Search engine optimization is a very dynamic discipline and every other day some new improvement over an existing process comes into light. This allows the marketers to try out a variety of things and choose what works best for them.
Google is making its sophisticated algorithm even more complex to make SEO extremely hard. Every year many new techniques are invented. While adopting some of these techniques may benefit your business, some may not. However, you will need to test these on your business to understand the effectiveness and benefits that each trend will have on your business. Split testing, or A/B testing is an excellent way to evaluate this.
How to do A/B testing
Split testing, usually known as A/B testing allows you to test two versions of the same web page or any other digital asset to see which one appeals to the customers better. When you make different versions available to different customer groups, one of these will typically work better than the other. Later, the companies can retain the version that is performing better, and discontinue the poor performing one. A/B testing is also used to test different versions of advertisements, titles, descriptions, etc. For example, for doing A/B testing on an advertisement, you can create different versions by keeping the image same and using different catchphrases or descriptions.
While two versions of a landing page can be created easily, it will be tough to have different versions of the same webpage created for your site. This is going to create problems for SEO since Google will see these as pages containing duplicate content. So it is better to group the pages differently so that they are seen as separate pages by Google.
The process of doing this is straightforward. You just need to identify the pages that need to be improved and the tests that you would need to run on those pages. After that, you can randomly arrange the pages into control and variant groups, and start measuring the results. You will need to run the test for as long as you need to arrive at some conclusive results.
How to do A/B testing
Split testing, usually known as A/B testing allows you to test two versions of the same web page or any other digital asset to see which one appeals to the customers better. When you make different versions available to different customer groups, one of these will typically work better than the other. Later, the companies can retain the version that is performing better, and discontinue the poor performing one. A/B testing is also used to test different versions of advertisements, titles, descriptions, etc. For example, for doing A/B testing on an advertisement, you can create different versions by keeping the image same and using different catchphrases or descriptions.
While two versions of a landing page can be created easily, it will be tough to have different versions of the same webpage created for your site. This is going to create problems for SEO since Google will see these as pages containing duplicate content. So it is better to group the pages differently so that they are seen as separate pages by Google.
The process of doing this is straightforward. You just need to identify the pages that need to be improved and the tests that you would need to run on those pages. After that, you can randomly arrange the pages into control and variant groups, and start measuring the results. You will need to run the test for as long as you need to arrive at some conclusive results.
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