Data in this article is traceable and backed by 3rd-party tools. Company-sensitive conversion data not included. Titles can also be traced in Archive.org. Additionally, I’ve compiled this data after my time at Tipalti, which is why clicks data isn’t available in all examples.
I’ve received a lot of demand from people wanting to check out more specifics from the SEO testing that my team and I designed, so the goal of this piece is to display what a high-velocity testing program can accomplish.
This testing program generated positive results from:
- Title tests
- Answer box tests
- Page revamps
- URL switch tests
If you’re interested in expanding your own team’s SEO testing efforts, my exact processes are now available in a free DIY SEO testing bundle which you can access at this link.
For now, let’s take a look at some of the positive experiments that came from this program.
Note: most websites will not need to run individual tests at the same velocity that we did. The same process applies at smaller scales, which can be impactful on conversion-oriented, money page URLs.
My walk-through of the testing program is illustrated in the video below.
And I’ve added a number of my favorite time-based SEO experiments in mini-case-study formats here.
Title Tests
Care to guess why the variants performed better?
AP automation was our most competitive keyword on which we eventually acquired the featured snippet. At the time of this writing it is ranking in position 2.
Answer Box Tests
Clearly, our SEO team thinks title tests are pretty cool, and there’s much more I could say / have said on the topic. But, our experimentation program didn’t stop at title tags.
We used the same process to test for featured snippets, for example. These experiments landed our content in the answer box for 100+ competitive search queries.
I covered featured snippet testing in my Moz article Beyond Title Testing, but we didn’t stop at the answer box either! Tipalti’s testing program included URL tests, content refresh tests, internal linking tests, and various other hypotheses.
Below are a few successful featured snippet tests that helped our team drive conversions & traffic on competitive search terms.
The Process
Whether it’s a title experiment, or a featured snippet test, we tracked all experiments in the same testing log.
That testing log went through a few iterations until reaching the point it’s at now, which looks like this:
The main difference between my new process and most other SEO testing processes is that this is designed to scale up individual page title tests.
For programmatic websites, this is easy to do because you can run one test variation on hundreds (or thousands) of URLs at once.
But for integrator websites like Tipalti & most B2B environments, we don’t have the luxury of operating with templatized pages, so we need a better way to scale our title tests one-by-one.
If you’re struggling to bring new life into your stale SEO campaigns and achieve growth trajectories that look a little more like this 👇, check out that SEO Testing Process here and let me know how I can help you grow in the rankings!
Included:
✓ Video instructions
✓ A Basic SEO Testing Dashboard
✓ SEO Testing Opportunity Analyzer
✓ An Advanced SEO Testing Dashboard
✓ A Test Data Normalization Calculator
