How Better Collective increased their clicks from organic search by 614% using SEOTesting.com
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Challenges
Ivan Stamenković is the Head of Organic Performance Operations at Better Collective – a leading digital sports media group operating a portfolio of national and global sports media brands. He has the crucial role of increasing organic traffic, whilst being able to report clearly on this to stakeholders. Ivan explains:
“As the central SEO team in Better Collective, Organic Performance always tried to showcase that the work we do affects the organic traffic of the company’s brands; which wasn’t always that simple.”
Ivan recalls how hard it was to get insight and verify whether their efforts brought about any traffic impact.
“Even when we did set up everything properly, it was challenging to weed out the proper data from GSC using regular expressions and filters.”
SEOTesting provided us with a platform that enabled us to easily get data insights from every change that we have made. Setting up a test takes a couple of minutes and saves hours of reporting later on.
Ivan Stamenković
Head of Organic Performance Operations, Better Collective
A major pain point for Ivan’s team was not being able to confidently report on the validity of the tests they ran.
“We rarely looked into the statistical significance of the results of our optimizations. Therefore it was hard to confidently say that scaling a certain implementation would increase traffic.”
It was difficult for them to get budget buy-in from management for certain initiatives without clear evidence of results. Better Collective needed rock-solid proof that their initiatives did and would bring results.
Hard to get budget buy-in from management
Ivan details that due to Better Collective’s websites encompassing a wide variety of content categories, it was crucial to identify which aspects were positively or negatively impacted.
“Previously this was really difficult to do. It was hard to spot changes in different content types and make solid conclusions, especially with trying to assess certain traffic fluctuations during Google updates.”
This made it hard for the team to make data-driven decisions.
Gathering SEO data at Better Collective was a time-consuming process. Ivan details:
“Before, it was mostly spreadsheets we used to gather and assess our data, along with our own analytics. This took quite some time in itself, combined with the time spent in manually preparing the data for visual presentation.”
Hours spent manually crunching data
Solution and Results
Ivan was delighted to see results “almost instantly”.
“When we started using SEOTesting, we were impressed by the fact that we were able to run tests to verify whether optimisation efforts brought about any traffic impact.”
Ivan highlights a striking case where, by using SEOTesting for a leading bookmaker and experimenting with frequent updates to evergreen content, they achieved explosive results: Clicks surged by over 614%, and impressions skyrocketed by 3579%!
“The average position moved up by more than 5 points. What was key was that the test facilitated by SEOTesting, proved to be statistically significant with a p-value of 0.00010. This proved without a doubt that there was a correlation between our updates and the better rankings.”
Preparing the data for visual presentation is something the team doesn’t have to worry about now when it comes to SEOTesting.
“SEOTesting provides a platform for showcasing this in a very easy-to-understand way.”
Ready-made graphs tell our compelling stories
Ivan explains that as Better Collective is striving to become the leading digital sports media group in the world, they are focusing more and more on news content, which he notes is very hard to A/B test due to its temporary nature.
“SEOTesting plays a crucial role in this type of testing, as it allows both single tests, group tests, or split tests, which is very convenient for large numbers of short-lived URLs.
We have now gained valuable insights into the statistical significance of our results, which gives us more confidence to scale these conclusions across our site or portfolio.”
It wasn’t just forward-looking tests the team ran.
“We were even able to retrospectively set up tests for implementations that were performed historically, meaning we could re-evaluate optimization efforts through a new lens and adapt our strategies moving forward.”
Budget buy-in from management is now easier
Better Collective’s sites cover a broad range of different content categories, so Ivan was pleased that SEOTesting could show what was affected.
“The content groupings that SEOTesting has make it easy to spot these changes in different content types and make data-driven conclusions. Additionally, the annotations on the graphs make our assumptions even more data-driven.”
Ivan and his team now track their performance in real-time, facilitating Core Update diagnostics when necessary.
Pre-made reports spot quick wins for easy traffic gains
Ivan is pleased the team no longer has to spend hours crunching data manually.
“Using SEOTesting, we now have ready-made graphs and statistical data that can be used to tell compelling stories about the work we do. Setting up a test takes a couple of minutes and saves hours of reporting later on.”
Saves hours of reporting time
Ivan’s team have used SEOTesting for 4 years now and put a lot of this success down to the customer support his team have with the tool.
“We have a very productive relationship with SEOTesting’s customer support team, so much so that we feel we are talking to an in-house colleague. We feel that we are growing together and that the tool is adapting to our evolving needs and the ever-changing SEO landscape.”
For organisations looking to make better decision-making from their SEO efforts, Better Collective recommends SEOTesting.
“SEOTesting eradicates the need to stop making bulk changes on a single-page level and start looking into individual optimizations and their scalability.”
Enable your teams to gather and determine clear results of SEO tests, whilst saving considerable time.
Josh Willet
Digital Marketing Consultant
Pieter Serraris
Digital Marketing Consultant, OMcollective
Helen Freeman
SEO Manager, Domino's