Thoughts from the SearchPilot team

When FAQ schema was released, it was highly controversial with a lot of speculation among SEO professionals about whether it was going to be a net benefit to websites or whether it would end up cannibalising clicks that they felt they should have received because searchers got the answers directly in the search results. In this post, we explore data-driven answers to these questions based on our own testing.

One of the important features of SearchPilot is taking care of the statistics and measurement automatically and we put a lot of investment into ensuring our mathematical approach is as sensitive as possible to detect the smallest possible uplifts with confidence. This post drills into an enhancement we rolled out that doubled the sensitivity, enabling us to detect uplifts half the size we could before with statistical confidence.

One of the features of SearchPilot that is most valuable to our largest customers is what we call its meta-CMS capabilities which enable us to make changes to any of the HTML or HTTP headers on any page on their website. This post explores ten common enhancements that we can roll out quickly using our platform. Does your enterprise site need any of these improvements?

Three interesting SEO split tests 1. Do H1 changes still work? 2. Will altering internal links give you a big payoff? 3. How good is Google at crawling and indexing JavaScript? Check out the results from real-world experiments.

There has long been a tension between SEO and CRO based on trying to figure out whether what is best for users is also best for search engines. With the launch of what we call full funnel testing, we are now able to test the combined effect of a change on both conversion rate and organic search traffic as well as break the effect down into its effect on each.

Without a structured testing program, our experience shows that it’s very likely that most SEO efforts are at best taking two steps forward and one step back by routinely deploying changes that make things worse. Unfortunately, this applies even to some of the most common recommendations SEO professionals have been making for years. Is this the reason your SEO performance is lagging?

We primarily use traffic as the measure of the impact of SEO changes in order to capture changes to clickthrough rate, capture effects across the full long tail of search queries, and use the most complete data we can get access to. So organic search traffic is the best proxy for business results - and because sensible tests get more of the same traffic (by ranking better within the same keyword space), we typically see conversions increase with the increase in the organic traffic we are targeting. Essentially Google is doing its job by sending more relevant traffic.

In enterprise environments, there are some changes that everyone knows need to get done, but that are nonetheless difficult to achieve because they cut across divisions and teams. Moving from HTTP to HTTPS was such a change for many sites, requiring not only changes to infrastructure but also to image hosting, embedded JavaScript and more. This post tells the story of getting a migration done using the Meta-CMS capabilities of SearchPilot.

When Chrome 68 rolled out and highlighted any site not yet on HTTPS as insecure, it made it incredibly urgent for sites that had been putting off their migrations to get them done. One of our customers needed help to achieve this, and we used SearchPilot to remove the final blockers preventing their team getting this critical change live.

We can now 1. Move pages individually or en masse (including redirecting the old pages) 2. Move sub-domain content into sub-folders and 3. Enable easy SEO A/B testing of full page redesigns.