Welcome, padawan, to the next stage in your SEO training. If you’re here, that means you’ve already mastered Search Engine Optimization basics like Local SEO and you’ve got some killer on-page SEO with copy that is making you rock the Google rankings. Now you’re ready for the next step: learning the vitally important, but often overlooked discipline of A/B testing copy as part of SEO maintenance.
What It Means to Test Copy for SEO
A/B Testing Your Website Copy
Once you’ve got an idea of which pages are your all-stars, and which need to get whipped into shape, you can start testing your copy. A website is not a billboard, it is an ever-changing thing that you can constantly tune and adjust. Not only does your copy need to be better than the competition’s, but it also needs to be fine-tuned. The way you do this is by A/B testing.
Sometimes called a split test or a copy-split test, A/B testing harks back to your high school chemistry days and the good ol’ scientific method. Here’s how it works. The “A” is your page as-is. Make a note of the copy, links, metatags, and so on, and gather data for a set period of time on how that page is performing (three days, a week, a month, etc). Once you have your data, do a little keyword research, see what the competition is doing with a tool like Moz’s free SEO peeker, then choose a single variable to change.
In the case of on-page SEO, this variable can be almost anything on the page, from the copy, the headings on the page, or the links to other pages. Don’t change them all, do one at a time, then wait and gather data, so you can isolate which changes are succeeding or lagging behind.
Once you change the content on a given page, it becomes your “B” page, and what you do next is… wait. Gather data (using Google’s Search Console or a similar tool) for the same amount of time on your “B” page as you did for “A,” then compare them. If “B” performed better, that becomes your new “A” and it stays. If it did worse, you swap it back to the original “A” and perform the test again, trying different keywords, links, tags, and so on. It’s a slow process, but being methodical is the only way to make sure it works.
Sometimes all you get from doing an A/B test is a few percent boost in traffic, which is a modest success, but nothing to scream about. However, if you use the tools we’re about to talk about in conjunction with your A/B test, you can make massive gains for minimal effort.
