Today I’ll be going over the next SEO tool featured in my previous post. These SEO tools are:
Google Website Optimizer as an SEO Tool
First of all, Website Optimizer is awesome. It provides awesome functionality, and is a Google product (read free). Let’s go into some detail.
What you need to know is that search engine optimization is more than just showing up higher on google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). SEO is about getting increased visitors, getting them to do what you want them to do, and making more money.
Once you have built your site (Don’t be worried if you haven’t built your site yet. I have plenty more tips in all areas to post about to help you along the way.) according to SEO best practices with the other SEO tools, you will begin getting increased website traffic. More people will be landing on your website, and hopefully buying your product, submitting a lead, or viewing your advertisements. There are an unlimited number of variations of how you can display the pages on your website. Some feel nice, but don’t elicit a customer response, some appear cluttered, but somehow make the visitor accomplish our goals, and sometimes you have to make trade-offs. The real point is that you can’t tell without data what visitors are going to like more.
This SEO tool allows you to direct visitors through a series of tests (completely unknown to the visitor). There are two kinds of tests:
- A-B Testing
- Multivariate Testing
A-B Test
An AB-Test is simply sending half of your visitors to one version of a page, and sending the other half to another. Usually you will want keep a control group like an already existing page, but you can do any A-B test you want. You are the captain of the website. You can A-B test pictures, headlines, text, whatever you think will improve the conversion of your visitors to your goals. When you are done, Google will spit out the differences in user behavior between both versions of the page, and this will tell you what elements to keep or change.
Multivariate Test
Multivariate tests are awesome. First of all you need to have over about 1,000 visitors per week to make it timely and helpful. The idea behind a multivariate test is that you can put 8 page elements into the test, and it will display the elements in different portions of the page to the visitors, and using a complicated algorithm, it will tell you the best of 16 possible page configurations for the best conversion rate. Remember that increasing your conversion rate from 2% to 3% is the difference of a lot of money depending on your visitors and order value, so a multivariate test is very worthwhile to get the best conversion rate.
So there you go. Check out Website Optimizer, and start thinking of A-B tests you can start doing. Join me next time for my SEO tools overview of Google Analytics.
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