Running an SEO test plays an important role in bringing the desired effectiveness. From this guide, we’ll learn the way to create a test site with the help of InstaWP, then set up and test the SEO checklist using Slim SEO.
Table of Contents
Why should you run SEO tests?
Changing your website for content, URL, structure, etc. may lead to some effects. It can be a positive or negative one, who knows? But, you should know exactly when it causes a negative effect on SEO on your site, especially a critical effect. Some cases can be mentioned as:
- Structure data is incomplete
- Broken link
- Open Graph is not suitable for the website
- Inactive Robots Meta tags
It’s regrettable if these errors occur on your official website. It not only affects user experience but also reduces the website’s SEO score.
Then, testing helps you save time and effort to check whether your changes are actually having the expected or unexpected effect.
So, we highly recommend you should carefully test every change first before applying them to your main site.
How to Test your site’s SEO Efficiency?
To check how your changes affect SEO matters, you should follow 3 steps:
- Step 1: Create a staging site as similar as possible to the official site.
- Step 2: Set up the technical SEO changes as you want.
- Step 3: Run some SEO tests.
Let’s start.
Creating a Staging Site
Creating a Site from Scratch
There are many plugins that support creating a new test site. Some typical plugins include BlogVault, WP Staging, WPengine, etc. Each plugin has advantages. To create a site quickly, in this practice, I will use InstaWP.
Visit the InstaWP website if you want to create a quick site without registration.
Just choose some option for your test site in the popup.
Pay attention to the SEO section. There will be some SEO plugins provided on the list.
You should choose the same SEO plugin as the official site since we will set up all of the technical SEO matters the same for both of them.
Just choose one, and InstaWP will automatically install and activate it on your staging site. It helps to shorten the process a little bit.
In this case, I choose Slim SEO. And, this is the site I created.
By default, this site will be active for 8 hours. You can see the count-down clock on the screen as well. However, you obviously can register a free account on InstaWP to extend the time to 48 hours in the case that you want to get all the free benefits from this service or just want to keep the site for more purposes. You also can try other plans of InstaWP to have more features and time.
This is a kind of sandbox environment which developers are so familiar with. Using it will definitely help you minimize the risk of SEO ranking.
Setup Content and Structure
We will set up the layout, structure, and content of the staging site as similar as possible to the official site. In other words, it is a clone version of the main site. From there, the result of testing changes will be more accurate.
On your InstaWP account, Click on the Auto Login button of the created site to go to the admin dashboard and start to set up the site.
You’ll see the admin dashboard exactly as a normal WordPress website.
After a building process, I had this site as an example.
Also, I had some posts in the blog.
Setup Technical SEO Matters
Similar to content and structure, I will set up something following a SEO checklist of my own. Of course, the same with the original site.
With Sim SEO, it automatically does some things for you. Just go to the settings of the Slim SEO plugin and see what it did.
In the case that you want to set up some advanced features such as schema or managing links, you should install the Slim SEO Schema and Slim SEO Link Manager as well.
Check the Current Status
After having a staging site that has content and SEO settings that are the same as the main site, we should check and record some SEO indexes or information about your website’s current status. This step helps you recognize the upcoming effects easily.
In this practice, I focus on just some typical things that usually be affected:
- Internal link
- Orphan page
- Schema
Let’s see their status.
Internal Links
Using internal links is a typical technique in SEO, and it brings significant advantages. For example, this post has an internal outbound link. You should check the status of each link to see their status in detail.
Sometimes, you may want to change the post slug of that link to add more keywords to shorten the link, or anything else. Then, it may cause some errors in the embed URL in this post.
Orphan Pages
An orphan page is one that has no post connected. With the help of the Slim SEO Link Manager plugin, I easily see which post/page is the orphan page. Just record them all.
Schema
With the help of Slim SEO Schema, you can set up a schema for any post or page on your site. E.g. I take my FAQ page for example. You can find out the way to have a schema for this page in this blog.
Making the Changes for the Staging Site
Based on those three SEO matters that I checked in the previous step, I will make some changes that can affect them, and check to see if the effect is positive or negative.
Change Post Slug
I will take a random post, change its slug. For example, I change ‘create-faq-schema-2’ to ‘create-faq-schema-using-slim-seo’.
Remarks:
Since the Slim SEO Link Manager plugin has the ‘Automatic Internal Link Updating’ feature, I decided to deactivate it in a short time to update the slug to disable this feature. This is just to create a case to show you how to check and how it can affect you. After changing the slug, I will re-activate the plugin to have detailed reports about the links.
Now, let’s see how this action can affect your site.
Broken Link
Go to another post editor. If there was a link from it to the changed post, you will see one of these situations:
- Since I deactivated the Slim SEO Link Manager plugin, the ‘Automatic Internal Link Updating’ feature did not work. Then, the old link is still embedded on the post, and it is broken then.
- If you still activate the SLim SEO Link Manager plugin, it automatically finds and updates all links to the post when its slug changes. So, there is no broken link. In the real case, you should always activate this plugin to avoid unexpected situations as above.
Back to my case, which is just for demonstration, the link is not automatically updated as the old ones are broken. This may lead to some other issues that I will find out in the next.
Orphan Pages
Although the post I changed the slug was linked from multiple posts, it’s by the old URL. So when I change its slug, that post will be a new orphan page immediately.
This report from Slim SEO Link Manager will let you know it clearly.
Add Content to See How Schema be Affected
To give an example to check the schema, I will add some questions and answers to my FAQ Page.
Now, go to the front-end to test whether they are enough or not.
The schema created with Slim SEO Schema still works well when we add more Q&A.
Effects Summary
To give you a better overview, I have a summary table as follows:
| Changes | Index | Before | After | Solution |
| Change Post Slug (without Slim SEO Link Manager) | Broken Link | No | Yes | Activate the Slim SEO Link Manager whenever updating the slug on the official site |
| Orphan page | No | Yes | ||
| Add content for FAQ Schema | Schema | Full | Full | You can apply the change on the official site |
So, after the test, you will definitely know which change is positive, and which one is negative. If it is positive, just apply it to the main site. They will obviously bring the expected results to your site without any risks.
On the contrary, if the test result is negative, don’t apply it on your main site. You should find out how to modify or fix it, then re-do the action with the new adjustment and test once again.
Last Words
As you can see, SEO testing helps you avoid any negative changes on your site and any unexpected effect on your SEO score.
By using the staging site, it’s easy to test which changes are good or bad for your site. This is a kind of should-have action to guarantee your SEO practices. Just do it and see which advantages it brings to you. We hope you always own a perfect SEO website.
