Experimenting with SEO

Successful SEO strategies depend on many factors and are usually the product of a lot of time spent on market research, competitor analysis, and social trends. Once this work is done, search engine algorithms will still need to crawl your site and determine its rankings. It’s a long, steady process that requires trial and error, and lots of patience. What happens if your main strategy doesn’t work how you expect? In this case, do what the pros do: experiment!

According to the SEO and marketing blog, Search Metrics, SEO experiments will help you answer the question, “will this tactic work for my business?” Here’s a few of their recommendations on experiments you can try:

• A/B Tests
• Font, color, and CTA (call to action) changes
• Tweaking your website copy and metadata
• Targeting search keywords with low search volume

The site Semrush also has some innovative SEO experiments you can check out. 

How did you get your SEO strategy in shape? Share your insights and experiments in the comments below!

Remember this important fact: Everyone is doing the same optimisation, everyone has the best content, everyone is targeting the low-volume keywords, and everyone is using the same data pulls to get the traffic opportunities

How then do you make your business stand out from the rest?

My advice is to look broader than search.

I always try to make articles with interesting topics. People tend to click and share them more, which is great for SEO. Also, those types of topics are more fun to make too 🙂 

Keyword research is always a good idea to do too (I use Keywords Everywhere). 

On 1/20/2022 at 9:36 AM, GlynMusica said:

Remember this important fact: Everyone is doing the same optimisation, everyone has the best content, everyone is targeting the low-volume keywords, and everyone is using the same data pulls to get the traffic opportunities

How then do you make your business stand out from the rest?

My advice is to look broader than search.

Thats only a chose with site builderes  as Squarespase

The first step is to create a SEO strategy.

This includes:

• keyword research
• content creation
• link building strategy

Of course, the on-page SEO optimization is required.

This includes:

• meta tags
• structured data
• xml sitemap

On 2/22/2022 at 6:31 AM, gper said:

• meta tags
• structured data
• xml sitemap

this nothing to do with Squarespace or real SEO it's just basic optimisation which work almost  in every CMS.

So, I have had my web up for over two months. I open a google window and type in a search option to try and see if it come up and NOTHING!!!  What the heck??  IS it necessary to hire someone? 

I am having a hard time swallowing all this. I  have previously used a Wordpress site and had  NO ISSUE like this.   You all have to be kidding that you can't google "yoga studio ellijay ga" and my site doesn't come up.  

https://www.risingsunyoga.life/

I have done this, hired a person to do the SEO optimization and still can't "search" my yoga studio, by "YOGA studio in Ellijay GA "

risingsunyoga.life

What do I do now???????

On 2/22/2022 at 12:31 PM, gper said:

The first step is to create a SEO strategy.

This includes:

• keyword research
• content creation
• link building strategy

Of course, the on-page SEO optimization is required.

This includes:

• meta tags
• structured data
• xml sitemap

 

That's what I'm saying! The only thing I have to add is, that I can only recommend to you guys, to make also analysis of your best contrahents: 

For example, "On which sites did they already build backlinks?"  "Is the domain good?" "Did I already build  there backlinks or still not?"

best regards,

Jürgen

On 5/7/2022 at 8:43 AM, risingsunyoga said:

I have done this, hired a person to do the SEO optimization and still can't "search" my yoga studio, by "YOGA studio in Ellijay GA "

risingsunyoga.life

 

What do I do now???????

There is a lot that goes into SEO, more than just adding 'Best Ellijay, GA Yoga' to all your title tags.

Just a few things I saw as I quickly scanned your website 

• At least 4 pages on your site have the same <title> tag, including some type of variation of 'Best Ellijay, GA Yoga'
  • They are all basically competing for the same search term.
• You are linking to a lot of external websites.
• Just on the home page you have 3 <h1> tags.
  • Make space for yourself
  •  Yoga & meditation that is passionate about helping you keep moving. 
    Stay grounded on the go! 
  • Experience…
• I didn't find a Google Business Profile. This is essential for local search.
• Images don't seem to be optimized. Meaning their file sizes are very large.

Not sure what the person you hired actually did for SEO, but there really is none on your website.

There are a lot of guides and resources out there in case you want to DIY this.

One of the most overlooked SEO items I see, especially with new sites, is submitting site's for crawl to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools. It's the simplest way to ensure that all your pages are being seen by search engines. Launching a new page? Just request a crawl and ensure it's being noticed as new content. 

A large portion of the information that is offered up as SEO is simply making a website fit into the mould and terms and conditions of a search engine. There is no tool that does SEO, there are articles by those tools that serve to reinforce the value proposition of using that tool 🙂

The goal of search engines is ultimately that your customers transact on their web-properties. Your website will become nothing more than a business card long-term, in the time between now and the evolution of search engines to arrive at that point, you can use SEO to drive traffic to your website. I have watched this evolution over 24 years, but I expect the above to happen in the next 5 once voice search kicks in properly.

Good SEO is not about traffic volume. Good SEO is about traffic quality.

When my company takes on a Client their traffic will go down, but the quality of their traffic will go up. They take less visitors than competitors but convert to business at twice the rate. At the end of the day that is what is important.

Any analysis of websites that are listed on the first page of Google have link profiles that a small business cannot even hope to outperform. In addition the ranking algo promotes choice and diversity as a performance metric meaning that if you have a single offering over time it is highly unlikely that you will hold your position even if you were to mirror the link profile of those websites on the homepage of Google.

The publicly available data on keyword search volume uses a shallow pool of data sources drawn from Google Adwords data and a few others. This data is solely geared towards commercial keywords. You will not be getting other keywords that Google does not (yet) consider commercial) this means that you are essentially using a keyword pool of data that everyone uses.

If you are running PPC campaigns you will know that % share of overall revenue through PPC is a fraction of that which arrives through organic. That means that focusing on the keyword data publicly available will only ever bring you a fraction of the actual revenue on the table.

I hope this can help some here zoom out and focus more on their business and making it better rather than ticking SEO boxes.

If you are starting out think about doing a PPC course and running those ads to be able to get immediate feedback on how interesting your website is to people that are looking for it. Don't spend 6-12 months doing SEO. Do the SEO once you know you are onto a winner 🙂

I see websites daily sitting at the top of Google that have really poor SEO 🙂

Good luck.

How do you make A/B test on SEO?

My SEO strategy always starts off with thinking about what target customers are searching, breaking this down into intent categories (i.e. are they looking to buy, get information etc.) and then I'll look at what the competition is doing.

After this, creating the best piece of content on the internet for whatever I want to rank for is key 🔑

On service pages, this is where internal linking and link building comes in, which is a whole different ball game!

On 6/14/2022 at 4:20 PM, jodrayton said:

One of the most overlooked SEO items I see, especially with new sites, is submitting site's for crawl to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools. It's the simplest way to ensure that all your pages are being seen by search engines. Launching a new page? Just request a crawl and ensure it's being noticed as new content. 

Hi! How do you do this?

35 minutes ago, lookseelove said:

How do you [submit a site]?

Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site's search presence. See:

• Verifying your site with Google Search Console
• Verifying your site with Bing Webmaster Tools

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On 8/25/2022 at 9:38 PM, antovicodg said:

How do you make A/B test on SEO?

To run an SEO A/B test, you'll first need to come up with a hypothesis about how you can improve your website's search engine visibility. Perhaps you think that changing the title tags on your pages will result in more traffic from search engines.

Once you have a hypothesis, you'll need to create two versions of each page on your website—one with the new title tag and one with the old title tag. Then, use a tool like Google Analytics to track which pages are being visited more frequently and whether or not your hypothesis was correct. If it was, congrats! You've just increased your website's search engine visibility.