SEO Test Results and Case Studies

For the first #SPQuiz of the new year, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to engagement when we changed inline hyperlinks on article pages to be a similar color to that of the surrounding text. Here’s what they thought: Majority of those who voted believe this type of change would result in a negative impact to key engagement metrics, and they were right! Continue to the full case study below for the details on SEO and CRO impact.

We’ve talked about FAQ schema a few times before– you can revisit those posts here, or here. From our testing we have often seen good returns from including FAQ schema even across different industries. In July of last year, we said that “67% of all FAQ schema tests we’ve run have resulted in a positive impact” and since then the trend has continued with most of our recent FAQ tests being positive too.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we added “Black Friday” to the title tags of a travel website. Here’s what people thought: Half of our followers believe that adding “Black Friday” to the title tag had no detectable impact on organic traffic while the second-highest vote was for a positive result on both page templates. In the end, the correct answer was that it was positive on one section and negative on the other!

For this week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought would happen when we added keyword-rich alt text to the images on an ecommerce website that previously didn’t have any: The vote was a true 50/50 split between voters who thought the impact would be positive and those that thought it would have no detectable impact. Not one voter thought that adding alt text would have a negative impact.

In this week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought the impact was on organic traffic when a customer added “book now” to the title tag of appointment booking pages. We prefaced the poll with the fact that running this test in a different industry gave a negative result: The votes were pretty split, but a slim majority thought it would have a positive impact - the opposite result of our previous case study.

For this week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought would happen when we added a “Book Now” CTA to the start of titles for a travel site: The vote was pretty evenly split, but most voters thought it would have some strong impact, be that positive or negative. Just under half of you thought it would have a negative impact. If you voted this way, you were right!

Earlier this week we put our Twitter followers to the test, asking them to guess the impact to organic traffic when we tested adding the keywords “Near You” to a customer’s title tags. Here’s what they thought happened. Exactly half of those who voted seem to think this change had no detectable impact on organic traffic. Turns out this test was actually negative! Continue reading to find out the details.

For this week’s SEO case study, we’re examining a test where we positively impacted organic traffic by introducing more internal links to the home page footer. The #SPQuiz this week asked twitter followers what they thought the positive impact from this test was: Of the three options, the majority of our votes predicted that the impact was between five and ten percent. This week, the majority was right! However, keep reading and you’ll find that the impact was not distributed equally among devices.

In our most recent #SPQuiz, we asked our followers what they thought would happen to organic traffic if we removed meta descriptions to allow Google to populate them. Here’s what they thought: A majority of voters were convinced this would have no detectable impact on organic traffic, while a third thought it would have a positive one. Turns out the majority were right, but you might be surprised to see that this was positive at a lower confidence level.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we took internal links that only loaded through client-side JavaScript and added them to the HTML. Here’s what people thought: From our followers, about 40% were split thinking this change had either a positive impact or no detectable impact, while 11% believed it would negatively impact organic traffic. The result from this test was that there was no detectable impact!