Finding the most effective form of your content
Do you ever have trouble making decisions? I know I do.
Should I wear red or blue?
Boots or joggers?
Do I feel like strawberry ice-cream or chocolate?
When you’re trying to pick between two different headlines for a post or the colour of a call-to-action button on your webpage, the pressure is on.
Suddenly the choice between red and blue could make or break your click-through rate.
Today we’re going to discover exactly how to make that choice through definitive reasoning and results that are so solid you could build an adorable cottage for piglets on them and no wolf could blow it down.
Tune in to learn:
- What is SEO A/B testing
- Why split-testing is important
- How SEO A/B testing differs from Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
- What kind of content you should be testing
- Why A/B testing is a must for eCommerce stores
- Why SEO A/B testing is a big part of the future of SEO
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And big thanks to Hayley for their lovely review:
“Great SEO Resource for this Newbie Blogger
This podcast has been an amazing resource for me as I prepare to launch my parenting blog.
What started out as a fun hobby is now looking more and more like a potential moneymaker, and it’s thanks in part to what I’ve learned from Kate Toon and her funny, down-to-earth podcast.
Thank you Kate! Hopefully one day soon I’ll be able to take your course and really get The Centered Parent blog off the ground!!”
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About Amanda
Amanda King has been in digital marketing for a decade, from agency to start-up to enterprise, across both the US and Australia. She’s also worked deeply in Analytics, CRO and content.
She’s been to over 40 countries, including Mongolia.
Connect with Amanda
Useful resources
- SEO-friendly product description copywriting template
- Google Optimise
- Recipe episode: What is Google Optimise and why use it?
Transcript
Kate:
Do you ever have trouble making decisions? I know I do. I wear red or blue, boots or joggers? Do I feel like strawberry ice cream or chocolate ice cream? When you’re trying to pick between two different headlines for a post or the colour of a call to action button for your webpage, the pressure is on. Suddenly, the choice between red and blue could make or break your click through rate. Today, we’re going to discover exactly how to make that choice with a definitive reasoning and results that are so slid, you can build an adorable cottage for piglets on them, and no wolf could blow it down. Hello, my name is Kate Toon and I’m the head chef for the recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. Today, I’m talking to Amanda King. Hi, Amanda.
Amanda:
Hello, Kate. How are you doing?
Kate:
I’m very good. It’s very exciting. I’m going to read out your bio, so people know who the hell you are.
Amanda:
… helpful.
Kate:
Yes, Amanda King has been in digital marketing for a decade from agency to start up to enterprise across both the US and Australia. She’s also worked deeply in analytics, conversion rate optimization and contents. She’s been to over 40 countries, including Mongolia. What was Mongolia like?
Amanda:
Mongolia was gorgeous. It was the one of the few places in the world where I’ve seen the Milky way clearly.
Kate:
There’s none of that light pollution.
Amanda:
Uh-uh (negative).
Kate:
Yeah, that’s definitely on my list. Obviously, we’re recording this in the time of corona. So everywhere is sort of out of bounds. I think one of the things I’ve missed most this year is being able to travel. We met at an event in Sydney. Was it at the start of this year? This year’s been about 10 years long, hasn’t it? When was it?
Amanda:
I think it… Was it February?
Kate:
It was February, which is pretty much a hundred years ago. We were talking before we started the part about how different this year has being because of knows speaking events, no nothing except glorious release, to be honest, for me. But anyway, one of the things that people have been really focusing on, which I think finally, in this period of corona is getting to grips with our websites, actually putting some time in to improving them. We talk a lot about optimization on this podcast in terms of speed and in terms of image optimization and copywriting, keywords and all that kind of stuff. But today, we’re talking about something a little bit different. We’re talking, I guess, kind of conversion rate optimization and A/B testing. Yeah?
Kate:
So rather than doing what most people do, which is put two pictures up in a Facebook group and go, “Do you like number one or number two?” And then people go, “I like one.” “I like two,” and they just pick whatever you want. We’re going to be talking about some actual, real, sensible, data driven, logical ways to A/B test. So let’s start off with the absolute basics. Can you break down for the listeners, what do you mean by A/B testing?
Amanda:
Okay. So there are many shades of testing, which makes things very difficult when you kind of talk about testing as a whole, but standard kind of conversion rate optimization is often focused on on-site conversion, in the name. Makes sense. Then what we’re actually kind of talking about today is SEO testing, which is looking more at your visibility and your demand and your traffic because as more and more people to CRO and A/B testing, which is great, I think it’s amazing, there are more and more opportunities for that conversion rate optimization to improve your conversion rate, but not enough to offset the negative demand impact that a change has. So I think one of the kind of standard examples is if you do an A/B test and you find that completely replacing your product detail page with a video increases your conversion rate by, I don’t know, 20% let’s say, but then it drops your organic visibility by 50%, it’s taking that extra step to make sure that what you’re doing is valid from a demand and that kind of top of funnel perspective as well.
Kate:
Okay. So that’s interesting because often when we talk about conversion rate optimization, we are just looking about changing headlines, changing colours of buttons, reordering content. All you’re talking about is that yeah, that might be a win on your site and you might be getting better conversions, but it’s actually going to negatively impact your ability to rank. And therefore, it’s kind of wiped each other out, I guess. Okay. That’s fascinating. Okay. So when we’re talking about SEO A/B testing, what kind of metrics are you using? What kind of elements do you look at? You’re coming to my site. I’ve done all my optimization. I’ve got a nice orange button because that’s the best colour and I’ve changed my headline. How do you then take a look at it from an SEO A/B testing point of view?
Amanda:
Look, it’s one of those things where you’d come in as someone who’s done SEO for a bit, right? It’s a relatively new field because it’s kind of come off as people are getting more into conversion rate optimization. So I wouldn’t say the thought process has been around for that long. So we’re kind of learning as we go. Right? But I would say take a look at it from an SEO lens. So like that example that I just gave, you kind of generally have that knowledge where it’s like, “Replacing all of the content on the page with a video of may not be great.” So it’s not something necessarily where I’d say do that for a button colour change or something like that. For me, I kind of would pick and choose where I would actually take the leap to do SEO A/B testing after a conversion rate experiment.
Amanda:
I know there are… The guys over at Distilled, I shouldn’t say guys, but the humans over at Distilled, they are probably one of the leading agencies doing this. They recently got pulled into brain lab, but Distilled will still kind of bring up their results. One of the things that they actually do a lot of is title tag tests. So they’ll take that… Say you’ve got 50 products under the same category. They’ll take 25 of those and change the format kind of in the same way for your title and description and see what happens because they’ve actually found that that can actually have a really big impact on click-through rate, more than you would expect, in the kind of like 20%, 30% range. So it’s kind of taking the expertise of SEO and filtering it over A/B test experiments and being like… I think we’d be fine if we were changing less than 20% of the content on the page, but big kind of wholesale changes is when kind of flags would raise for me.
Kate:
So yeah, title tags is one of the things I was going to come to because obviously, that’s a really great place to start with kind of A/B testing and SEO. You mentioned the e-Commerce stores and I think e-Commerce stores, they do wonder what the best structure is for a title tag. People are always saying to me, “Should I put brand first? Should I put colour first? Should I put a gender first?” And I’m like, I can’t tell you that. You need to tell me that because for this particular product, maybe the colour is the key selling point. But for this product, maybe the brand is the key starting point. But if you use the brand, who are you going to be up against in the new SERPS?
Kate:
So you’ve talked there about sort of Distilled will be working with the kind of companies on a lot of budget, a lot of developers. Let’s bring it down to the level of a normal, small business or e-Commerce store. What’s a simple SEO A/B test they could do tomorrow? Would you say something like taking a product that’s quite similar and doing one that has a title tag and a message description that’s written one way and one that’s written another, and then if they do that, how long do they leave it to know which ones worked and how would they know which ones worked?
Amanda:
Yeah. So actually, the way that I do it at Optus, I do actually use a tool from Distilled. I’m in no way associated with them, but they’ve got a lot of free resources. What they generally recommend is that the pages have about a hundred days of traffic and then you implement the test. Generally, they say at least 10 days, but I tend to treat it like I would treat A/B tests as well. So usually, two kind of product life cycles. So generally, I’d say at least a month in terms of making that change is kind of what I benchmark stuff by.
Kate:
We’ve mentioned here in the questions, why is it so important that e-Commerce stores? We’ve raised that as a point to talk about. It seems pretty self-explanatory that the stuff, so usually the first thing anybody’s read about your brand, unless they’re searching for your brand specifically, and that it’s a highly competitive space and often, you’re reselling a product that other people are selling. So you are lining up there. It’s your shop. There’s 10 shops sending exactly the same product. The window display is going to make the difference and the setup to the window display. Is that a good analogy?
Amanda:
Yeah, absolutely. The way that I kind of look at it, as well is, yeah. It’s free advertising space. Titles and descriptions, there’s kind of ongoing debate at the moment as to whether or not they still actually impact your SEO rankings, but they are definitely free advertising space. It’s a platform for you to say, “Hey, this is why you should go with me instead of the five other sellers doing exactly the same thing.”
Kate:
Yeah, and I think one of the big piece of advice I always give, especially e-Commerce stores, but I think it applies to service-based businesses as well is even if you can’t afford to run a Google ad campaign, look at the ads that are being spawned. What are the key benefits that they are mentioning? Which they all have optimised the crap out of. What are your adjectives that they’re using? If it’s a particular product, people talking about it being soft or affordable or smick or whatever it may be, what are the adjectives they’re using? Because they’re obviously working. The benefits, they’re working. Can you work them into your titles? So two’s in my products. Try one format for one, another format for another and then leave it for about a hundred days. Okay. So is that what you said? 100 days of traffic.
Amanda:
No, sorry. It’s a hundred days beforehand to have historical data to be able to model.
Kate:
Okay. Yeah.
Amanda:
And then about a month I would say.
Kate:
Okay.
Amanda:
Yeah.
Kate:
Thank you. I misheard you… message descriptions of one form of SEO A/B testing. Can you give us some other examples?
Amanda:
Particularly, with e-Commerce, I would say any changes to your product detail pages would be whether that is adding a product description where you didn’t have one before or again, kind of changing the way that you’re positioning it, whether you’re going for a price-based positioning or a features based positioning. That can all have an impact and it’s a bit scary sometimes how much of an impact that can have. Yeah, like I said, as well, if you wanted to add different media as well, sometimes that has unknown consequences around things like site speed and page performance, which in turn, will impact our visibility. So it’s all an interconnected web.
Kate:
Let’s break that down a little bit. So a couple of examples could be maybe at the moment, you have three images for each product. You have main image, close up and then an image from another angle. Take 10 products, add two more images. See if that makes a difference. Make sure you’re optimising, so it’s not going to ruin the speed, but then try that for a month. As I said, 100 days before whatever and that could be an image based test. Another one you mentioned there was adding a video. And of course, if you’re using YouTube or Vimeo to host that, you can embed it. It shouldn’t have too much of an impact on speed. Do products perform better with videos? We know they do, but how much more, and is it worth the cost of putting the video together and which products are you going to pick to put the video on? I like what you mentioned that for anybody listening, there’s a great template in the SEO shop for how to write a product description.
Kate:
But I like what the idea is there of trying out different formats. So when I’m writing product descriptions, sometimes I’ll go for more of a story based format talking about, “This is a beautiful product to use on this kind of event. It’s a sunny day. You’re walking hand in hand on the beach.” Other times, I might go with the already features focused product description, or really getting into the specifics of the materials and how you wash it. So changing up that. So there’s lots of different things you can do talking from an e-Commerce perspective, again, adding content to your category pages. What impact does that have? Adding a hero image to category pages. Lots of different things you could do, but I think one of the things that is really important with A/B testing, and I’d love your thoughts on this, is people often do too much in one go. What’s your ideas around how you should perceive with this in terms of structuring it and how much you should change in one fell swoop?
Amanda:
Yeah. I’m a bit of an odd duck in the testing world, I think, because I have worked with lots of small companies and with kind of small businesses, you have to weigh up how long it takes to reach statistical significance versus the level of the change that you want to make. So typically, what I do and the way that I approach it is, I create kind of an overarching hypotheses and I say, “Okay. I think that focusing our product detail pages on features will increase our visibility by X percent.” I won’t just do the changing the description, but maybe I’ll change some of the product images or maybe I’ll change what tabs are visible from a specs perspective.
Amanda:
As long as that ladder’s all up to that main hypothesis, I don’t care. If it’s something where afterwards, after we get statistical significance, someone comes in and is like, “Well, I want to know specifically about X change and what impact that particular change had,” then at that point, you can do a very kind of granular tests and do a down test and say, “Okay. It’s going to take us three months to get an answer, but we’ll get an answer as to that for you,” but I have that main result where it’s like, yeah, it’s impacted our visibility and was an increase of 10%, 15% or whatever it may be.
Kate:
Okay. So that’s interesting because I’ve always gone more with the kind of incremental, cautious, teeny changes. So I love that different perspective. Now, I think we should talk about the degree of change because I used to work in… major in email marketing and obviously, you do a lot of A/B testing there on subject lines because they obviously have such a huge impact on open rate, but often we would run campaigns. It was ’02 at the time, and obviously their mailing list was gigantic. So we could do great huge segments, 20000, 40000 people, and that was still a tiny percentage of the list, but the percentage difference, it would be like one would be getting 49% and the other would be getting 51%, but still overall, that was a huge amount of people. So when you do this kind of testing, do you see… Is there an obvious winner or sometimes the change is quite subtle, the percentage is quite small?
Amanda:
What is it? There was some statistic where it was basically only four out of every 10 tests that you do will get a statistically significant result. So you have to be comfortable with grey areas when it comes to testing. You have to be like, “Oh, this was a 1% uplift, maybe.” So that’s definitely one of the challenges, which is also why I am a proponent of go big or go home. Do more changes laddering up to hypotheses and kind of get all of those ideas in at once rather than trying to ladder them in one by one.
Kate:
Yeah. I like go big or go home. You’re so American. No, I love it because this is it though. If you’re a store that sells a number of products, a 1% difference could actually be fairly major. But anyway, interesting. Interesting, your thought. And I like that because you’re already going to be changing a small proportion of your pages, so you can go big or go home. I think people need to understand that all optimization, all SEO is a risk. It’s continually changing. Nothing’s fixed. That’s the joy of it and the horror of it. You’re never finished, are you? There’s always more you could do. We talked at the beginning of the episode about the negatives or the dangers of doing these changes.
Kate:
So obviously one of the biggest factors would be speed. So if you’re beefing up your page with copy, probably not going to make that much difference. But if you’re beefing up your pages with videos and images, and especially, I think I see a lot of e-Commerce stores kind of adding fancy widgets. Shopify has got an app that does this. There’s a plugin on WordPress and it’s like, is the benefit outweighing the negativity of slowing your site down, not working as well on a mobile device? So what are the other things we need to consider, the risks involved in doing these things?
Amanda:
Yeah, absolutely. Along with that, and kind of in with that as well is how much JavaScript that’s introducing. That’s a big one. Personally for Optus right now, which is where I’m on at the moment, that’s kind of a foregone conclusion because most of our website is built on JavaScript anyway, but for a lot of smaller businesses using kind of standard Shopify templates or things like that, they will be more HTML and CSS based. But putting in those fancy widgets is introducing the JavaScript, which means that you’ll have to go through a second crawl, which means your pages could rank later and lower anyway. So that’s where something like SEO A/B testing comes in because you can say, “Okay. I’m going to put that widget on half of my pages. See what happens.”
Kate:
Yeah. It’s so, so important, I think, to just because you bought this thing that wiggles and jiggles, is it adding to the user experience? Sometimes we are not the best judge of that. So going down the data approach really works. Now, obviously there’s Google Optimise, which allows you to do some of these changes. This can be confusing for people, but obviously on a basic level, you can have two products and you can code them differently and they can look differently. Google Optimise is a very clever tool that allows you to have the same page, but presents it in two different ways to your audience.
Kate:
You can change colours. You can change copy. Is that something that you’ve played around with? Sorry. I should also say, you can say, “I want to show this version of the page 50% of the time for a month. Then I want Optimise to tell me, which was the most successful version of the page.” I tried this out ages, about four years ago on the copywriter page and I just changed the… This isn’t SEO optimization as such, but I just checked the CTA on the homepage banner and it was a 2% difference over a month. But that 2%, I was like, well, better than nothing. So yeah. Do you use Google Optimise much?
Amanda:
Yeah, we do. We use the whole suite of tools, but I’ve used Google Optimise quite a bit, and especially for people that aren’t necessarily enterprise level. I personally say it’s the perfect tool. In all honesty, it’s really great in terms of the way it lets you make those changes. Yeah. No, it’s really good for kind of on-site personalization or conversion rate optimization. If you are looking to do an SEO A/B test, because you’re looking at kind of a higher top of funnel metrics, it’s generally something where the changes actually have to be live on the site on that separate category of pages. So it’s a weird balance of a lot of different things, but Google Optimise is a fabulous tool. I know in the last four years, if you looked at it now, you’d probably be like, “Whoa, there’s a lot here.” They’ve really advanced it in the last four years.
Kate:
But I think as well, we’ve got an episode on Google Optimise in the podcast, so go and check it out. I think it’s one of those things, often Google tools can be a little bit dense to get through, but I actually found it relatively easy to get very basic tests up and running. I’m not a go big or go home. I’m a stay small and stay in bed. So I just changed a few tiny things. So that’s something to play with, but that’s a really important point, that it has to be you’re actually loading a page and you need two different pages.
Kate:
So some of the metrics that you’re going to look at to decide whether this is the most successful page. We’ve talked about, obviously click through from the search. That’s something we can measure. We can measure that through Google search console. Other things like time on page, is that increasing? Number of pages viewed. Obviously, the biggest one that we care about is, what metrics do you think about when you’ll go in… because it can’t just be like one simple percentage. How do you go, “Oh yeah, this one’s working way better”?
Amanda:
Yeah. So typically, with Google Optimise, so they use a basient model, which is just a fancy forecasting model, does math in the background, but typically, it’s 5% change is usually kind of the lowest increment of change where they’ll say, “Hey, yes. This has been a successful test.” You can do some kind of hand modelling yourself if you want to at lower change levels. But typically, 5% is kind of the lower threshold that I look at.
Kate:
You’ve got to balance this up because obviously, we’re all busy people. If you’ve made all these changes to a particular page and it’s not having a massive result when you’ve got to weigh up your time to do that and are there better uses of your time, would you be better off running a Facebook ads campaign or doing some Instagram or doing some outreach or writing a guest book? Maybe you think about your three hours a week to work on your marketing for your small business site. What are you best spent doing? But I think it’s definitely worth the effort, especially as you mentioned that e-Commerce stores, because there’s so many variations that you can have, but you’ve got to weigh up that time. I made one more sale, the product’s $7. It took me six hours to make the changes. Okay. Maybe it’s not going to really be worth it.
Kate:
Can it be quite hard, as a small business owner, to do that because often you don’t account for your time when you’re working out your billing? “Brilliant. I made a sale. Took me six hours to make that sale, but I made a sale.” So that’s interesting. So I’ve got a couple of questions from members of the Digital Masterchefs community. So I hope you don’t mind me putting these to you. So the first one.
Amanda:
Absolutely not.
Kate:
… is from Bec Slack and her website is an e-Commerce store. It’s called Clever Stuff. She sells lovely toys for kids. So I think we’ve covered a couple of these, but let’s just go through them. So is there a certain amount of time you should let the test run to see if there’s a true difference? We know this one.
Amanda:
Yeah. Typically, I’d say 30 days is the minimum and there are lots of free tests, calculator links online, and it really depends on what your success metric is. But generally, I typically will go for like two fortnights, two kind of product cycles to even out any kind of weird traffic spikes or trends.
Kate:
Yeah, I like that. I think what was really important was the 100 days of data before, which is something that people might not think about. You have to have your benchmark obviously, and the thing is as well, obviously with an e-Commerce store, it’s so seasonal and it depends on what… You can’t do this and then run a sale at the same time because you’re going to skew your results. Do you know what I mean? You’re going to mess things up. So maybe would you say that it’s good to run these kinds of tests in high sales periods or in lulls, like in quiet times when you maybe don’t make… Because it’s kind of like I’m not selling much anyway. It’s not going to make that much… I’m not going to make mistakes and dramatically ruin my sales process.
Amanda:
Yes. I’d also say consider what your normal is as well. If you’re running sales 70% of the time, then fine. Run it during a sales period.
Kate:
Okay. Okay.
Amanda:
But if you’re running sales 20% of the time, maybe don’t want it during a sales period.
Kate:
I love that. Consider what your normal is. I have no idea what my normal is, Amanda, seriously. Changes every day. Now Bec asks, “Is there an app to easily do this on Shopify?” But I think we’ve already answered that as well, in that it’s not kind of playful, tricksy showing one page or the other. It’s literally having two separate pages done in different ways. Is that right?
Amanda:
Yeah. So in terms of conversion rate optimization, yes. There are absolutely tools like Optimise and Optimizely and VWO and a bunch of other tools or A/B tasty, lots of other things. For SEO A/B testing, because it was such a new concept, there are a couple of platforms out there, but they’re super expensive, but in terms of the quick and dirty way you can do it, it’s changing half of your category of pages to one while keeping the other.
Kate:
Yeah. Yeah. So I think we could almost say that there’s a degree of maybe using heat mapping software to work out what’s working on your page, is thinking about the colours and getting kind of the basic conversion rate optimization done, and then moving into the zone of SEO A/B testing. It’s kind of like stage two to a degree, but then equally, it’s all combined as well because as you said, adding those extra buttons could mess up your speed. So yeah, it’s a bit mixed up.
Amanda:
Yeah. Nothing’s easy in SEO, right?
Kate:
It depends. That’s what we say. So I’ve got a question from Elanya Van Heerden and her website is Four Vans in A Caravan. And she says, “In terms of Facebook ads, is it better to use that split testing function or is it better to create two sets of ads?” So kind of moving away from SEO for a bit, but obviously a lot of people are using SEO to drive traffic to their sites and some people are using ads. Would you incorporate ads into your SEO A/B testing or would you keep it completely organic?
Amanda:
Typically for SEO A/B testing, I keep it completely organic. For conversion rate optimization, you can absolutely do A/B testing and A/B test the shit out of it. Sorry, I don’t know if I can say that.
Kate:
You can.
Amanda:
You can do very channel specific targeted A/B testing. I would say generally for something like that, unless you are actually A/B testing the ad copy, use something like Optimise because then you can A/B test the landing page.
Kate:
Yeah.
Amanda:
So it depends what it is you’re trying to test. If it’s the ad copy, I’d go with the Facebook native platform and you can probably talk a bit more about that kind of Facebook native testing platform. For me, it’s all Greek. But if you’re looking to actually test the landing page and what people see when they come to your site, absolutely use something like Optimise or VWO or something like that.
Kate:
Yeah. Thank God I know much about Facebook ads either. All my traffic for the whole business has always been organic. Then the last month, I did try Facebook ads for the first time ever. So I’ve never used ads, which is, I think… because it’s a portrayal. I’m an SEO person. If I can’t get people to buy a milkshake in my yard… Is that the expression? By SEO and content marketing, then I’m no good at SEO and content marketing. I did Facebook ads and it was a glorious flop. I’m delighted that it didn’t work for my particular brand of things because it made me feel I was very wise, but I think people get overwhelmed with A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. There are so many tools, so many things you can do.
Kate:
But what I think you’ve kind of given us permission today to do is to be a bit more down and dirty and just take a page for one of your products and be playful and compare it to a product you haven’t touched. See what happens. Give it the time. I like your idea of going big or going home. The only thing I would worry… I would wonder, was it the video that made it better or was it the copy that made a better? I don’t know. That’s what I would worry about. I don’t know how to replicate this result. Do you know what I mean?
Amanda:
Yeah. Well, if that works, you replicate everything. And like I said, if it is something where you’re curious and you want to-
Kate:
Drill down.
Amanda:
Yes.
Kate:
… and you just do that one thing. Okay. Well, I love that. I love that permission to just play and try a couple of pages and see what happens. You don’t need to buy an expensive tool. You are just kind of being intuitive. Most people understand their audience and they know what they want. I was talking to a lady in my community, has a website called Modella Clothing and she wants to introduce stuff around, “Hey, this is a little bit see-through. So if you’re going to wear it, maybe wear a vest underneath it or do this.” I’m I love that kind of information. I want that. If you added that to all your site pages, I reckon that would improve conversion because you’re overcoming a pain point for me. You’re making me… I’m worried about buying this and you’ve now just got rid of my worry. You know?
Amanda:
Yeah, and like ModCloth, I keep coming back to because they know their audience to a T in terms of how they present their clothes, the language that they use in their descriptions, the fact that they’re just reams and reams, and reams of customer reviews.
Kate:
Yeah, and the customer pictures of people in the stuff. Also, I think it’s them that do the thing of, “The model is called Sue. She weighs 180 pounds. She’s this tall.” So you go, “Okay. That looks good on Sue, but it’s not going to look good on me,” and that’s okay because I’ve got to look at another product. It’s not put me off. It’s just means you’re going to get fewer returns. You’re actually going to get more trust and therefore, you’re going to get overall, more conversions. So I think little tweaks like that, adding size metrics, adding usage. It sounds crazy you should tell people how to use stuff, but maybe they don’t think this is something they need in their life that you can introduce it in a way that it is, and as you said, videos, photos detail.
Kate:
Especially in this time where we can’t go out and physically shop and buy things, I want as much detail as possible. So there’s this amazing group on Facebook where it’s people order stuff off Etsy and it’s like a rug and then they get it and it’s that big. Have you seen those pictures? I’m doing that big and it’s an audio format, but imagine you’ve ordered a beautiful Persian rug and it turns up and it’s the size of a matchbox, and they never lied because they didn’t put the dimensions in.
Amanda:
Exactly.
Kate:
I love this topic. I think it’s really interesting. I encourage listeners to just try out a few pages, go big or go home and see what happens and experiment because it is all an experiment. SEO is a mystical beast. No one really knows a hundred percent of the answers because it’s going to depend on your site and your customers. Okay. Brilliant, Amanda. Thank you so much. So where can we find out more about you? You mentioned that you’re working for the big boys. Can we follow you on Twitter? Can we find you on Instagram?
Amanda:
I am terrible at Twitter and at Instagram, but I’m happy for people to reach out to me directly actually. If you feel like sending an email, it’s just Amanda.King@optus.com.au. Or you can stalk me on Instagram @AmandaECKing.
Kate:
I’ll include links to Amanda’s LinkedIn profile and her appalling Twitter account. All right, Amanda, thank you so much for your time.
Amanda:
Thank you. Have a lovely day.
Kate:
Interesting stuff. SEO split testing for visibility and conversion rates, I love it. If you want to have a chat about this or learn more about the topic, head to my, “I Love SEO” group on Facebook to ask questions and maybe share your experiences. Now, as you know, at the end of the show, I like to give a shout out to one of my lovely listeners. Is it you? Did you leave me a review? Well, this one is for Hailey from Pittsburgh in the United States. She says, “Great resource for this newbie blogger. The podcast has been an amazing resource for me as I prepare to launch my parenting blog. What started out as a fun hobby is now looking more and more like a potential money-maker, and it’s thanks in part to what I’ve learned from Kate Toon…” that’s me, “… and a funny down to earth podcast.” Thank you. “Thank you, Kate. Hopefully one day soon, I’ll be able to take your course and really get this centred parent blog off the ground.”
Kate:
I love that plug. Centred parent blog, people. Check it out. So thank you, Hailey. And thanks for you for listening. If you have time, please leave a five-star rating or review on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you heard the podcast. Your review will help others find the show and learn more about the wonderful world of search engine optimization and digital marketing, and you’ll get a shout out on the show. Now, you can head to the show notes for this episode of the recipeforseosuccess.com where you can find out more about Amanda and check out her LinkedIn and Twitter. And finally, if you haven’t checked it out yet, check out two of the Kate Toon Show, my personal podcast about living life as a misfit entrepreneur. There is a new series, hopefully coming out in 2021. I said that a few times. Now, I kind of vaguely mean it. Anyway, thanks for listening. And until next time, happy SEOing.
