What Exactly Is SEO Testing?

What Is SEO Testing? 

SEO testing is the process of making a change to your website and measuring its impact on organic search traffic or rankings. It’s a crucial part of search engine optimization (SEO) for several reasons, including the fact that Google changes its algorithm frequently. It can also help you cost-justify your SEO and marketing activities based on data rather than hunches. 

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It’s a good idea to run an SEO test before making any major changes to your site, like adding new pages or entering a new market. This way, you can avoid any unforeseen negative impacts on your SEO strategy, and you can ensure that any alterations you make are effective at improving traffic. 

To do this, you’ll need to choose the website pages you want to optimize and create a test for them. You can use a free SEO testing tool, or you can do it manually using tools like Google Optimize and Split Signal. 

You’ll then divide those pages into Control and Variant groups. You can then implement your changes and measure their impact on both groups of pages. There are various types of tests you can use, depending on the size of your website and the model you choose to measure the impact. 

For example, if you were trying to increase the CTR on your e-commerce category pages, you could randomly choose a few of these pages and change their title tag formulas. You can then analyze how much CTR they experienced before and after the changes were made. 

Another type of test is one that focuses on changing specific elements on a page, such as the meta description, heading tags, or content. You can use a rank tracker to monitor these changes and verify whether they produced any positive results. 

Aside from these individual tests, there are many things you can do to improve the performance of your whole site in SERPs. You can improve your content, design, and navigation. Similarly, you can optimize your social media presence and landing pages. 

If you’re unsure of what elements to test, try experimenting with the ones that you know are important. Usually, these will be the most impactful and can lead to large, long-term benefits. 

Typically, these are the changes you should make first, but not always. A small change can have a significant impact, so it’s important to be prepared. 

It’s also a good idea to set up an experiment with a wide range of variations to give yourself the best chance at getting statistically significant results. You’ll need a large enough sample size for this, so make sure to include pages from all parts of your site and across a range of time periods. 

You can do this with a spreadsheet, Google Search Console, or another analytical tool that tracks SEO data and provides graphs for you to analyze. Ideally, you’ll need a test that takes a few weeks to generate meaningful results. 

Ultimately, the biggest benefit of an SEO test is that it helps you understand what Google wants from your website and how to optimize it accordingly. This helps you gain more market share and avoid any unforeseen negative impacts that can happen if your site’s performance isn’t optimized well.