How A/B Testing SEO Resulted in 57% Increase in Organic Traffic with Ryan Bednar, CEO of RankScience (GMT070)

When you think about A/B testing, the first thing that comes to mind probably is optimizing the conversion rate of two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. RankScience, a YC-backed company, built technology that enabled companies to A/B test their SEO initiatives with one-line of code. In this episode, Ryan Bednar, Co-Founder and CEO RankScience, shares how their product sits next to your website, making hundreds of experiments to tweak your HTML for improved page rankings.

In episode 70, you’ll learn:

  1. How does A/B testing SEO work?
  2. How A/B testing increased Coderwall’s organic traffic by 57%
  3. Big mistakes that companies make when it comes to SEO

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Our sponsor for this episode

Thank you for the sponsor of this episode, RankScience. RankScience is the easiest way to grow organic traffic and get your content ranking higher in Google.

Their AI-powered platform gives your content team superpowers and helps you get more value out of the content you’re already creating.

RankScience uses real-time search data and Natural Language Processing to help you craft content that is highly relevant to searcher intent and maps directly to what users are searching for. This allows you to optimize past blog posts and plan out and create new ones, giving you a step by step plan for easy success.

For customers with lots of landing pages, you can leverage RankScience’s SEO A/B testing platform to easily test which HTML changes cause an uplift in search traffic.

As an added bonus, their platform also allows marketers to make SEO enhancements to websites without eating up precious engineering resources.

RankScience is used by hundreds of companies to grow organic traffic, from startups to publicly traded companies. Including customers like Buildzoom, Goldbelly, Suiteness, and CareerKarma.

Sign up for a free risk-free 30-day trial at https://rankscience.com/growthtoday

 

 

Tweet Some Quotes from This Episode
If referral isn't one of your biggest acquisition channels early on, then your product probably isn't good enough. – @ryanbed from @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full podcast episode 👇 Click To Tweet Focus on the problem that you really care about. It could take up to five to ten years to build a really successful company. – @ryanbed from @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full episode 👇 Click To Tweet When it comes to creating content for SEO, focus on quality over quantity. It's better to have 20 pages that are really good and go deep than 200 light landing pages. – @ryanbed from the @GrowthToday podcast. Get the full episode… Click To Tweet
My takeaways from this episode
  1. Focus on the problem that you really care about. It could take up to five to ten years to build a really successful company. Spend a lot of time on the idea and make sure it’s something that can become big.
  2. It’s never as bad as it seems. At YCombinator, Ryan thought that everyone’s company was better than his. But, during a group office hours, he realized that other founders are going through the same thing.
  3. When it comes to content, focus on quality over quantity. The biggest mistake Ryan saw as an SEO consultant is that companies focused on targeting hundreds of keywords and create really light landing pages that doesn’t go deep enough It’s better to create 20 pages that are really good and cover relevant terms mapped to search intent of the user. Then figure out how to build links to those pages.
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About Ryan Bednar

Ryan Bednar is the Co-Founder and CEO of RankScience, an SEO split-testing platform. Ryan help companies grow with data-driven SEO. Previously, he co-founded Tutorspree (YCombinator-backed) where they did over $1M in revenue annually from SEO, and also was an early employee at SeatGeek.

Show Notes
  • 3:16 – The story of how Ryan co-founded RankScience
  • 6:50 – How Ryan’s software development background help with doing SEO
  • 7:56 – Why one good way to start a company is to start off as a consultant first
  • 10:09 – What is RankScience?
  • 11:52 – How does A/B testing SEO work?
  • 17:56 – How other page attributes can RankScience split test?
  • 18:58 – A case study of how RankScience increased Coderwall’s organic traffic by 57%
  • 22:42 – How RankScience acquired their first customers
  • 24:44 – Why do they require people to talk to sales first before trying out RankScience?
  • 30:43 – What’s their strategy behind their pricing?
  • 33:52 – Big mistakes that companies make when it comes to SEO
  • 35:25 – Ryan’s one piece of advice to founders
  • 37:12 – The best piece of advice Ryan got from YCombinator
  • 40:27 – How much of Ryan’s success is from luck and from hard work?
  • 41:47 – Where can people find Ryan and RankScience online?

 

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