Can a Categories Accordion Boost Organic Traffic?

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If you aren't familiar with the fundamentals of how we run controlled SEO experiments that form the basis of all our case studies, then you might find it useful to start by reading the explanation at the end of this article before digesting the details of the case study below. If you'd like to get a new case study by email every two weeks, just enter your email address here.

In this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our followers on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) how they thought adding a categories accordion to an ecommerce site's store pages would impact organic traffic.

Here are the results:

Poll Results

Poll results for whether followers thought adding a categories acccordion would impact organic traffic.
Our followers were evenly split between the addition of a categories accordion helping organic traffic and having no impact.

The Case Study

A categories accordion is a collapsible section that users can expand to reveal links to relevant categories or services without cluttering the page.

Our ecommerce customer tested adding an accordion with links to popular categories and services on Store Pages. We hypothesised that this would help people find what they’re looking for more easily, while also making it clearer to search engines how different parts of the site connect. By surfacing relevant links in one place, we expected important categories and services to be easier to discover and better linked internally.

We also expected this to create a smoother experience for users, helping them reach relevant content faster, which could ultimately support organic performance.

Changes like this are often difficult to ship on large ecommerce sites, where product teams and leadership can be understandably cautious about altering core page components. Without controlled testing, these decisions either don’t get made at all or are rolled out without any clear way to prove whether they genuinely helped, making data-backed experimentation essential for confident decision-making.

What Was Changed

We added an accordion module with links to popular categories and services on Store Pages.

Mockup of control store page against variant store page with a categories accordion added.

Results

Statistically significant result at the 95% credible interval

This test delivered a positive result at the 95% credible interval, showing that adding a categories accordion to Store Pages can have a measurable positive impact on organic performance. By surfacing popular categories and services in a clear, structured way, the accordion appears to have made it easier for users to navigate the site, while also strengthening internal linking and reinforcing topical relevance for search engines.

Based on these results, the recommendation to roll out the accordion module across all Store Pages was made to the customer. By testing this change in a controlled environment, our ecommerce customer gained the proof needed to confidently roll out improvements that might otherwise remain stuck in debate.

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How our SEO split tests work

The most important thing to know is that our case studies are based on controlled experiments with control and variant pages:

By detecting changes in performance of the variant pages compared to the control, we know that the measured effect was not caused by seasonality, sitewide changes, Google algorithm updates, competitor changes, or any other external impact.
The statistical analysis compares the actual outcome to a forecast, and comes with a confidence interval so we know how certain we are the effect is real.
We measure the impact on organic traffic in order to capture changes to rankings and/or changes to clickthrough rate (more here).