Very nice site you have there too.

John (Organic SEO India) :
Hello,
I like this article. Very well written. However, not everyone can afford to turn work away or even take the time to do such testing to show ideas. This isn’t possible every time.

Yes agreed. As said above, choosing exactly what client to use for split testing is key here. Depends totally on the the client.

BTW: as it’s nearly christmas I let your blatent SEO link go

thanks for comment.

This is quite risky, granted and I probably wouldn’t use it on a brand new client or in an area where I was sure the a method would benefit the client. It perfectly possible that I could do some split testing on a brand new unestablished client who goes elsewhere – thus leaving me greatly out of pocket. As you noticed, I probably didn’t stress this enough in the post. Saying that, you could be from a huge web agency and be able to take a minor hit on these things.

The client in question brings in a fair amount of work too, which shouldn’t be ignored in my opinion.

As we were dealing with long tail terms here and some basic seo my plan was to show the results via Google Analytics.

I have agreed to present some results to the client ihn the new year. However, he has already mentioned that last week he had 12 site enquiries, more than he got in the previous month – so at least he can see some positive effect.

From the last bullet point, are we to assume that this split test showed that you were right? It doesn’t seem to be mentioned elsewhere.

As you imply, this strikes me as a very risky undertaking unless you’re 100% confident that you’ll get a result in favour of your side of the argument.

Get it wrong, and not only do you have to acquiesce to the client’s immediate wishes, but also you’ll be sowing the seeds of doubt in the mind of the client when it comes to working with you in the future.

Not that I’m suggesting immediate capitulation to avoid this risk, you understand. Perhaps go about it in a less transparent ‘my idea versus your idea’ way. Or prep your client so that they understand that there are no guarantees when it comes to the web, and that some mistakes are inevitable on the path to greater success.

I like this article. Very well written. However, not everyone can afford to turn work away or even take the time to do such testing to show ideas. This isn’t possible every time.