This blog was written by Tim Mehta, a former Conversion Rate Optimization Strategist with Portent, Inc.[1]
Running A/B/n experiments (aka “Split Tests”) to improve your search engine rankings has been in the SEO toolkit for longer than many would think. Moz actually published an article[2] back in 2015 broaching the subject, which is a great summary of how you can run these tests.
What I want to cover here is understanding the right times to run an SEO split-test, and not how you should be running them.
I run a CRO program at an agency that’s well-known for SEO. The SEO team brings me in when they are preparing to run an SEO split-test to ensure we are following best practices when it comes to experimentation. This has given me the chance to see how SEOs are currently approaching split-testing, and where we can improve upon the process.
One of my biggest observations when working on these projects has been the most pressing and often overlooked question: “Should we test that?”
Risks of running unnecessary SEO split-tests
Below you will find a few potential risks of running an SEO split-test. You might be willing to take some of these risks, while there are others you will most definitely want to avoid.
Wasted resources
With on-page split-tests (not SEO split-tests), you can be much more agile and launch multiple tests per month without expending significant resources. Plus, the pre-test and post-test analyses are much easier to perform with the calculators and formulas readily available through our tools.
With SEO split-testing, there’s a heavy amount of lifting that goes into planning a test out, actually setting it up, and then executing it.
What you’re essentially doing is taking an existing template