What makes clients click
Do you ever wonder how effective your site’s SEO is?
You’ve put all this time and effort into finding effective keywords, your images are slim, your page loading time is faster than a fast thing.
But is it bringing in the clicks and sales?
Because at the end of the day, ranking is nice, but you know what’s nicer? Making money!
Today we’re going to look at some tests you can run on your SEO to make sure it’s all ticking along, and what needs some work.
Tune in to learn:
- What SEO testing is
- Where to start – simple tests for small business owners
- How to measure how successful your title tag is
- How long you should run a test before looking at the results
- How you can test the effectiveness of a featured snippet
- How to look at your highest conversion pages and see where the clicks are really going
- What tools Logan recommends for SEO testing
- Logan’s top tip to get started with testing
Listen to the podcast
Share the love
If you like what you’re hearing on The Recipe for SEO Success Show, support the show by taking a few seconds to leave a rating and/or comment on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, or Stitcher. Thanks!
And big thanks to Leesy-lou from Australia for their lovely review:
“Brilliant! There isn’t too much that this lady doesn’t know about SEO. Love her knowledge, content and podcast. Highly recommended listening. 10/10”
Share the meme
Connect with Logan Bryant
Useful Resources:
About Logan Bryant
Fun fact: Despite being a notoriously picky eater, Logan has eaten Balut (duck embryo) and he liked it!
Transcript
Kate Toon
Do you ever wonder how effective your site’s SEO really is? You put all this time and effort into finding effective keywords, your images are slim, and your page is loading faster than a fast thing. But is it bringing in the clicks and the sales? Because at the end of the day, while ranking is nice, we know that what it’s all about is making money. So today, we’re going to look at some tests you can run on your website for SEO to make sure it’s all ticking along beautifully, and what needs some work. Hello, my name is Katie. I’m the head chef at the recipe for SEO success and online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization, and Digital Marketing. And today, I’m talking to Logan Bryant. Hello, Logan.
Logan Bryant
Hi Kate, how are you?
Kate Toon
I’m very well, it’s lovely to have you here. Let me tell everyone who you are. So Logan has been building content driven SEO programs at companies like to polti workboard Koala and clearlink. Early on in his career, he became obsessed with the question of which activities work versus which activity stones. This turns into a natural curiosity that has led him to develop an experimental mindset. In most cases if a thing is worth doing, it’s also worth measuring and learning from Logan likes to combine curiosity with measurements to untangle the messy black box of SEO efficacy. Fun fact, I love the fun fact despite being a notoriously picky eater, Logan has eaten ballute duck embryo and he likes it. Okay. That’s a bit weird. And I’m a vegetarian. So I think maybe we should just I’m not sure what. I’m not being funny. But how does one come to eat a duck embryo? It doesn’t seem like a regular thing that will be happening in the middle of America.
Logan Bryant
No, definitely not. I spent a couple of years living abroad in the Philippines and they had that there that’s like where they’re notorious for having the balut. And I it took me a year I was there for a whole year before I even went near it. And it honestly it wasn’t as bad if at least you know, maybe if you’re a vegetarian, don’t don’t go Yeah,
Kate Toon
I don’t think it’d be top of the list. Did it? Was it the classic thing of everyone says when they eat something weird? Oh, it tastes like chicken? Did it taste like chicken?
Logan Bryant
It absolutely tasted a bit like chicken. Because it’s so, duck isn’t really that far. Yeah.
Kate Toon
It’s like a chicken cousin, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, I remember going through the markets in Thailand. And there’s all like, sort of, you know, battered tarantulas and locusts and all kinds of things. I was very grateful at that moment. I was a vegetarian, and I didn’t have to be adventurous. So there you go. But anyway, when it comes to SEO, we should be adventurous. And we should try new things often. Look at that segway Logan. And that was pretty good, right?
Logan Bryant
Not bad. Hard to go from duck embryo to SEO.
Kate Toon
Duck embryo to SEO, there’s always a connection, I can always find it. I think when people, you know, they do their SEO things, and they kind of they’ll open up their Google Analytics, I’ll open up the Google Search Console, have a bit of a poke around and go look, okay, then, and make absolutely no changes at all. So when we’re talking to complete newbies, what do you really mean, when you talk about SEO testing? What sort of things are we testing?
Logan Bryant
Yeah, so one of the things I think people’s brains sometimes I’ve noticed tend to shut down when you when they hear SEO testing. Oh, it’s this big advanced thing. And they start thinking CRO, and they start thinking about hot jar and, you know, Optimizely, and all kinds of different testing stuff, and it starts to just be overwhelming. But really, it shouldn’t be that overwhelming. The best way that I like to think about testing is just break it down, just scale it back to what the word testing even means. You know, at the end of the day, it means trying something. That’s what a test is, whenever we’re testing something, we’re trying something. And at its most basic, fundamental roots. That’s what I think testing is. And you don’t have to have a perfect process, you don’t have to have the most scientific or statistically significant method to your testing, aka trying approach. You just have to be willing to try things and at least have some idea of like a hypothesis or an idea that you want to try and then also just some way of measuring it even if that way isn’t perfect.
Kate Toon
I love that I love the being able to release the imperfection and also focusing on small things, you know, one thing at a time, and I like your idea of creating a hypothesis because I think people often go into testing tools that are available with no idea in mind of what they’re looking for. But if you’re like right, well, I’m gonna try and I’m sure you’re gonna give us some examples. I’m gonna try So I’ve been writing 1000 word blog posts. And from here on out, I’m gonna try pushing up to 1500 words and see if that improves my time on page, see if that improves people going from page to page. And I’m going to try that for a period of time. But let’s, let’s break that down. What if you were starting? If the first test that a small business owner could do on their SEO site? What would you recommend? What are some simple tests, you can run for SEO?
Logan Bryant
I tell pretty much everybody to start with titles, that tends to be the first test for most people that are attempting to impact their SEO, if you think about it a title tag, it’s not very long, they’re usually somewhere between maybe 30 to 60 characters somewhere in that range most of the time. So it’s really not that long. And it’s not very high effort, as you know, in comparison to writing a whole new blog post, yeah, all you’ve got to do is just have an idea for, hey, this title looks like it could be improved in a certain way. I typically like to analyze what’s on Google to see what other people are writing and then see if Hey, maybe there’s a way that I can improve my title, then you just launch that title test and see what happens.
Kate Toon
Yeah, and I like that. I think people are quite terrified about touching their titles. But the truth is, Google manipulates them anyway. And often, one of the things you can do with title tags is look at what how Google has changed it based on searcher intent, look at the ads that other people are using, if there’s ads that come up for your search to see what phrases they’re using, and then give it a change. And then what metrics would you use to measure whether you’ve made a good decision or a bad decision with your title tag?
Logan Bryant
Yeah, and if you don’t mind, I’m gonna go on a very short tangent on that. You. It’ll be short, I promise. But if you if you take the title tag with you mentioned dynamic title rewrites from Google 9.9 times out of 10. When Google changes it, it’s usually because it likes your h1 better. So a fun fact, if you’re doing a title test, and you’re thinking about the dynamic stuff happening, if you change your h1 to match the new variation that you want, you have a better chance of Google selecting that new variation. Because when it goes to the to the h1, it’ll see the same new variation that you’re wanting to test.
Kate Toon
That’s not a tangent. That’s a bloody excellent tip. I love it. Fantastic. So title tags, obviously, one of the you know, the best things that title tags do is encourage click through rate. So you could look at your click through rate before, and then look at your click through rate after and see if that’s improved, because you know, obviously, it’s improving people’s ability to understand your content. Could you know what else would you be looking at to see if you’ve done a good job or a bad job?
Logan Bryant
Most of the time, with a simple test like this, we’re looking at before and after data. And I like to look at just overall clicks, you know, you can look at click through rate data as well. And it is helpful to look at multiple metrics in, in, in union with each other. But I do like to look at clicks as the overall benchmark as to whether or not I made an impact or didn’t make an impact, because that’s what we’re looking for is clicks. So most of the time I go for clicks. However, there is another scenario in which rankings become very important, as well, because sometimes you might have a page or a URL, and that URL may be ranking on page two or three for a keyword that you’re really trying to rank for. In that case, measuring clicks isn’t going to be super helpful, because you’re not going to be getting a lot of clicks to that URL in the first place. So it is definitely not uncommon to run a title test on some on a page like that. See rankings go up and be able to measure an impact without any clicks data whatsoever. And that’s another reason why I tell people, they don’t always have to be statistically significant because rankings when they go up, there’s no statistical significance there that you can really measure. But is it a valid test? I would say? Absolutely. It is, especially if you see rankings go up.
Kate Toon
Fantastic. All right. Well, that’s one really simple test that we can do, which I hope everyone will maybe go out. And that, you know, obviously what Logan saying is No, don’t go and change your titles on 200 pages, you know, pick two or three products, maybe one that’s or pages, one that are doing well already, could you improve it a little bit and one that’s languishing, could you improve it a lot? I think there’s a simple test. And I guess the other question would be how long do we wait logon before we kind of look for results, because people are very impatient. And you know, we know that with Google, you know, doesn’t crawl everything instantly. And it may take a little while to see results. So for tests like that, how long would you wait before you started looking at results?
Logan Bryant
Yeah, I typically advise people and you’ll hear a lot of other people Both who are running SEO tests stick within the two to three week timeframe. And it’s important to note that that two to three week timeframe, it’s not really a magical number that that tells us Hey, and in two weeks, that’s when we know. So it’s not, there’s no set magical timeframe that you should always abide by the however, the reason I, the real reason I go with two to three weeks is mostly because I like to be running multiple tests. And I like to run subsequent tests after my initial ones, which means that if I want to run more tests and kind of create a backlog of testing ideas and get through those, I like to move through those at a cadence. And that two to three week timeframe makes a lot of sense for me to be able to continue testing in a in a more structured way. So you can see results earlier than that, you might need want to wait longer than that. But it’s a good idea to give it at least two to three weeks.
Kate Toon
And I think that’s often the problem that I see with the students on the course is once they get the SEO knowledge, I want to do everything at once. And I’m often like, you know, be iterative with it. Because you will not know if you’re you know, you’ve fixed this and you’ve changed that you’ve changed that. And then you see a change in results, you will not know what was the deciding factor? Was it that you did x? Or was it that you did y and you’ve got too many tests going at the same time. And they’re all impacting obviously, everything’s connected, you know. So having that kind of iterative kind of cadence, waterfall approach of one thing than another. And having a little bit of patience can be better. Because obviously, if you find that, you know, you have made a correction to a title tag, and then that’s something that you can then write and it’s made an improvement. And that’s something you can roll out over other pages. That’s great. That’s great. You’ve learned from that, and then you can roll it out. But doing too many tests at once can be a bit overwhelming, don’t you think?
Logan Bryant
I think you can do a lot of tests at once. As long as they’re not overlapping. That’s it. And it can be overwhelming indeed. So you know, I wouldn’t say overdo it, but go at a pace that’s comfortable for you. And that aligns with your goals that you have, whether they be growth goals or educational goals.
Kate Toon
Right? Well, before we move on to talking about like, you know, using data to improve traffic and sales, can you maybe give us an example of one more test? Because I love that one? It’s so straightforward. One more test that someone could try this week on their small business website.
Logan Bryant
Yeah, my next favorite most favorite test is featured snippets. Oh, so usually people think of these things, such as featured snippets, or even content refreshes. A lot of these projects that I think tend to be labeled as optimizations. I don’t always think of them as optimizations because at the end of the day, how was it an optimization if the result didn’t follow? So experiment? Yeah. Yes, exactly. So a Featured Snippet test. The really interesting thing about those is the result is binary. So you either get got the featured snippet and one that result or you didn’t, and love
Kate Toon
the back. And why anything in SEO that’s actually black and white is such a relief, isn’t it? Because everything’s such a sliding scale? So it’s either a love a yes or no answer. So what would you how would you go about testing that? What would you do? So say, you’ve got an existing blog post, for example, and you’re hoping to get the featured snippet for a particular question? What actions would you take there?
Logan Bryant
Yeah, most of the time, you’re, first of all, you want to make sure that you’re ranking somewhere on page one, if you’re not on page one, you don’t, you’re not, you’ve got to get it ranking higher to even be in the running for that featured snippet. That’s the first criteria. And ideally, you want to be somewhere in the top five, you can absolutely still win a Featured Snippet if you’re in position nine, or 10. But your chances decreased quite a bit. So hopefully, you’re on page one, and hopefully, you’re even higher up on page one already to begin with. Once you’ve done that, I like to just check out first, like, learn from what Google’s selecting because a Featured Snippet test, you’re kind of trying to predict what Google thinks is the best answer. So in a lot of these answers, there’s not an objectively best answer. It’s what Google’s algorithms think is the best answer. So learn from whatever’s in the current featured snippet. Make sure you’re matching the format. If the format is a ordered list or an unordered list or a table, make sure you’re matching that format. Most of them are going to be paragraphs. So nine times out of 10. That’s probably what you’ll see as a paragraph and then try to rewrite that same answer in a way that doesn’t exactly match the answer that is existing but you might want to just do a spin off of what’s existing. And see if you can improve on whatever answer there is. Make sure you’re staying succinct. Make sure you’re not using any filler words or fluff and answering in the most direct way as possible. And of course, we could go a lot on a lot more Featured Snippets. But that’s, that’s essentially how I would do it. And then I would just treat it just like a title test, where I track the what I had before. And I track my new answer. And I see which one Google Preferred.
Kate Toon
I love that. I love that. And, you know, a simple way that I do that is in my my blog posts, I kind of answer the question shortly. And then I answer the question Longley, as I like to say, so a nice little snippet at the top that summarizes the answer. And then you can continue on in your piece of content to expand on that and add more detail and videos and all sorts of things. But yeah, having a sort of shorter answer at the top of your content can be great for Google to kind of scrape and use, but I love those tips. Fantastic. So if we are sitting here and listening to this and thinking these both sound great, you know, obviously they’re going to drive more traffic to our sites. And he’s going to be more qualified to drive traffic because people are interested, the title tag is more relevant. The Featured Snippets partially answered the question shown or authority, and we were keen to click through, what other kinds of data can we use from testing to increase our site traffic and sales?
Logan Bryant
Well, I’m not sure in terms of data, because I think that’s most of the data other than if you want to look at conversion data, which you know that conversion data tends to happen, after we generate the traffic, which SEO testing doesn’t go as far as to dive into the actual conversion rate optimization tactics. So usually, the goal of SEO testing kind of the furthest it can take you is traffic growth. So I don’t know that there’s a lot of other data. But I will say that the best way to utilize it is to focus on your highest converting pages focus on your money pages. So you can look at existing conversion rates to see which pages are currently converting. You can look at striking distance, come to think of it, there are a few data points. One of my favorite ones is I call it available clicks, which is where I look at all the URLs on my site. And I will, I’ll pull the Search Console data. And I’ll say, what I’ll subtract the clicks data for each URL from the impressions data. And that tells me how many people are getting an impression but not clicking through. And I’ll sort that column to see where are the most available clicks, leads me to some of the best seo testing opportunities because it tells me, hey, if my title tag performs better, or my Featured Snippet performs better, I’ll generate even more clicks off of these pages, and I can prioritize my efforts in that direction.
Kate Toon
Yeah, that’s such a great idea. I’ve not heard that one before. That’s amazing. And I think you’re right, you know, I like to say SEO gets people to your door, and then your content and your CRO drags them through and gets the sale. But I guess you could also look at, you know, new, new versus existing traffic with the basic premise that people who’ve been just before a slightly more likely to buy than people who’ve never been to your site before. So what could you do with your testing to encourage loyal customers to come back again? And I think one would generally say that, even when you got the traffic engagement, is it people are more likely to buy if they’re engaged with your content, if they’re spending more time on the site, if they’re looking at more than one page, if they’re getting further down the page? So you possibly could look at some engagement elements as well, don’t you think?
Logan Bryant
Yeah, I think you can, once you get into engagement elements, then I would suggest doing tests that are a little bit more related to the site content after they click yes, because the title tag is usually kind of like, after they click, they don’t see the title tag anymore. The Featured Snippet. Yeah, they see that, but it’s only a small part of their overall engagement. So I would think about doing like a content refresh test, like hey, can we redesign it? Can we refresh it? In those instances, when we’re trying to improve those like, in on site engagement metrics, you might get a little bit more thorough or a little bit, you know, more hands on with larger tests.
Kate Toon
Yeah, I mean, even just basic things, you know, working with some of the E commerce stores or just taking the best performing products, you know, that are already getting good clicks and good traffic’s and just augmenting them adding a bit more detail, maybe adding a video, adding some FAQs, adding a couple of additional pictures just to get people to get more engaged with that content on the page, which doesn’t sound like SEO, but it can Have is SEO. And it’s because this is I think people try and be too distinct about oh, this is SR SEO. And this is CRO, and it’s kind of all combined to some degree, I think. So we’ve talked about some great tests, as we talked about Title Tag testing Featured Snippets. Looking at conversion data, I love the available clicks tip that’s just fantastic. Looking at the gap between impressions and clicks. That’s amazing. And then some engagement factors. But what tools would you recommend for people to use to do these kinds of tests? So we are we sticking with Google guts Search Console, or using one of the sexy expensive ones? What what do you use to do tests?
Logan Bryant
Yeah, I was think if if you’re just starting out, just use Google Search Console, if it’s your first test, if you’re still getting in, get, you’re getting your hands dirty with SEO testing, you don’t need to sign up for any tools, I would just use Google Search Console, maybe some of Google Analytics, although I prefer Google Search Console in these specific testing environments. If you do want to start doing more testing, meaning, hey, I want to scale up to do more tests, or I want to measure my tests better. Or I want to do even more advanced testing. Like there’s there’s SEO, split testing, which we haven’t talked about, but we shouldn’t, because it’s very advanced. If you want to start going in that direction of higher velocity or complexity of your testing, then that’s when you would want to look at other tools. And the first one I would recommend graduating to would be Seo testing.com. That’s a great tool. It’s not very expensive, I think, I don’t know the exact pricing. And I’m, by the way, I’m not sponsored by them or anything like that, but but I think it starts at like $30 a month or something like that. So it’s really not too bad. And they can give you that tool can give you a lot of data, and it can really help support and help you scale out your SEO testing program. So that’s where I would start, there’s also really advanced ones for enterprise like search pilot is a fantastic, really cool tool. Once you get to some more really advanced testing techniques, there’s several others out there. But I’ve also got a you know, maybe a selfish plug, I’ve got a tool that I’ve been building, it’s not launched yet. That’s basically just designed to help scale out more testing as well. But
Kate Toon
if you’ve got a wait list going for that, we’ll drop a link into the show notes.
Logan Bryant
I do actually it’s meta test lab.com, test lab.com,
Kate Toon
test lab.com, we’ll put that in the show notes. So go to the recipe for success to see that. But I love you know, I do think that for most, you know newbies or beginners or even people who’ve been around a while Google Search Console is great, we’ve got all the data there, if you go into your, you know, performance on search results report, you can see clicks, you can see impressions, you can see click through rate, you can see average position. And that’s a great place to start, especially with things like those title tags. And then obviously, using the search results themselves, I mean, you know, obviously, they’re going to be to a degree personalized, but you know, the Featured Snippet one, it’s either there, or it isn’t, you know, it’s either there or it isn’t. So you can actually just look at the data within Google itself. You don’t need to go out and necessarily pay for a sexy fancy tool. You know, on top of that, unless it’s meta labs, meta test labs.com, then get that one. So look, any final tips for people who are thinking about starting out with testing, you’ve given already given us some great examples, any other tips that you can give us the wrap up the episode?
Logan Bryant
The main tip I would want to leave people with is learning how to think with an experimenters mindset. So more than anything, don’t overcomplicate your SEO testing efforts, and start thinking like an experimenter going back to the idea that SEO testing is really just about trying new things, and giving things a shot and seeing what happens and measuring those results. Start Stop thinking about optimization so much, because you don’t really know if it’s an optimization if it doesn’t work. So think a little bit more like an experimenter. And I think that will open up your approach to SEO in general, not just SEO testing.
Kate Toon
I just want to finish off on a final point, because when I was, you know, learning Seo 10 or so years ago, I use my own site as a Petri dish. So I did all my experiments there, you know, Seo was kind of in its infancy back then. And we had some information from Google, but not much. Those were the days of Rand and his whiteboard a long time ago. And I was unafraid of, you know, fiddling with my site, you know, I was happy that it would have winds and I would have losses, but a lot of people will be thinking like I don’t like I don’t want to change the title tag for this page. Because what if I flick it up? So you know, can how can we get people away from the fear of this and that they’re not going to break their site by change? Take a few title tags.
Logan Bryant
There are very, very few instances where your SEO test is irreversible. Yeah. Almost everything is reversible. If your title tag doesn’t do as well, if your featured snippet doesn’t work, if your copy referred fresh does more poorly, almost always you can revert right back to what it was before. And Google will pick that performance right back up, and it won’t be a big deal, I promise. So that’s the number one thing. Just don’t be afraid, because you can always go back.
Kate Toon
Yeah, I love that. And you know, we’re not talking about doing things at mass scale, changing 1000s of title tags on a single day building 1000s of links in a single week. You know, it’s small, iterative changes that then you roll out over time. And as you say, Everything’s undoable. That’s the great thing about the internet. It’s not like print. Back in the day when you make a mistake there. It’s there forever. So everything’s fixable. laughable. So Logan, you mentioned your new testing tool, meta test. lab.com. Where else can we find out about you? Well, which social media channel do you hang out on the most?
Logan Bryant
I am most often on LinkedIn, I occasionally pop into Twitter now x,
Kate Toon
x Yeah, wild west land there. Now, I found Logan via LinkedIn. And that’s why I invited him on the show post lots of useful tips and advice. I will include a link to your LinkedIn on the site so people can go and follow you and read all your bits and bobs. And we’ll also include links to Logan’s website and his Twitter strike X account, as well. So Logan, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some really practical doable tips. I really appreciate it.
Logan Bryant
Amazing. I hope it helps. Thanks so much, Kate, for having me.
Kate Toon
That’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about SEO testing, then head to my I love Seo group on Facebook, I’m going to do a little demo of a couple of Logan’s tests because I thought that was such great advice. Also, if you don’t have it already, check out my free ultimate SEO checklist. That’s a great way to start with testing. Go through that and make sure you’ve ticked can tick every box. And that’s a great way to get started feeling confident that you can make changes to your site and that you’re not going to necessarily break it. Anyway, we’d like to end the show with a shout out to one of my lovely listeners. And today it’s Leesy-lou from Australia. Brilliant. There isn’t too much that this lady doesn’t know about SEO love her knowledge, content and podcast highly recommended listening 10 out of 10 Thank you, Leslie Liu. And thanks to you for listening. If you have a minute to leave review wherever you’re listening to this right now, it’s a bit harder on Spotify. But on iTunes. It’s as simple as clicking on the app and clicking on the five stars. You don’t even have to write anything if you don’t want to. If you do, you’ll get a shout out on the show. And don’t forget to check out the show notes for this episode. I’m going to drop in a link to Logan’s tool and to the other tools that he recommended. You can also leave a comment about the show. So until next time, happy SEOing.
