Use SEO Testing as a Foundation for Website Growth

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool that can significantly impact the success of websites in today's digital landscape. By optimizing websites for search engines, businesses can drive organic traffic and increase online visibility. Search Engine Optimization can be used as a foundation for website growth and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to get website ranking faster. This could help meet short-term and long-term marketing goals of businesses, helping them reach out to more potential clients and create brand awareness.

What is SEO Testing?

SEO testing is the process of changing a website's content and design to measure how these changes impact the site’s organic traffic and visibility in search engine results like Google. It involves experimenting with elements like keywords, content, meta tags, HTML headings, and backlinks. Successful SEO testing hinges on understanding the changes to test and how they might affect a website’s SEO key performance indicators (KPIs)- such as Keyword Rankings, Backlinks, user click rate, user engagement, Return on investment, Branded v/s Nonbranded traffic, etc.

Importance of SEO Testing

There are various factors as follows that make SEO testing important like improved decision-making, better use experience, and enhanced performance.

Improved Decision-Making:  SEO testing helps explore new ideas and strategies, assess their impact before implementing, and bolster decisions with data and not just intuition or so-called best practices.

Better User Experience: Better user experience (UX) is a crucial part of SEO, as page experience is an important ranking factor for Google. A great user experience keeps users on the page. SEO testing includes UX elements, which can impact search engine rankings and organic traffic.

Enhanced Performance With testing comes better decision-making. And with better decision-making comes better performance. This includes search visibility, rankings, and traffic. 

Types of SEO Testing

There are different kinds of SEO Testing like SEO A/B Testing, SEO Multivariate Testing, Before and After Testing, and SEO Serial Testing.

SEO A/B Testing

A/B testing (or split testing) is where you change some pages but not others and compare how the changed pages fare against the unchanged pages. The group of unchanged pages is known as the control group, and the group of changed pages is known as the variant group.  For example, one might run A/B tests on groups of product pages or long-form articles with similar structures. After a predetermined duration of time or once the test gets significant results, end the experiment, analyze the results, and adjust the pages accordingly. 

SEO Multivariate Testing 

SEO multivariate testing, which is complex, allows to evaluate multiple variables simultaneously to understand how they affect search rankings, user behavior, and other variations. For example, combinations of headlines, images, calls-to-action, or page layouts could be tested. Perhaps, one headline variant works well with one image but not another.

Before-and-After Testing

This involves comparing key SEO performance metrics before and after implementation. To do this, first there is the need to record performance metrics over a period, then make a test change to the webpage or website, and then record the performance metrics over the same length of time. By analyzing the metrics before and after the changes, it could be understood how the changes influenced key SEO metrics. Here, test conditions are not controlled, and variants can be influenced by external factors such as seasonality, search engine algorithm updates, changes in competition, and more.

SEO Serial Testing

SEO serial testing involves making changes to an entire page type across the website and observing the results. For example, if one wants to test adding the current year to the title tags on blog pages, one could roll this out across the entire blog at once and record the SEO results following the change. This method is great if the change results in improved metrics. SEO serial testing is limited by the influence of external factors. Results may be affected by seasonality, competitors, algorithm updates, or something else entirely.

How to do SEO Testing for Your Website

The following are the steps involved in doing SEO testing for the website:

Form a Hypothesis: A hypothesis is a statement that predicts how a specific change to your website might influence your SEO results and user behavior. It should be based on observations or SEO data.

Select the Type of Test: Each testing method is suited to specific contexts and applications. For example, A/B testing is ideal for testing single changes. Multivariate testing helps understand the combined effect of multiple changes at once. And, for testing a major change such as a website redesign, consider a before-and-after test.

Choose Suitable Pages: Select pages that represent the website’s broader structure and content. 

Determine the Test Variables: Identify and define the specific elements you plan to alter in your test, such as meta tags, headings, images, content length, or user interface elements.

Create Variations: Create different versions of the page or element that are to be tested.

Set Up the Test: Implement the test by configuring the tools and parameters you need to split traffic between the different variations.

Run the Test: If you are testing a keyword with low search volume, it may take longer to collect enough data. But a high-volume keyword on a high-traffic website could see results much faster.

Collect and Analyze Data: Dive into Google Analytics to compare the performance of the control and variant pages. Position Tracking will monitor the rankings for a set of keywords and display the total change in visibility, estimated traffic, and rankings.

Implement Findings: This step is about implementing findings in a way that maintains user experience and reinforces the website’s key messaging and goals.

Monitor and Iterate: There is the need to consistently monitor performance after making changes, which is a continuous process.

Conclusion 

As Best Practices for SEO Testing, setting clear Objectives, implementing changes gradually, documenting everything, ensuring statistical significance, and focusing on one variable at a time are important.

At Reflections, we perform SEO Validations with Meta information to capture issues in meta titles and description, meta tags, missing canonical links and problematic domain names/page URLs. Page Quality is ensured and checked for duplicate contents, outdated framesets, poor optimization, ads that overlay your content. Also, Page and Link structure are verified to check H1 headings, wrong order or empty heading tags, duplicate anchor texts, and unfavorable external or internal links. Server Configuration is checked to ensure wrongly configured redirects between www and non www subdomains, problems with HTTP header, long response time, and high number of CSS & JavaScript file & big HTML file size. External Factors like whether the website is listed on Blacklists, a Backlink is available, and the website is shared on social media are verified.

Author

Anu Mathew – Associate Manager, Testing