Before you start: what do you know about SEO split-testing? If you’re unfamiliar with the principles of statistical SEO split-testing and how SplitSignal works, we’re suggesting you start here or request a demo of SplitSignal.
First, we asked our Twitter followers to vote:
Only 25% of our followers guessed it right, the test result was positive.
Read the full case study to find out why.
The Case Study
Over the years, many SEO professionals have questioned whether it is better to use a dash (-) or a pipe (|) right before the brand name in the page title. For SEO, you’re always trying to write the best possible title tag. We’ve seen that small changes and tweaks can make a huge difference. But this case study may blow your mind…
Have you ever considered whether there would be a performance difference between using a pipe or dash in the page title? Read on to find out!
Most of the time, using a dash or a pipe before the brand name is just an aesthetic decision. However, there has also been some discussion about optimizing the amount of space you get for your title tags in search results. Title tags are measured in pixels. That means if you replace dashes with pipes, you can actually fit more characters into a title tag. That, in turn, increases the number of words that appear in the title that shows up in Google search results. But is this argument enough to make a final decision?
For a major e-commerce company in Australia, we replaced pipes with dashes in their product page titles to see if it would make a difference in terms of organic performance.
The Hypothesis
The website in question had its page titles set up like this:
We wanted to validate whether replacing pipes (|) with dashes (-) in the page title of their product pages would have a positive effect on organic traffic, so that’s what we did.
