If you live in an AI bubble like we’ve been in recently, you might believe that Search Engines (Google or others) have become obsolete.
However, Search is still as relevant as ever.
While we can’t claim to know what the future holds, the numbers today reveal a different story than the one spreading in my bubble.
As a matter of fact, the influence of ChatGPT on Google’s search dominance is exaggerated, given that ChatGPT receives only 2% of the monthly traffic that Google does.
Therefore, your SEO strategy is still very much important and you shouldn’t neglect it.
At the same time, A/B testing is still relevant, as it challenges you to test assumptions and find the winning combination of website elements that can deliver the best possible rates.
But is SEO affected by A/B testing?
SEO Performance from A/B Testing with Omniconvert’s Explore
Your site ranking will be affected by various factors, including page speed and the existing website content.
When it comes to poor website speed, the culprits are usually the hosting services, your files’ types and sizes, plugins, and even your traffic volume.
What about the content?
Nowadays, many (if not all) A/B experiments can change your content one way or another.
When we use Explore for A/B testing, we take extra steps to ensure your rankings aren’t affected from a technical perspective.
And it’s always nice to look at the results and get real-world data and confirmation that SEO isn’t affected by our experiments.
Real World Experiments
One set of such data came after we tested new content for two eCommerce shops and checked SEO rankings before and after the experiments.
Here’s the methodology we used.
Sample A
We took an eCommerce shop with high traffic that had Explore installed. It also featured an experiment running for 6 days with traffic evenly split at 50% each (control vs. variation).
Sample B
We used another eCommerce shop with substantial traffic that had Explore installed.
It had an experiment running for over 30 days with 100% traffic allocation.
This meant that for more than 30 days, all users were seeing only the changes from the experiment, with the control receiving no traffic.
In both cases, fresh new content was inserted, that couldn’t be found anywhere else on the page/website.
Given that Google holds about 90% market share in the countries we sampled, we focused our checks there.
We are pleased to report that Google did not index any content added through the experiment.
Additionally, Google only found and returned results based on the content from the control group.
So there you have it.
From a content perspective, if your website has good rankings, performing experiments using Omniconvert Explore keeps your good results.
On the other hand, if your content is performing poorly from an SEO perspective, it would not be wise to keep a winning experiment too much live.
Better to make those changes natively on your website as well.
Are you looking for a powerful, yet intuitive and agile experimentation tool? Then check out Omniconvert Explore!
Explore supports your experiments with data by conducting A/B tests, personalization, and overlays to boost conversions from your existing traffic.
