Maintain Or Grow Traffic To Your High-Potential Content: An SEO Testing Case Study

SEO testing is highly important because it allows you to discover and test metrics with the biggest potential impact. Bluntly, SEO testing shows you what works. In this SEO testing case study, we dive into the steps we took to find optimization opportunities using Serpstat and the tests we ran in SEOTesting.com for a client in the health/food niche with a large monetizing blog. The metric in question here is the almighty, organic click-through rate.
First, let's lay down some basics regarding SEO testing.

A mantra we live by in our professional endeavors is: what gets measured gets done. Testing is an integral step to incorporate into your workflow when attacking new projects and tasks. It can be executed in a variety of ways, but a good place to start is to adapt, is to alter your title tags and meta descriptions on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

These updates can help match current expectations while getting higher click through rates for your content that has already been ranking. Moreover, these components are the first thing your users see before (hopefully) clicking to your website. In this case, first impressions really do matter.

As you are executing your tests, you want to make sure you are following SEO testing best practices in order to ensure reliability. These best practices allow us to get directional data about our test results that we can act on with confidence. A few to keep in mind are:

If you would like to explore a comprehensive list of SEO best practices, check out our Complete Guide to SEO Testing.

We aim to make data-driven decisions and test them before any implementation is completed. Our client's large monetizing food blog lives amidst a highly competitive digital space, and although the site currently ranks well, Google market trends for our client's industry are declining. It is imperative to optimize and make improvements to keep the visitation steady.

By using Serpstat, our goal was to find opportunity in the content that is already ranking and see what we could optimize to increase CTR. Once we gathered the suggestions from Serpstat, we tested these by using our testing tool, SEOTesting.com and see whether there are positive or negative outcomes.

Typically known as the "problem", but in our eyes, we see these suggestions for improvement as an opportunity to improve traffic, rankings, overall visibility, and of course, CTR for our client.

Serpstat can be utilized for a myriad of things. For this specific task we honed in on our high-potential content, and identified where it could be improved to generate a higher CTR.

With our handful of content that had already been ranking in our test sample, we dug deeper into Serpstat and saw if there was some keyword opportunity that we were missing out on.

Spoiler - there was.

The pieces we were conducting keyword research for in Serpstat were mainly blog-style articles and recipe guides. And Serpstat's seamless UI made it very easy to identify keywords that we could use for title and meta updates to then test in our SEO testing tool. Here is an overview of the simple steps we took:

Serpstat gave us rich SERP data results and gave us suggestions as to which pages we should rewrite our title tags and meta descriptions for, and which keywords could potentially lead to a higher CTR in our test sample. We had to further optimize our title tags and meta descriptions in hopes of captivating the audience and driving them to click. This valuable data helped us hone in on the keywords that would expectantly return a higher CTR for our client.

After repeating the steps mentioned above, we had a couple of terms for each piece of content that could potentially be a "golden ticket" of sorts to increase CTR for these selected content pieces. A few of the keywords we chose to test in our meta descriptions and title tags included:

• Keto milk substitute

• Keto milk

• MCT oil dosage

• How many calories on keto

• How many calories should I eat on keto

With SEO testing best practices in mind, we needed a hypothesis that will provide for an actionable SEO test that is specific in both what we want to do,and what effect we think it will achieve. By analyzing our SEO data in Serpstat, it yielded a plan for what steps to take to improve content in order for us to reach its full potential on the SERP. Now, for our hypothesis:

With our handful of content pieces, our strategy encompassed optimizing our titles and metas with the stellar keyword opportunity we found in Serpstat.com. We determined this strategy by referring back to our SEO testing best practices, knowing that adapting title tags and meta descriptions would be a profitable introductory step to increase organic CTR. Since our client's website is in the food/diet niche, there were important actions for us to take aside from us simply planting the keywords into our current title tags and meta descriptions. It was imperative that we tailored our approach to this site for the target audience. With saying that, with our list of keywords, we had to keep some important things in mind when we approached our CTR optimizations for each set of keywords we found:

All of these questions we asked ourselves affected how we wrote our titles and metas to ensure that we were making updates as valuable as possible. Looking at trends in the suggested keywords we gathered, it works well to provide a useful portion of the answer to the user's question on the SERP, but create a curiosity gap to entice the user to click.

In our own experience with CTR testing, two weeks seems to be a minimum duration of time to run SEO tests. Although, if you are able to execute testing for a longer duration of time, that is always welcomed as it allows you to gather a larger sample size of SEO metrics to influence your results. For our tests, we decided to run them for a 26-day period. With saying that and SEO best practices in mind, it is important to compare your test CTR to a control CTR of the same time frame. Therefore, we compared our test to the same amount of time (26 days) before we began testing.

SEOTesting.com allows you to setup SEO tests quickly and makes it simple to pick control groups in order to get as close to split testing as possible. Now, if our test in our testing tool comes back and says that we didn't see any significant improvements, we go back to the drawing board and iterate until we do see significant improvements. Then, once we know what works for our client and target market, we can implement these tactics on a larger list of content pieces.

Eager to analyze our results from SEOTesting.com, we were able to identify which keywords would generate the highest CTR for the pieces in our test sample from our results. Our first test is for a page that details a guide on low-carb milk substitutes.

Keyword: keto milk substitute

Just by skimming our summarized metrics, it was easy to see that there was more red than green for our test results. We could say that testing this term didn't quite have the increased CTR we were looking for. In closer investigation of our CTR results, we could analyze what went wrong during our testing period.

The resulting trend in the line graph above for the term "keto milk substitute" was reminiscent of an uneventful rollercoaster ride (which is okay!). This negative test is just as valuable as a positive test. The largest losses for this specific keyword were between days eight and ten. Overall, our CTR dropped from 16.10% to 14.44%, leaving us with a decreased CTR of 10.31%. However, we fortunately had a couple of terms from Serpstat that we believed could yield a high-potential organic CTR for this page. Without hesitation, we went ahead and tested another term, "keto milk".

Keyword: keto milk

In the reiteration of test #1, we saw that the higher-volume keyword without the modifier "substitute" performed better over a 26-day period in terms of organic CTR. On approximately half of the days in our time frame, our Test CTR performed better than our Control CTR. Overall, our organic CTR increased by 41.02%.

Keyword: mct oil dosage

For test #2, our results were overwhelmingly positive. On all days, but one, our Test CTR was greater than that of our Control. Overall, organic CTR climbed from 12.94% to 23.17%, making the overall percent increase in CTR a whopping 79.06%. Due to these positive results, there was no need to perform a second iteration of test #2.

Keyword: how many calories on keto

In the first implementation of test #3, we used the keyword term "how many calories on keto". Our test results were negative and showcased our organic CTR dropping from 28.62% to 27.66%. We turned to the list of terms found in Serpstat for this page, and reiterated test #3 using the query "how many calories should I eat on keto".

Keyword: how many calories should I eat on keto

In the reiteration of test #3, our CTR grew from 20.85% to 24.56%, with a percent increase of 17.79%. Using the keyword term "how many calories should I eat on keto" somewhat exemplified the impact of Google's BERT update, a pivotal moment in the digital marketing realm. The BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) update allowed Google to adapt to the AI-centered world we're living in, and better-understand natural language; therefore, it made sense that this longer-tailed voice search query yielded a higher organic CTR.

With these clear testing results from our repeated CTR tests, SEOTesting.com helped us grasp an idea of what can be implemented for future campaigns. We should see decreased time to high-quality traffic now that we took the time to act on results we saw from testing.

In the SEO industry, research, analysis, and testing are vital to any successful organic campaign. When budgets are tight, but there is a need to continue generating demand, testing your tactics on a sample of content provides the utmost clarity in decision-making. When budgets are generous, SEO testing helps ensure that no dollars go to waste and you scale as far as possible. As SEOs, it is our duty to test, adjust, test again, and repeat this process until we get an outcome that satisfies us and our clients. It is vital that we make data-driven decisions in order to reap any benefits from our hard work. This may seem simple, but these basics lay the foundation for SEO for a reason.

Testing minimizes unpleasant surprises, helps you scale faster, refines strategy, and accelerates the approval process.