A/B Testing SEO Page Titles for Optimization

A utility for testing SEO titles, Meta descriptions, and Images.

TL/DR – a tool that monitors changes that you make to your title, description and images. You can use this to analyse which changes brought in best SEO results.

Useful for – A/B testing your SEO titles and meta description.

Prerequisite – Google Sheets. Having an engineer by your side, or someone who knows how to deflate JSON is important. (I find JSON very valuable to keep the sheets tidy).

Known limitation – it can’t scrape titles/etc. if your site has Cloudflare or some sort of scraping protection.

A/B testing, especially that of title and meta is essential for SEO growth. However, one problem is – how do we analyse the changes, and its impact when there are 100’s of urls. How do we go back in time and analyse which change brought us the best results or roll back titles when something goes wrong?

To solve this problem, we build a tool to keep a change log. So what it does is – it monitors changes that you make to your title and metas. This enables you to go back in any point in the past and see the most impactful title and metas. And, there are many more use cases. For example, You can concentrate on a crucial search term and align its movement with the corresponding changes in the title and meta description.

Why we built it

We’ve been thrilled with the impact of data driven title changes that we’ve made on our rummy page. However, as with most of the experiments (We conduct a lot of experiments, but publish only the ones that work), change may not improve impression/clicks/positions. So, in such cases, we revert the changes and try with another iteration. All this is great, but the process is painful if done manually. Thus we build a tool to capture all the changes that are made to pages every x hours. (One big ASO and SEO lesson I learned along the way is – hour is the optimum unit for measuring any marketing effort, so those who want to run it every day can simply use 24 – as there are 24 hours in a day). Even our free app rank tracker uses hour as the unit for cron jobs.

What does the tool do

1. Captures every single change in title and meta description – along with the date of change.
2. Captures any image change etc – however, so far, we haven’t seen much utility in tracking this metric. This is anyway pulled from the sitemap.

Here’s how it looks.

So in the above case, column B is a JSON – because it’s a key value pair, and keeps the sheet pretty. Once you set it up, it will run every x hours, and append any changes that it discovers in title/meta or count of image to the corresponding cells.

Here’s how you can use it. 

1. You can do title analysis by deflating the JSON in column I.
2. Do a time series analysis of the search terms, impressions etc – for the corresponding url.
3. If you see any dip in the impressions or clicks – after making data driven changes, then you can use this to revert the changes.
4. If you see any dip in CTR after making data driven meta changes, then again you can roll back the changes.

Launch of this tool

We are going to roll out this feature in one of our extensions, however, it may take us months – given that we already have lots of items in our pipeline. Currently, this tool is used internally at NextLabs.

If you are a SEO specialist with data or programming background, and are looking to a join us, then do visit our job board.