More visitors, higher quality traffic, & a more engaged audience

Music experts, a UK based guitar review website, saw a massive growth relying only on SEO Testing with Polkadot Tiger. Without any other optimisations, creating new content or receiving any relevant backlinks, the blog achieved its best quarter ever in terms of revenue and organic traffic.

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The Results

The Music Expert Team tested their SEO metadata with Polkadot Tiger from 1 August until 27 December of 2020. This testing period is compared with the preceding period of 5 March until 31 July 2020. Aside from SEO testing no other optimizations were being made on the site (no advertising, no strategy or design change). Even though the testing took a minimal amount of work (20 minutes per week) significant improvements were recorded.

+250% Affiliate Clicks

Increased CTR for Affiliate Links

As Music Experts’ primary revenue comes from affiliate links to Amazon their “One Metric That Matters” is the number of clicks on affiliate links. As a result of their SEO A/B Tests, clicks on the tested pages increased by 250% from 80 in the pre-test period, to 277 in the test period.

+190% New Visitors

Successfully attracting more visitors

Music Experts is a review publication website, so gaining new visitors is one of their main goals. This was also very successful with the testing as from 410 in the pre-test period this number had increased to 1191.

+116% Engagement

More Engaged Visitors

It is extremely important that visitors read the whole review on the Music Experts website because the affiliate link was located at the end. The visitors were much more likely to read the whole review during the test period compared to before which more than doubled from 112 in the pre-test period 242 during.

+33.5% Pages/Session

More pages visited per session

As a review website, the trust and reputation gained from reading a guitar review is very important. A good sign of this is if after reading one review, visitors continued to browse the Music Experts website for other guitar reviews. The pages viewed per session increased from 1.91 to 2.55 by the end of testing.

+185%

Visitors

Not only did the number of new visitors increase, returning visitors also more than doubled.

+181%

Sessions

With all visitors increasing the number of sessions also increased from 452 to 1270.

-10%

Avg. Session Duration

Music Experts saw a slight decrease in Average Session Duration from 0.49 to 0.44.

20 min/week

Time spent on SEO testing

Writing the new variations of metadata only took up to 20 minutes per week.

Tested pages substantially outperformed all other pages, even with seasonality taken into account

The global search trends for the tested pages’ main keyword “guitar” has shown no increase in the testing period which would justify the improvements measured.

Heard enough? Want to start testing your SEO Metadata today?

The Story

Industry

Music

Format

Blog

Revenue Source

Affiliate Commissions

Using Polkadot Tiger

From August 2020

Avg. SEO Traffic Before

950 / month

Location

United Kingdom

Music Experts is a blog publication focusing on reviewing the latest guitars. Their revenue comes from affiliate links to Amazon for guitar and other instrument purchases. The company’s main goals are to provide readers with valuable information via guitar reviews and direct them to where they can buy the instruments

The beginning: Slow but steady traffic growth

The Music Experts team are a group of guitar-enthusiasts, and decided to launch a blog publication about their favorite instrument. The team always enjoyed reviewing guitars and they selected a handful of products and started writing about them. The team slowly grew the website as it seemed like a good additional source of revenue. By 2019, the blog had a stable average monthly traffic of ca. 950.

Pushing for growth but pressed for time

As for many of us, 2020 brought a big change for Music Experts. The team no longer had time to create new content or tweak the site’s SEO or CRO performance. However, Stephen, the founder of Music Experts and cofounder at Polkadot Tiger was excited to get started with SEO A/B testing as he knew that Polkadot Tiger would automate most of the time-consuming work associated with the process.

A time-efficient method for SEO Testing

From August 2020, the Music Experts team began SEO A/B Testing with Polkadot Tiger. Setting up the plugin and connecting it to the website was straightforward. After that, they could start experimenting with the tool.

The focus was on testing new variations and structures of metadata for key pages. This only took a few minutes of the work week (about 15 minutes/week) to create a hypothesis about which type of metadata would perform best and write a couple of variations to test each potential approach.

Testing could easily fit the Music Expert’s team schedule despite the busy period.

Using Polkadot Tiger enabled the team to be consistent with SEO testing even though they did not have time to improve Music Experts in any other way. And after nearly 149 days of continuous testing, they were delighted to see that performance for the tested pages had vastly increased compared to all of the website’s other pages that were not subject to A/B Tests.