SEO Test Results and Case Studies

In this week’s #SPQuiz, a listings website upgraded their category pages with a “swipe for more info” function that added additional information for each listing. Previously the website wouldn’t display the details of the listing without clicking onto a new page. We asked our followers on Twitter and LinkedIn what they thought the impact would be on organic traffic. Here is what they thought: Twitter Poll The majority of our Twitter followers thought this change would have a positive impact on organic traffic while 31% thought it would have no detectable impact.

For the first #SPQuiz of 2023 we looked at whether redirecting trailing slash URLs to the non-trailing slash URL had any impact on organic performance. These pages already had a canonical to the non-trailing slash URL, but got a small amount of organic traffic. We asked our followers on both Twitter and LinkedIn what they thought the impact would be on organic traffic. Here is what they thought: Twitter Poll Most of our Twitter followers thought this test wouldn’t have an impact on traffic that we’d be able to detect, with almost a quarter thinking it would have a negative effect.

On this week’s #SPQuiz, we looked at the value of removing the product carousel element on a customer’s store pages affected their SEO performance. This change would completely remove the element which could positively or negatively impact the pages organic traffic. How did this impact organic traffic? The votes were fairly evenly split, however inconclusive took a narrow lead. In this case though, the minority was correct - this change had a positive impact on organic traffic!

On this week’s #SPQuiz, we looked at how updating the H1 and the introductory copy can affect SEO performance for a company’s local pages. The changes would emphasize language around service quality, with the aim of improving E-A-T signals. How did this impact organic traffic?

We previously ran this same test for the same customer, which provided inconclusive results. We decided to rerun the test to see if the results would differ, resulting in a positive outcome. 

How did this impact organic traffic?

We tested removing the word “Airport” from the title tags of a travel customer’s flights pages. This test was run in three different markets. Now that Google rewrites title tags more frequently, title tag tests have a new layer of complexity. How did that impact this test?

In this week’s #SPQuiz we asked our followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic would be when taking content on the page and putting it into a collapsible section. Here is what they thought:  The Case Study  An ecommerce customer’s category pages were set to have more content added to them, so their UX team requested the existing FAQ content to be put into a collapsible section as a way to minimize the amount of content at the bottom of the page on the initial page load.

This week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact would be of adding dateModified into schema markup on location pages. Here’s what they thought: Most of our Twitter following thought this test wouldn’t have an impact on traffic that we’d be able to detect. Around a quarter thought it would be positive, and only a handful of people thought it would have a detrimental impact.

This week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the outcome would be on organic traffic when we added an additional question to the FAQ section that links out to the top brands on category pages. Here is what our followers thought: The vote was evenly split between positive and no detectable impact - nobody thought this change would be negative. Those who voted that this change would be positive were right!

This week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers how they thought adding pricing information into the title using JS would impact organic traffic. Here is what our followers thought: Nearly 50% of people thought that this test would result in an inconclusive result, with the rest of the votes being split 50/50 between positive and negative. This time the majority of voters were wrong! Read the full case study below for a full breakdown of how this test went down.

This week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we added the category name to the title tags of product pages. Here is what people thought: In this case, the majority of respondents were wrong - only 15% of you guessed the correct answer. This change had a negative impact on organic traffic. Read the full case study below to learn more!