A/B testing in SEO is a tactic where you compare the performance of two different versions of the same thing to see which is better. In SEO’s case, you test two types of websites or apps to see which one users interact with more.
A technical SEO consultant can tell you that having excellent on-page SEO will help you increase how much traffic you experience. It can also enhance your conversion rates and sales. We examine and discuss how you should implement the A/B testing process and what to look out for.
In this article:
What is A/B Testing?
A/B testing, which some people call SEO split testing, is when you compare multiple versions of variant pages to see which performs better. However, you should know that there’s also a different tactic called SEO split testing. As such, we’ll exclusively refer to this method as A/B testing in this article.
With this strategy, you create multiple versions of the same page. You can also create several email subject lines, design elements, and CTA (call-to-action) buttons. Then, you monitor and analyze the different versions to see which users interact with more.
A/B tests can be used with a variety of variables. You can use it to test your marketing strategy, sales tactics, SEO content brief, product designs, or SEO. Where you would create several versions of products or marketing plans. With this, you create two or more SEO test pages.
This test shows the statistical significance of how users influence search engine results pages (SERPs). Comparing the different versions in SEO testing helps you eliminate the guesswork on what works for your clients and what doesn’t.
Importance of A/B Testing in SEO
We’ve started touching upon this above, but A/B testing and SEO have a strong relationship. On-page SEO testing helps you understand what users look for. That way, you can improve the SEO of the original page and apply the same template to other pages.
By testing user behavior with a variant page, you can collect enough data to know exactly how to structure your website and apps optimally. When you run SEO experiments like these, you can help boost and improve your search rankings, title tags, and organic traffic. Employ A/B testing to check what website layout, colors, buttons, content, and visuals people respond better to.
Common Myths and Misconceptions
While A/B SEO testing can help deliver incredible results, there are a few misconceptions about SEO testing. We clarify a few common misunderstandings to ensure you know what you’re getting into.
Myth 1: This strategy will guarantee immediate results. While this tactic can help you improve your organic traffic and search results, it doesn’t provide immediate results. You have to give the SEO experiment enough time to collect the necessary data and to consider external factors and the control group.
Myth 2: It only improves your website performance. You can employ this method with digital marketing strategies, product designs, email campaigns, mobile applications, and advertisements. You can even run off-page SEO testing. SEO tests on off-page elements show what aspects of your marketing result in higher click-through rates (CTR).
Myth 3: You only use this tactic for design changes. Many businesses don’t utilize it to its greatest potential. You can test aspects like the content, copywriting, CTA buttons, and pricing packages. Consider what metrics you want to improve, and conduct SEO testing on factors that influence those key metrics.
Myth 5: It’s only effective for large companies. A/B SEO testing works for small, medium, and large-sized companies. It can help you gain the insight you need on user behavior when you start, which companies with more experience might already have.
Myth 6: You only need to do A/B testing once. Historical data shows that the target market and consumers can change rapidly. Trends shift, and your original page might not be optimal anymore. That’s why you need to test your product pages and other statistically significant results continually.
How to Run An A/B Test Correctly
While performing A/B SEO testing might feel like climbing a mountain, it can be broken down into five simple steps. We discuss and explain these steps, helping you see what to look out for in multivariate testing. We also mention how you can improve your search engine rankings by using this tactic on your control pages.
Designing Your A/B Test
The first step is designing your A/B SEO test. To effectively design it, you have to understand what you’re working with. As such, we break down the first step into two sub-steps.
Research and Hypothesis
In the first sub-step, research how your website is currently performing. See where it ranks on search engines and how much traffic you’re presently experiencing. Perform website audits and run tests to see which web pages drive the most organic search traffic.
If you audit your entire site, you can more easily identify gaps in your design and offers. When researching, it’s also a good idea to check your highest-ranking competitors on the search engine results pages. That way, you can see what they’re doing and whether it might work for you.
Without knowing what metrics you want to improve, you won’t be able to design an effective A/B positive or negative test. You can also complete internal linking tests to see which pages need a boost in traffic. Based on the research, you should create a hypothesis of what will cause you to see different readings.
For example, you see that most people use your internal links to access your other web pages. Thus, by completing internal linking tests, you find all the orphan pages to which you should link. You would hypothesize that your traffic will increase if you add more internal links. That’s because search engine bots can more easily index your site, which increases its domain ranking.
Design Your Test Pages
Once you’ve completed the necessary research, you can start designing your A/B SEO tests and control pages. Determine the elements you want to test, which can include:
- Meta titles and meta descriptions.
- Page titles and headings.
- Content layout.
- Visual elements.
- Copywriting and content brief.
- Design of product pages.
- Keywords and anchor text.
Once you’ve identified the crucial elements, design variant pages to compare against control pages (the existing page you originally had). By creating multiple versions, you can test several hypotheses or one version at a time.
While it’s more time-consuming, you can get clearer results by creating variant pages with one or two key differences from the original page. This way, if you get more organic traffic, then you know it’s due to that change. If you test too many features at once, you might not be able to determine which feature caused the difference.
The variant pages you create should test your hypothesis and have clear objectives. For example, on one version of your variant page, you only changed the CTA button’s design. You hypothesize that there’ll be higher click-through rates if you implement another design. You can test the hypothesis by seeing how many users clicked the button after the change.
Implementing A/B Testing Tools
Using A/B testing tools is crucial to accurately monitoring and analyzing results. There are many SEO tools you can use to boost your rankings, and some of them even help with performing A/B tests using Javascript code. Different types of tools exist, though the two primary tool categories are quantitative and qualitative tools.
- Quantitative tools: These testing platforms will show you the quantitative data of your test. They focus on the statistical significance of the SEO test. These statistics include your click-through rates, the number of visitors, or the number of responses to the variant page vs. the control page.
- Qualitative tools: These platforms will analyze the qualitative data of your test. You can learn why users perform specific actions or what consumer behavior results in purchases, subscriptions, and other actions.
Some of the best tools you can use are:
- Hotjar
- VWO (Visual Website Optimizer)
- Omniconvert
Hotjar is a qualitative testing platform that lets you better understand why users perform specific actions. You can gain insights into their purchasing behavior and how your on-page SEO influences it. The dashboard offers customizable widgets, and it provides heatmaps to help you identify what features frustrate users.
- Session Recording will show you the variant pages and how consumers interact with them.
- Heatmaps show the statistical significance of user engagement and visual/design elements.
- Surveys help you perform more in-depth user testing to see why they don’t perform actions.
VWO is a quantitative platform that lets you easily test the design elements of your website to optimize it better. It has a visual editor where you can customize your web pages and provide them for user testing. It also provides additional testing options, such as multivariate testing and server-side testing. That way, you can test more than two versions of a page and visual designs.
- Visual Editor will help you create variant pages.
- Insights help leverage visitor insights to grow your traffic.
- Web Rollout publishes the control and variant web pages and randomly assign users to these pages.
Omniconvert can provide both quantitative and qualitative data. It optimizes your website performance by using surveys, A/B SEO testing, customer segmentation, polls, and behavioral targeting mechanics. As such, you can test what type of advertising and visual content snags more users. However, you can also measure customer satisfaction or analyze client feedback using polls or surveys.
- Explore is the division that helps you run experiments to test your insights.
- Reveal is the eCommerce analytics platform that allows you to collect quantitative data.
- Survey is the customer service platform that lets you use polls to collect qualitative data.
Running Your A/B Test
Once you’ve designed the test and found the right tools to use, it’s time to run tests. The two versions of your website and pages must be randomly assigned to users, and their SEO performance must be compared. This way, you can split traffic between the two versions, which helps you accurately analyze how consumers react to each platform.
However, you must first decide on the sample size and duration of your test. Many of the tools will provide advice on this front. When calculating the best duration, you should consider factors like:
- Average daily/monthly website visitors.
- Existing conversion rates.
- Number of variants.
- Percentage of users included in the testing.
- The minimum improvement you expect from the testing.
Some tools will also help you calculate the duration of your testing. For example, VWO has a Bayesian calculator for that exact purpose. You should constantly monitor the test, though you should also account for internal factors.
Analyzing A/B Test Results
You can only start consistently increasing organic traffic if you thoroughly analyze the results of your A/B testing and SEO performance. The tools and platforms you use to perform the tests will often provide you with more insight into your control group and other key metrics.
It also helps you identify significant changes in consumers’ behavior. Generally speaking, these differences are due to changes in trends and the market. By identifying, analyzing, and understanding consumer patterns, you can better adjust for them.
It can also help you understand how search engines rank pages and what on-page SEO elements can cause your rank to drop. For example, using inoptimal canonical tags might mean search engines don’t index your site correctly. This can cause your brand to be less visible on SERPs. Data-driven decisions are the best way to ensure optimal performance.
Applying Insights from A/B Testing
What use is an A/B test if you don’t implement the insights you gained? The data collected will show you which variation performed the best. If you conducted multivariate testing on a control group, then it can also show you what website elements performed the best.
Now’s the time to enhance your technical SEO to get better rankings and authority online. You implement the version or elements that performed the best. However, you’re not done just because you’re now using the most optimal version. No, you need to continue testing your performance.
Analyze the long-term impacts of the changes you implemented and keep monitoring them. That way, you can ensure you maintain optimal on-page SEO as trends and consumers change. A/B testing and SEO have a continuous relationship, as search engines also change their guidelines and algorithms.
Best Practices for Effective A/B Testing in SEO
Besides the process of implementing A/B tests, we also evaluate and discuss the best practices. Effective testing can help you get better search results and traffic, which increases your authority on search engines.
Choosing the Right Metrics to Track
Choosing the right SEO metrics is essential to your testing process. When you consider the objectives you want to complete, you can narrow down the metrics to look at. Some of the key SEO metrics you can track are:
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Website visitors
- CTR
- Scroll depth
- Retention rate
- Abandonment rate
- Average order value
- Session duration
- Revenue
- Churn rate
For example, if you aim to improve your organic traffic, then you’ll track metrics like the number of visitors, bounce rates, and the most popular pages. If you want to increase your conversions, then instead, track average order value, scroll depth, and revenue.
Avoiding Common Pitfalls
There are various pitfalls business owners fall into when completing A/B tests. Some of these are easy to avoid, while others can be more challenging. Common traps you should avoid are:
- Testing too many elements at once.
- Not thoroughly planning your test.
- Ignoring statistically significant results.
- Testing with unbalanced traffic splits.
- Testing for too long or too short a period.
- Failing to account for external factors.
Carefully plan your tests and use the right tools to avoid these problems. Using the wrong tools can make your tests less effective and result in penalties, which will damage your SEO.
Maintaining SEO Health During Tests
SEO health is essential to keep your website authority and rankings from tanking while you test variant pages. There are Google Search engine guidelines that you should follow so as not to receive penalties while conducting A/B and multivariate testing.
Follow the below Google-recommended practices to avoid penalties.
- Don’t cloak your test pages.
- Use 302 redirects instead of 301 ones.
- Implement rel= “canonical” links.
- Only run tests as long as necessary.
While you have to keep testing your sites, it’s important to do so in line with Google Search Console’s guidelines. Otherwise, search engines can take it as misleading behavior, trying to deceive and cheat the rankings. In that case, it’ll penalize your SEO.
Leveraging Data for Continuous Improvement
Testing your platform and making data-driven decisions should become part of your company’s culture. It helps you consistently collect insights for ongoing optimization in an ever-changing market. Search engines have frequent algorithm updates, which can mean you need to change your on-page SEO.
By making it part of your SEO strategy, you ensure that you don’t implement changes based on personal preference or impulsive decisions. That will lead to a more consistently effective on-page and off-page SEO practices.
How Our Content Services Can Help You Optimize Your Content
Captain Words always aims to deliver the highest quality professional content that’s ideal for A/B testing. Content is the first thing you should improve if you want to enhance your SEO. Your content is what search engines like Google scan and index to determine the reliability and authority of your website.
Captain Words’ team of professional writers and SEO experts can create multiple variants and formats of content you can test on your sites. Whether you need reviews, blog posts, listicles, copywriting, localization, or translation services, we’re here for you. Enhance your SEO efforts by accurately testing what content resonates with your audience.
