The more irregular the traffic to your website is, the more traffic you will need to build a robust traffic model. Generally speaking, the more stable your traffic patterns are, the easier it will be to run experiments with less traffic. How much traffic? That’s a good question, and it depends on your website. You need lots of pages on the same template.To be able to run tests, there are two primary requirements:
Some websites, and parts of websites, aren’t suitable for running SEO split tests. What types of websites can run SEO experiments? You can compare the organic performance of both groups against each other and against an expected forecasted level of traffic had no change been made to the site.īelow I’ll walk you through how the SEO A/B testing process works, share some case studies and answer some frequently asked questions.
That makes looking at data, like traffic or rankings, and trying to line it up with a change you made near impossible.Ĭontrolled SEO split-testing is when you split a group of statistically similar pages into control, and variant groups then make a change to the variant pages. It could be instant or it could take weeks. In addition to not having a control group of pages in before and after testing, the fact that the length of time it takes for search engines to crawl your site and take the changes into account is also unpredictable complicates the analysis. While before and after testing is better than not measuring anything at all, it’s not a controlled test and you can’t use it to draw firm conclusions - it’s easy to be misled and think that your change was responsible for the observed impact, when it could just as well have been a competitor changing their site, or many other external factors. Making a change and reviewing metrics is often referred to as before and after testing. Unless you can control for external factors, there’s no way of knowing whether the changes in rankings or CTR are because of the change you made or some other external factors. Merely making a change to your website and looking at the impact of metrics like rankings and click-through rates (CTR) isn’t good enough. Knowing what impact a change to your website has had on organic traffic from search engines can be challenging to measure. What is SEO A/B testing and how to design SEO split-tests? What types of things can you test (with case studies).How to account for external factors like seasonality and Google updates.What’s the difference between user testing and SEO testing?.There’s a lot to cover, so feel free to jump ahead to any of the sections that interest you the most: This is a guide that covers all of that and more along with case studies and example tests.
There’s a lot of confusion over things like test design, controlling for external factors and some of the tools that can help you run experiments. Running A/B experiments for SEO, as opposed to for users, is a complicated subject.
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