It was a frigid cold day in Des Moines on January 28, 2019.

Like most January days, I was just hoping to hold on a few more weeks until the early signs of Spring would start to thaw things out and give me that yearly boost of energy.

But, it turned out that I was going to get a different kind of jolt.

“Dropbox Acquires HelloSign for $230mm,” the headline read in my push notifications.

I stared at it for a long time.

A combination of shock and elation took hold as I bounded out of bed.

HelloSign and Optimist had been working together for nearly two years at this point. But I had no idea that the acquisition was in play. The whole deal has been basically kept under wraps. Most of the team only found out about it right before it was finalized.

It was a momentous achievement for their team.

When we first started working with HelloSign, they had just raised their Series A and were on a path to rapidly expand their eSignature solution, roll out HelloWorks, and move upmarket with HelloSign integrations and API.

There was a lot to do and a lot of content and strategy to figure out.

We had our work cut out for us.

Luckily, our team and the HelloSign team are both full of outrageously smart people. We dug in and put together a strategy.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought would the result of restructuring the HTML, to bring the most important content above the sidebar. This was with the intention of improving the user experience, and therefore improve performance in terms of organic traffic.

This is what people thought:

Poll result showing 61% of people voting for positive
The response was very one-sided: 61% of people thought it would have a positive result, with only 3% thinking this would have a negative impact. In this case, the majority was correct! As you’ll read below, this test gave a 16% uplift to the pages where we made this change.

The Case Study
User experience and SEO are overlapping more and more these days. We heard directly from Google (via Google Webmasters on twitter) that future page experience updates will further consider UX-related signals for rankings.

The layout of a page can affect a user’s experience, including which bits of content the user focuses on and takes in. In addition, the way and order the page renders can change their impression of the page and whether it meets their needs. In other words, even with the same content present in the HTML, different ordering can cause different first impressions and can strongly influence whether a user stays on the page or leaves.

Before testing the page layout, our client, a coupon aggregator site, had product pages that would load the sidebar content before the coupon content. The sidebar content provided the user with general information on the store along with miscellaneous details on how many offers are currently available, store contact information, and additional ways to save when shopping via said store. The sidebar content did not however show actual coupons – which were the primary user intent of searchers landing on these pages. Taking this into consideration, if a page were slow to load, the user would first see the sidebar content and may think the page wouldn’t deliver on the content they intended to find. They’d navigate back to the SERP and take their organic traffic ‘business’ elsewhere.

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:

Result of Twitter poll on emoji meta descriptions

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. As you’ll read below, this change was negative for organic traffic in this case, a fact that 75% of people got wrong!

The Case Study

The use of emoji can be a divisive topic in SEO, especially in the context of trying to get them shown in search results. On the one hand, they can be eye-catching, and an easy way to get people to notice your result and potentially click on it. On the other hand, they can come across as gimmicky, and some searchers may be put off from clicking because it looks unprofessional.

Before we get into the details of this particular test, a bit of background information on emoji and how they can be used for SEO purposes. Emoji are characters that form part of the Unicode standard for text, alongside letters, numbers, punctuation and all other characters in a wide range of writing systems.

Since they are just Unicode characters, they can be used within HTML elements the same way as any other character. As such they can be included in title tags, meta descriptions and even structured data markup. In general, Google will pull these characters through into the search results as it would for any other character. Note that the emoji will be displayed in the default font of a user’s browser, and as such may be displayed differently to how you might expect.

In this particular test (launched in July 2020), we wanted to test replacing the number of items listed in a website’s category page meta descriptions with the equivalent numerical emoji. For example, 125 would be replaced with 1️⃣2️⃣5️⃣. Below is an example of how this would look in an analogous website’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) snippets.*

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.

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. I know, we were surprised too. Read below for the full case study:

The Case Study
Prior to releasing our feature to run full funnel testing through SearchPilot, it was not possible to measure the impact a change had on organic traffic and conversions at the same time. Most conversion rate optimisation (CRO) experiments are single page experiments that rely on JavaScript to make layout changes, blocking the ability to test for Googlebot. For our SEO experiments, we work around this by splitting pages instead of users; while this enables testing for Googlebot, it doesn’t allow for measuring the impact on user behaviour.

Yet changes that impact CRO often impact SEO too and vice versa, meaning that we run the risk of rolling out a positive CRO test only to later find out it tanked our organic traffic. Similarly, we may have implemented a positive SEO test and unknowingly caused a drop in conversions. Over the years we’ve been A/B testing, we’ve seen both scenarios.

To illustrate the importance of full funnel testing, we wanted to share a case study from a client of ours in the travel sector.

Our client had plans to make changes to their flight search widget, and wanted to confirm there was not going to be a negative impact on SEO before going ahead with the new widget.

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:

Twitter poll on internal linking test

Most believed there was no detectable impact on the higher level category pages….

In this test though – the higher level category pages also saw an uplift in organic traffic! Read below for the full case study:

The Case Study
Google’s creation of the PageRank algorithm to rank web pages was the idea that led to Google becoming the dominant search engine. PageRank is based on the assumption that important pages will get more links from other important websites. It works by considering the number of links to a page while giving more importance to links with a higher PageRank.

The concept of PageRank underlies the historical importance of links for SEO, but it doesn’t only apply to external links – PageRank can flow through internal links too. This effectively means that within your own website internal links can indicate the importance you place on different pages in addition to being just a way to navigate the site (if you want to read more on the subject, one of Distilled’s (now BrainLabs) senior consultants Tom Capper’s blog post on internal linking in 2018 and beyond is a good resource).

As such, internal linking tests are an important part of SEO split-testing. They tend to be more complex to build than pure on-page tests, as there are two groups of pages that will be impacted: the pages more links are placed on, and the pages being linked to.

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:

Example of FAQ rich snippet

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.

In August last year we shared our first case studies from testing FAQ schema, where we reported that we had seen uplifts in organic traffic ranging from 3% to 8% despite the concerns of ourselves and others that this new search feature was going to negatively impact organic click-through-rates.

They were exciting results, but a lot has changed since then. First, since we published that case study Google made some changes to FAQ schema implementation. Gone are the days where you can go wild on the SERP with price, and review, and FAQ schema and get rich snippets for all of them. Today, aside from some rare edge cases, Google only allows you to have either price and review snippets or FAQ snippets:

FAQ Only

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.

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.

Unsurprisingly, John Mueller has previously advised against including this kind of text. The comment, shared in a webmaster hangout, was in reference to e-commerce websites, but it applies more broadly:

Many e-commerce websites optimize their categories by adding a big chunk of text under the product listings. Nothing except an h1 heading above the fold. I don’t consider this good usability since users need to scroll all the way down to read this. Does Google treat this content the same as any other or would you for improving rankings recommend putting the category text above the fold?

From our point of view, that’s essentially keyword stuffing. So that’s something…which I would try to avoid.

I’d try to stick to really informative content and put that in place where you think that users will be able to see it. Especially if it is content that you want to provide for users. And more than that I would think about what you can do to make those pages rank well without having to put a giant paragraph of content below the page.

John Mueller, Google
It’s common for Google’s best practices to come into conflict with what actually works in the real world, so we wanted to put this to the test.

We took a client in the travel sector, whose key transactional pages had copy that appeared to be of relatively little value to users and tested removing that copy. Our client had hired freelancers to write this copy, so they also wanted to know if hiring freelancers was a worthwhile investment to inform future business decisions. What were the results?

Don’t go and start removing all your strictly SEO targeted text without a plan to enrich those pages, because removing this text resulted in a 3.8% drop in organic sessions for our client, and an estimated loss of 9,800 organic sessions a month!

Earlier this week we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we added a 2-step email signup component to pages.

Almost 64% of those who answered thought this change would have no detectable impact on organic traffic while almost 32% thought this would result in a negative impact to SEO.

Well, majority of the guesses were incorrect. In fact, this particular test resulted in a negative impact to SEO (and conversion rates). Read on to learn more!

The Case Study
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but there can be trade-offs between different approaches toward capturing users’ email addresses and permissions. In our latest case study, we explore how one approach to email capturing impacted SEO.

We tested adding a signup component that involved two steps: it appeared at the bottom of the page, encouraging users to sign up for email updates. Once clicked, it expanded to a larger component and centered itself in the middle of the page so that users could input their email address. Our goal was to begin capturing email addresses on these pages without obscuring the whole page with an immediate overlay.

We tested this change full funnel and hoped that by only showing the larger email capture pop-up to those users that had already indicated they were happy to submit their email, we would avoid negative impacts on users who didn’t want to subscribe. Below are examples of how the 2-step component appeared on both desktop and mobile devices.