This Simple Canonical Tag Change Increased SEO Traffic by 22%

You know, looking at Google patents and Google documentation is fun and useful, but there's really nothing like looking at realworld SEO tests. And the test that I'm sharing with you on this episode of the show answers a common question. Is there anything special you should do in SEO if you have multiple product variations? And it turns out there is. There is something special that you should do. If you have a metal water bottle, for example, and you have variations in size or color, there's actually something special in SEO that will boost the organic traffic you get and make you more sales. This test comes from search pilot. It's called, "Does canonicalizing to more specific product pages improve SEO performance?" And it's fairly recent. It was written in 2024. It reads, "For e-commerce websites, it's always a challenge to ensure all variations of a product are indexed and able to rank alongside pages that may appear to be very similar. Different websites can take very different approaches, ranging from only having one URL for each product type to having lots of fine grained variations all available to rank in search engines. We have seen previously that how e-commerce pages link to each other can have a strong impact on performance. One of search pilot's e-commerce website customers decided to test whether it was beneficial to have the general landing page for each product have a canonical tag pointing to the primary specific varieties URL or to leave them as self-referential canonical tags. If you're new to SEO, a canonical tag is a piece of HTML that tells search engines which version of a page is the main version. And this is especially useful when there is similar or duplicate pages. Canonical tags prevent duplicate content confusion, consolidate ranking signals to the preferred URL. They just help search engines index the right page. That's all a canonical tag is. So, this e-commerce company doing the test previously made a change to make all of their product variations indexable with self-referential canonical tags, including quantity and size variations, but those pages were not getting indexed consistently and were not receiving as much organic traffic as had been hoped. So going back to our water bottle example, you have your main product page, which is forward sls/metal-water-bottle. And then you have your variations. So for size, you would add a question mark to the URL and then say size equals 20 ounces or size equals 32 ounces or size equals 40 ounces. Or for color variations again you just add a question mark and you say color equals black, color equals blue, color equals stainless steel and you have the canonical for the main product page be itself. The canonical for each variation URL is also itself. That's what a self-referential canonical means. But again it wasn't working out as had been hoped. So this is what was changed. The way their site was structured was to have one URL for the main product page with separate URLs for each variation using a URL parameter to differentiate them. The URL parameter being the question mark. The test they ran involved changing the canonical tag on the main product page from being self-referential to pointing to one of the product variations. They hypothesized that by doing this, the product variations would start getting indexed while the main product pages would continue to perform well as well. So now back to our water bottle example. The main product page/roducts/metal-water-bottle. The canonical points to the most popular variation. Let's say it's question mark size equals 32 oz. and the canonical on each variation URL continues to be self-reerential. The test was measured in two different places, the main product pages and the product variations. This allowed them to weigh up the impact for both the main and variation pages to see what the net effect of this change would be. And this is the results. And nobody expected it. Maybe some people expected it, but it's still cool. For the main pages, we saw no negative impact with the test being inconclusive overall. However, on the variation pages, we saw a positive result with the best estimate being a 22% uplift to organic traffic to those pages. As such, the overall result was positive and this change was deployed to all relevant products. Every e-commerce website setup will be different depending on a lot of factors including the number of variations per product, the internal linking structure, and the lifetime of products on the website. This approach may not work for everyone, but in this case, adding a canonical to a specific variation of products definitely had a positive impact. So, back to the metal water bottle company. Before the test, all metal water bottle variation pages combined would be getting, let's say, 10,000 organic visits per month. After the test, they would be getting 12,200 organic visits a month. That's a 22% uplift. It's also possible that, you know, this test said that all product variation URLs experience the uplift, but it's possible that the canonical target URL, like the 32-oz metal water bottle, might get the biggest lift because the main page points directly to it. But the other variation URLs could also benefit indirectly if Google understands the product variation structure better. It crawls them more, starts treating those pages as more indexible. So, let's say that there's a 6% conversion on these pages. 2,200 extra visits times the 6% conversion rate would be $132 extra orders. And if the average bottle order is $35, this uplift would mean an extra $4,620 of revenue each month. So, this was a cool test. And the last question is, can we extrapolate a greater lesson from this? And I'm going to say that we can. This is what it is. A greater SEO lesson. Don't automatically assume that a generic product or service page would be the best page for Google. Sometimes the more specific variations better match what people search for and can capture more organic traffic. If searchers are using modifiers like size, color, material, location, use case, quantity, or model, pages that directly represent those modifiers will have SEO value. So create pages for product and service variations and make those pages distinct and useful. Niche down. Niche down. Go after more specific highintent keywords. And if you want to learn how to find those keywords and my templates for targeting these keywords using conversionbased SEO landing pages, not blog posts, how to structure your site for these keywords, how to do a SEO tech audit, how to build links, so much more. I have a 13 and a halfhour course on exactly this at compactkeywords.com. I just got this review yesterday. This is from Phil who said, "Hi Edward, I went through your compact keywords course about 6 months ago. Just 30 days ago, I started a brand new rank and rent site project from scratch and your course has really set things up for success. The first two weeks of the build, I had issues with blog posts and a few pages not indexing. So, I revisited your podcast about updating page titles to make them more unique or value forward. After updating page titles and ensuring there was an internal link in them, too, every page, 31 in total, is now indexed. Just Just wait. This review is crazy. That was literally all I changed. And they indexed 2 days later. Such a cool indexing tip. Thank you for that podcast. I now have 777 keywords appearing in Search Console, 18 of which are in position one. This is my very first rank and rent site attempt. Reddit says it's a dead model, but hyperfocusing on a bottom offfunnel local SEO site, I'm averaging about two to three phone call inquiries per day and about four form inquiry submissions per week. Tomorrow, I'll start reaching out to local businesses to find one I can redirect the leads to. I can't believe that the site's SEO has come together so quickly compared to my previous builds, and I'm already on the verge of monetizing it after just 1 month of existence. This is my first totally from scratch website build since going through your course. Compact Keywords does such a great job of focusing on the details that matter and the thought processes needed to effectively approach and implement SEO. Your internal SEO template spreadsheet inside the course is absolutely amazing at helping me keep my site organized and pages purposeful. Thanks so much. You really put all those other courses I bought to shame. Let's go. Thank you, Phil, for that. It makes me so happy. So, if you want that for your business, that's at compactkeywords.com. You're going to love it. That's everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,68 of the Edward Show. 1,068 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watched this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.