: Measuring before and after on-page optimization I'm new with SEO. I want to start with on-page optimization as it is quick and easy to implement. I will start with HTML structures such as <title>,

@Jessie594

Our SEO firm uses Moz's On-page grader to measure it, but that tool mostly makes sure you are doing basic things right like making sure the keyword you are optimizing for is used throughout the page. Your best bet is probably to use a tool like Majestic SEO to check what your off-page optimization is like (links, domain reputation, etc.) and then take the change in that into account when you look at your before and after rankings. That should help you isolate the effect of your on-page efforts.

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@Heady270

When I want to do SEO changes and measure the results, I change half the pages on the site. This works best if you have a site with lots of similar pages that get similar amounts of search engine traffic. To make it work:


Divide your pages into two groups, randomly if possible. I generally use the content id for each page and do even and odd.
Exclude pages that typically get a lot more SEO traffic than other pages (for example the home page).
Make the changes on one group of pages but not the other.
Let the experiment run for a while (at least two weeks, I usually wait a month).
Measure the amount of search traffic to each group compared to a previous time period and see which group changed the most.
Be careful of outliers. For example, if you have a page that went viral or got press coverage during the experiment, you probably want to exclude it from the results. Whichever group that it is in will likely get a boost that has little to do with the changes you made.


Here are some types of changes that you might make using this methodology:


Title templates: Test "product at brand" vs "brand - product"
Templates for meta description, H1 or other areas that are likely to alter search engine rankings
Page layouts
Keyword density


To measure the results, use the following metrics:


Number of search engine referrals -- Most important metric
click through rate (CTR) -- available from Google Webmaster Tools
Bounce rate - to ensure that the changes are not turning away users


Pro tips:


You can have more than two test groups. Just divide the page id by something larger than two.
Dividing the page ID by prime numbers gives you multiple test groups that can be run simultaneously. For example, divide by 7 and put mod 0, 3, 6 in group A; mod 1, 4 in group B; and mod 2, 5 in group C. The test groups won't be of equal size, but that can be accounted for by looking at percent improvement of the metrics rather than the absolute value of the metrics.

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@BetL925

Unfortunately, you most probably won't be capable of measuring the SEO performance of the page before and after on-page optimization. The reason is you can't freeze the search engines for a period of time for your keywords. Search engines continue to calculate positions during the time where robots (web crawlers) index your page page for the first time and index your page after your modifications.

You can try to compare positions of your page for your keywords before and after but you have no guarantee that positions changed because of your modifications.

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