Curious about quick SEO results showing up...
-
Recently, I did a couple of major SEO mods on our e-commerce site.
Here's what I did:
A. No-indexed hundreds of thousands of Search Results pages.
B. Changed the URL structure for the better of our product pages.
I literally made these changes about 3 weeks ago and I am seeing some very interesting results in such a short period of time.
Here is one example. My product pages increased impressions by about 20% or so, but the real crazy thing is the increase in click through rate on my product pages. All of a sudden I am getting about a 95% clickthrough rate!??!?! Previously I was getting around 58%.
Any ideas on this? Is it a normal fluctuation that goes away? Or can I expect it to stay or even improve?
Thanks!
Craig
-
Good stuff Patrick! Yeah, I am thinking I hit the sweet spot. It's that clickthrough rate that's rocking my world a bit, but who knows? I feel like Google is still processing our pages though as we have close to 900,000 products, so I am looking forward to more improvements I hope... Plus, I still have more mods to make. Believe it or not, I actually did make these changes to a sub-set of our products that had the most to gain, but also had the least to lose. I just thought it would take longer for me to see improvements, so hopefully the Googles aren't playing tricks on me.
Thanks for the quality answer! I really appreciate it.
Craig
-
Hi there
Congrats on the increases! Sounds like you hit some potential sweet spots and optimized in some big ways.
While these could be fluctuations (especially with Phantom 2.0 hitting on May 3rd), I would also be mindful of your Average Positions in Google Search Console and organic traffic in Google Analytics. Are you seeing the same increases in traffic, average rankings, and conversions? That will be the real success if those saw increases as well!
I would also take an inventory of everything you changed and updated for future reference, and also look to see if there is anything else you could possibly work on. I wouldn't recommend doing big sweeping changes to your site - pick small groups of pages and test your ideas out there, measuring them against previous growth, as well as growth comparisons to pages that didn't have changes.
Sometimes these changes could be temporary fluctuations, but given your updates and algorithm changes, you may have lucked out and hit the right targets! Give it a little more time and see how everything ultimately ended up; a good gauge would be between 1-3 months, depending on who you talk to and what changes were made - but it's really upto you and how comfortable you feel that changes stuck.
Keep an eye on everything, test your assumptions, and make changes are based on your audience & topic research - have on-site and content ready to go for potential user searches. Hope this all helps! Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Any SEO benefits of adding a Glossary to our website?
Hi all, I manage a website for a software company. Many terms can be quite tricky so it would be nice to add a Glossary page. Other than that, I have 2 questions: 1. What would be the SEO benefits? 2. How would you suggest to implement this glossary so we can get as much SEO benefit as possible (for example how would we link, where would we place the glossary in the terms of the sitemap, etc.). Any advice appreciated! Katarina
Technical SEO | | Katarina-Borovska2 -
Impact of Non SEO Subdomains
My company has several subdomains whose specific purpose is to act as a landing page/site for our paid search and/or email program. One of the things I've noticed on these subdomains is that they are not being excluded from the SEObots. Could the lack of proper SEO techniques on these subdomains impact our main www subdomain? What is the proper configuration we should use to make sure these sites are not considered for SEO?
Technical SEO | | APFM0 -
Inurl: search shows results without keyword in URL
Hi there, While doing some research on the indexation status of a client I ran into something unexpected. I have my hypothesis on what might be happing, but would like a second opinion on this. The query 'site:example.org inurl:index.php' returns about 18.000 results. However, when I hover my mouse of these results, no index.php shows up in the URL. So, Google seems to think these (then duplicate content) URLs still exist, but a 301 has changed the actual goal URL? A similar things happens for inurl:page. In fact, all the 'index.php' and 'page' parameters were removed over a year back, so there in fact shouldn't be any of those left in the index by now. The dates next to the search results are 2005, 2008, etc. (i.e. far before 2013). These dates accurately reflect the times these forums topic were created. Long story short: are these ~30.000 'phantom URLs' in the index out of total of ~100.000 indexed pages hurting the search rankings in some way? What do you suggest to get them out? Submitting a 100% coverage sitemap (just a few days back) doesn't seem to have any effect on these phantom results (yet).
Technical SEO | | Theo-NL0 -
Does SEO Reflect when We change the Host??
I would like to know, if i switch to host not Domain, Just Host which just change the internal IP, Will that Affect to My SEO? If YES then What is the procedure to safe our SEO before Move? Or what is Procedure after we Moved. Hope many people found this issues, and got the solution, I through Google Webmaster do through filter, but i am not sure about it. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Webranx0 -
Google Cache is not showing in my page
Hello Everyone, I have issue in my Page, My category page (http://www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html) is regular cached in past, but before sometime it can't show the cached result in SERP and not show in cached result , I have also fetch this link in google web master, but can't get the result, it is showing following message. 404. That’s an error. The requested URL /search?q=cache%3A http%3A//www.bannerbuzz.com/custom-vinyl-banners.html was not found on this server. That’s all we know. My category page rank is 2 and its keyword is on first in google.com, so i am little bit worried about this page cache issue, Can someone please tell me why is this happening? Is this a temporary issue? Help me to solve out this cache issue and once again my page will regularly cache in future. Thanks
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Does Bitly hurt your SEO?
I often use bit.ly or Google URL shortener in links when other websites post my articles so I can track clicks. However, I am thinking this may HURT my SEO given that it is taking away a back link to my website. Is that logic correct ? If so, what is a good way to be able to track clicks if a website posts your article without jeopardizing the SEO value?
Technical SEO | | StreetwiseReports1 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0