What is bucketing in SEO testing?

Bucketing in SEO testing involves dividing your pages into different groups or "buckets" for comparison. Ethan Smith explains that this process is essential for setting up controlled tests, where one group serves as the control while the others undergo various changes. This technique doesn't require sophisticated tools and can be done manually, especially if you have thousands of pages. Ensuring the traffic composition of each bucket is roughly equivalent helps provide valid test results 1 .

Lenny Rachitsky adds that while there are tools available for bucketing, often, the human approach can be just as effective. For instance, at Zillow, they would randomly sample a percentage of pages for each bucket, which worked perfectly fine without additional tools 1 .

Ultimately, bucketing allows for straightforward implementation and effective SEO testing without heavily relying on external tools.