SEO Tester Online: the Italian alternative to SEMrush e Ahrefs
I do love working from home, but I don’t dislike to visit co-working spaces from time to time.
The good thing about sharing an office in a co-working space is that you redefine the line between home life and work.
Over time you also get the chance to meet interesting people, which gives you the opportunity to potentially create new synergies and network.
For example, a few days ago I had the opportunity to meet Giancarlo Sciuto and part of the SEO Tester Online crew in a local co-working space, here in Catania.
I had never met Giancarlo before, but had recently watched his live interview with Marco Montemagno – an Italian digital entrepreneur who has amassed over 3 million followers on social media in recent years.
I really liked Giancarlo’s story and his desire to open a start up in his native Sicily, a beautiful – but complicated – territory.
Long story short, we grabbed a coffee together and he offered me a free trial of SEO Tester Online.
I tried it for two weeks – here is my feedback.
Tabella dei Contenuti
What Is SEO Tester Online and Why Should I Use It for My Business?
SEO Tester Online is an SEO suite – a collection of tools, useful for analysing and monitoring the organic visibility of a website.
Founded in 2016 in Catania, Italy, SEO Tester Online already has customers in over 45 countries around the world and its target audience is mainly made up of entrepreneurs, marketers and digital agencies.
What Are SEO Tester Online's Main Features?
SEO Tester Online’s main focus is on-page SEO, which is the practice of optimising elements within a web page, in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines.
Among the main features of SEO Tester Online are:
- SEO Checker – which allows the detailed analysis of a single web page, suggesting what needs to be fixed from an SEO point of view.
- SEO Spiders – which enables users to scan all pages of their website, identifying potential errors and warnings (duplicate content, missing meta tags, etc.).
- Keyword Rank Tracker – which gives users the ability to check the ranking of their websites for targeted keywords in Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.
- SERP Checker 360° – which provides users with the possibility to obtain a complete overview on the SERP results for a given keyword, combined with a series of useful metrics (from Page Authority to Domain Authority, passing through the number of backlinks, both DoFollow and NoFollow).
- Keyword Explorer – which identifies the best keywords based on search volume and difficulty, plus related searches.
- Keyword List Manager – which gives the possibility to collect and manage the desired keywords in an agile and intuitive way.
- SEO Editor – which supports the creation of SEO-friendly articles. After writing an article, you can review it on SEO Editor, which will provide suggestions regarding possible improvements to be made (e.g. suggesting more relevant keywords, etc.).
- Copy Metrics – by entering the URL of a web page, Copy Metrics provides suggestions on how that page could be optimised in terms of keywords and other crucial SEO signals.
- Lead Generation Tool – this feature allows you to build a form that you can easily embed on your website.
What Surprised Me About SEO Tester Online
I was pleasantly surprised by three aspects of SEO Tester Online:
SERP Checker 360°
Let’s start with SERP Checker 360°, a feature that can be really useful to understand how Google works.
If you enter a keyword, you are provided with a whole series of stats about the sites that rank in the SERP.
Stats that may be inspiring as to why they are ranking more or less well (e.g. perhaps the number of quality backlinks? Or just the site authority? Or perhaps they simply manage to answer that search query in the best possible way, more than any other site?).
Search Volume Data Very Close to Keyword Planner
The second aspect that struck me is the search volume data, which is very close to what Keyword Planner tool returns.
I ran a test, looking for the same keywords with both Keyword Planner and other pieces of SEO software. And I must say that the results of SEO Tester Online were closer to the estimates provided by Google.
Web crawlers
The last aspect is about SEO Tester Online’s web crawlers – as a test, I tried to scan a Help Center built with Zendesk. However, the only tools who completed the task were Screaming Frog and SEO Tester Online. The other tools’ bots, on the other hand, were prevented from crawling on that domain.
SEO Tester Online - What is missing
What is missing on SEO Tester Online are advanced features to support off-page SEO. A bit like SEMRush’s Backlink Gap or Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Tools that, in short, allow an SEO pro to evaluate the quality of a site’s backlinks and intercept the best opportunities for their strategy.
However, as Giancarlo mentioned on the occasion of our meeting, something is brewing: SEO Tester Online’s dev team is already working on designing features to support off-page SEO.
Finally, a nice-to-have: in an SEO dominated more and more by semantics and search intent, it would have been good to add keyword search intent. A bit like Intent Match provided by SEO Zoom or SEMrush Keyword Intent.
SEO Tester Online - Pricing
SEO Tester Online has a wide range of prices, aimed at meeting the needs of individual entrepreneurs, agencies and enterprises. Compared to other SEO suites, the prices of SEO Tester Online are quite competitive and range from just €18 per month (Personal – Lite plan) to €499 per month (Enterprise plan).
SEO Tester Online - Review Conclusion
SEO Tester online is an efficient and intuitive SEO suite. My feedback is highly positive. However, I sense that well-rounded SEO professionals may find the lack of advanced off-page features limiting. I’d recommend it to digital agencies that provide on-page and technical SEO services to their customers; and to entrepreneurs who start a business and are not yet able to hire a dedicated digital marketing team: SEO Tester Online will allow them to identify, analyse and organise keywords and plan strategies around them in a self-explanatory way.
June 2022 Update
At the beginning of June, I received a message from Giancarlo and his team, informing me about the launch of the Backlink Checker functionality.
I tried Backlink Checker for a week and it is exactly what SEO Tester Online was missing: a backlink checker tool, useful for carrying out an in-depth analysis of the backlinks received from a website.
The tool – which makes SEO Tester Online even more competitive – doesn’t just provide just list of backlinks, but also:
- Number of backlinks and anchor text
- The EL (External Links), which shows the number of backlink that the source URL owns
- The DR (Domain Rating), which shows the rank of the source domain
- The UR (URL Rating), which shows the rank of the source URL
- The AS (Authority Score), which shows the value of the analysed backlink
