How to Get Started With SEO Testing to Optimize Your Content

Intro

You may want to level-up your organic traffic with the help of SEO optimisation, but how do you know what works? You could take an educated guess and apply changes in the hope your research comes through. Or, you could take a more measured and probably more successful approach.

SEO testing is one of the most valuable ways to optimize your content. It is a flexible method of improving organic traffic to your website and it delivers results that are specific to your brand.

If you’re just getting to grips with SEO, this guide will help you to understand what SEO testing is, why it helps and how you can get started.

The challenges of SEO optimization

Google’s algorithm has a huge amount of ranking factors - over 200, in fact. What’s more, not all the same ranking factors are applied to websites equally. Meaning, what works for one topic, industry or even website; may not work for another.

This means that formulating an SEO strategy is a complex business. You can do intensive keyword research, get the opinions of a host of experts, and yet still struggle to get the results you are looking for. That’s where SEO testing comes to the rescue.

However, before you jump on to your Dialpad video chat platform** for a team strategy meeting, **let’s clarify exactly what SEO testing is.

(Free to use image sourced from Unsplash)

What is SEO testing?

Upping your SEO game can be a daunting process. If you’re looking to boost low organic traffic, you look into scaling up your guest blogging and building more links. However, SEO testing is a great option for websites that are already gaining a lot of traffic, but want to capitalize on that success.

SEO testing is the process of making changes on specific pages or sections of your website. Then, you subsequently evaluate the impact these changes have on organic traffic or rankings. Essentially, make one change to one part of your website, then see if it has the desired effect.

You can analyze a lot of information through SEO testing. Variables include positioning, click through rate (CTR) and impressions. SEO testing can be invaluable in helping you effectively SEO-optimize your site.

Why you should be SEO testing

There are numerous things you need to do in order to keep your website SEO-optimized. You may already know how to implement a content audit or SEO-audit. But you should definitely be SEO-testing as well.

This is because testing eliminates the guesswork involved in SEO. It is possible to rely upon generic opinions or general research to try to make your content SEO friendly. Alternatively you can do your own tests to find out what actually works for you.

By testing a small group of pages, or an area of your website at a time, you can track the results. Then, if it doesn’t work, you can easily roll it back and try something new. Essentially, it’s low risk and high reward.

(Free to use image sourced from Unsplash)

What type of SEO testing to use

There are various ways to do SEO tests, but the best practice is to run A/B split testing. This method involves creating two groups of the same type of page e.g. product categories or blogs.

You then only implement the desired changes upon one of the two groups. The other pages then become the control group. This is the most accurate and efficient way of SEO-testing.

This is because seasonality factors and algorithm updates can affect your test results. By having a control group, you eliminate these factors, as both groups will be impacted. Therefore, you can trust that your test results are entirely due to the changes you have made.

Choose how to track your results

You can certainly track your results manually yourself, simply by using some form of spreadsheet. When you’re busy in meetings all day, learning how to send a voicemail with email will make your life easier. Likewise, automating your SEO-testing will simplify matters.

Any kind of testing with an automated tool will streamline the process. If you were software testing, you’d benefit from using the Global App Testing software testing tool**. **When SEO testing, a quick web search will provide you with plenty of affordable options.

Both ways of tracking will give you good results, but an automated tool will save you a lot of time.

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Pick your pages

Choose a small group of pages to begin with. They should be of the same category, so all blogs, or all product pages. Then, you want to split them into two groups randomly. Again, an SEO testing tool will do this for you, or you can do it manually.

Select one of the groups to make your desired changes to. Do not make any changes to the other group, as this is your control sample.

Decide how long you want to test for

We’re all constantly learning, whether that’s keeping up with the latest Google algorithm changes, or how to master the art of sensory marketing. Establishing how long to run your tests for may be a learning curve as well.

It could depend upon how much traffic you get to the pages you’re testing, or what changes you are implementing. However, a good starting point is two weeks at the absolute minimum. The ideal length would be six weeks, for the most accurate results.

But there is absolutely no issue with running a test longer than six weeks, if you want to and you have the time. The more data, the better.

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Create your hypothesis

Like with any good experiment, you need to begin with a solid hypothesis. This encompasses the changes you are going to make and the results you expect to see from those changes.

It’s helpful to know where to start. If you are a developer looking to scale your application quickly, it might be a good idea to look up “Java microservices example**” **to get the ball rolling.

But with SEO testing, your starting place should be with the goal of achieving one (or more) of the following:

• Increase organic click-through rates (CTRs)
• Rank more keywords
• Improve existing ranking

So, say you wanted to improve your blogs CTR by updating your meta descriptions. You would then begin with a hypothesis like this:

Adding [X] keywords into blog meta descriptions will lead to a 15% CTR improvement

When you have completed your tests and got your results, come back to this hypothesis to establish the success or failure of your test.

Implement your changes

There are a couple of important things to bear in mind when you start making changes to your website.

• Make one change at a time. Though you might want to try different things all at once to maximize your optimisation - don’t. That will cloud your results. You can only tell what actually works by keeping it simple.
• Keep the way back open. Even Amazon Alexa is not always perfect, and neither are you. Your changes might even have the opposite effect to the one you wanted. You need to be able to reverse the changes in the event that testing produces negative results.

(Free to use image sourced from Unsplash)

Analyze your results

If you have chosen to do your tests manually, there are a few ways you can analyze your results. These include a rank tracking tool, Google Analytics or Google Search Console.

If you have used an SEO testing tool, then you’ll be able to view your results in a graph format.

This will show you both your control group and test group results over the selected period of time. You should be able to clearly interpret the impact, if any, your changes have made to the variable you’re tracking.

Refer back to your hypotheses - how accurate was your prediction? If you achieved close to what you expected, then you can call your test a success and roll out the changes to the rest of your pages.

However, if you see no improvement or indeed, a negative result, then it’s back to the drawing board. But that’s the great thing about SEO testing, you’ve only applied the changes to a small section of your content. Reversing the changes is easy and you’ll be ready to start again.

Testing is the quickest way to optimization

Make sure you perform tests regularly, ideally you should be SEO testing once every quarter. This will keep your content optimized and make sure your website maintains a good level of organic traffic.

There’s a lot to keep on top of when optimizing your content. From the many tactics you should be using, to all the SEO mistakes you should avoid. However, SEO testing is one of the most efficient and foolproof ways to achieve great results.