30-second summary:
- SEO A/B testing allows site owners to understand whether the changes they make to their website have a positive impact on keyword rankings.
- Anything on a website can be A/B tested, but the best variants to test are those that have a direct relationship to Google’s ranking algorithm.
- How site owners can best execute an SEO A/B test will depend on the size of their website and their ability to easily roll back changes.
- If an A/B test proves that a specific optimization is effective, a site owner can more confidently incorporate identical or similar changes to other pages of their website.
For SEO strategists, it is sometimes difficult to know which of the many changes we make to our websites actually impact their overall SEO performance. Moving websites from page 10 to page 2 can usually be accomplished by following SEO best practices, but the trek to page 1? That requires far more granular attention to the specific changes we make to our landing pages. Enter SEO A/B testing, one of the best ways to narrow in and understand the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of specific optimizations.
Many digital marketers are comfortable using A/B testing features in their PPC campaigns or to analyze user behavior in Google Analytics, but fewer are incorporating this powerful strategy to better understand which of their on-page optimizations have the greatest impact on keyword rankings.
SEO A/B testing can seem intimidating, but with the right tools, it’s actually fairly simple to perform. Not only does A/B testing help SEOs identify the most impactful optimizations, but it also gives them a way to quantify their efforts. Although SEO A/B testing is more often utilized by advanced SEO strategists, site owners who are comfortable working on the backend of their