Curious about quick SEO results showing up...

[TheCraig]

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

[PatrickDelehanty]

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!

[TheCraig]

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