SEO Test Results and Case Studies

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!

In the latest edition of #SPQuiz, we asked our followers what they thought the SEO impact was of adding the min-max salary range to the meta descriptions of a customers' informational job pages. The votes were nearly split between positive and inconclusive, with the majority voting positive. None of our followers believed this change would have a negative impact - which means that all of you will be surprised to find out that this change was actually negative!

In the latest edition of #SPQuiz, we asked our followers what they thought the SEO impact was of adding “with video” to a media site’s title tags. Over half thought this addition would have a positive impact on organic traffic, you may be surprised to find out that this change was negative! Read on for the full case study: The Case Study Having video content as a complement to article copy can be a great way to engage users and enhance their overall experience, particularly in industries where video content helps illustrate things like “how-to”s.