SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Adding Links to Nearby Locations

SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Adding Links to Nearby Locations

This week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter asked our followers what they thought would happen when we added links to nearby locations on a website with a large number of location pages:

Twitter poll with 88.5% votes for positive
This one was a landslide! Internal linking is clearly believed to be an important contributor to SEO performance, as the vast majority of our followers thought this test would have a positive impact.

And they were right! Read on for the details, but this test showed a 7% improvement to the pages we added internal links to.

The Case Study
Many websites have a large number of location pages. For example, a real estate website with property listings organized by location; a job site that lets you search by location; a site for a company with a large number of physical locations – the list goes on.

These pages can often spiral in number in order to capture the demand for people searching for services in their location, which can cause various challenges for SEO. A large number of pages can cause issues with crawl budget and indexation, and these pages can struggle to receive sufficient internal link equity to perform well in search. A well-designed internal linking structure can benefit all of these aspects.

The particular website this test relates to has around 8,000 ‘regional’ pages across the USA, each of which lists the nearby physical company locations in that geographic area. Before the test began, some of these pages received internal links via breadcrumbs from the individual location pages, and some other sporadic links around the site, but there was no systematic internal linking in place.