SEO is generally considered a strategy or method to increase the significant visibility of a website on a web page.
When looking at its definition, it's a word you don't often see "experimental".
Why is it like that?
Experimentation is the precursor to SEO. Experimentation is what moves the industry forward.
Without SEO experiments, people would still change title tags and keyword stuffing.
The industry has moved forward because Google has also grown.
As SEO professionals, we should continue to come up with different hypotheses and test them to figure out what's most important to Google and our clients. This is our job.
Every website is unique and faces unique challenges.
The following three SEO experiments can yield amazing benefits for your specific website - test these to determine the benefits!
Experiment 1: Content Pruning
Every SEO person has heard the Latest Mailing Database saying "content is king". Unfortunately, the meaning of this idiom is often not fully understood. Most people agree that this colloquial means "create more content".
As an agency, we work with many clients and have tens of millions of pages indexed. While there may be situations where more content is needed, our primary goal is to analyze unnecessary content.
That's right, we want to try to find the page that should be removed.
How to do it?
In short, Google scores pages on each website that contribute to your overall domain authority. If you have a lot of pages that have no value, the overall SEO strength of your site will depreciate.
Here's how to do it:
Get Your URL List
Use a tool like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to get your URL list.
Check your link metrics
Once you have a list of your URLs, it is recommended that you download a URL analyzer. This tool will greatly reduce the time to analyze the data.
Import URLs into URL Profiler and connect Google Analytics (Analytics) with Ahrefs, Majestic or Moz (Link Metrics) and run the profiler.
Recommendation: Be sure to choose a schedule of at least 90 days if not longer.
Once the analysis data
is complete, download the results into a spreadsheet and sort. Then you can see the traffic metrics and link metrics for all pages.
Dealing with low-value page
identification results in pages with zero or very little traffic on the site. In most cases, those pages that haven't received user traffic in the past 90 days (or more) probably won't provide a lot of value to the user, otherwise there might be traffic.
Before indexing, make sure these pages don't have a ton of links pointing to them. If they have very little traffic and few links, it's probably safe to assume you can index those pages.
(Just common sense here, you should know how important this page is to you. For example, if this is a seasonal page, that's probably why you don't have traffic.)
Experiment 2: UX Optimized
UX (UX ) has always been an important consideration, but more than ever, it should be integrated into your SEO strategy as a never-ending experiment.
As Google's algorithm evolves, they can now better understand the positive experience searchers have with a website. The more you can understand your searcher's intent, the better you can improve your website to match and attract them.
Here's how to do it:
Survey your users
A "Voice of Customer Research" gives you access to whether your users are helping them reach their goals or making them happy. This can be done site-wide by using feedback polls or surveys when your site is converting or abandoning. A tool like Hotjar makes this very easy.
Often, website owners feel that they know what is most important to their users. But if you don't take the time to listen to them, how can you be sure you know what they want?
Ask the right questions Ask the right questions
in your survey, otherwise the data will be useless. Here are some examples:
What is your first impression when you visit the website?
What are the factors that influence your purchase?
Is there anything on this page to help you decide?
Why did you choose us after the comparison?
Why did you leave the site?
Watch how people navigate your site
To really understand how your visitors interact with your site, you should also first integrate visitor records (Hotjar can help you). This will allow you to revisit your site for any usability issues. Getting feedback is great, but users can also see session replays as they browse your site.
Testing and tracking results
Now with data, the key is to identify where optimization opportunities exist and what changes we think will improve the user base experience. Because it's free and integrates seamlessly with GA, I like to recommend Google Optimize.
Setup is simple because it is part of the GA Suite product, which allows you to target your experimental population based on GA goals.
Once you've enabled the Google extension, you can edit or add any element you want to test. And compare it with the original version to see how the test performed.
Without the data provided through surveys and visitor records, you won't be able to accurately identify potential gaps on your site for testing.
Experiment 3: Promote Internal Linking
SEOs are always focused on getting new links to their sites, but often ignore the impact of internal links. It's not about populating our pages with off-topic links, it's closely related to internal linking.
Here's how to do it:
Choose your page
Choose the page you want to rank higher on. This could be an important page that is not currently ranking as highly as you hoped or expected.
Check your keyword usage
to decide which terms you want to rank for higher. Next, go to Google search your site for that term to determine which pages are the most valuable for that term.
Find and add
links to your target page Look at the search results to see if those results already link to your target page. If not, add a link to the target page.
Track your ranking progress
After adding links to those pages, go to Search Console and recrawl those pages.
Wait 2-4 weeks while tracking the progress of the page.
Analyze Your Results Have
these improved your page rankings? If it improves, repeat these steps for other pages on your site.
Conclusion
While there are many other SEO experiments to test, my agency has seen these 3 SEO experiments provide our clients with huge benefits on a definite basis.
As SEO professionals, we shouldn't expect big gains if we only do the bare minimum. Continued experimentation is the key to continued growth. As Google grows, so must we.