SEO TIPS: Testing, Testing, A,B,C (Part One)

When you are using SEO techniques, you must target the most effective keywords that are relevant to your site if you plan to get anywhere productive. When your site needs a keyword upgrade, there are a few things you should do to prevent your web-pages from becoming less efficient and losing relevance. Here are a few simple tips to keep in mind when you perform your ongoing keyword analysis.

If your site isn’t getting the traffic you think it should, take s look at what is going on critically before making changes. Make sure it’s a keyword issue, and not broken links, weak content, or lack of promotion. Keywords that under-perform are sometimes affected by other factors, so it is important to look at your website as a whole before you go changing the keywords you are targeting.

Be realistic about what kind of success, or lack thereof, you are having. Reaching the first page of the SERPS is hard. If you have managed it, you really may want to consider long and hard before switching your keywords and having to start over. You may be able to improve a spot or two by helping your site itself perform better rather than aiming at a whole new set of keywords.

Use a good web analytics program to understand different issues which could be negatively impacting any single page’s performance. This will give you additional insight as to the habits of the consumers who visit your site who are drawn in by targeted keywords. You can look at how they see your site compared with those who arrive by other means such as paid search.

Get familiarized yourself with your consumer base. Once you can start to isolate the best possibilities for enhancing your site’s user engagement, you can start looking at what is and isn’t possible from a position of strength. You need a solid balance between keyword optimization and good polished content

Look for keywords that are over or under-performing from a visitor / conversion point of view. Sometimes a tweak of the page is all that is needed, or even lifting a high performing word out and giving it its own page.

Look where your customers go after a brief time on a ‘low performing’ page. If they follow a pattern of eventually converting, perhaps the page is doing its job after all. If they back out and take another route consistently, consider restructuring your page flow.

Run tests. A landing page test, split A/B or A/B/C can bring to light hidden weaknesses and help you figure out how to strengthen your call to action. Usability tests and focus groups are a good way to get information directly from consumers, and Google’s Website Optimizer can also help by showing two different groups of visitors different versions of your landing page – this immediately shows you which one is more successful at engaging visitors.

Tomorrow we’ll talk more about running tests.