SEO Fight Club – Episode 171: SEO Testing Demystified
“Test Before You Wreck: The Perils of Google Business Profile Reinstatements”
– I recently joined an episode of SEO Fight Club to discuss a thought-provoking topic put together by our host.
When I began my journey in SEO, the first thing I did was testing small stores and only migrating victories to other stores which led to double digit growth for organic Revenue over many years.
Testing has always served me well throughout my career in SEO and it’s boggling to me why more people don’t test specifically over guessing things when Guru X and Y are both saying different things.
Muhammad Essie had an experience with a client’s Google Business profile being disabled which took a long time to get back
– something that can be avoided if changes aren’t necessary as there is an extended wait period on reinstatements from Google.
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“Network Wisely: Don’t Fall Victim to Black Hat Tactics!”
– Ensure to have all documents and photos in order before applying for a business profile with Google.
Research the forums on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Google Community to get an idea of any problems related to waiting times associated with getting approved.
Be aware that this time of year can lead to malicious activity/black hat tactics by competitors.
Network Administrators should be aware of any suspicious activities as they may be attacks against ranking pages or services being disabled without notice.
If Google suspends a service, receiving ad payments towards it is still possible
– however responding by throwing money at them is not recommended as it only encourages their behaviour.
Instead, reward good behaviour from Google and punish bad behaviour
– speak up with your advertising spend instead!
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“Gearing Up for the Holidays: Make the Most of SEO During Q4”
– It’s likely too late to be SEOing pages for Black Friday, so attempting it now could be a risky move.
– Back in the early days of SEO, some people theorized how many places to put keywords and that seems cute now by comparison.
– Our thinking on SEO has changed significantly over time which can make it difficult when we try and apply old methods today.
– Indexing recently slowed down with Google making modifications but they seem to have passed that bump at this stage.
– We expect backlinks will take more of a driver’s seat as we enter Q4 and see better ad Revenue numbers from Google again this year due to their practices around Black Friday/Q4 seasonality .
– If you need to respond quickly I suggest new pages, new keywords or multi-channel marketing where you have little or nothing lose but everything gain during this time of year .
– For those interested in tested SEO training upcoming sessions start in two weeks
– check out testimonials & case studies for success stories!
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“Test Your Way to SEO Success”
-I recently came across a great SEO training called testingSEOtraining.com
-The course is designed for intermediate to Advanced seos and isn’t suitable for beginners
-The course requires students to have the bias of taking action and pushing through homework assignments each week in order to get results with their own ranking website
-After completing this training, students are invited into a mastermind group which holds high level discussions on SEO topics
-Testing is another key important aspect of the course, but many people don’t take it seriously due to its complexity
-However I want all those who take my program to understand that although it may look daunting, testing isn’t as difficult as they think
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“Testing SEO: An Experiment in Progress”
– Testing for SEO requires more than just “copy paste” skills; basic HTML knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals is also essential.
– The science of testing can be likened to a middle school science fair: formulate a hypothesis, introduce procedures to test it, measure the results and analyze whether or not you were right/wrong.
– Publicly available data on testing are often unreliable, even if well-intentioned.
– Measurement facts should be clearly established
– attempting to debate them defeats the purpose (e.g., arguing over number of keyword matches).
– I have a hypothesis that including keywords in strong tags affects rankings
– further investigation is needed.
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“The Search for Ranking Factors”
– I use Laboratory Testing to figure out which ranking factors work by creating two pages with the same keyword in the text or strong tag format and seeing which one ranks higher.
– There are a few issues when relying on this method, such as not being able to tell if the results were random or not and not knowing how powerful that particular ranking factor is.
– Leaderboard testing has also been used in the past but due to difficulties indexing pages it can be challenging.
– To get more accurate results we need to test multiple times while making sure that our control page don’t fail due to Google shrinking their primary index.
