Every business wants to increase their search engine rankings, and that's a good thing especially given that 93 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. But how many businesses are actually getting results?

It turns out Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more competitive by the day, and as a business, if you want to get results off of it, you'd have to up your game.In fact, one recent study reported that 82 percent of marketers say the effectiveness of SEO is on the rise and so they are making it a top priority to improve their SEO and grow their organic presence.The question now is, how can you compete effectively?

The answer: don't just do SEO, do the right SEO.

SEO is a proven tactic for boosting your rankings, increasing your organic traffic, and ultimately building your business. However, it's one thing to do SEO and it's another to do the right SEO (the type that's right for your business and gets results). If you look around, you'll find that there are tons of different SEO tactics. And a number of businesses are trying them but not everyone gets results with every tactic they try. Some tactics are effective, others aren't. Some are more effective than others. Some work for one business and not for another.
Why? Because every business is different; each business has its own peculiar needs. So the SEO tactics a business implements should correspond with the business’s needs.

One way to determine which SEO tactics are right for you is to run SEO tests and experiments.

Unlike in marketing techniques like pay-per-click (PPC), testing is often neglected in SEO by marketers. Yet, 57 percent of B2B marketers stated in one survey conducted by HubSpot that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative. Another study reported that seventy to 80 percent of people ignore paid search results, choosing to only click on organic listings. Tech firms love PPC, not necessarily because it's more effective than SEO, but because it is easy to test.

With pay-per-click, you can easily split test elements like ad copy, headlines, color, CTA buttons, landing page structures, and more. Such tests help you fine-tune your strategy and provide you with barefaced, intelligible evidence that your bottom line is getting better. That's not something that's common in SEO.

But here's the rub:

If you do not test and validate your SEO tactics, chances are that you will end up wasting your time, money, and efforts on ineffective, or even counterproductive, tactics. Scientifically-backed tests and experiments are the key to getting results in optimization. So today, we’re going to discuss some key SEO tests and experiments you can perform (and how to run such tests reliably), so you can stop wasting resources and start crushing the competition.