SEO Test Results and Case Studies

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we were looking at using approximations of results counts for a listings website would impact SEO performance. We reached out on our Twitter page to see what our followers expected the results to be. Here’s what the SEO community felt about this variant title tag version: The majority of poll respondents felt that the result of this test would be ‘no detectable impact.’ Well! Let’s continue to see if we can trust the instincts of our fellow SEO’ers.

Early this year we noticed Google was scraping the ‘Estimated read time’ from some blog post pages into their meta descriptions. We wanted to know if that had any benefit to organic traffic, so we tested manually adding it to the front of the meta descriptions on an ecommerce customer’s blog pages.

In this week’s #SPQUIZ we asked our followers what impact they thought, shortening truncated title tags and removing the words “find” and “book”, would have on organic traffic. Here is what they thought: Our followers this week were split between positive, negative and inconclusive. Nearly half of the respondents thought it would be negative. Those who thought it would be positive - only 21% - were correct! This change improved organic traffic.

Third-party review platforms allow customers to post reviews about your products and services freely. They also provide code snippets that can be installed on your site to display the ratings to visitors. Our customer tested injecting positive price and price transparency ratings to their meta descriptions. Read the case study to find out the result.

We ran a title tag test with a customer in the listings space on their search results pages. Our customer had the current month and year in the title tag to indicate freshness, but actually updates their listings more frequently than once a month - they update them daily. We wanted to test if putting “Updated Daily” instead would improve organic traffic.

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we replaced templated content with unique content on a customer’s website. Here is what people thought: Most of our followers believe that this change positively impacted organic traffic - and they were right! When we replaced the templated content for unique, this change had a positive impact on organic traffic! Read the full case study below!

This week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought would happen when we updated internal links that pointed to URLs with 301 status codes to their 200 status code equivalent. More than half of our followers thought this would have a positive impact on organic traffic: This change actually had no detectable impact on organic traffic. How could that be? Read the full case study below. The Case Study One item in a typical technical SEO audit is to seek out internal links that point to URLs that redirect (have 3XX status codes).

In this week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought would happen when we added emojis to title tags for thematic content pages. Here’s what they thought: The largest proportion opted for positive, but it’s fair to say that opinion was evenly split between all three options - there was no intuitive feel among the community for how this test would go. In situations like this, testing is extremely useful so that we know the true impact of a change rather than guessing.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our followers what they thought happened to organic traffic when a customer added authorship content to improve their pages’ E-A-T signals. Here’s what they thought:  All the votes this week were evenly split between this change having a positive impact or no detectable impact on organic traffic. Were half of the votes right? Or was everyone wrong? Read the full case study below to find out!

This week’s case study highlights a test that involved a client-side script to perform an API request for data that would then be injected onto the page to enhance the page’s content. We asked our twitter followers in our #SPQuiz poll what they suspected the impact to organic traffic would be: Most of the respondents believed there wouldn’t be a detectable impact from this test. Read on to see if they were correct.