Thoughts from the SearchPilot team

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:

I recently gave a talk exploring what an Apple search engine will look like, how it will work, and what it means for marketers. Watch the full video.

We have now been publishing SEO A/B test results for some time and for each one, we have polled our audience to get them to say whether the specific changes in question were a good idea or not. For the average case study, only 35% of poll respondents get it right.

I’m often asked to contribute to articles predicting the future of SEO. Over the years I’ve predicted all kinds of things, but I’ve recently come to realise that I can summarise all the trends by saying that the future of SEO looks more like CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation).

When a test is based on a strong hypothesis, and yet our analysis is failing to reach statistical significance, we should make a consulting-style call on whether to recommend that the customer deploys the change. In many cases, where we believe that we are improving the site, or making it more discoverable from information retrieval first principles, and where the cost is not prohibitive, we should default to deploy. The primary purpose of testing in many cases is to avoid deploying changes that have a negative impact.

SearchPilot’s mission is to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites by empowering them to make agile changes and test their impact.

Running A/B experiments for SEO, as opposed to for users, is a complicated subject. There’s a lot of confusion over things like test design, controlling for external factors and some of the tools that can help you run experiments. This is a guide that covers all of that and more along with case studies and example tests.

In my opinion, the latest machine learning models such as GPT-3 can now create useful content that is worth testing for SEO and user benefits.

Download our SEO A/B testing whitepaper to get our detailed thoughts on what exactly SEO A/B testing is, why it’s needed and how it helps as well as a year of lessons from running tests, case studies and a detailed article on how SEO testing can help avoid marginal losses.