SEO Test Results and Case Studies

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.

Last time we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to organic traffic when we tested a new, server-side rendered ReactJS page template for an ecommerce customer’s product pages. This week, we’re sticking to the theme of JS frameworks. In the latest edition of #SPQuiz, we asked our followers what they thought the impact to SEO was when we pre-rendered parts of a listing site’s pages, originally served with AngularJS.

This week in #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought would happen to an ecommerce site’s product pages' SEO performance if we served them via the React JavaScript framework. Just over half of our Twitter followers thought this change wouldn’t have a detectable impact, with the remainder being split between positive and negative. Perhaps this reflects SEOs' faith in frameworks such as React, with them having been around for a few years now.

This week’s #SPQuiz asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact was on organic traffic when we increased the number of related article links from two to four on each page of an ecommerce customer’s content hub. Here’s what they thought: It was close but 40% of our followers believe increasing the links in the content hub would have a positive impact on organic traffic but at a lower confidence interval.

Earlier this week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to organic traffic when an eCommerce customer tested fixing their breadcrumb markup so that the breadcrumbs would show up in the search results. Here are the results of the poll: While majority of those who voted think this change had either a positive or no detectable impact on organic traffic, the result of this test was actually negative!