How We Test
Most “best SEO tool” pages are written by people who never opened the software. They rank tools by how much commission each one pays. This page exists so you can check whether we’re doing that.
We buy the tools
Every tool on Benchgrove is bought with our own money, on a normal paid plan, like any other customer. We don’t use vendor-supplied review accounts, and we don’t accept a free upgrade in exchange for coverage.
This matters more than it sounds. Review accounts usually come with raised limits, and limits are exactly where SEO tools disappoint you. If we tested on an account with no row caps, we’d never notice the row caps.
We use them on real work
A tool gets tested on a live project — our own sites or client work — for at least a full billing cycle before it gets a score. Not a demo dataset. Real keywords, real competitors, real deadlines.
That’s also why reviews take a while to appear. We’d rather publish four reviews we stand behind than forty assembled from vendor feature lists.
What we score
Every tool is scored out of 10 on the same five criteria:
| Criterion | Weight | What we’re actually asking |
|---|---|---|
| Data quality | 30% | Is the data right? We check volumes and difficulty scores against keywords where we already know the answer, and against other tools. Big database, stale data is still bad data. |
| Does the core job | 25% | Does it do the one thing it exists for, well? A keyword tool that’s mediocre at keywords doesn’t get rescued by a nice dashboard. |
| Value for money | 20% | Not “is it cheap” — is it worth what it costs, at the tier a small business would actually buy. |
| Usability | 15% | Can you get an answer in under a minute, or do you need a training course? |
| Support and docs | 10% | When something breaks or a metric is unclear, can you find out why? |
What the scores mean
| Score | Verdict | In plain terms |
|---|---|---|
| 9.0 – 10 | Excellent | We use it ourselves and would buy it again. |
| 8.0 – 8.9 | Very good | Strong tool with a known weakness we’ll name. |
| 7.0 – 7.9 | Good | Does the job. Something better probably exists at the price. |
| 5.5 – 6.9 | Fair | Works, but only for a narrow case we’ll describe. |
| Below 5.5 | Weak | We would not spend our own money on this. |
We publish the low scores too. A review site where everything scores 9 is a catalogue, not a review site.
What we don’t do
- We don’t let vendors read reviews before publication, or approve changes.
- We don’t remove a review because a vendor asked, or because they ended an affiliate partnership.
- We don’t rank by commission. Several tools we rate highly pay us nothing at all, and we say so on the page.
- We don’t republish vendor screenshots as if they were our testing. Every screenshot is from our own account.
How we make money
Some links on this site are affiliate links, marked with an asterisk (*). If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That’s what pays for the tools we buy and the time spent testing them.
The commission never changes a score or a ranking. The full detail is on our affiliate disclosure page.
Keeping reviews honest over time
SEO tools change constantly — pricing especially. Every review shows the date it was last updated. We re-check pricing and re-test major feature changes, and if a tool gets worse, the score comes down.
If we’ve got something wrong, tell us. Vendors and readers both. Send the correction to hello@benchgrove.com with evidence and we’ll fix it and note the change on the page. That offer is the whole point of this page.