As an SEO expert, have you ever wondered whether changing your title tag would have a positive or negative impact on your organic search visibility? Have you also thought about changing the meta description and trying to measure the impact on click-through rates? A/B testing is a powerful way to know whether or not the changes we made have a positive impact on our site. In the course of this article, I am going to walk you through how to set up and run an SEO A/B test. Alright, let us go!
The best two approaches for accruing profit to your blog are by driving traffic to it and by converting your visitors to customers. One of the best ways to increase your sites profit turnover is by performing A/B SEO tests. Maybe it’s time to change the colour scheme, button size or even button placement of CTA’s on your site, and check out how they impact your SEO.
Therefore, let before we delve into how to run A/B tests, let us walk through the conventional SEO benefits and A/B tests. Plus the difference between SEO A/B tests and what we typically see in digital marketing, which is known as CRO (conversion rate optimization).
Differences Between SEO A/B tests and CRO in Digital Marketing
In conversion rate optimization, you make changes on one page and then, you show the variance of that page to a specific group. Then you go ahead to look at the different outcomes and tell whether the test was good or bad.
When it comes to SEO A/B tests, we are making changes on any pages and we have two different groups. There is the experiment group or the control group and based on the interactions and results that are seen from both groups, we can prove whether or not the test was good or bad.
Those are the two main differences between SEO A/B testing and CRO in digital marketing.
Introduction to A/B SEO Testing
So, before we get into the next step, let us get into two quick definitions.
When creating an A/B test, you have to ensure that you really have one clear objective of what you are trying to do. It is easy to get off into trying multiple things out, but that is going to make your results really muddy and you are not going to know whether the changes you made actually had an impact. Still, in the light of having a clear objective, you need to be fully aware of the result of running these specific tests.
For example, you might want to experiment on increasing the amount of organic traffic that lands on your location pages or product pages or blog pages. Then, you need to come up with a hypothesis- you need to make an educated guess on what you believe would happen. For instance “ I believe that changing the title tags on a location city can help improve the local search for those pages”.
Next, you need to create an experiment groups which would be your variants or control pages. These are the pages that you want to keep the same and the pages that you change to know whether there was a difference between the two.
Next up, you need to set a duration period. This is important because you want to run a test that you can collect the data in a time frame, take a few weeks for instance. Search engines actually take time to index your pages and this greatly depends on how old your site is or how often the crawlers get to your site. However, you can run your A/B SEO test from 4 to 6 weeks, and see how they perform- that is a really good benchmark.
Finally, you going to need a metric- what is the single metric that you are going to use to judge your test outcome to know whether or not the tests where successful. This can be organic sessions for example, or impressions or clicks, things like that can be your primary metric. So, you would also need to validate data from two analytics tools. The data from the first analytic tool would be called the primary metric, while the data from the second tool would be called the secondary metric. For instance, you can validate your organic sessions with data from search console.
What Can You Test in SEO A/B Testing?
For search engine optimization, your tests would be basically on elements that have an impact on your site visibility. Here are some elements that a webmaster can test in SEO A/B testing;
- Meta Descriptions
- Title Tags
- Content on the web page
- Image Alternate texts
- Your Site Schema Markup
- Header Tags (H1, H2, H3 etc.)
Testing your site’s title tags is extremely important. The Meta description of your site has a maximum impact on your click-through rate. As for the Header tags, they help with the concepts and their connection with the content types on the page. Maybe you extend the content, or shorten the content or even add video content.
Coming to Image Alts, you can optimize your images a little bit further. You can check for changes after you have added some keywords to your image alternate texts.
Schema Markup can be added to some pages or not added to others to see how they perform. This SEO A/B testing options are not exhaustive by any means but should be able to give you a head start.
Impact of A/B testing on Digital Marketing- Ecommerce Sites
Search engines primary job is to show the most relevant sites to users. If the search engines where to deliver a bad website to users, they would not be in business. The point of the search engines is for visitors to make their queries and get answers that they are looking for.
Therefore, if you show up in search engines, but when visitors go to your site, they bounce and start searching again, that tells the search engine that your site is not relevant to what they are searching for. This is however the essence of landing page testing.
Visitors leave your site because you have a bad landing page. This tells the search engines that you have a bad website, and that they should not show you in search results. In the light of this, search engines are incentivized to show the most relevant websites in SERPS.
By optimizing the landing pages of your site, you are A/B testing so that your visitors would enjoy good user experience. With A/B testing, you are increasing your SEO value in the eyes of search engines.
Tangible Vs Intangible Benefits- A/B Testing vs Conventional SEO Benefits
When you A/B test, you get a tangible measure of how the test best impacted your revenue, your site visitors. As a plus, you also get quantifiable metrics that say this was good or this was bad. The next thing about this metric and the increase in visitors and revenue is that you get to see what happens in the short term.
You do not need to wait for six months to see if the test you did was valuable or not. As a digital marketer, you can run a test and in a few weeks, you would get data that proves that the test was viable, increased your revenue etc. It is a very short term way to get data that can be quantified about the effects of the metrics that you are testing on.
In contrast, you search engine optimization is very intangible, it is also very long term. You cannot make a change and the next thing you say ” well our SEO went up and we are ranking number one”! That is not the way it works with this intangible metric! You might have to wait for months before you would be able to measure how your SEO A/B test affected your site. When you do SEO yourself without A/B testing, you are not going to be able to accurately measure how much success you achieved in the endeavour.
On top of that, the SEO algorithms that Google uses are always changing all the time. They are always trying to stop people from gaming the system. The intangible long term benefit of SEO is very hard to quantify. So, if you contrast them and ask, which would I rather have? A short term benefit that I can measure now that also helps my SEO or an intangible long term benefit that may or may not help? You can see why keeping your company focused on A/B testing is the sure way to improve your site and your digital business.
Six months is a really long time to rank your website, whereas you can A/B test your site for profitability now.
