SEO Testing Case studies

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we moved a travel client’s flight search widget from the bottom of the hero image to the top. This is what our followers thought: 55% believed that there was no detectable impact, followed by 35% who thought this change had a positive impact… In this test though - moving the search widget from the bottom to the top of the hero image had a negative impact on organic rankings.

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to the organic traffic of higher level category pages when we ran an internal linking test on a grocery website where we added links to some lower level category pages. We shared that the lower level category pages saw an uplift in organic traffic. This was what our followers thought: Most believed there was no detectable impact on the higher level category pages….

FAQ schema is a form of structured markup that can get rich snippets in search results. It was released in 2019 and allows web pages to mark up FAQ content on their web pages so that it appears for users in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When implemented, it can transform your web page’s search result to look like this: Not only can these rich snippets readily provide informative content to users, they also created quite a buzz in the industry when SEOs discovered they could be used to take up more real estate on the SERP, pushing competitors further down the page.

The constant dialogue between webmasters and representatives at Google has always been littered with SEOs sharing case studies with examples of when what they’ve seen out in the wild hasn’t lined up with what the powers-that-be at Google claimed should happen with its algorithm. Single examples, however, are generally not sufficient evidence to confidently dispute information that comes from the horse’s mouth. There are often a multitude of factors impacting organic traffic, so while a chart of organic traffic over time with an arrow pointing to the date we made a change to our website can present a strong argument of a cause-effect relationship, we still often lack the backing of a controlled experiment.

Across most verticals, websites commonly will have text below the fold that predominantly exists to target search engines, not users. We’ve all seen it and we all know hardly anybody reads it other than Googlebot. Unsurprisingly, John Mueller has previously advised against including this kind of text. The comment, shared in a webmaster hangout, was in reference to e-commerce websites, but it applies more broadly: Many e-commerce websites optimize their categories by adding a big chunk of text under the product listings.