SEO Testing Case Studies

This week in #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought would happen to an ecommerce site’s product pages' SEO performance if we served them via the React JavaScript framework. Just over half of our Twitter followers thought this change wouldn’t have a detectable impact, with the remainder being split between positive and negative. Perhaps this reflects SEOs' faith in frameworks such as React, with them having been around for a few years now.

This week’s #SPQuiz asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact was on organic traffic when we increased the number of related article links from two to four on each page of an ecommerce customer’s content hub. Here’s what they thought: It was close but 40% of our followers believe increasing the links in the content hub would have a positive impact on organic traffic but at a lower confidence interval.

Earlier this week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to organic traffic when an eCommerce customer tested fixing their breadcrumb markup so that the breadcrumbs would show up in the search results. Here are the results of the poll: While majority of those who voted think this change had either a positive or no detectable impact on organic traffic, the result of this test was actually negative!

This week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the result would be of adding ratings, reviews, and their associated structured data markup on two sets of local pages: some that were content-rich and some that were not. This is what people thought: Half of our followers thought this would be beneficial to both sets of pages. No one voted that it would benefit only the pages without pre-existing content.

Featured snippets are a popular target for website owners to bring in more organic traffic from the top of the funnel. In this test, we added new informative content to a travel customer’s car rental pages to target featured snippets.

The question of whether to include seasonal messaging in titles and meta descriptions comes up a lot - depending on the industry, it could be Christmas, Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, or a seasonal sale. The argument in favor is that searchers may include the seasonal term in their searches, and there may also be click through rate benefits even if users don’t search using that phrase.

This week on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought happened to organic traffic when we localized a UK company’s ecommerce product content for the US market.  Nearly half of you think the extent of the change’s impact was up to 10% while the other half was almost split between the impact being up to 20% or 30%. Read on to find out how much of an impact this change had on organic traffic.

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the outcome in organic traffic was when we added a new keyword to the H1 of a customer’s product pages. Here’s what people thought: The majority of our followers believe adding additional keywords to the H1 would positively impact traffic. In contrast, almost 30% and 7% believe this change would either not have a noticeable impact or have a negative impact on organic traffic, respectively.

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.