seo testing guide
How do you prove the work you are doing to a website is offering a return on investment by getting better rankings and more clicks from Google?
One way is implementing a test-driven SEO process of:
Change -> Test -> Learn
This allows you to pinpoint what is working, what isn’t working, and how the business should invest in its SEO strategy going forward.
In this guide we will define what SEO testing is and describe valuable use cases. We’ll cover best practices, how to track results, and cover an extensive list of ideas for SEO experiments you could run and why you should consider adding SEO testing to your SEO workflow.
Finally we’ll walk you through how to set up an SEO test using SEOTesting.com.
What Is SEO Testing?
SEO testing is the process of measuring and evaluating the results of a change you make to a page or your site in relation to organic search traffic.
We look at clicks, impressions, position, click through rate, and the number of queries ranked for. This can be based on an individual page or section of a site over two time periods, a specific query, two separate groups of pages you run as a split test, or a group of pages you continually track to help you show your work is bearing fruit. You can successfully incorporate SEO testing into your SEO checklist to ensure success.
This brings us nicely to why we should be running SEO Tests…
Why Run SEO Tests?
SEO testing shows you what actually works.
Google’s ranking algorithm is a black box. In fact there are multiple algorithms that are fed into other algorithms, that come together to produce an overall ranking of a page or website.
There are over 200 ranking factors the algorithms use, with machine learning working alongside these signals to try and show the best results it can for the user’s individual query. It has been reported that the Google search team are unsure of the weight of individual signals as machine learning has taken over judging which are the most important.
Different niches are also evaluated against different criteria and factors. Travel websites are likely to use different ranking factors to medical websites – and potentially completely different ranking algorithms.
Running a website change as an SEO test allows you to evaluate these ideas and see whether they work on your site and in the niche it sits.
BKing Digital have got great results for a local regenerative medicine clinic. After two years of test-driven SEO, the site managed to outrank WebMD for a set of high-value keywords.
Once you see a positive result you can confidently roll out the change to other pages. If the results aren’t positive you can roll the change back.
Systematic testing turns ad-hoc website changes into a methodical approach of collecting insight about what works for a particular website. When done long term, test-driven SEO tends to lead to a snowball effect, often visualized by exponential growth curves.
SEO Audit vs SEO Test
Sometimes there is a bit of confusion over what is an SEO audit and what is an SEO test.
An SEO audit is the process of looking at the current state of an existing site or page, and based on technical best practices and rule sets, coming up with a list of things to fix, improve or change.
Sitebulb is an excellent tool for doing SEO audits.
SEO site audits are valuable because they review the overall state of your website. They may discover inconsistencies in your URI structure, pages that should be noindexed or have canonical URLs, images that are missing alt tags or have disproportionate file sizes. SEO audits can even discover content gap opportunities or information architecture flaws.
An SEO test is the process of tracking the results since a change has been made. Quite often, you should look to do an audit, and run SEO tests on the fixes the audit suggests. This way you can evaluate the effectiveness of the recommended changes.
5 Business Cases For SEO Testing
SEO testing is the super power that can help internal SEOs and agencies demonstrate the value and return of their work. Building a test-driven SEO approach into your work practices allows you to have a continuous method of improvement to make sure your website does not stagnate.
#1 Find Out What Works, And Scale It Up
It can be costly to implement a change across an entire site, and it can also be risky if you do not know how the change will affect rankings, especially for new businesses with limited budgets just setting up their business websites.
By using an SEO testing approach you can make your change to a single page, or a group of pages, and track the results.
A good SEO test gets rid of all "guesswork" when it comes to making significant changes to content. We all know making big changes to your content can have severe consequences, and by approaching this as an iterative process, you can test something small and get feedback on the outcome and adjust accordingly. Then you can scale it with minimal effect on your SEO while cutting cost and unnecessary stress.
Suganthan Mohanadasan
Changing a small part of the site and testing will give you confidence to roll out changes across an entire site.
#2 Avoid Costly Mistakes
When running an SEO test you can quickly see if a hypothesis is incorrect and the results have gone south!
If it is conclusive over a few days that a change to page title and meta description has led to a decrease in click through rate, reverse the change and continue to track the CTR in the test to see if it recovers.
#3 Discover Opportunities
Brad Smith, the founder of Codeless and an author at WordStream, puts it well in his own piece about SEO testing ideas:
If you want to grow site traffic in a serious way, you need to experiment, do what big brands won’t do, and discover what works best for you (instead of reading someone else’s best guess.)
If you’re a smaller player in the search market, Rand agrees that the strategy of doing what bigger brands don’t do is something you should take to heart.
#4 Base Decisions On Data Instead Of Opinions
Using a framework for running SEO tests will allow you to base decisions on data instead of opinions.
We’ve already said that the world of SEO consultants offers up a myriad of different opinions – some based on actual experience but often quoting someone else (who in turn has quoted someone else!). This can often lead to the game of SEO Chinese Whispers!
#5 Justify Retainers And Ongoing Projects
If you are an agency, you can be on the constant merry go round of proving the value you offer to clients to get retainer contracts renewed.
Committing to run a number of experiments each month and reporting on the results can show how you are delivering value to clients, growing organic traffic, and also avoiding costly mistakes.
For internal SEO teams, SEO testing helps you show the efforts deployed each month to your website, what has worked and can be rolled out, or what hasn’t and can be scaled back. This can help the business invest into the areas of the website they are confident will provide a return on that investment.
6 Best Practices For SEO Testing
You are going to be making big decisions based on the results you gather from SEO tests so it’s important to run your experiments in the right way. Check out these best practices we have put together from running and analyzing thousands of different tests across many websites and niches.
#1: Pick Pages And Keywords That Already Get Impressions
#2: If You Can, Run Split Tests
#3: Form A Clear Hypothesis
#4: Test One Thing At A Time
#5: Know What You Are Trying To Optimize For
#6: Set The Right Test Duration
Ideas For Test-Driven SEO Experiments You Can Try
Get inspired by our list below containing a big variety of experiments you can play with. Please remember that each of them can lead to both positive and negative changes in your organic clicks – many times you’d be surprised. This is why it’s important to test everything.
A: SERP Appearance
1. Meta Titles And Descriptions
- We’ve written an entire article on how to SEO test Page Titles we recommend reading.
B: On-Page Copy
4. Copy Length
C: Visuals
9. Images
D: UX & Design
13. Page Speed
E: Information Architecture
16. Internal Links
F: Indexability & Crawling
18. Trailing Slashes
G: Distribution & Backlinks
21. Bringing Traction To The New Post
How To Track Results
There are two options when it comes to tracking results of your SEO experiments:
- Manually track the results in a spreadsheet such as Google Sheets
- Use an automated tool such as SEOTesting.com to track and report on the results for you.
Frequently Asked Questions on SEO Testing
What is SEO testing?
Why is SEO testing important?
How is an SEO test different from an SEO audit?
What are the main types of SEO tests?
How do you run a successful SEO test?
What are common things to test in SEO?
How long should an SEO test run?
Can SEO testing help justify client retainers or budgets?
How do you track SEO test results?
What are some business cases for SEO testing?
Summary
Hopefully this guide has given you a good overview of why SEO testing should be an important part of growing your organic search traffic from Google.