SEO Testing Case Studies

This week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter asked our followers what would happen to organic traffic if we removed the leading number from the title tags on a media brand’s article pages. Our audience was equally split between this test having a positive or negative impact on organic traffic. While there was no real consensus on what the outcome would be, in this case about a third were correct - this test had a negative impact on organic traffic!

This week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter asked our followers which they thought was most beneficial for organic traffic: just review schema, both review and price schema, or that there no difference between the two. The majority believed that the answer was both types of schema together. However, the majority in this case was incorrect. We ran two tests on the same website, one with both schemas and one with just reviews.

This week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter asked our followers what they thought would happen when we added links to nearby locations on a website with a large number of location pages: This one was a landslide! Internal linking is clearly believed to be an important contributor to SEO performance, as the vast majority of our followers thought this test would have a positive impact. And they were right! Read on for the details, but this test showed a 7% improvement to the pages we added internal links to.

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we reordered title tags to include brand names at the start, especially if you are a household name. Here is what they thought: While it was close, the majority of followers that responded believed the brand name in the front had a positive impact on organic traffic. Although it was a small sample size of followers, the majority were correct!

Earlier this week we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we added a 2-step email signup component to pages. Almost 64% of those who answered thought this change would have no detectable impact on organic traffic while almost 32% thought this would result in a negative impact to SEO. Well, majority of the guesses were incorrect. In fact, this particular test resulted in a negative impact to SEO (and conversion rates).

For this edition of #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact would be on organic traffic of adding the current month and year to title tags on a listings website. Opinion was split between positive and no detectable impact, with a majority thinking it would be a beneficial change. In this case, the majority of voters showed how smart they are by picking the correct answer! In this case, as you’ll read below, adding the month and year to title tags showed a 5% uplift for organic sessions.

This week on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought would happen to organic traffic when we forced Google to respect meta descriptions, instead of pulling content from elsewhere on the page into search results. This is what they thought: This was by far our closest #SPQuiz result so far, with a tie for Positive and Inconclusive, each on 35.7%, and Negative not too far behind in third place. It seems our followers' opinions were incredibly divided, with no consensus on what would happen.

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to the organic traffic of pages when we replaced microdata markup with the equivalent JSON-LD structured data. This was what they thought: It turns out those 61% of people were correct! This change had no measurable impact on organic traffic, despite JSON-LD being Google’s preferred way of adding structured data to a page. The Case Study We have run hundreds of tests implementing different schema to win various rich snippets over the years.

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we added the price of a product to the title tag on an ecommerce client’s site. This is what our followers thought: Nearly 70% thought this had a positive impact. In this case, the majority was incorrect. This had a negative impact on organic traffic. Surprised? Read on for the full case study.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought would the result of restructuring the HTML, to bring the most important content above the sidebar. This was with the intention of improving the user experience, and therefore improve performance in terms of organic traffic. This is what people thought: The response was very one-sided: 61% of people thought it would have a positive result, with only 3% thinking this would have a negative impact.