SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Adding Prices to Titles

SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Adding Prices to Titles

This week, we asked our Twitter followers what they think happened to organic traffic when we added the price of a product to the title tag on an ecommerce client’s site.

This is what our followers thought:

We asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened when we added the product price to the title tag on an ecommerce site. 69.2% thought this had a positive impact, 15% thought negative impact, 15% thought no detectable impact.
Nearly 70% thought this had a positive impact.

In this case, the majority was incorrect.

This had a negative impact on organic traffic. Surprised? Read on for the full case study.

The Case Study
There are a lot of ways to make product pages stand out in the search engine results page (SERP) from rich snippets which may show rating stars, price, and availability, to leveraging titles and meta descriptions to give users valuable product info before clicking through.

While it’s exciting to win snazzy snippets, how does one know whether advertising the price from the SERP is actually the right thing to do?

Users are notoriously price sensitive, so having prices advertised right in the SERP that are even the slightest bit higher than the competition may mean bad news for click through rate.

Our case study this week puts this to the test by adding the price after the product name in the title tag on an ecommerce site. Below is an example of how this would look in a mock SERP.

Control Variant

The hypothesis behind this was that, given we were not displaying the price via a rich result like price snippets, advertising the price directly from the SERP by including it in the title would entice users to click through.

We were also aware that if competitors had lower advertised prices in their SERP snippets, this may deter users from clicking on our entry. Across thousands of product pages that we tested this on, we just didn’t know if that would be the case at scale; that’s where SearchPilot comes in.