Case Semrush: How boilerplate content can affect SEO performance
Case Semrush: How boilerplate content can affect SEO performance
What?
As an SEO expert, you want to give search engines the right signals about which content and topics are important on the page. Although Google claims to be good at recognizing boilerplate text, the guidelines suggest minimizing it. By analyzing and adjusting headings in boilerplate content, we can improve relevance and SEO performance.
How?
We conducted tests on 500 category pages and 1500 product pages, replacing <h2> and other boilerplate tags with <div> tags. The tests were conducted over 21 days, and the pages were visited by Googlebot 99% of the time.
Result?
After 21 days, we saw a 3.9% increase in organic traffic for category pages and 8% for product pages. The results were statistically significant, meaning the adjustment actually contributed to the improvement in SEO performance.
What now?
The impact of HTML structure on SEO
The results show that Google assigns significant weight to HTML elements in boilerplate content. Removing unnecessary header tags led to better ranking and more impressions in search results. This confirms that it is important to maintain control over which content is emphasized through header tags.
