7 SEO Experiments to Test in 2020

– SEO isn't something that you learn once and it's good to go forever.

Google makes over 3, 000algorithm changes per year.

That's a lot of changes.

So if you're not continually testing, you're not going to do welland outrank your competitors.

Hey, everyone, I'm Neil Patel, and today, I'm going to sharewith you seven SEO experiments to test in 2020.

(light music) Before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel, and if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.

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The first test that I want you to try is to A/B test your headlines.

You want to come up with ahandful of different headlines and test them against each other.

You can use tools likeclickflow.

com to do this.

The reason this is important is, Google is all about user metrics.

If someone does a search for something, heck, if 1, 000 people doa search for the same term and everyone clicks on the second result instead of the first result, what does that tell Google? The second result is more relevant.

It doesn't matter if thefirst result has better SEO or more backlinks.

They do not care.

It shows them that the secondresult is more relevant and that the second resultshould be ranking number one.

And some quick things that you can do to ensure that yourheadlines, your title tags, get more clicks.

One, you can add the yearsto the end of the title, such as updated in 2020, updated in 2019.

Those things help with a lot more clicks.

You can also do somethingin which you ask questions in your title tag.

What is SEO? What is digital marketing? Questions tend to increaseclick-throughs by over 10%, according to ClickFlow.

Another simple thing that youcan do is evoking curiosity.

Example, the seven benefits of green tea.

Number six will shock you.

That's a good example of like, oh what's number six? Well, if you want to findout, you got to click through and find out more.

So continually test your title tags, and ClickFlow will give youideas on what you can do to improve your title tags, and they have a freeversion of their product or a free trial, so thatway you can get started without spending any money.

The second experimentI have for you to run is create separate headlinesfor social media and SEO.

Now in the first tip, I talked about adjusting yourheadlines, your title tags, so you can increaseyour click-through rate on Google and boost your rankings, but here's the thing.

From everything that we found, what's loved by socialmedia is the total opposite of what's loved by Google.

Using things like shocking, using things like, words like amazing, allthose type of terms, those words like effortlessly, in a lot of cases, they do extremely well to gain social shares, butwe're seeing a new trend in which people don'tnecessarily want to click on those keywords forGoogle because they think it's quote unquote clickbait.

So you want to createseparate titles for your SEO, and you want to create separatetitles just for social media.

And you can use Open Graph, and that'll allow youto create different tags just for social media.

And then you can havetitle tags just for SEO.

Heck, the headline on your page, the title of your blog post, could be totally differentthan what you use on social media or even SEO.

But that's something that's worth testing, because that way you canget the best of both worlds.

You can create a headlinethat does really well for social media, youcan create one that gets a lot of clicks for SEO, and you can create one thatdoes well for your readers.

The third experiment I want you to run is to produce a lot less new content.

So on neilpatel.

com, Ionly blog once a week.

Most people don't know that, like, “You have so much content.

” I'm only blogging once a week.

Sure, in the past, I havea lot of content, but now, one a week.

But can you guess howmany pieces of content that I update on a monthly basis? 90.

Now I'm not updatingall the content myself.

I may be writing thecontent myself every week, but I have a team of three people that just update my old content.

And they update 90 posts a week.

And what we found is, whenyou update your old content, make it fresh, not just afew words here and there, but update it, reallymake it thorough, better, make sure the links aren't dead, everything that improvesthe user experience, we find that our traffic and our rankings have continually gone up.

Before we started doingthat, we were getting four million visits a month.

Now we're at roughly 5.

3million visits a month, all from updating old content.

That's a huge increase.

The fourth experiment thatyou should consider running is improving your time on site.

Google's all about usermetrics, bounce rates, time on site, click-through rates.

All these things can impact rankings.

because they're not just about, hmm, the page that has the mostlinks should rank at the top.

They're like, huh, the pagethat users love the most should rank at the top.

Some of those metrics arethings like time on site.

So how do you do that? Well, adding videos to yourcontent is a simple way.

When you see YouTube videos or videos that you've created, embeddingthem within your content is a great way to keeppeople there longer.

Embedding audio fileslike your podcast episodes on your page is a great wayto keep them there longer.

Slideshows, you can use SlideShare to do PowerPoint presentations that you want to embed on there.

Continually updating yourcontent and making it longer, that should improve your time on site.

Internal linking, gettingpeople to go throughout your whole site, that helps.

Quizzes, people love that as well.

Asking people to comment, engage, and then responding backto them brings them back to your site again.

That should help as well.

All those things shouldimprove your time on site.

The fifth test I have for you to run is load your HTML files from a CDN.

Everyone already knows that page speed is important to Google's rankings now.

The faster your page loads, thehigher you're going to rank.

You optimize your mobileload speed, that's fine.

You do that for desktopas well, that's great.

But even if you get a better server, that's not necessarily going to guarantee that your site's going toload as fast as it can.

What a CDN is is acontent delivery network.

Companies like Akamai haveservers all around the world.

That way, when someonein India views your site, it's getting deliveredfrom a server in India.

When someone in New York views your site, they're seeing a serverfrom New York or New Jersey or somewhere close.

And the same goes for mostof the rest of the world.

So with the CDN, you canuse things like Cloudflare to have them host your HTML files, so that way wherever peopleare visiting your site around the world, you candistribute to them faster, which should improve your rankings.

The sixth experiment I have for you is LSI and search intent.

Don't just focus on main keywords with the highest search volume.

While this may drive alot of top line traffic and you want to rank fromthem, and even if you can, takes a lot more time, a lot more effort, and a lot of those keywordsdon't convert into revenue.

Go for the most qualifiedtraffic that's possible.

So instead of justgoing for sheer traffic, optimize for conversions, for revenue.

Go further down the funnel.

Move into keywords and termsthat your target audience, your qualified buyers, really look for.

I'd rather have 1, 000amazing, ready-to-buy visitors than 100, 000 visitors whoare likely to bounce away and don't convert.

You can use Ubersuggest for this, and a quick win is, go take the keywords that you already rank for andit'll give you a long list of long-tail phrases.

And it sorts them by volume and CPC data.

Typically if a keyword has a higher CPC, that means there's morebuyer intent there.

And if you take the pagethat's already ranking for these head terms or popular terms, you integrate all these long-tail phrases that are much more likelyto bring in buyers, you'll notice within 30 days, you should be able to easily rank.

All you have to do is adjust your content, include those keywords, expand upon them, make sure it's relevant, and then resubmit that URL into Google Webmaster Tools.

When you submit it, you canrequest for new indexing, and then within 30 days, you should see your rankings go up.

The seventh experiment I have for you is double down on video content.

Most people aren't into video.

They're just like, “Ah, it's more work, “I don't look good on camera.

” They're all picky.

Don't worry about it.

You're going to be your harshest critic.

Google is trying to rankvideos more and more, same with podcasts.

They rank podcasts as well now.

And they're pulling outthe audio, transcribing it, and using it to figure outwhat it should rank for.

The reason I want youto double down on video is one, YouTube SEO isdifferent than Google SEO, in which when you rank, you tend to rank withinthe first 24 or 48 hours you upload the video.

You don't even have to wait months.

That's the beautiful part about it.

Two, the audience in general, we want to consume content through video rather than text now.

Video's becoming much more popular.

I get way more peoplecoming up to me that say, “Hey, Neil, I see your video content “over your text-based content, ” even though my text-basedcontent gets roughly three times more trafficthan the video-based content.

That's the power of videos.

You need to keep pushing it out there.

You need to keep creating it.

And I recommend youcreate more video content than text-based content.

I create roughly three videos a week.

Remember, I only writeone blog post a week, but I'm doing more thanthree X the video content.

So start mixing that intoyour overall SEO strategy, especially in 2020, andthat should help you get more traffic.

Now if you need any helpgetting more traffic to your business, check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.

If you enjoyed this video, like it, comment below, share, subscribe, thank you for watching.

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