SEO Test Results and Case Studies

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!

In this week’s #SPQuiz we asked our followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic would be from repurposing product descriptions that were behind tabs into a content container above the fold. Here is what they thought: Most of our followers believed that this change had a positive impact on organic traffic; they were right! When we included product descriptions in a container above the fold, this had a positive impact on organic traffic.

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.