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As Google continues to tweak and alter its algorithm to create better results for searches, content writers and anyone offering SEO copywriting services are forced to monitor these changes and continually adapt. Many on-page SEO practices will likely never change, like using keywords, internal links, and frequently updated content. Unfortunately, these practices will only take your website so far, and everyone will eventually get to the point of scrutinizing the finest details to keep moving up on SERPs. At this point, once your SEO baseline is well established, and you are continuing to improve your landing page results and conversion rates, changes to your website become riskier.
What is A/B Testing?
You can think of A/B testing as running an experiment on your own website. The benefit of this experiment is that it carries a very low risk of ruining your website’s performance. A/B Split Testing is when you alter a page on your website and then test the performance of that page against the original.
Even though it is a relatively new practice for applying the principles of A/B testing to SEO, the general idea has been around for quite some time and used to measure the response to potential changes on a website. In general, A/B testing is often used for website changes that don’t have anything to do with SEO. Using the data to improve conversion rates is the most common application. Minor changes are made to the page’s layout, trying to convince readers to subscribe or make a purchase. There are plenty of applications of A/B testing relevant to SEO, but it’s essential to understand its most common applications first.
Why Would you Use A/B Split Testing?
If done correctly, A/B testing can allow you to have the best of both worlds when making changes to your website. Rather than risk your SERP ranking dropping dramatically, A/B testing enables you to test differences against the original and routes user traffic equally between the original page and the variant. This allows you to analyze if the page with the changes outperformed the original, without the risk of a low-performing change negatively affecting your entire website.
The amount of risk associated with these changes being made to significant websites moves A/B split testing into the realm of advanced SEO techniques. Although the process is not especially complicated or requires a high level of expertise, it’s often used by websites with steady and significant traffic, which can’t afford to make mistakes of that magnitude.
Although this method can be helpful to any website, it’s more advantageous when considering more significant changes or when making changes to a more prominent website.
These changes can be made and then reverted if proven unsuccessful in many situations. With a major website, this change could potentially mean the loss of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue from something as simple as a change in formatting, should it negatively affect conversion rates or the website’s SERP ranking.
Another interesting benefit of A/B split testing is trying out more aggressive or perhaps out-of-character approaches to improve your website’s performance. Rather than using the same old techniques, you can use A/B split testing to try something completely different and see how it performs on your website.
Minimizing Risk When Making Changes to your Website.
When your website is in its infancy, it can be much easier to make drastic changes to see how these changes affect traffic and conversion rates on your website. Should these changes yield positive results, it’s as simple as continuing to make similar changes to improve. However, there are many cases where even small changes can negatively affect your website traffic. When this happens, it is usually not as simple as reverting the change. Often, the damage has already been done, and it could take your website significant time to recover from a single shift.
Early on, this can be attributed to a learning curve, with some changes making improvements and others being setbacks. Even when a change has a significant negative impact on your website, the smaller the website, the less of a problem this setback is.
When your baseline is already established, and you have achieved a certain amount of success, making a change that negatively affects search engine results and website traffic can be catastrophic. In these cases, the recovery time to get you back to where you were initially can be significant, and there is always the risk that your website may never recover. Loss of traffic and revenue are real possibilities when this happens.
Even with significant data analysis on your website, it can be virtually impossible to tell with any amount of certainty that changes you are making will positively or negatively impact your website. You are running these tests at the potential expense of your own website.
How Does A/B Split Testing Work?
The principles of A/B split testing are quite simple. “A” is the original page as it currently sits on your website. For example, this page may be a blog post related to your website. To increase your website’s SERP ranking, you may be considering adding in a few keywords, changing a subheading, and changing the layout of the page itself. Each of these changes may positively or negatively affect the page’s performance.
Since you’re isolating one variable at a time, a new page is created with just one of the changes made from the original, such as the subheadings. Rather than permanently making this change and analyzing performance, an A/B Split Test would route that page’s traffic equally between the original page (A) and the page that has the variable changed (B).
After a certain period, you can analyze the performance of these two pages against each other and see if the change caused the page to perform better or worse. If the variant page performed worse, you can scrap that change with almost no harm done. On the other hand, if the variable results in a more positive change, the changes can be permanently made to the original page.
How Many Variables?
Isolating a single variable is one of the key aspects of running a successful A/B split test. It can be hard to determine what improved performance and hindered it when changing multiple variables. These variables can take many forms and optimize a page or your entire website down to the most minute detail.
Just because you need to isolate a single variable doesn’t mean that you can only make a single change at a time. Multivariate testing is similar to A/B split testing but utilizes multiple pages being altered against an original. In this case, it would be more like A/B/C/D/E testing against the original page. This would speed up making changes, especially when you overhaul existing pages on your website. Still, this method is only as good as the gathered data.
It may seem like a good idea to test all your variables at once, but if your website doesn’t have enough traffic to split visitors between the different pages, the data gathered may not be of a large enough sample size. The other possibility is that the data may take too long to compile. With SEO techniques changing as Google updates its algorithm, collecting data quickly and efficiently is critical to a website’s success.
The Issue With A/B Split Testing and SEO
A/B testing operates like an experiment. You change a single variable and compare it to the original to better understand the impact of that adjustment. This method works exceptionally well with websites that get a lot of visitors and pages with many views because you can analyze the behavior of individual users.
However, what makes A/B Split Testing so valuable when analyzing user behavior also makes it challenging to apply to SEO. It can be hard to judge if the change positively impacted SEO differences because thousands of users don’t decide things like SERP ranking. Instead, it’s a single user — Googlebot — determining the success of this alteration.
The simple solution is to treat the pages on your websites as the users, then compare the SEO-related data against the unaltered pages. For example, you may be considering changing the format of pages that display blog posts on your website. To do a proper A/B split test for SEO, you would change some pages but not others.
At the end of the test period, you could then examine the SERP rankings of the changes with the alterations compared to the ones without it. If the altered pages were outperforming the original pages, then you can be confident in making those changes to all of the blog posts on your website.
Applying Changes
Once you have gathered enough data on potential changes, you can then start making these changes more permanent and applying what you learned to new content in the future. Even if you only applied these changes to a handful of pages on your site, you can use the insight you gain to generate new content that is already optimized for your page.
This data can also help when purchasing pre-written blog content, as you can see what content would be a good fit for your website without the guesswork that typically goes into it. If you’re working with a team of writers, you can pass this information on, and they should incorporate it into their daily practices.
Having the confidence of fully optimized content can also amplify the benefits of content writing services. Even if you can’t spend big with the more established names in the content writing industry, any data you can provide the team you hire will allow them to be successful immediately. Immediately passing on all of your hard-earned data will eliminate much of the learning curve that might slow down your website performance.
Potential Problems with A/B Split Testing
Googlebot can be a little bit wary of some testing methods when indexing your website. In general, some of the practices utilized in A/B testing are the exact behaviors that Googlebot may see as a red flag. One of the most significant issues is showing Googlebot pages with highly similar content. In this case, Googlebot may think that the page is a duplicate, causing your website’s ranking to drop.
There are a few other potential issues involving website testing you should be aware of to prevent hurting your website’s rankings while trying to improve them. These issues vary from website to website depending on their goals and the type of content available, so the best thing to do is go over Google’s Best Practices for Website Testing to avoid making any of these mistakes.
Test, Refine, Revise
A/B Testing can be an absolute game-changing tool for your website. There are plenty of SEO techniques and tools that can help improve your website’s search engine performance, but A/B testing is the only method that lets you apply all of these techniques while minimizing risk. Whether it’s minor changes or complete website overhauls, the first thing that every web developer should do is gather and analyze existing data on their website. A/B testing takes the next step and allows you to immediately put this data to use, taking out much of the guesswork that could result in a SERP drop and reduced revenue.
Of course, no matter how much analysis you run for your website, no amount of data will help improve your online performance if you’re not making changes and generating fresh content. It can be easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of trying new techniques and approaches, but engaging content is the most important tool you have at your disposal. Using the best SEO Copywriting services will improve your SERP ranking more than any other method. That’s why you should give Content Cucumber a try! Sign up for a free demo today.
