SXO Testing
Search experience optimization and how to test for your clients
To stay competitive in today's market, SEOs must move beyond traditional strategies and adopt more innovative approaches. By using other marketing disciplines along with SEO to focus on the best way to help users creates a powerful strategy that enhances both the visibility and user satisfaction of a website.
What is SXO?
Search experience optimization is a holistic approach to improving a website that combines SEO and UX principles. This means you aren’t just focusing on visibility in the SERPs, but also how user-friendly and accessible the site is. This could be through layout changes, design tweaks, or creating content that may not bring in traffic from the SERPs, but will be helpful to users overall.
SXO goes beyond traditional SEO by ensuring that users not only find a site but also have a positive engaging experience to keep them there and hopefully complete a desired action.
How to do SXO testing
It’s basic, but start with visiting the site on your devices. Visit the site on your desktop/laptop and visit it on your phone. Go through it and see how you feel navigating through the site. Is there anything that sticks out (in a good or bad way)? Do you feel like something is missing? Is anything broken?
Follow your gut and make notes of your thoughts. Use tools like Microsoft Clarity to help prove or disprove your beliefs about the site. Analyze user behavior, identify issues, implement improvements, and come up with the appropriate hypotheses based on the data.
Once you have your hypothesis, set up a an A/B or split test. I usually recommend letting the test run for at least 6 weeks. This should be a decent amount of time to recognize patterns in user behavior and learn from the way they are interacting with the new updates.
Example test #1
SearchPilot ran a test that can be housed under SXO, where the hypothesis was “Does reducing the height of an internal linking block improve organic traffic?” The thought process behind this test was that Google prioritizes user experience, and considers factors like page layout and engagement metrics when ranking pages, so shrinking the link block can improve a user experience which may improve the crawlability and indexing of the page's content.
Since SearchPilot works with very large sites, they are able to run A/B tests that reach statistical significance and found that at the 95% confidence interval they saw an uplift of 10.2% with an inconclusive result. There wasn’t a negative result to this test, so they ended up deploying the change sitewide.
Example test #2
This example is for a small site where statistical significance will likely never be reached for any test. We did a time-based test on URLs for a home building site where we focused on page by page improvements.
Our findings were to reduce the hero image size, remove it from blog posts, move the contact form on blog post pages, and a few different homepage updates to make things more readable.
After comparing the page by page data after 3 months, we found that there was a 122.22% increase in conversions.
We also learned so much more about user behavior after the changes and found new ways to improve the site. One of the pages we improved showed the floorplans, and we saw an increase in dead clicks on the floorplans on the page. We found out that users want individual pages per floorplan and were able to create a content strategy based on these dead clicks.
Test things for yourself
While those 2 example tests give you ideas of things you could potentially try out on your client site’s, always do your own research. Collect the data for yourself and determine if it’s right for that specific site. Just because it worked or didn’t work for one site, doesn’t mean another site can’t have different results.
Always be testing
Regularly updating and optimizing based on user behavior data leads to better engagement, improved rankings, and higher conversions. This creates websites that truly connect with users, leading to long-term success.