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Contents

Overview

Copy above a product grid can help a category page rank, but it also fills the space where shoppers expect products. This test measured what happened to organic clicks when a leading ecommerce retailer took that copy away.

 

The Challenge

A leading ecommerce retailer's category pages followed a familiar template: a heading, a block of copy, the product grid, then more copy at the foot of the page. On these product listing pages (PLPs), the top block pushed the first row of products below the fold. A shopper arriving from search landed on a paragraph, not a product.

Trimming the copy or collapsing it behind a "read more" link were both options. Full removal asks the question most cleanly: if taking the copy out changed nothing, a halfway version was unlikely to either.

The bottom copy stayed, so each page kept its descriptive text. It just stopped leading with it.

 

Hypothesis

STP - 5 - Hypothesis

The question behind this test: does search performance follow what a shopper sees first? A shopping query is best answered with products, so a page that shows them immediately may be a better match for that intent, to searchers and to the signals Google uses to judge a result.

The case against is already in this Playbook. Adding copy above the grid lifted clicks for an enterprise tools retailer, on the logic that the text gives Google category-level language to rank on. Removing it risked weaker relevance for the broad queries these pages depend on.

The Test

The team used seoClarity's SEO Split Tester to split 46 category pages evenly into 23 test pages and 23 control pages.

The test pages lost the copy above the product grid, which moved the grid into the first screen. Bottom-of-page content stayed. Control pages kept both blocks as they were.

The test began in July and ran into September, on test pages that together earn over 4,000 organic clicks a day. 

Results

  • Verdict: Positive lift, significant at 99.9% confidence

  • Test group: +730 organic clicks vs. the model's predicted performance

  • Absolute effect: about 12,760 more organic clicks than the Causal Impact forecast*
  • Test vs. control: test-page clicks fell 1.5% period-over-period while control-page clicks fell 8.0%, a gap of about 6.5 points
  • Impressions (secondary): down 4.4% on test pages vs. 0.5% on control pages
  • CTR: up 0.41 points on test pages (to 13.9%), down 0.34 points on control pages

 STP - 5 - Image 1 (Analyze Impact)

STP - 5 - Image 2 (Test vs. Control)

 

* Editorial Note: Clicks declined in both groups during the test, so none of these figures is raw growth. The 12,760 clicks are the gap between what the test pages earned and what Causal Impact forecast from the untouched control pages. The 6.5-point gap is a simpler Search Console view of the same comparison.

Key Insights

For this retailer, what filled the first screen mattered. Products in view earned more clicks than copy above them, while the lower copy still gave each page descriptive text.

That doesn't overturn the earlier finding that adding top copy can help. The two tests ran on different sites, templates, and copy. Together they suggest top-of-page copy is worth testing in both directions, and that how far it pushes products down may matter as much as whether it exists.

Impressions are the qualifier. Test pages lost visibility against control even as their average position (3.91 to 3.75) and CTR improved, which would fit losing some peripheral queries the removed copy happened to match. The change was deployed through ClarityAutomate.

> > > Next Steps and How to Scale

Extend the change across the rest of the PLPs in phases, starting where top copy pushes the grid furthest below the fold. Track impressions alongside clicks at each phase, since that is the metric that moved against the test pages.

How This Test Was Run

  • This was a controlled split test, not a before-and-after comparison. Comparable pages were held back as a control, so the lift reflects the change rather than seasonal swings or background noise.

  • It ran on seoClarity's SEO Split Tester with minimal setup and no extra tooling, proving the result before any sitewide rollout.

Start Your Own Page Layout Test

Page layout is one idea worth testing (in either direction), and a held-back comparison can settle internal linking, structured data, or title tag questions the same way.

Want to run a version of this test? See how seoClarity can help.

 

Start SEO Split Testing Today

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