Thoughts from the SearchPilot team

Your C-suite should know that SEO is changing, and effective teams running SEO for large websites are investing heavily in testing capabilities. The investment required to do it well is significant, but the results are powerful.

Losing tests can be just as important as winning tests in the overall effectiveness of an SEO program. A crucial part of the return on investment comes from the ability to try more things, and to try bolder things, safe in the knowledge that you won’t roll out losers. We’re often asked about it, so I put together this resource: some needed sensitive controlled A/B testing to detect, some of the impacts were so large, you might never want to touch a title tag without testing again!

Something we are very often asked during the sales process is what are some examples of winning tests?. It comes up so often that I put together a resource listing some interesting winning tests - some predictable, some less so, ranging from modest uplifts that you really need to be running a statistical testing program to be sure worked to some stonking winners where it’s great to be able to know just how good they were.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) were controversial from the outset. Over time, many of the architectural issues were resolved, and the platform that remained, while still closely tied to Google, did less to encourage the most egregiously intimate integrations, but I have to admit to being happy to be able to predict the end of standalone AMP versions sitting alongside regular web pages.

I have regularly heard people say that SEO is zero sum and it seems that almost half the industry thinks that’s true. What I believe people mean by it in an SEO context is that every time you move up in rankings for a particular search phrase, other websites necessarily must move down to make space for you.

This is intuitive, but I believe it’s wrong.

The quality of SEO advice really matters in the real world, because steps back in performance are at the root of a lot of underperforming SEO initiatives and as SEO gets harder it also gets more confusing, and harder to tell the good from the bad. In this post I share my “surprisinginess / riskiness” framework for evaluating what to do with different kinds of SEO advice.

Someone born in the year I started Distilled would be learning to drive in the next year, and I still don’t really understand internal linking. I don’t think I’m alone. So we need to test! The big difference between regular on-page tests and internal linking tests is that the hypothesis can be about effects on the page where you are making the change (the “source” of the link) and on the pages receiving the new links (the “destination” of the links).

Title tag testing still works even with Google rewriting many page titles for display in the search results. Since the majority of titles are not substantially rewritten, and title tag changes are among our most consistently detected and largest impact tests, it would be worth continuing to run title tag experiments even at much higher levels of rewriting than we see in the wild today.

SEO at the edge means any SEO changes that are made after the HTML is created by your CMS or origin server before it is served to the user. These changes are made closer to the user by modifying the HTML on the way “through” a CDN-like layer.

The biggest benefit is that you aren’t constrained in the changes you can make. Between engineering resource constraints, and technical limitations of some web platforms, there are certain kinds of changes that can be difficult, prohibitively expensive, or even impossible to make via a CMS or origin code change. Many of these changes are quick and easy to make by modifying the HTML output at the edge.

I know a lot of folks who started out in SEO, and are now in marketing leadership positions.

One challenge, when this happens, is that it’s hard to stay plugged in to SEO news, but you still have oversight of the SEO channel.

Does this sound like you? Here’s what you need to know: