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Ever wondered how agencies like Media group just seem to get SEO right all the time? Running an SEO test may be the answer. If you’re unsure whether changing your website would have a beneficial or detrimental impact on SEO, this is the place to be.
Why SEO testing, and how is it done?
We’ll check out the following in this article:
- What is SEO testing?
- Why SEO testing?
- The various types of SEO tests
- Is SEO testing right for you?
- A how-to guide
What is SEO testing?
SEO testing aims to make changes to your website and see how they affect organic search traffic or ranks.
Why SEO tests?
Here are four advantages of performing SEO testing:
See what works for your website
Aside from these top-ranking criteria, there are many “it depends” situations in SEO. It does not imply that things will pan out similarly for you because someone observed a beneficial effect after implementing change. It’s more practical to do it on your site.
Justify the allocation of your resources
Rolling out SEO updates may take a long time and resources. If the result isn’t what you want, you’ve wasted your effort. Testing lets you know whether an action will benefit less time and use fewer resources.
Be data-driven, not opinionated
Everyone has their ideas about what works and doesn’t work in SEO. When it comes to squashing arguments, testing them is often the quickest method. If you don’t do this, the individual with the loudest voice will usually take charge—which isn’t always ideal.
Ensure that any modifications will not backfire
It’s far better to spend time and effort rolling out an SEO improvement that does not affect SEO than it is to waste time doing something that harms SEO. You may limit any negative outcome to a specific group of pages by performing an SEO test.
The various types of SEO tests
There are three distinct types of SEO testing available.
SEO serial testing (not recommended)
In an ideal world, you’d want to test your website’s performance in a controlled environment before rolling it out for real. This approach is called A/B testing; it’s where you split up your site into two groups and change one group at once. We don’t advocate this approach for three reasons:
- If this change harms your site’s SEO, it will affect all of your pages, not simply a few.
- It’s often more time-consuming to make a sitewide modification and then roll it back.
- It doesn’t take into account seasonality or uncontrollable variables.
SEO time-based testing
Time-based testing entails changing one page and seeing how it performs. We don’t suggest performing time-based SEO testing because you cannot assume a single sample size to imply causation.
SEO A/B testing
A/B testing (or split-testing) is when you make changes to some pages while leaving others alone. You then compare the modified versions against the original ones to see how they performed. The control group comprises pages that have not been altered, and the variant group is made up of versions of those pages. Because:
- If the change is harmful to search engine optimization, it only impacts a small percentage of the pages.
- It’s not as time-consuming as serial testing since you only need to modify a small number of pages.
- Because seasonality and uncontrollable elements beyond your control affect both sets of pages, it enables you to compensate for them.
Is SEO testing right for me?
Unless your website receives significant organic traffic, it’s probably not the best fit for SEO testing. Hundreds of thousands to millions of organic visits per month. There are two reasons for this:
- There are other things you could be doing with your time. SEO testing will not solve this problem if your website does not receive traffic. Instead, concentrate on developing more search-focused content, obtaining extra backlinks, and utilizing other known methods to enhance SEO.
- The data in question should be considered insignificant. You wouldn’t assume that everyone else felt the same if you asked three individuals to choose their favourite band, and they all picked BTS. You may have just come across a few die-hard BTS supporters by chance. However, if you asked 10,000 persons and they all stated BTS, it would be reasonable to assume that most people are fans. The same may be said about SEO testing. It’s unwise to conclude a change and an observed effect without a large enough sample.
Improving rankings or increasing traffic by a bit of amount might have a significant impact on your business if your website receives a lot of traffic—and this is where SEO testing makes sense.
