For this week's #SPQuiz, we asked our followers on X/Twitter and LinkedIn about the impact of enhancing the nutritional information pages for an ecommerce customer on organic traffic. They wanted to know if the traffic gains would justify the costs of maintaining these pages.
Poll Results
With a 100% result, our followers believed that improving the content would positively influence organic traffic and that it was worth enhancing.
And you know what? They were right!
The Case Study
Our customer, a major ecommerce retailer with a nationwide network of brick-and-mortar stores, had nutritional information pages alongside their product detail pages (PDPs) in specific categories, specifically food. The content on the nutritional information pages was historically thin, and these pages had not been updated in some time.
While these nutritional information pages brought a small percentage of organic traffic compared to PDPs, our customer was weighing a decision to sunset the entire page type and redirect their URLs to the corresponding PDPs, with internal opinion leaning towards removing the pages.
SearchPilot had previously run a canonical test, which revealed that the two page types served different user intents. PDPs could not fully replace the value of their supporting nutritional information pages for searchers. The test results showed that if nutritional information pages were to be deprecated, the site would experience a net loss of organic traffic overall.
Instead of removing the pages, we tested a different approach: improving them.
What was changed
To better serve users and search engines, we enhanced the content on the nutritional information pages using existing PDP content and additional structured information, such as adding a specification table similar to the one found on PDPs and listing related products.
Results
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After running the test, the results were unexpected: we saw nearly a 20% uplift in organic traffic to the updated nutritional information pages! That kind of uplift can be challenging to get in SEO, and it validated that these pages not only had value but were underperforming due to content limitations, not intent mismatch.
As this was a statistically significant result, we can examine Google Search Console data to learn how this change impacted click-through rates.
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In the visual above, the variant group outperformed the control group significantly. Before the intervention began, the control group had a click-through rate of 4.91%, while the variant group was at 3.43%. This test ran for nearly six weeks, and upon completion, the post-intervention results showed the control group at 3.53% and the variant group at 4.27%.
The variant group experienced a 24.5% increase in click-through rates from pre- to post-intervention; at the same time, the control group had a decline of 28%. We believe the reason was that the added content to the nutritional information pages provided Google with more material for snippets, enticing searchers to click more.
More information on interpreting our Google Search Console insights can be found here.
The practical outcome of this test was a shift in our customers' internal conversations, which initially started as a discussion about deprecating a page type. With the data obtained by testing an alternative approach, the conclusion was that the customer should implement these changes on more nutritional information pages, reinvesting in the page type rather than discontinuing it.
It is common for in-house SEO teams to be asked whether outdated, minimally supported, and low-value content can be removed to streamline operations and reduce costs. Removing it can be more costly than keeping it without testing to determine its true value. In this case, the customer's testing strategy preserved traffic and revenue and increased them due to the additional investment.
If you're debating whether to sunset a set of pages, it's worth testing before making the call. Sometimes, the page type is not the problem—it's the missed opportunity to serve users better.
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