I tracked every change across three client sites for six months — every content update, every technical fix, every link earned. Here is what actually correlated with ranking gains, and what turned out to be noise.
The setup
Three mid-size e-commerce sites, different niches, same tracking discipline: every change logged with a date, and rankings pulled weekly for a fixed keyword set.
What moved the needle
- Consolidating thin, overlapping category pages into fewer, stronger ones
- Fixing internal linking so money pages were reachable within two clicks of the homepage
- Rewriting title tags to match actual query intent instead of keyword-stuffing
