Reconfiguring Page Layout SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

Reconfiguring Page Layout SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

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.