Has Changes Made To Increase Conversions Ever Killed Your Rankings?

[Pjman]

I'm in charge of a membership website that has 1/3 of the content index-able and 2/3 of the content behind a pay wall.

- The site is 18 months old.

- Natural high quality links flow to our content steadily.

- The content is the highest quality in the industry. Not based on our opinion, bloggers and respected organizations often cite us for it.

We have made steady gains in our rankings until...

We engaged a conversion specialty agency. They have done a great job testing and finding ways for us to increase conversions. Everything has panned out great!

We notice a slight rankings drop when we inserted their testings scripts (Crazy Egg, Quarloo, Convert Experiments), but nothing major.

This last change we did made our rankings fall 20% and still falling. The change that we made was to add a simple CTA box with an "Upgrade" button. 3 lines of text and a button above the fold, but off to the sidebar (far right) not interfering with the content flow.

The lift we got from the CTA addition was cancelled out by the lost traffic. I plan to sit tight, just continue to add fresh indexable content, for awhile to see when it levels off.

Has anyone faced this? What solutions have worked for you?

[goodroi]

Whenever you touch your code you can impact your rankings. You can earn or lose ranking power based on your code.

Even if you haven't impacted the page's ranking power, Google has been known to play around with rankings for pages that have recently tweaked something (even very small changes). This is done to make it harder for webmasters to reverse engineer the serps.

[Pjman]

@goodroi

That's kind of what I thinking (sit and wait it out). That makes me feel better. Thanks for your input.

[webcentric]

Whenever you touch your code you can impact your rankings.

Which, if true (and recent experience is supporting this notion) is a really good way to discourage people from making changes to improve the user experience a site offers (something G seems to want webmasters to do). Doesn't matter whether the chance is actually a manipulation or an improvement of the user experience. Do anything too radical and your probably gonna get dinged. That is my current experience right now.

[goodroi]

I recently refreshed an old site and made radical changes and almost overnight had a significant ranking & traffic boost.

Improving the user experience is a good idea and should be our goal. Not all changes do improve the user experience. Some webmasters skip the step of real research and make guesses when changing things which end up hurting them. Other webmasters forget that the world is becoming more integrated and that we should remember the big picture as we make small changes because SEO, PPC, Social, Mobile, and Offline marketing can impact & influence each other.

Smart adjustments are always a good idea.