SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Bringing Content Out of Tabs

SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Bringing Content Out of Tabs

The constant dialogue between webmasters and representatives at Google has always been littered with SEOs sharing case studies with examples of when what they’ve seen out in the wild hasn’t lined up with what the powers-that-be at Google claimed should happen with its algorithm.

Single examples, however, are generally not sufficient evidence to confidently dispute information that comes from the horse’s mouth. There are often a multitude of factors impacting organic traffic, so while a chart of organic traffic over time with an arrow pointing to the date we made a change to our website can present a strong argument of a cause-effect relationship, we still often lack the backing of a controlled experiment.

Having the capability to test SEO changes in a more controlled fashion through SearchPilot has given us a new source of authoritative evidence on what does or doesn’t improve your organic traffic – regardless of what comes from the horse’s mouth or what best practice says.

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.

When Gary Illyes was asked about this type of content on Twitter in September 2018, this was his response:

When asked how Google handles content behind tabs and accordions, Gary Illyes said ‘AFAIK, nothing’s changed here, Bill: we index the content, its weight is fully considered for ranking, but it might not get bolded in the snippets. It’s another, more technical question how that content is surfaced by the site. Indexing does not have limitations.’
Another user responded to Gary saying he had authoritative tests proving otherwise, and we now have further evidence to support him with, that comes from a split test we ran on Iceland Groceries.
In this test, we removed the tabs / accordions that were concealing product information like ingredients and nutrition facts when the page loaded, and instead made this text visible on the page when it loaded.