in terms of new traffic sources.

Here are the content based reports SEOTesting has and what you can use them for:

New Keywords - see queries your website has only just started to rank for. Plenty of new content ideas here.

Search Intent Keywords - find queries your site ranks for based on informational, transactional, commercial and your custom search intent.

Long tail keywords - find less competitive queries that your site is already ranking for to target.

Queries with a low click through rate - review these queries and your content targeting them to see whether it matches the user's search intent.

Questions to answer - this report pulls out question type queries your site/pages already rank for. Use them as new sections in existing content or for totally new articles.

Striking distance keywords - your site ranks just off page 1 for these queries. Add some internal links and on-page SEO to try and break into the top 10.

Find low quality content - find out which of your pages aren't ranking in Google and could be of low-quality. Considering improving or deleting them.

All data

Review all the data collected on each of your site's queries and urls.

Keyword cannibalization

Is your site suffering from keyword cannibalization? Find out if multiple pages are competing for the same keyword. This can harm each page's ranking in search results.

How to add users

You can add users to SEOTesting by visiting the Account section which you can find on the left hand navigation menu.

How to add sites

On the main launchpad at the top there’s a link to ‘Add a new site’.

When adding further sites, you can filter the data that comes back in the following ways:

Country - this allows you to add a site to SEOTesting so the reports and other functionality filter the results to searches from that country. Really useful if your website only sells to a specific country.

Dimension - this allows you to add a site where the data and reports filter by a query or url.

If you want to see a dashboard and reports on a subsection of a site, for example the blog, you could create a dimension filter such as this:

If you want to remove brand searches from the dashboard and reports, for example for a website such as Autotrader, you could create a dimension filter such as this:

Brand searches for the website Autotrader could include:

Autotrader
Auto trader
Auto-trader

Unfortunately the Search Console query filter is relatively simple (ie no regex’s) so if you want to do a brand filter you need to consider which text is likely to be used in each brand variation.

In our example above this is why we created a filter to exclude (notContains) the string ‘trader’. This would remove all the brand variations, but is specific enough not to filter out non-brand queries.