A website’s conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete a desired action. For example, a 10% conversion rate means that 10 out of 100 visitors take a desired action. Conversion rate is the metric used to measure how successful your website is. Improving your website conversion rate will help you make more money online.

Whether you’re selling products, offering memberships, or displaying ads, the ultimate goal of a website’s content is to compel visitors to perform the desired action. When a visitor lands on your website, their intent might be to explore content, make a purchase, or subscribe to your newsletter. In order to persuade them to take the desired action, you need to make sure that your website’s content is structured in a way that is easy for the visitor to navigate through.

That’s where A/B testing SEO comes in. Using A/B testing SEO, you can literally experiment with the best search words and phrases to use, and the best location for those keywords. It might sound easier than it is, but it’s worth the effort. Because your SEO strategy will impact your site’s search ranking, A/B testing SEO can help you drive more traffic to your site. We’ll walk through six different experiments that you can try with SEO.

1. Meta Descriptions

The meta description appears beneath the title and gives searchers a preview of what a page contains. It exists to give searchers clarity on what a page covers and encourage click-throughs, convincing them why they should click your result over those of competitors.

Spend some time thinking about how to make your meta descriptions more relevant to the kinds of visitors you want to attract. If you want to improve your CTRs, make sure your meta descriptions are well-written.

2. Meta Titles

Meta titles are short, but they’re also one of the first things users see when they’re exploring your listings in the search engine results.

While not directly correlated, Google’s algorithms also take CTR into consideration when evaluating the quality of organic searches. So it follows in theory that better CTRs should contribute to better rankings. (Meta titles matter here.)

Keep in mind that people read these titles when deciding between different pieces of content in the SERPs. Variants can help you to check what effect such changes might have on your CTRs and rankings across your whole site.

3. Heading Tags

Headings are important because they’re shown in the search results. H1 tags are shown prominently, while H2 tags are shown less so, and so on. Test these factors to improve the quality of your content for search engines.

Are you looking to improve the clarity of your site’s content for search engine crawlers? These can be tested to help you get the right results.

If you run split-test experiments with your Control and Variant groups, you can see whether any of the changes affect organic traffic.

4. Move Element

It’s also worth testing to see whether moving certain elements around has any effect on your SEO. You can test the effects of moving parts of your site around.

Google doesn’t always treat changes to your on-page content the same. Whether you’re doing on-page or off-page SEO, the purpose of SEO split-testing is to monitor Google’s response to a change.

When designing for CRO, you’ll need to consider UX metrics in addition to SEO metrics, and use both together to find the layout with the best results.

5. Internal Linking

Internal links are a great way to direct people to other relevant pages of your site. Additionally, it is also a great way for search engines to learn about your site or your products.

A/B testing will help you understand which user behavior metrics are most important to improve, and allow you to measure progress towards that goal. It’s hard to know if your SEO performance is improving. A/B testing on one of these internal links will let you know whether or not changes you’ve made improve user experience for people visiting your page.

6. Image Alt Text

Without alt text, search engines can’t interpret images and find suitable results for users. The good news is, you can split-test whether or not Googlebot changes the ranking position of a page based on the changes you make to your alt texts.

The top pages in Google Images search results do not change frequently. If you see changes, you can use that information to improve your site’s SEO.

Conclusion

As shown above, there is a large variety of SEO experiments you can try out on your website to find ways to improve your organic performance. It’s important to know which SEO experiments are going to provide the best return on investment.

You can make small, incremental changes to your SEO strategy without worrying about losing your site’s organic traffic.

Track changes in your organic traffic over time to determine which changes to make and increase your conversion rate.