Are you struggling to get website traffic from Google?
If so, you’re not alone. One report found that 91% of content gets zero organic traffic. It’s easy to feel frustrated if you fall within that range, especially if you’ve executed an SEO strategy you hoped would work.
However, you don’t need to overhaul your entire approach to SEO to start seeing results. Instead, you can run experiments to determine the optimization tweaks you need to make, without:
Changing your entire website
Sacrificing the (albeit small) number of rankings you’ve got
The answer? A/B SEO testing.
In this guide, we’ll explain why A/B testing is important, the SEO elements you can split test, and a handful of companies who’ve run controlled experiments that resulted in increased search traffic.
Let’s dive in.
What Can I A/B Test?
There are various on-page SEO elements that could form the foundation of your A/B experiments, such as:
Meta titles and descriptions
URL structures
Headlines
Sales copy
Product descriptions
Images or videos
However, The Sleep Judge’s SEO Manager, Roman Kim, thinks that:
“Rewriting large parts of existing content would not be a very good test, as it would invoke Google's content freshness algorithms, so it would not be a fair test against control pages that did not receive updates.”
Let’s put that into practice. Say you’re split testing your product descriptions. You could run a controlled experiment that shows different versions of a webpage to different control groups. Group A sees your standard page with a 150-word product description; Group B is redirected to a duplicate of the page with a 400-word product description.
This type of SEO A/B test allows you to determine the ideal length of your product description before committing to writing an extra 150 words for each product — without knowing whether it’s worth it.
The same concept applies to split testing your meta titles and descriptions. You could simply group several URLs into two categories — one with the word “buy” in the meta title and one without — to see whether that phrase impacts key SEO metrics (such as CTR or ranking position).
If so, you’re not alone. One report found that 91% of content gets zero organic traffic. It’s easy to feel frustrated if you fall within that range, especially if you’ve executed an SEO strategy you hoped would work.
However, you don’t need to overhaul your entire approach to SEO to start seeing results. Instead, you can run experiments to determine the optimization tweaks you need to make, without:
Changing your entire website
Sacrificing the (albeit small) number of rankings you’ve got
The answer? A/B SEO testing.
In this guide, we’ll explain why A/B testing is important, the SEO elements you can split test, and a handful of companies who’ve run controlled experiments that resulted in increased search traffic.
Let’s dive in.
What Can I A/B Test?
There are various on-page SEO elements that could form the foundation of your A/B experiments, such as:
Meta titles and descriptions
URL structures
Headlines
Sales copy
Product descriptions
Images or videos
However, The Sleep Judge’s SEO Manager, Roman Kim, thinks that:
“Rewriting large parts of existing content would not be a very good test, as it would invoke Google's content freshness algorithms, so it would not be a fair test against control pages that did not receive updates.”
Let’s put that into practice. Say you’re split testing your product descriptions. You could run a controlled experiment that shows different versions of a webpage to different control groups. Group A sees your standard page with a 150-word product description; Group B is redirected to a duplicate of the page with a 400-word product description.
This type of SEO A/B test allows you to determine the ideal length of your product description before committing to writing an extra 150 words for each product — without knowing whether it’s worth it.
The same concept applies to split testing your meta titles and descriptions. You could simply group several URLs into two categories — one with the word “buy” in the meta title and one without — to see whether that phrase impacts key SEO metrics (such as CTR or ranking position).
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