Learn six common SEO testing mistakes and how scientific thinking can help you design better experiments, interpret results, and make more reliable decisions.

Testing is everywhere in SEO: Our industry started testing titles, then moved on to internal linking, content formats, templates, and now we are increasingly curious about the impact of AI-generated changes.

But running a test and learning something useful from it aren’t necessarily the same thing.

You can make a change, watch a metric move, and still have very little evidence that what you implemented caused it. Equally, you can see no measurable movement and incorrectly conclude that your change had no effect.

I ended up in SEO by chance, like many of us do. And I brought my research background with me, along with the curiosity of knowing why I was observing certain things, rather than just limiting myself to report on it.

That’s what made me particularly interested in running SEO tests and eventually made me train teams to think like a scientist when running one.

Scientific experiments are designed not simply to produce results, but to make it harder for us to fool ourselves about what those results mean. That requires more than a testing tool or a sparkly before-and-after graph. It requires:

Most SEO testing mistakes happen when we skip one of those steps.

So, here are the ones that can make the difference between simply running a test and actually knowing whether your SEO change worked – and yes, I made most of them myself at some point, but we learn from experience, right?

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