SEO Testing Case Studies

For this edition of the #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they expected to have happened when we replaced numbers with emoji in meta descriptions. The response was mixed: No answer gained an overall majority of votes, but the largest group thought that this change wouldn’t have a significant impact on organic traffic. Only one in four of our Twitter followers thought that this change would be negative. In this case, it turns out that the minority was correct.

E-A-T has been a big topic in SEO for the last few years. In this test, we wanted to test exactly how big an SEO (and conversion rate) impact adding some confidence messaging to a travel website would have.

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we moved a travel client’s flight search widget from the bottom of the hero image to the top. This is what our followers thought: 55% believed that there was no detectable impact, followed by 35% who thought this change had a positive impact… In this test though - moving the search widget from the bottom to the top of the hero image had a negative impact on organic rankings.

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to the organic traffic of higher level category pages when we ran an internal linking test on a grocery website where we added links to some lower level category pages. We shared that the lower level category pages saw an uplift in organic traffic. This was what our followers thought: Most believed there was no detectable impact on the higher level category pages….

FAQ schema is a form of structured markup that can get rich snippets in search results. It was released in 2019 and allows web pages to mark up FAQ content on their web pages so that it appears for users in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When implemented, it can transform your web page’s search result to look like this: Not only can these rich snippets readily provide informative content to users, they also created quite a buzz in the industry when SEOs discovered they could be used to take up more real estate on the SERP, pushing competitors further down the page.

This case study is just one of many examples of when our test results have challenged what we heard from Google, in this case it was what happens when you bring content on page that was previously concealed behind tabs and accordions.

Across most verticals, websites commonly will have text below the fold that predominantly exists to target search engines, not users. We’ve all seen it and we all know hardly anybody reads it other than Googlebot.

We ran a test where we removed this text on a client’s site.