Before you start: what do you know about SEO split-testing? If you’re unfamiliar with the principles of statistical SEO split-testing and how SplitSignal works, we’re suggesting you start here or request a demo of SplitSignal.
First, we asked our Twitter followers to vote:
Only 31% of our followers guessed it right, the test result was positive.
Read the full case study to find out why.
The Case Study
If you’ve been involved in writing or optimizing content from an SEO perspective, you’ve probably thought about the most optimal heading structure for your content. Google recently reaffirmed that to understand what a web page’s content is about, they look at different things, such as headings, to figure out what is actually being emphasized. Proper use of semantic HTML can make content more meaningful. In return, it helps search engines understand the page a little better.
Headings are defined in the HTML of a page. They provide hierarchy and help users and search engines read and understand textual content. Headings show which parts of your content are paramount. There are six types of headings: H1 through H6, with H1 being the most important and H6 the least important.
For a major e-commerce company in the Netherlands, we restructured the headings on their category pages to see if it would make a difference in terms of organic performance.
The Hypothesis
The website in question had its heading structure set up like this, where we’ve changed the H3 to H2:
We saw that the website’s H3 subheadings were not necessarily subtopics of the previous H2 heading but, from a hierarchical perspective, subtopics of the pages’ H1 heading.