A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing SEO Landing Pages

Have you ever experimented with A/B testing SEO landing pages? In marketing, we talk about split testing all the time. However, A/B testing SEO doesn’t crop up quite so often.

Why?

Perhaps it’s because A/B testing SEO can be more tricky than testing an email or pay-per-click campaign. When you’re trying to gain more online visibility, there’s plenty else to think about. It’s easy to understand why your average website owner wants to steer clear of overcomplicating things.

That’s why I’m talking about A/B testing for SEO today. You can gain a lot from using this technique, and I want to remove some of the overwhelm.

Before we immerse ourselves in the topic, though, let’s be clear about one thing:

More Traffic vs. More Conversions

This post is not about testing different variations of SEO-optimized content and elements to see which version attracts more traffic from the search engines. It’s about A/B testing SEO variations to see which version converts higher for a desired goal.

An easy example that illustrates this point is the desire to enhance a product page that ultimately sends more visitors to a checkout page. You obviously want the product page to rank high in the search engines, but the point of testing the product page is to achieve the highest possible conversion between the product page and the checkout page.

Also, in this post, I’ll talk extensively about SEO variations “A” and “B.”

Variation “A” is the first SEO-optimized page you build and the first that is live on your site.

Page “B” is the first test variation of “A.”

How Does SEO A/B Testing Help? 

A/B testing for SEO helps you see you see how your audience acts. It takes away any bias, assumptions, and opinions you might have and allows you to make informed decisions.

For example, if you change the call to action button from green to red and your conversions shoot up, then you know, without a doubt, that the green button spurs visitors into action.

Likewise, you might use stock product photos on one set of sales pages. Then you’d use staged photos showing what a product looks like when it’s in use. When you compare the two sets of results, you should get a clear winner.

You can then use these results and apply them across different areas of your website. Then, by rinsing and repeating, you can use SEO A/B testing to refine and optimize your website content and elements.

This can result in more organic traffic to your site, leading to better visibility and improved conversions.

A/B testing can also help you:

Find which version resonates with your target audience

Improve conversion rates

Ensure your decisions are backed by data rather than assumptions.

Better understand consumer behavior

Target and personalize campaigns to different segments

Finally, using A/B testing in SEO can lower your bounce rate by enabling you to understand which content your audience finds most engaging.

First Optimize Your SEO Landing Pages

Here is a checklist of important on-page SEO items you will want to focus on when you create your first SEO landing page:

SEO–friendly URLs:

If you can include SEO-friendly URLs on your website, then do so. Simply ensure you have keywords in your URLs and separate each word by dashes. For example: http://example.com/seo-friendly-urls 

Title Tag:

The title tag is the biggest influencer in terms of “SEO weight” for any webpage. Include the keyword near the beginning of the title tag.

H1 Heading:

The H1 should match the title tag if possible. Again, ensure you include the keyword in the H1 heading.

Bold the keyword once in the text:

You may want to bold the keyword once and make sure it appears in the body text.

As John Mueller from Google confirms, bold text can assist your SEO.

In a 2021 Google Hangout, Mueller explained:

“…usually we do try to understand what the content is about on a web page, and we look at different things to try to figure out what is actually being emphasized here, and that includes things like headings on a page.

But it also includes things like what is actually bolded or emphasized within the text on the page…”

H2 Headings:

It’s a good idea to have a couple of H2 heading tags to act as subheadings. These subheadings should include keywords that are similar or related to the main keyword, like in this example from Semji.com.

Images With Alt Text:

Images provide a better user experience, so try to include a couple of images on your landing page that contain descriptive alt text, like I do.

External Links:

To show the search engines how your landing pages relate to other pages on the web, place a few links for “further reading” or to include “references.”

Finally, create separate landing pages for all the keywords you want to rank for. I generally recommend that service-based businesses build niche landing pages for each service they provide. For example, if you’re dealing with a landscaping business, you may want to create landing pages for “walkway lighting,” “irrigation,” and “putting green installation,” because these would all be pages of different services the landscaping business provides.

How to Conduct SEO A/B Testing

I’ve talked enough about the theory. Now it’s time to discuss putting your SEO A/B testing into action.

Choose What to Test

Begin by deciding which elements you want to test. Here is a quick list of webpage elements that you can A/B test:

The headline.

Your call to action.

Any graphic you use in direct correlation to your sales efforts.

The sales copy or product description

Meta descriptions.

If we go with meta descriptions as an example, look for pages with a lower click-through rate and decide how you could improve it. For instance, could the content be more engaging, or could the keywords better meet search intent? 

For more information about this, check out my blog post: A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: An Introduction.

Launch Version “A” and Wait

A critical part of launching your A/B testing SEO experiment you have to wait for the search engines to index the page. The reason for this is to ensure you have enough traffic to run an A/B test. You need to hit a certain traffic threshold to generate results worth analyzing. A good figure to aim for is 5,000 visits a week. 

If you are building links toward your landing pages, you should wait until you acquire those links and wait about a month for the “link juice” to apply to those pages. Watch your analytics and wait until traffic to that page ramps up and levels out. Then you’re ready to run your tests.

Don’t Let Variation “B” Get Indexed

Since you will be testing two different web pages with very similar content and about the exact same subject matter, you want to ensure that you keep variation B out of the search engines. Here’s why:

Keyword Cannibalization. By having two live URLs on the same topic, the search engines get confused about which landing page variation is the most important version to index. What happens is the search engines choose the more important page arbitrarily and, therefore, only send traffic to one page (or a majority of the traffic). This can cause damage your previous SEO efforts. 

How To Make Sure Variation B Doesn’t Get Indexed

Here are some tips to prevent search engines from indexing your variation B.

Apply a meta “No Index” tag to the landing page B head. This instructs the search engines not to index landing page B.

Apply the canonical reference to landing page A in the landing page B head. This tells the search engines that landing page A is the original version of the two landing pages.

Don’t mention variation B in your robots.txt file. There is no point in alerting others that this page exists. Sometimes this is a way to actually get a page indexed that you don’t want to get indexed (because other “bad” robots can follow those URLs and link to them elsewhere on the web).

Run, Rinse, and Repeat

Once your SEO A/B testing is ready to begin, let ’em rip and monitor your website testing software to see how each variation is performing. Most website testing tools give you real-time feedback on how each page is fairing. You can use VWO, Google Analytics 4, or Optimizely for this part.

These SEO A/B testing tools also let you know when you have hit a statistically significant threshold where you can make a decision on which page variation was the winner.

If your variation B landing page turns out to be a winner by a long shot, then congratulations! Now you can make variation B the new A and prepare for another series of tests.

Remember A/B Testing Best Practices

You’ll want to get the best out of your experiments, so here are some A/B testing best practices.

Clearly Define Your Goals: Decide which goals/ metrics you want to focus on. Perhaps you want to improve revenue per user, organic traffic, or conversions. 

Random Sampling: Ensure that your sample is randomly selected to avoid bias in your test results. Use a representative sample of your audience.

Test One Variable at a Time: Measure one element per test. For instance, the color of your CTA button or the imagery on a specific page.

Traffic Segmentation: For more detailed insights, segment your audience, say by new or regular customers.

Sufficient Sample Size: You’ll need a decent sample size for usable results. HubSpot recommends having a group of at least 1,000.

Set a Reasonable Time Limit for SEO A/B Testing: The recommended minimum is two weeks, but you can adjust the time depending on factors like seasonal variations and business cycles.         

Avoid Ending Tests Prematurely: Test for a sufficient duration to account for daily and weekly variations in user behavior and keep running until you’ve reached statistical significance. 

Track and Analyze Results: I’ve already detailed tools like VWO, but there are plenty more A/B testing tools around.

Finally, apply SEO best practices, test headlines, and keep testing and refining. 

Interpreting Results of Your SEO A/B Test

What if the difference in results is minimal, making your A/B SEO testing results hard to interpret?

This is indeed a problem with A/B testing web pages. If the results between your tests are not significant enough, you must keep testing drastic variations until you find a winning variation that produces significant results. Your website testing tools will alert you if your test did not hit a statistically significant result.

You can also use my A/B testing calculator.

FAQs

What Is A/B Testing in SEO?

Will the Winning Page Hurt My SEO?

Conclusion

By now, you should be fully up to speed on A/B testing and SEO. You should also have come away with some SEO testing ideas.

As you can see, there are numerous potential benefits to SEO testing, such as addressing visitors’ pain points and enhancing ROI.

If that sounds good and you’re ready to give it a go, you’ll find several tools around.

With these tools, you can easily perform SEO A/B testing for your website pages and individual elements. You just have to be cautious when preparing your tests and ensure you have enough traffic to make testing fruitful.

About The Author:

Sean Work is the former marketing coordinator at KISSmetrics. Follow him on Twitter (@seanvwork) and ask him for a free cup of coffee 🙂

Do you use A/B testing for SEO? Tell us about your results!