Split Testing for SEO - 9 Months of Learning

1. @dom_woodman

2. This talk is about split testing

3. Money.

4. Talked ourselves out of money How to get the money back

6. How did we talk ourselves out of the money?

7. Part 1

8. Not knowing things is scary

10. We’re paid experts, of course we should know

11. 3 Part 2 Fear

12. SEO is hard to measure

13. Before

14. Before After

15. Not money. At least we’re on sessions

16. Still not money. Now we’re on clicks.

17. What on earth is search visibility?

18. Seasonality

19. Seasonality Industry Demand

20. Seasonality Google Industry Demand

21. Seasonality Google Industry Demand

22. Ranks

23. Ranks CTR estimates

24. Ranks CTR estimates Handwaving

25. No-one cares when the going is good

26. Fear Measurement Part 3

27. Part 3: SEO has become more individual

28. More ranking factors Which interact in more complex ways

29. Fear Measurement Complexit y

30. So how does this all fit together

48. SEO Manager: Jan 2016 - Jan 2017 ● SEO Manager at T-Shirts and Shorts. ● Completed 4 major projects. Reduced Dev backlog. ● Removed a penguin penalty. Regularly audited backlinks. ● Organic traffic went up from 100K ~ 150K What does my CV look like?

49. SEO Manager: Jan 2016 - Jan 2017 ● SEO Manager at T-Shirts and Shorts. ● Completed 4 major projects. Reduced Dev backlog. ● Removed a penguin penalty. Regularly audited backlinks. What does my CV look like? -- If I’m unlucky

51. Stop making guesses about our results

52. CRO and growth hacking are doing it right

53. Learning from split tests

54. What does an SEO split test look like? Control Variant

55. This is a traditional CRO test Control Variant

56. I’m about to show you 2 graphs a lot. This is the first.

57. Black is the variant, treat blue as the control

58. In this case the blue line is higher, it’s a negative test

59. This is the start date

60. The second graph shows the total additional sessions

61. The fans show margin of error

62. The test is significant when the fan crosses 0

63. In this case it happened here:

64. Here they are together.

65. 1.Adding ALT tags 2.Removing SEO category text 3.Using JS to show content 4.Setting exact match title tags 5.Adding structured data

67. Established wisdom would say ALT tags on images are good for SEO

68. We found adding ALT tags to images had no effect

70. How does SEO text on category pages perform?

71. E-commerce site number 1 - No effect/negative effect

72. E-commerce site number 2 ~ 3.1% increase in organic sessions

74. We can render Javascript!

75. What happens if your content is only visible with Javascript? Javascript EnabledJavascript Disabled

76. Making it visible increased organic sessions by ~ 6.2%

78. Title tag before: Which TV should I buy? - Argos Title tag after: Which TV to buy? - Argos What happens when you match title tags to the greatest search volume?

79. Organic sessions decreased by an average of 8%

81. Category pages have lots of images and not much text

82. Adding structured data to category pages

83. Organic sessions increased by 11%

84. Running your own tests

85. 1.How much traffic do you need? 2.How long should you run a test for 3.What kind of things are easy to test? 4.How can you do all the maths?

87. Average of 1,000 organic sessions per day to your set of pages

89. Typically takes 2 - 3 weeks to reach significance.

91. Anything where you’re making changes to a page

93. distilled.net/diy-splittester

94. bit.ly/testing-lessons

95. Thanks! @dom_woodman

Split Testing for SEO - 9 Months of Learning

Dominic Woodman

Split Testing for SEO - 9 Months of Learning