4 Surprising SEO Test Results — Whiteboard Friday

The final idea is article Schema. Google has said before that they love structured data. It helps them understand the site better. Article Schema is a form of structured data that includes the headline of an article, the author, the publish date, and many, many more, and it can also win you rich snippets.

However, we wanted to test again if that is the case. Google’s advice might not work for all industries, so we decided to add article Schema to a customer’s site. With that happening, we should see an increase in organic traffic, as Google has said that it will understand the site a little bit more.

However, we were surprised to see no impact at all on the site. We saw no increase. We saw no decrease. We saw just a flat line, which was quite interesting because, according to Google’s advice, it should understand the site better. Therefore, we should have more organic traffic because of improved clicks, improved rankings, and maybe by winning the rich snippets. But we saw nothing. So that’s why it’s very important for us to test all the time to make sure that things work.

However, this customer did decide to roll out the change anyway because it can be seen as a positive as opposed to nothing because it didn’t damage your site, and it didn’t do well for your site. You might as well just implement it anyways because Google has said that this is best practice.