Best A/B Testing Tactics for SEO

Online businesses will often use SEO techniques to help them stand out and achieve a higher rank for their website. However, if you have tried to optimize your website or its content for search engines, you have probably found out how quickly it can get complicated and confusing. Even if you follow a guide, the different tips can sometimes contradict each other. This is because it’s practically impossible to equally optimize for every single requirement that search engines might consider. This can leave some designers stumped about what they should do. Thankfully, they can test different approaches to see what gives the best results. Simple A/B testing is one of the most efficient ways to see what works and what doesn’t. To help get you started, we will explain the best A/B testing tactics for SEO.

1. Do the research and look at the current state of your SEO

It can be very tempting to decide that you want to ‘fix’ your website and start making changes. However, we recommend that you first take the time to monitor and document the current state of your website. You can run a website audit to see what techniques and SEO design tricks you are employing and how effective they are. After all, if you want to implement any A/B testing tactics for SEO on your site, you will need to have a baseline for comparison. 

Additionally, you will need to determine what exactly you want to achieve. SEO is often paired with PPC and other forms of marketing. We suggest doing research and talking to your marketing department about the goals of your joint strategy. This can give you a good focus and direct you towards the best A/B testing tactics for SEO and which design elements you should be testing.

2. Have a plan on how to implement A/B testing

Now that you have an idea of what you want to test, you also need to create an implementation plan. Unless you know how to do it right, A/B testing might not give you accurate feedback, and you could end up wasting time and money. You’ll need to know which features you are testing and what you want to achieve. From there, you can start going into the finer details.

We suggest that you set a timeline for when you will implement the changes so that they don’t interfere with your marketing campaigns, product launches, or significant events. Also, when you are making copies for testing, it’s recommended to make them different enough from one another. Start with the largest and most impactful elements, like the page headline or the Call to Action button. These sorts of changes will have the highest ROI.

3. Don’t test too many changes at once

When they realize how significant A/B testing can be, most website owners want to tweak every feature. While that is entirely possible, you shouldn’t change too many things at once. If you are testing two different copies where you have modified multiple features, it will be challenging to tell what makes the A version perform better than B. Therefore, your changes should be iterative, meaning that you should test one thing at a time. Although SEO relies on many hacks to boost your rating, doing too much at once could skew your test results.

4. Get feedback from your users

While you are performing optimization on your site and testing copies to see which gives the best results, it can be pretty easy to get lost in all of the available data. You should drown out the noise and define which key performance indicators you will be looking at. However, the raw data alone might not tell you the whole story. The experts from Convert More suggest that you should talk to your website users and get their direct feedback. After all, the changes you are implementing are intended to make your website more appealing to users. 

Perhaps your customers prefer certain features of one copy but end up clicking on the other for different reasons. We suggest that you listen to your customers and show them that you are willing to act on their feedback. This will always boost your rate of conversions, which is then reflected in your bottom line.

5. Take your time

It’s very natural to get impatient and expect immediate results for your efforts. Unfortunately, changes take time to show their effects. This is because Google will need to re-crawl your pages, evaluate them and adjust their rank. Even if you have the best A/B testing tactics for SEO, you should continuously monitor the changes over time. Sadly, we can’t give you an exact amount of time that you should wait before you finalize the results of your testing. The time needed to get accurate results will depend on your website traffic, the size of your marketing campaign, and the sample size for the test.

6. Keep on testing

Your work is far from over, even after finding a copy that gives better results. The best A/B testing tactics for SEO are the ones that continually iterate and help you improve your website. Search Engine Optimization isn’t just meant for new websites that are just starting out. Instead, SEO is an ongoing process that you should occasionally revisit. When your current round of testing is completed, you should keep a close eye on how your site is performing. Once you’ve set goals for a new marketing campaign, you can also start getting ready for a new round of testing. 

In conclusion

When properly implemented, simple A/B testing can help you achieve outstanding results. You can select the best copy for your marketing or go with a page heading that gives you the most considerable SEO boost. We have given you an overview of the best A/B testing tactics for SEO which you can implement whenever you are undecided on which copy you should use. 

Meta description: Try out different versions of your website design to see which gets the most clicks and a higher search engine rank with the best A/B testing tactics for SEO.