Hacker News Reader

Comment by dillonforrest | Hacker News Reader

Co-founder/CTO here. Please share any SEO questions!

Why have you taken this approach to monetizing this SEO optimization method, instead of other options, for example PPC arbitrage?

Why A/B testing and not a more complex statistical hypothesis testing method?

The biggest reason is that there's so much more volume in organic search (80% of all clicks) vs paid search (20%), and the ROI on SEO is so high. There's also so many companies in the PPC space -- it's quite saturated. SEO is appealing to us because we think it's overlooked due to stigma.

SEO and PPC are really two very different games overall, but I have a ton of respect for people who are really good at PPC.

Thanks, just to be clear, I mean you generate the clicks via SEO and selling them on a PPC, lead, etc. basis.

Oh, I misunderstood. Good question. A lot of people have suggested this. The main reason we've avoided it is complexity, but it's something we might revisit. I'd also be concerned about customers not having an easy way to understand our pricing.

>> "I'd also be concerned about customers not having an easy way to understand our pricing."

That would likely to be best expressed relative to major PPC players like Google.

For example, "clicks are 20% cheaper than Google for the same keywords."

Anyway, just nitpicking, awesome solution to a big problem. Good luck!

Thanks for the thoughtful questions! :)

I think this is a super compelling idea. : ) Thanks!

> Why A/B testing and not a more complex statistical hypothesis testing method?

We like simple! We only take on extra complexity if it's worthwhile.

How does your product compare to Distilled's offering? https://www.distilledodn.com/

Ours is automated and continuous, and there's is a self-service product. We like those guys though!

That's an enormous difference for me, for what it's worth

We allow self service but most of our customers use our team (currently 16 SEO Analysts and Consultants) to work with their team, helping ideate, manage and run tests on an ongoing basis. See https://www.distilledodn.com/learn-more/expert-insights/

I think it's fairly similar - I remember showing Ryan a demo of our tool back when he was at 7cupsoftea before RankScience got going.

We just published an update on our first year of data: https://www.distilled.net/resources/distilled-odn-by-the-num...

(Distilled founder & CEO here)

seems like a hard nut to crack, considering there are constant changes to google algos that could screw with test results mid-test, and many other moving parts. I think what you are doing is great, have built similar tools in the past and always ran into issues due to so many moving parts, but im not a statistician.

Also what do you consider success? what if one title/meta combo gets a better rank but fewer clicks(ie; the bots like it but the users dont)? which one would you keep? I know many people like to brag about how many rankings they have but as an SEO for over a decade, i think traffic count is still king. in that id rather rank 11th for an extremely high volume term, then rank 2nd for a low volume one.

another thought... a blackhat site gets banned halfway through one of your tests and you move up based on no actions you took. thus you would get a false positive, no?

- Is there a minimize traffic to the website required to get statistically significant results? Or does it matter since you're trying to move the site up in the Google ranking? - Does site traffic affect the length of time it takes to test?

Good question -- all of the things you mention are factors. It's harder to run statistically significant experiments with really small sites that have few pages. The factors involved are: # of total pages, search traffic, and Google crawl rate.

Dillon,

I have a proposal for you - please respond via my email

Ric AT myUserName

Hey Ric, we'll be in touch!

Does it work with French websites ?

Although we work with almost entirely English sites, we're starting to expand to non-English too.

Cool I applied with a French website. Happy to help you guys test it.

Yep, we work with all languages. One caveat though is we only test against Google metrics, so if you live in a country where Google is not the predominant search engine, we're of no help at the moment. : )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com