How Content Structure May Impact Rankings: A Quick SEO Case Study

By Ethan Lazuk

Content should be “helpful” and written for people to satisfy the user’s intent. That’s a current refrain when it comes to SEO content writing. But what does that mean exactly?

Well, I have an interesting example from a website blog post I optimized in February 2023.

The Original Blog Post

This blog post was a general guide that targeted a specific query about a medical procedure: “What is (procedure name)?”

Based on the query, we might infer the user wanted a simple, quick answer defining what the procedure was. However, based on top-ranking Google results for the query [what is (procedure name)], we inferred a holistic guide was in fact a better fit (or at least needed to rank competitively).

This was a small local company publishing this article, so we knew our details had to be spot on.

So, we wrote a detailed guide, using an original outline that included many of the sections we saw from other top-ranking articles, but incorporated the company’s unique perspective, voice, and expertise.

What happened when we published this article in early November of 2022?

Virtual crickets.

Optimizations Performed

Seeing the article was destined for obscurity, I restructured it on February 21st, 2023.

Since this was a Your Money, Your Life medical topic, the information already had been extensively reviewed by the company to ensure it was accurate and demonstrated expertise.

Therefore, the optimizations I performed were limited to changing the order of information only.

When I say changed the order of information, I don’t mean merely rearranging the order of headings and their paragraphs. Rather, I also physically moved sentences around, creating expanded sections or shortening other sections.

Here’s a summary of the big changes I made:

• Shortened the introduction by moving flowery details to a final summary section.
• Made the first section a summary answering the question “What is (procedure name).”
• Enriched the first section with relevant details from other sections further down the page.

The core meaning of the information on the page stayed the same, but the order of the information the reader encountered, how it was packaged, and how much detail was in there, was completely different.

The Results

Within a day of submitting the URL to be re-crawled in Google Search Console, the page started picking up more impressions and earning clicks at a higher rate.

Then, with the start of Google’s March Core Algorithm Update on March 15th, the rate of impressions and clicks improved markedly, going from an average of less than 10 impressions daily before the optimization to upwards of 2,000 impressions daily. Clicks weren’t substantial, but again, this was a highly competitive topic and the company hosting this blog post was much smaller than the top-ranking players.

Replacing impressions with average position, we can see how the amount of clicks the page earned often correlates with the improvements to the average position of queries overall.

Unfortunately, the availability of GSC data ends before the completion of the March Core Algorithm Update, so we can’t continue to monitor page performance.

Summary

Though this is a small sample size, we can see how changing the order of the information on a page (without actually changing the information itself) may help improve how that page ranks for queries in Google Search. The hypothesis is that page structure has a role in the helpfulness of content, and how well that content satisfies the intent of a user searching a relevant query.

My takeaway is that on-page SEO can include simply rearranging the order of information, especially for YMYL content where the SEO themselves doesn’t have the expertise to add (or maybe even remove) content.

Update

Google announced a change to their guidance on helpful content on April 19th, 2023, to include page experience. Part of the self-assessment portion of Google’s “Understanding page experience in Google Search results” documentation mentions:

• “How easily can visitors navigate to or locate the main content of your pages?”
• “Is the page designed so visitors can easily distinguish the main content from other content on your page”

I was curious if “main content” could be a portion of text that directly satisfies the user’s main search intent. For example, did the edits made to the blog article in this case study, namely moving the definition and overview of the medical procedure earlier in the page, make it easier to navigate to and locate and help distinguish it from other content on the page?

Dr. Marie Haynes was kind enough to point out to me on Twitter that main content (MC), per Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines, includes “any part of a page that directly helps the page achieve its purpose.” This can include text.

So, in theory, reorganizing a page to make the main content more accessible (even if the information on the page didn’t change) could make that page more helpful, which supports the hypothesis of this case study.