When you come up with an SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, you need to make sure it’s working well. There are several best practices in SEO testing which will help to ensure that the actions you’re taking are helping your business or your clients. After all, you wouldn’t put in place any strategy without some degree of guarantee that it’s working well. Here are a few SEO testing best practices that are worth looking closer at. Keep reading.
Have a series of metrics to look at
When you’re looking at how well you’re doing or you’re instructing an outsourced SEO company, you need to look at how well you’re doing with a series of metrics. Obviously, the overall page ranking is going to be right at the heart of this. However, there are other elements such as the bounce rate, your conversions, and your newsletter signups that you need to consider.
You need to know which metrics that you want to focus on actively improving. You may even want to have these in priority order. Over time, you may also decide that some are more important than others and some can be dropped altogether. When you have these metrics established, it’s going to be much easier to test as you know where and when improvements can be made.
Evaluate and use certain pages for SEO testing
When you’re looking to make SEO improvements to a website, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to rush in at the deep end and change the entire site. Instead, you’re better off making changes to certain pages. Once this has been done, it’s much easier to then see if your changes are having the impact that you had hoped for. If not, you can then discontinue the trial and attempt something else instead.
Before you do all this, you need to evaluate your site and work out which changes are going to be best for SEO testing. These should be good indicators that will allow you to get a decent overview of your whole site.
Decide on your analytical tools
There are all sorts of tools in the world of SEO testing. Some of them are ubiquitous such as Google Analytics 4. However, there are many more niche tools that are used from agency to agency. You need to work out which ones are best suited to your needs. There’s no point in relying on tools that simply aren’t up to scratch.
Also, once you’ve decided on the right tools, you then need to set about working out the individual features and components that are most useful. Updates are made on a regular basis and keeping up with these can also be right at the heart of your overall strategy.
Decide on your control variable
When you are doing any sort of test, you need to have a control variable that acts as the stable factor that you can measure any changes up against. Your control and your experiment group of pages need to share a common set of factors. This way, your experiment will product the richest and most accurate set of results.
For example, you may have pages that perform in a relatively similar way on search engines. It could be that the content format of the page is the same. Also, you will be looking for pages that are quite similar in age. Looking at the link profile is also important. The closer the pages meet all of these factors, the more likely it is that you will have an accurate test.
Repeat the test to ensure accuracy
Another best practice of doing an experiment in general involves repeating the test to ensure a good level of accuracy. After all, the results may have been an anomaly and you don’t want to find yourself in a position where you are implementing wholesale changes that are based on a bad set of data.
Repeating the experiment helps to give you some weight if you are recommending changes that can be made to an external client. Ultimately, it is just good practice and more than worth putting at the heart of your testing regime.
These are among the best practices that should be at the forefront of your mind whenever you are looking at SEO testing. Essentially, they follow the format of general scientific principles and are designed to ensure that your SEO testing yields accurate results. This way, you can keep on following these principles time and time again and will then be able to improve in the future.
