Nick Swan built a business that explains the effects of SEO work

From a search data archiving tool to a business that explains the effects of SEO work

SEOTesting, created by Nick Swan, is a subscription service that measures and reports how search performance changed after a page was edited. It focuses on cutting down the data collection, comparison, and reporting work that SEO specialists and agencies repeat over and over. It started in 2016 as a small data archiving tool, and it is a case of a business changing direction around the features customers actually used.

Turning his own repetitive work into a product

Nick was a developer who had already run software businesses. He sold his stake in Lightning Tools, which built products for Microsoft SharePoint, and then ran a discount code affiliate site where he tested page titles and their search click-through rates.

The first problem he solved was how briefly search data stayed available. At the time, Google Search Console only let you look at the last three months of data, so Nick built a tool that pulled data through the API and stored it separately. That tool was SanityCheck, released in November 2016, and it became the starting point for SEOTesting.

He gathered the first users from SEO Facebook groups and Slack channels he took part in. When he released the free tool, people asked him to automate work they were doing by hand in Excel, and when he started charging, the price began at $10 per website per month.

When Google's expanded features forced a change of direction

In January 2018, Google announced that the new Search Console would provide 16 months of search performance data. Comparing with the same period a year earlier and analyzing long-term trends became possible, which reduced how much an outside tool that made up for the short data window stood out. For SanityCheck, a reason to buy that went beyond data archiving became important.

Meanwhile, as the features expanded, it started being compared with full-service SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, and revenue growth stalled. Nick looked at customer interviews and usage data and confirmed that the customers who were most satisfied valued the SEO testing features.

In April 2020, SanityCheck changed its name to SEOTesting and focused on testing and reporting results. According to Nick's own account, the new product reached, nine months after launching its paid plans, the monthly recurring revenue the earlier product had built up over two and a half years. The assessment was that the more specific name and description made it easier for customers to understand what the product was for and to buy it.

Connecting page changes with performance reporting

The basic flow is to connect your own Google Search Console and record the pages you edited and when you changed them. After changing a title or body text, you compare clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and so on before and after the change. There is no need to install a SEOTesting tracking code on the site, but the page edits themselves are done by the user through a content management system or development work.

For sites with many similar pages, it also supports SEO split tests that compare a group of changed pages with a control group left unchanged. For example, you change only the title format of some product pages and watch the search performance of the two groups over the same period. External conditions such as search demand and holidays also affect the metrics, though, so to separate the effect of the change from a simple increase rate you have to look at the observation period and the comparison conditions together.

The product is used not only for reporting after a test but also for deciding what to do next. It provides reports that find pages with a low click-through rate relative to impressions, content whose search performance is declining, and pages that compete with each other for the same keyword. You can also group multiple pages into content groups and track their performance, which reduces the burden on the person who would otherwise classify individual URLs by hand each time.

These features are especially useful for people who have to explain the results of their work to a client or a manager. Agencies can show clients the performance of the pages they edited, and in-house SEO specialists can use it as material to argue for the budget needed for more content production or development work. For these uses, SEOTesting puts reporting that tracks and shares test results forward as a core value of the product.

A customer case from Decathlon Ireland that SEOTesting published shows time saved as a reason to buy. The team explained that it previously classified URLs, exported the data to Google Sheets, and organized it by week, month, quarter, and year, and that after adopting the product it cut the time spent on data collection and similar work by an average of 3 to 6 hours per week. It is the customer's assessment that the product's value lay in reducing the time spent preparing repetitive analysis, beyond changes in search rankings.

From solo development to a cofounder and funding

As the business grew, the way it was run changed too. In September 2021, Phill Duffy joined as technical cofounder, and TinySeed's official 2022 selection list also lists Nick Swan and Phill Duffy together as founders. So the early solo development and the later cofounded team operation have to be kept apart.

SEOTesting then took part in TinySeed's spring 2022 program, and reports at the time said it raised $150,000 in funding. Nick valued not only the money but also the network where he could ask questions and exchange feedback with other founders, and he said the funds would be used for product development and marketing. Its official description still calls it an "independent bootstrapped product" today, but describing it as a business that never took outside funding would be inaccurate.

In a public interview in September 2022, Nick said monthly recurring revenue had passed $18,000 with roughly 330 customers. He explained that at the time he reinvested the money left over into marketing and generally ran at around break-even, so this figure should not be read as the founder's personal net profit.

The current team in the official description checked in September 2026 is three people: Nick Swan, developer Faith Summon, and Vicky Webster-Garvey, who handles customer experience and operations. Nick also takes part in feature development, customer support, and writing documentation, and he explains that the core team handles development, support, and educational content directly. The record of the cofounder joining in the past and the team composition described now have to be read as separate points in time.

At the same point in time, the base monthly price is $50 for one website, $125 for five, and $375 for twenty. There is no extra charge based on the number of users, and you can try it for 14 days without entering a credit card. Because it charges by the number of sites, an SEO specialist, a developer, and a content writer on one site can use it together without adding a seat cost.

Expanding the measurement work in a changed search landscape

Today it connects to Google Analytics 4 to use event data in time-based tests, and it also analyzes visits coming from AI services such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. These features test whether traffic from AI services changed before and after a page edit, or check which URLs receive those visits. The main thing it observes directly here is traffic that came into the site from AI services, so this should not be stretched to mean that it measures every mention or citation in AI answers.

The data archiving feature that was the center of the early product has a different role now too. The official support documentation does not define SEOTesting as a long-term archiving tool for Search Console, and it explains that most reports pull data through the API when they run and store only some data, such as test results. The problem the product solves has moved from securing old search history to the work of repeatedly comparing and using data.

What stands out about SEOTesting is the process of resetting the focus of the paid product through conversations with customers. After meeting users with the small feature of data archiving, it put the repetitive work of testing and performance reporting at the center and grew the product. This case shows a tool that started by filling in for a platform's missing feature growing into a service that becomes part of a customer's ongoing work.