How Can You Perform SEO A/B Testing in Google Search Console – SEO A/B testing enables the website owners to understand the positive impact on keyword rankings that are taking place, due to the changes they made on the websites. Any elements of a website can be A/B tested, but the best ones to test are the ones having a direct relationship with the ranking algorithm of Google. However, these tests depend on the size of the websites and their agility to roll back changes. If an A/B test proves effective, a site owner can confidently incorporate more similar changes. So, if you want to perform SEO A/B Testing in Google Search Console, then you can easily avail of the best SEO Australia services.
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The uses cases for SEO A/B testing:
To improve in keyword rankings, you will need to change certain website elements because of the weight they have in Google’s algorithm. The title tag influences click-through-rate (CTR) directly. A/B testing meta descriptions are beneficial for the sites that already consist of a lot of keywords as they result in more clicks. Adding schema markup to a web page can be of great use for an A/B test. The Internal links can promote keyword ranking improvements, especially for websites with an enormous number of landing pages. It also helps to measure how much Google is responding to the content. A/B testing also looks after that all the pages are properly crawled and indexed. For site migrations and to understand the impact of adding experience features, A/B testing becomes important.
The types of SEO A/B testing:
The types of A/B tests that can be executed on a site are- A Then B, multi-page and multivariate testing. The basis for A/b testing is A Then B. This form of testing simply compares a single page’s performance with a different variant. It is much easier to implement and is better for smaller websites, particularly when you are confident about the changes you are making. Multi-page is a type of A/B test that can be performed on big websites that consists of a massive number of landing pages. A multivariate is a form of A/B test that works great for measuring the behavior of the user, as it increases the number of variants that are being tested.
How to execute an SEO A/B test?
Making use of website snapshots and rollbacks are the easiest ways to perform the A/B test. Perform website backup or take a website snapshot before implementing the changes, so that you can restore your website to its previous versions if the changes are not effective. Figure out the variant that is being tested, and make the changes to a page or the group of similar pages. Wait for about 7-14 days to conclude the impact. Finally, compare the keyword rankings with the original page/s in Google Search Console. If the SEO gets improved, you will be able to see it in the benchmarking. If you doubt any mistake, restore your website to its previous versions and commence with different optimizations.
Hosting environment matters:
You can either perform a website backup or take a site snapshot, but it depends on the hosting environment. While one environment may require you to take site snapshots, another environment will require you to perform backup to restore from. The best is to use a tool that allows the users to roll back to any version of the site. For blocking the dev domain from indexing and crawling, just adding a canonical tag will not be enough. Thus, it is better to make sure that all the in-development website pages contain robots with no index tag. It can be best if you can use both robot’s no index and real canonicals for better protection.
Conclusion:
A/B testing is a robust method to refine the SEO strategies for a maximized result. Besides helping the website owners to make more data-driven decisions, it also helps the SEO strategists to prove the worth of their work to their clients.
