COMMENTS
I'm going to throw out a guess of 60% increase, therefore, about 6400-6500 visits a month.
I've done this for the most part on our company web site and blog and the traffic has increased a fair amount.
This is a great article and gets people to think and act!
I say 6,600.
To be fair, the voting ought to be blind - otherwise you are going to have the Price Is Right phenomenon on this one! Someone will pick 6,601, and someone else will 6,599.
BTW, I bet there's other factors that'll be driving the traffic up, which you might be hard-pressed to deconvolve. The clean experiment would be for them to not do any incremental marketing.
I say a 40% increase for 5400 visitors for the month of December. Could you disclose if they are the type of client that would be affected by holiday shopping one way or the other?
"We plan to make the changes by November 1st."
Is this purposely vague? If not, can you zone in on it a little more?
I think that they will see traffic at about 8400 month.
@marshall The holiday season should have no clear impact on this client's traffic.
@marcel Not purposefully vague. The changes will be made by Nov. 1, and we're looking for the traffic number in December, given that they currently average 4K/month
@ilya you're right but, but if that happens, we'll happily send out more than five t-shirts.
I think the changes will have a negative impact in November followed by a positive impact in December...so my guess is 2500 for November. My rationale is that the title changes will take time to process for Google...Google sees changes and needs to reanalyze, which will lead to a decrease in ranking while this process occurs. So, the rankings will decrease for 2 - 4 weeks, followed by a normalized uptick.
I'm no SEO person, but I'd be surprised if it made much difference at all. It seems most search engines can figure out a page title based on the visible H1 tags in a way to try to avoid seo abuse of things, especially duplicate text -- which this would be.
A refresh of the pages, though, will likely cause reindexing of them and may bump the "freshness" up which could help just as much. So, I'll guess at a 20% improvement, assuming that's the _only_ thing that's actually done for all of November.
I agree with this being so vague its really hard to put a tangible number on it. Basing this solely on the size of the site and that its mainly articles, I'm going to suggest the possibility of 10,000 with the give or take 1000. :)
As this is a bit of fun really I'll say that by the end of November it'll be 10K hits
However, and this is the more serious bit from me....
I am presuming that the titles of the articles are the sort of things that their "ideal Client" would actually be searching for?
Sure they might get more visitors but does it really matter unless they are writing articles which have titles that are relevant to their marketplace?
Extra visitors are lovely and gives a warm glow all over however if they don't interact by subscribing to the RSS, a newsletter, making a comment on the blog, emailing you or calling you, does it matter at all......
See, this is the problem I have in the UK with all these people who call themselves SEO gurus, traffic is nice but its not as important as other KPI's
Mike Ashworth
Small Business Marketing Coach
Brighton and Hove, Sussex, UK
SInce I know too much about the account, I'm going to refrain from the contest.
However, I predict a nice bump in long tail traffic without any short term drop. I think that theory is wrong in this particular case. Anyone that has experienced that after doing a "website redesign" process needs to check their process against this:
http://www.hubspot.com/website-redesign-kit/ It is vague because we want to keep the customer's anonymity, as we do with all of our clients.
@Shane. This is not duplicate content. Nor is this manipulating anything. A keyword should be placed in a Title tag, URL AND H1 tag to increase the likelihood of an individual page ranking for a keyword. That is just best practices for SEO.
And lastly, many sites make this SAME mistake. It's just rare that a site with this many pages makes this mistake. So, they should see a nice bump.
I'll eat a HubSpot T-Shirt if I'm wrong.
It also depends if they are adding/removing any marketing campaign or promotions during that month!
@Mike Ashworth.
For this company, it doesn't make sense to do keyword research for this process.
They've started keyword research process for future articles. But, for their articles, it would be too forced to use keywords that are different from the article titles.
@peter Wait, that's not what I meant. I simply meant that the title itself (the string of two or three words) is duplicated in the title tag and, likely, and H1 tag. From reading various things on the search engine side, as time goes on this should effect search engine results less and less. If they were different, I would actually expect it to hurt the results because the algorithms might detect contradictory content and thing it's abuse.
Like I said, I'm no SEO person. I do agree, though, that the title should be in the title tag, if only for usability and better default bookmarking labels.
If this is truly the only change, though, (and no one discovers which site this really is causing artificial increase in traffic due to this discussion) it will make a great example case for this since it is a large enough site. I'm looking forward to seeing the results.
At first, their traffic will drop about 30% (they'll receive 2800 visits per month) due to the changes but after about 3 weeks, the traffic will return. Once it stabilizes, the monthly traffic should be about 45% higher than the original 4000 per month so that gives us a total of 5800 per month.
It wont be easy to guess figure i would say. There are quite a few factors that would influence the figure.
Firstly, what is the approximate search volume of the keywords that the pages will be target?
Secondly, how competitively are those keywords?
Thirdly, how many times will the keywords appear in the body of the articles?
Would say that the page title is an important factor for onpage optimisation but without knowing the above factors, it is difficult to forecast an estimated amount of traffic increment.
What do u say?
It wont be easy to guess figure i would say. There are quite a few factors that would influence the figure.
Firstly, what is the approximate search volume of the keywords that the pages will be target?
Secondly, how competitively are those keywords?
Thirdly, how many times will the keywords appear in the body of the articles?
Would say that the page title is an important factor for on-page optimization but without knowing the above factors, it is difficult to forecast an estimated amount of traffic increment.
What do u say?
It will probably take a week or so for Google to update their index with the new page titles, so I dont think it will be huge the first month. Im going to say they will have 5750 visitors in November, but December that number will increase to 12,000 or so...
This is a trick question. I posted my answer on my blog.
Seems like unless this company is ad supported (and they may be, given the notation of "articles" in the original post), an increase in "traffic" is at best a secondary goal.
How about an increase in sales, leads, downloads of key content, phone calls, etc? Hubspot, you guys know that SEO is about conversions, not rankings and page views. So, it would seem that the key metric in this contest is misplaced.
That being said, I believe traffic will approximately triple to ~ 12,000 visits/month by end of the year.
This is based on a similar long tail strategy I employed for a client. Traffic increased 3X, but more importantly, conversions increased 10X due to great rankings for specific, long-tail phrases that indicate a consumer deep in the purchase research funnel.
Jason Baer
Convince & Convert
Internet consulting for agencies
www.convinceandconvert.com/convince-convert-digital-marketing-blog
The comments have been really well thought out and I agree that traffic will likely increase to 7,000 and go higher than that in December. I'll be looking forward to the result and any other post-mortem analysis.
This is totally impossibly to measure as there is no context. There is little indication of current rankings, little indication of SERP competition and nothing on the quality of the content.
If this is an attempt to get links to this post then it really is a low quality effort.
I wouldn't expect that their traffic would increase significantly in the first 3-6 weeks due to search engines having to work through all of the changes and due to much of the material being old. I'm also just going to make the assumption that the majority of their visitors are looking for something relatively specific so would have been likely to find them anyway. My guess is the number will reach
5678 by the end of November.
Eric Pratum
The Hotel Experience Eric Pratum's Musings
@Bernie There's no trick. These guys don't care about conversions.
@Jason Very astute observation in your first sentence.
@ both of you... who named their company's first and is it purely coincidence? Find & Convert (Bernie) & Convince & Convert (Jason)
4k - No change b/c google won't have moved anything up to the first or second page in november....december could be a different story
I'm with Mike Emery on this. There will probably be some short-term confusion on Google's part while they sort out all the changes and figure out where your clients' pages "fit" in the recall and ranking process.
I had a similar situation on one of my sites -- the entire NEWS section (about 5,000 pages) had the same Page Title. After we made the same change you propose, we suffered for about 6 weeks and then saw traffic rise by about 30%.
So, my guess is that your client will see less than a 10% increase in November -- less than 4,400. But around December/January, I'd bet it starts going up more dramatically.
my gut tells me based on another client we have that they will see limited growth in the first 3-4 weeks of the change. I would hope with 4000 pages indiexed Google is stopping by often. By mid december I believe the traffic could double to 8350.
If implemented Nov 1st, I predict a 50% in November (6K) following by 100% increase in December (8K) given their service/product doesn't have any seasonal demand shifts.
Todd Scholl.com
Lots of good comments above.
To me, more important than the traffic number for November, is the process you go through to estimate improvement. You can then compare with cost (seems low if it is only a template change) to get ROI of a particular SEO activity. Typical steps I go through include:
1) Check where their traffic is going now, by page type. How much to the home page, how much to other page types, like the existing article pages. If not much to the existing article pages, you really have no downside to making changes. Furthermore, in this case, there doesn't seem to be any downside risk because the home page should already be winning for the company name, so the other pages aren't going to be losing traffic due to changes from the existing title tag (the company name). I'll assume half the traffic is going to article pages (not knowing whether other page types on the site, like the home page and category pages, get material traffic).
2) How do the article pages rank now (on average) on key phrases in the article title? (Use your web analytics tool to identify high volume keywords). And how much do you think they'll improve from this change? If they rank 100, and you'll move them to 80, you won't see much more traffic. If they rank 3, and you move them to 2 (on phrases with volume) you'll get materially more traffic. I'll estimate an average SERP improvement of 0.5 for keywords that are currently driving traffic to article pages (many of which are probably not in the article title and won't be affected) which I'll estimate will yield a 25% increase in traffic to article pages.
3) Check how frequently the site is being crawled, especially the deeper article pages. Easiest is to divide site size by average pages crawled by day, and this is the minimum time it will take the pages to get recrawled. Add several days for index updates. I'll assume the site is recrawled, indexed with SERP updated by end November, with even improvement over the course of the month.
4) If you're making a change to the page template, I'd touch all the on-page factors while you are at it. While everyone has different opinions, you might as well go beyond the title tag and also work on the meta description tag, the URL (with redirects from old URLs), the H1 tags and whatever other on-page factors you believe have an impact to keywords in the article title. This really only affects how much ranking will improve and I'd boost up the 0.5 if more of these things were being improved.
5) As an aside, I'd suggest focusing more on something other than traffic. Either conversions (lead generation or commerce site) or total page views (advertising based site).
By the way, is the question:
a) How much do you think their traffic go up in the month of November...
b) The five closest guesses to the actual number of visitors this site gets for the month of December will receive...
With above, I'm at an improvement of 4,000 * 0.5 * 0.25 = 500, for a total of 4,500 visits in December. I'll go with 4,250 visits in November.
Peter
<a href=http://www.GlobalDoctorOptions.com>Global Doctor Options
Since the title tag is probably the most important SEO variable, I would say that most of the estimates are conservative. My prediction a spike in traffic from from 4k to 16k by November and from PR5 to PR6.
I think that traffic will increase by 10%...
16,000 I'm assuming they have lots of unique pages and will suddenly appear in lots of new places.
As others commented above, my take is your client's traffic percentage will go up slightly higher in November than it went up in October, but traffic (if any) from Google indexing won't be seen until mid-November or December.
There is also the question whether the page titles as-is are keyword rich and relate to the page content and the rest of the site.
And, what you don't mention, how many inbound/outbound links are there, how many social networks does the client participate, and what about offline marketing/advertising/PR campaigns?
Too many variables.
If you want a single answer for traffic rise in November, I say the same percentage that October was over September.
I reckon it could double in a couple of months, maybe go up 50% in November if that is when it is implemented and maybe get to 100% in December!
<a href=http://www.myinternetbusiness-opportunity.com>Mark Everett
Ahhh....how many jelly beans are in the jar and provide a systematic algorhythm for your calculation. OK, I'd get stuck on providing any complicated formular except WAG but I do believe that a jump of around 55% is called for, or approximately 6,200 visitors in December.
its only depends upon the number of visitors are coming on the website.
well site is good.
i have changed the title of the site that I work on coz I thought its ok to change the old title, i dont have any idea that the rank will decrease all of a sudden i really did something wrong and thats when changing the title. but still happy coz traffic is in good condition. thanks for sharing this very good source of information am thankful that i have read this article. but its too late that i have made a wrong move.
Interesting parlor game, in that I feel like we're trying to determine whodunnit based solely on the position of the body. There's simply way too much missing information to make an educated guess. The key points, IMHO, would be the frequency of indexing by the Googlebot and the relevant pent up demand that is not currently finding them by standard search parameters. Are these 4,000 articles on different subjects (like About.com) or are they 4,000 articles on the same general topic?
Regardless, it sounds like fun, so here goes:
We'll see a fairly decent bump in November but the real difference will be in December (unless they are sporting on odd topic that people don't care about during the holidays, in which case January will be the banner month.)
November visits: 7,123
December visits: 9,867
January visits: 11,948
I'll send you my address for the T-shirt. ;-)
/Jim
I think it will easily bump it up another 30-35%. 4k Pages indexed and a page rank of 5 means a good deal of quality traffic and inbound links. Slicing and dicing the pages with the title tags will increase the visibility of each individual page.
4,112 visitors for November.
I'd be curious to know the number of external links to the client's website.
I'm going to guess high because... well, why not :) 75% increase in traffic.
While I would expect long term benefits, I would say that the month of November will see minimal improvement over the 4000 visitors they are currently getting. Assuming the title tags are the only thing you optimize, and assuming it is all done on or very near Nov. 1, I would put my chips on something conservative like 4350 for November.
The importance of page title tags depends on the competitiveness of the market.