Adding Google Search Console Metrics into Your SEO KPIs Without SEO A/B testing, you might not even be aware of the optimization changes that have the potential to affect your organic traffic on your site negatively. The last thing an SEO wants are changes that negatively impact traffic on their site, making their KPIs and goals further away and harder to achieve. This allows SEOs and marketing departments to deliver on their KPIs and goals. Ultimately SEO A/B testing can help prevent a reduction in organic traffic due to optimizations implemented solely on SEO best practices. Would you like to see more test examples? Join our email list and receive the most exciting tests in your inbox once a month. It also reinforces why you should constantly be testing to find organic growth potential. When we overlay user intent and keyword intent, it makes sense why no two tests are the same. We have found from running hundreds of SEO A/B split tests on SplitSignal (an SEO split testing platform) that the same tests perform differently on different sites, even in the same niche. Instead, we suggest testing different changes until you receive positive test results that would provide an organic lift in clicks. In this instance, we would recommend not implementing this test change.
In this example, the test shows that if this optimization were implemented without SEO A/B testing, the optimization would negatively impact existing organic traffic. There is a decrease in clicks between the control and variant groups (absolute effect size) by −3,225.There is a decrease in clicks (effect size) by − 23.5%.The confidence level of the test is at 99%, so it is statistically significant.We will also see a decrease in the additional clicks graph when we have a negative resultĮxamples: Pages Tested (Control & Variant Groups) Pages Crawled By Google Bot Split Change Test Confidence Level Variation Group Traffic Additional Clicks Analysis:.There will be a negative absolute effect size (the difference in clicks between the control and variant groups).There will be a negative effect size (percentage change) in the number of clicks from Google search engine results to the variant group.When the test has completed running, and if the variant group clicks show below the control group, the test is negative.The test is statistically relevant when we reach 95% in our confidence level metric.
How do you know if the change you are optimizing for will be positive or negative? While SEO best practices are a good starting point, they consistently have different results on different websites. As SEOs, we have not had a way to push back on what is a good or bad optimization, except by quoting SEO best practices. Website content changes can come fast and from many different departments in an enterprise organization. When Does On-page SEO Have a Negative Impact? Without a line of sight to this issue, SEOs are implementing changes blindlybased on SEO best practices, making SEO goals harder to hit.
What SEOs don’t always consider is how to protect their web pages from a loss of organic traffic due to optimizations that adversely affect their sites. When an SEO hits or exceeds their SEO goals, this can lead to bonuses and raises. An example is a percentage of lift in organic sessions or an increase in conversion rate. SEOs use SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure SEO goals. Most SEOs in the enterprise sector have quarterly and annual SEO goals. If you are curious about how you can prevent your on-page SEO from negatively affecting your site, then keep reading. In this blog post, we take a deep dive into negative SEO A/B tests and their insights.