A/B Testing Local SEO strategies

A/B Testing local SEO strategies in Google Business Profile is a concept that revolves around seeing whether marketing efforts or optimisations impact the KPIs in your Google Business account.

The idea behind A/B Testing local SEO strategies in Google Business Profile is to determine whether marketing initiatives or optimisations have an impact on the KPIs in your Google Business account.

Do our Google Business Profile optimisations result in different consumer behaviour, such as increased impressions or customer actions?

Why is A/B Testing in Google Business Profile important?

There are lots of optimisations in Google Business profiles that require a significant amount of time and effort.

For example:

Uploading business owners’ local photos.
Adjusting descriptions.
Adjusting services
Product focus on local offering
Testing a local content strategy
The impact of local citations
Create a local landing page

If the same optimisations are applied to each location, then you would assume that notable changes would be visible over time. However, the challenge is that there are more ‘uncontrollable’ factors playing a role. For example, seasonality or the inevitable Christmas discounts.

To account for that, you want to set up an A/B Test: You apply optimisations to one area and not to another. You compare the impressions and customer actions for each area. With this, you have a more granular view of the performance of optimisation efforts.

How can we help you set up the right A/B tests?

We continuously conduct A/B tests for our clients at GMBapi.com. Therefore, we can advise you on what test to run next. Best practice is to perform one test per quarter to improve learning and keep investing in enhancing your presence on Local Search.

We have developed a methodology for creating reliable test and control groups. To ensure that we reduce the likelihood of false positives or negatives, we do recommend a specific minimum number of locations included in the area. Our method is simple and can be executed by anyone with enough locations to test with.

Our Local SEO A/B testing solution

Our A/B testing solution on Local Search is designed to quickly design and run tests and review and quantify the results for your Google Business account.

How our tool works

You can see the result of an A/B test here we did for a retailer.

We selected one-third of their locations – which were representable for the entire population.
We then applied the optimisations and boosted those locations with a substantial improvement.

Our hypothesis was simple, we expected a significant impact in the number of impressions on Local Search. The control group had been set up to ensure we eliminated other factors (than the optimisation we did) that were outside of our control. As you can tell from the graph, the test group grew its relative share of impressions versus the control group as soon as we launched the optimisation on November 1st.