Adding Confidence Messaging SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

Adding Confidence Messaging SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

This week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened when we added a confidence banner to a travel client’s website (this test was run pre-COVID). The test was a full funnel experiment, so we measured the impact on user metrics (conversion rate and bounce rate) and on organic traffic.

We asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact of this test was on organic traffic, 37% guessed positive impact, 17% guessed negative impact, 46% guessed no detectable impact.We asked our twitter followers what they thought the impact on conversions was for this test, 68% guessed a positive impact, 12% guessed a negative impact, 20% guessed it had no detectable impact.
The consensus from our followers was that this experiment had no detectable impact on organic traffic and was positive for conversion rate. This was partly correct – this test was positive for both organic traffic and conversion rate. Read below for the full case study:

The Case Study
Can trust signals impact SEO performance? That’s what our client set out to answer with this test. Our client tested adding confidence messaging below their search bar and measured the impact on user metrics (conversion rate and bounce rate) at the same time as measuring the impact on organic traffic. They tested this on three different domains, Spain, Russia and France.

Mockup of changes to the page where confidence message was added saying: ‘No hidden fees’, among other benefits.Mockup of changes to the page where confidence message was added saying: ‘No hidden fees’, among other benefits.
In our previous case study, testing page layout changes, we shared a test where moving the search widget on a travel client’s page had a negative impact on organic traffic. This case study of ours is one of many that we believe support the increasing importance of user signals for rankings.

In addition to user signals, many in the industry argue that the August 2018 core algorithm update placed further importance on E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), especially for Your Money Your Life (YMYL) websites.