Comprehensive Guide to Website Testing with a Focus on SEO

Do you ever spend hours writing code and trying to optimize everything, only for it to crumble down as soon as you launch? Yeah, we’ve all had that. Unsurprisingly, this goes for all parts of a website’s technical side.

Search engine optimization, unsurprisingly, fits into this mold as well. It’s a fairly complicated process with many variables, where things can go wrong both on the technical and content sides. This is why testing is so important. What is SEO testing? How do you plan for it? How do you conduct it without missing anything essential? Read further to have this question answered and more!

Pre-Testing Preparation

Before you start doing anything, you need to plan and prepare your tools. Otherwise, you’ll be stumbling around in the dark. Here are some things you need to take care of.

Setting Up Testing Environment

When setting up the server and software for your web SEO test, there are a few things you need to pay close attention to.

• Operating system and web server software. Your production environment might likely have some OS-specific or web server software dependencies and configuration differences. Therefore, use the same OS and software for the testing as you did for development.
  
• Programming language and runtime. Make sure the programming language you use and its runtime versions are the same in test and live to avoid possible incompatibilities.
  
• Database management system. If your website has a database, set up a DBMS that has the same version and schema as the one you used in production.
  
• Content management system. If you use a CMS to build your website, don’t forget to install the same version and apply the same plugin and theme configs.
  
• Third-party services. Integrate any external services you used in production to simulate the live environment accurately.
  

You can always update your software later, but troubleshooting both production issues and software updates at the same time will balloon your testing time and bring worse results than if you did these tests separately.

Establishing Testing Baselines

Document your current search rankings, performance metrics, and existing SEO issues before making any changes. This baseline data will prove invaluable in measuring the impact of your optimizations. Use tools like Google Search Console to export current ranking data and performance metrics for future comparison.

When establishing your testing baselines, focus on the following:

• Current search rankings documentation. Record your site’s rankings for target keywords across different search engines and locations.
  
• Performance metrics baseline. Gather data on your site’s current loading times, user engagement metrics, and other relevant performance indicators.
  
• Existing SEO issues inventory. Identify any known technical, content, or user experience problems that may be impacting your SEO.
  

Language-Specific Preparation

Every language, library, and platform has its own set of rules, dependencies, and intricacies that only rarely coincide. For example, if you want to do SEO website testing on your site written in JavaScript, you’ll have to check a few language-specific preparations:

• Rendering mechanism. Identify whether your site uses server-side rendering (SSR), client-side rendering (CSR), or a combination, and adjust testing approaches accordingly.
  
• JavaScript framework/library. Ensure your testing environment matches the specific JavaScript framework or library (e.g., React, Angular, Vue.js) powering your site.
  
• Prerendering and indexing. Implement prerendering solutions (e.g., Preact, Next.js, Nuxt.js) for CSR sites to enable effective crawling and indexing by search engines.
  
• Automated crawling. Use headless browsers or browser automation tools (e.g., Puppeteer, Selenium) to simulate how search engine crawlers interact with your JavaScript-powered pages.
  

Content and Structure Testing

Content is front and center of every website that wants to achieve high rankings. Here are a few tips to SEO test your content and structure.

Content Quality Assessment

Content quality is the very first thing you need to check in this step. Good content keeps people reading and coming back for more, so without it — it’s pretty pointless to do anything else.

First, check for duplicate content using Copyscape, Siteliner, or any other similar tool. Dupes will negatively affect your content, and you must eradicate them. 

When we say “duplicates,” we also mean content pieces that cannibalize each other — meaning that they talk about the same things. They might be phrased differently or present the ideas in a slightly different light, but it will still negatively affect your rankings.

After that, you need to check each article for quality. Manually. This is going to be a long process, but it needs to be done. Otherwise, people will see that your content is crap and will never return.

Finally, SEO test whether your content is readable and has a good semantic structure. Use only one Title (this is for SERP results) and one H1 (displayed directly on the page). After that, divide your articles with H2s and H3s. Unless your article is massive, avoid going down to H4s. 

You should also avoid making paragraphs over 4 lines. Use simple language; smaller words will get you more attention than fancy wordplay. Leave that for fiction.

As a bonus, test your site’s internal search engine to confirm it returns relevant and helpful results, making it easy for users to find the information they need.

Interlinking and Backlinks

You might think that content is the backbone. However, it is more akin to juicy meat and tender crusty skin. The real bones are links, both internal and external. Good content will make people finish it, but good content with links will make people stay for even more.

Create an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet to SEO test all your articles. Add all of your articles to it. Preferably, divide them into categories. When you’re done, you should see articles that relate to each other. Find spots where linking would be relevant and useful for the user. Keep doing the same with your new articles to maintain freshness.

While internal links hold people on your website, external links help them discover your website and establish you as an authority in the industry. If you want to increase the reach of your content, you can use a guest posting service, which will assist you in expanding your link portfolio. You can do it independently, but that will take you a lot more time and interactions with other website owners.

On-Page SEO Elements

On-page SEO can make or break your rankings, regardless of the quality of the articles and all the links you throw at people. When testing on-page SEO elements, consider the following:

1. Title tags and meta descriptions. Ensure each page has a unique, compelling title tag and meta description that accurately reflects the page’s content.
   
2. Header tags. Verify that your pages use the appropriate header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to create a clear, logical content structure.
   
3. Schema markup. Use Google’s Rich Results Test tool to validate your implementation of structured data markup, ensuring it is properly formatted and comprehensive.
   
4. Meta robots tags. Confirm that your meta robots tags are properly configured to control how search engines interact with and index your content.
   

Technical SEO Testing

Technical SEO requires some different SEO testing techniques, so here’s a small tutorial for them.

Crawlability Testing

Search engines need to find your website before serving it to users. This is called indexing. Make this process easier for engines by:

• Robots.txt configuration. Ensure your robots.txt file is properly configured to allow search engines to access your important content while blocking unnecessary pages.
  
• XML sitemap validation. Verify your sitemap is error-free and has all the crucial pages without including non-canonical or redirected URLs.
  
• Crawl budget optimization. Analyze your server logs to see how search engines are crawling your site. Find any areas where the crawl budget may be inefficiently distributed.
  

Page Speed and Performance

People love sitting around and waiting for a website to load, and will leave if it takes too long. Make sure speed and performance are on your SEO website testing plan.

• Core Web Vitals optimization. Measure and improve your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metrics to meet Google’s Core Web Vitals standards. You can find more info about this in Google’s official guide.
  
• Server response time. Optimize your server configuration and backend processes to reduce the time it takes for your pages to start loading.
  
• Resource optimization. Minify and compress your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and implement effective caching strategies to reduce the total memory required to render your pages.
  
• CDN configuration. Ensure your content delivery network is properly configured to serve assets from locations closest to your users, reducing latency.
  
• Mobile performance. More than a half of all internet traffic comes from mobile, so test your site’s performance across a variety of mobile devices and network conditions.
  

URL Structure and Navigation

URLs are unquestionably vital for the SEO health of your website. They help search engines understand which pages is where, and assist users in finding the content they need. So you need to SEO test them before continuing any meaningful work on the website.

Start by ensuring your URLs are uniform and easy to understand. We recommend all your  articles to be in lower case. Surprisingly, URLs are case-sensitive. So if you start capitalizing their parts, you might end up with a messy URL structure. Lowercase URLs will help you maintain consistency and avoid mistakes.

Test your redirect chains. Ensure any redirection is done only once, instead of sending your user on a world-tour of redirect links. 

Evaluate your site’s navigation structure to ensure it provides a clear, logical hierarchy that helps users and search engines understand the relationships between pages. This also includes testing breadcrumb navigation, which should accurately identify user’s locations within your site.

Conclusion

By following the testing framework outlined above, you can ensure your website ranks well and provides genuine value to your visitors. 

The key is to approach testing methodically, documenting your baseline metrics and changes along the way. This allows you to track improvements and quickly identify any issues that arise. 

Stay current with SEO best practices and testing methodologies to avoid falling behind. For example, using automated SEO testing tools can improve and speed up many of the things we described in this article.

The time you invest in thorough SEO testing now will pay dividends in improved visibility, user experience, and your website’s success.