Brendan Tully0 Comments
May 13, 2022
Numerous site owners and admins underestimate the importance of meta descriptions. These snippets, no longer than 160 characters, are the tags in HTML code that offer a brief overview of page content to the users in search engine result pages (SERPs). If used correctly, meta descriptions can significantly increase your site’s traffic and the number of conversions.
In this article, we’ll get into more detail on what meta descriptions are, why they matter, how they impact SEO, and how to write a good meta description. Many people still think that ranking in SERPs equals traffic, but we must underline how outdated this approach is. Another factor that must be considered today regarding SEO is called click-through rate (CTR), which we’ll also discuss below. If you’d like to learn how to improve your site’s performance by using meta descriptions and optimizing your CTR, keep on reading.
Meta descriptions are tags in HTML code that can be set for all pages of your website. They should sum up the content present on a particular webpage. Simply put, meta descriptions are those tiny portions of text that the search engines show beneath each search result.
They’re the ones that offer visitors the first look inside your web page and so can greatly influence whether your page gets opened or not. Most people find meta descriptions very helpful and often rely on them when deciding on the search result they’ll open. Ultimately, meta descriptions are a chance to attract more traffic to your site. All web pages should have a unique meta description.
Click-through rate (CTR) is a great way to measure how much traffic your keywords, ads, and free listings gather. CTR presents the ratio of visitors that click on a particular page to the total number of visitors that see that page/advertisement. That means that if 10 out of 100 users that view your webpage or ad actually click on the link, the CTR would be 10%. Therefore CTR is very useful when determining how successful your advertising or email campaigns are. We should also state that improved CTR almost always means higher rankings in search engine result pages.
As we said before, meta descriptions should be used as an opportunity to convince users to visit your web page. The Google algorithm uses meta descriptions and other meta tags, which allows certain pages to appear higher in search results for particular keywords.
Furthermore, meta descriptions offer the chance of adding a meta tag that your content doesn’t include. So if you want your Google ranking to improve, you must use meta descriptions in a proper and creative way. The great news is that this can be done in a rather short amount of time, without too much effort.
Meta descriptions will surely help you increase your CRT, improve your rankings in SERPs, and help the users find the information they’re looking for in a simpler way. Backlinko states that pages that use meta descriptions count around 5.8% more clicks than the ones that don’t. Keep in mind that meta descriptions may also appear on social media beneath the link.
It’s important to say that in case you miss out on setting up your meta descriptions, the search engine might do it on its own. Unfortunately, the technology is still not advanced enough to be able to write better meta descriptions than humans do, so this might create a setback in your click-through rate as well as your SERPs ranking. If you weren’t convinced until now, you can see how this further adds to the importance of writing your own meta descriptions or having someone that will create high-quality ones for you (there’s plenty of copywriters available on Upwork and Fiverr).
There are several tips you should follow in order to create well-written, attractive meta descriptions. In the following paragraphs, we’ll take a closer look at each of them.
Before moving on to the tips on how to produce interesting meta descriptions, you should first run an SEO audit tool, such as Semrush or ContentKing. This will help you find any gaps in your meta descriptions as well as any other issues related to SEO.
The next step on our road to more attractive meta descriptions is to test them using your SEO plugin of choice. Here, we suggest using Yoast SEO, especially for WooCommerce sites.
Use Yoast SEO’s Google preview section to write your meta descriptions and find out if they’re any good. Yoast SEO focuses on two key factors: the length of your meta description and whether or not you’ve used your focus keyword in it. Ultimately, Yoast is very simple and user-friendly, so do check it out.
If you have multiple ideas for creative meta descriptions, you needn’t rush into a permanent decision; you can simply test them and see which performs better.
To A/B test your meta descriptions, you can write two of them for each page. If you’d like to see whether a new meta description would perform better than your current one, leave your current meta description as an A version while implementing a variation of a phrase, keyword, or a CTA in the second as a B version.
Use both for a few weeks each and use Google Analytics to determine the option that attracts more engagements such as clicks, time on page, bounce rate, and conversions. You can also use SEOTesting to A/B test the most important pages of your site.
When it comes to actually writing the meta descriptions, present your content to the searcher in a way that’s catchy and attractive to the reader. Use different methods such as clickbait titles or questions that visitors would ask to attract their attention. Of course, don’t go overboard with the clickbait as that can have the opposite effect.
Another hint we should mention here is the use of catchy words such as free, shocking, bonus, hilarious, fast, etc. It’s a good idea to capitalize those words since, unlike Google AdWords, meta descriptions allow the use of capitalized words. However, make sure not to promise the impossible or to deliver a lower quality than advertised.
A call to action (CTA) is a great way to interact with the visitors since they provide the users with a brief explanation of your site’s content. CTAs can be applied if you’re selling products on your site, you want to point the visitors toward your social media accounts, or you want to offer an email sign-up, for instance.
Another great way to easily make your webpage more appealing to potential visitors is by using “active” words, so to say. Phrases such as “Click Here”, “Read More” “Shop Now”, or “Learn More” can easily attract users to click on your link.
Although, meta descriptions should also be simple and easily understandable. Words such as “see”, “read”, “learn”, “deal” or “watch” are very compelling to visitors and can help you increase the number of clicks.
Including keywords in your meta descriptions can make a great impact on your site’s SEO and CTR. Keywords allow search engines to see what kind of content is contained at your site, and rank it accordingly. There are several tools you can use when looking for the best keywords, and Ubersuggest is our top pick.
Anyway, keep in mind that you should always use different keywords in the meta descriptions since that will allow your web pages to appear in all important search engines. We should also note that Google doesn’t base its rankings on keywords, but they’re still very important from the user-experience point of view.
Another thing you should remember is to make sure not to put too many keywords in your meta descriptions because that will make them look spammy and may even get you penalized. One or two of your main keywords included in each meta description should be enough to make your webpage stand out.
HTML tags that can be implemented to a website for the purpose of including larger context for search engines and social media are called structured data meta tags.
Marketing experts typically use a company’s name, phone number, product with price, email address, address, and more, as structured data meta tags. The methods for implementing structured data into meta descriptions are numerous.
The one that’s probably used most often is including reviews in meta descriptions. Now that’s a great strategy since it lets the searcher see whether your previous customers are satisfied with a product or service you offer.
Let’s start off with a poorly written meta description. As you can see, it’s unengaging and boring, so from the marketing perspective, it’s not useful at all.
If you’re looking for products containing vitamin D, the meta description doesn’t provide information that you don’t already know, so you, as a seller, will need to make it more appealing.
We’ve used the tips listed above to rewrite it and now it looks like this:
As you can see, the new meta description is very different compared to the previous one. It uses capitalized letters and appealing words such as “Premium”, “High Potency”, “RAPID”, “FAST”, and “100% Guaranteed”.
Now, this is a much better option considering CTR and SEO. The new meta description provides more value-driven information to the user, so it’s more likely that they click on the link.
In the third example we see a title and meta description with a phone number and call-to-action included. Implementing your businesses’ phone number into your meta description can improve your conversion rate since some users may simply call you right away without even visiting your site.
This concludes our pretty comprehensive post about meta descriptions. Stick to the tips listed above and your meta descriptions will surely improve, as will your CTR. As always, in case you have any questions that need clarification or need more detail on a particular point, feel free to post a comment below, and we’ll be more than happy to respond.
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