Your website is ranking well, but users just aren’t clicking through to your website. You might be feeling sad or confused or even angry about it. We understand.
So how can you turn your frowns upside down and inspire searchers who see your SERP listing to click and view your carefully crafted pages?
It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3:
While every searcher’s intent may be different, there are a few reasons people will click through to a website.
An organic listing will have the following elements:
This is simply looking at your standard listing, and doesn’t include local listings, company info boxes, or paid ads.
You can optimise your page titles and URLs of landing pages, add schema mark-up, and adjust your meta descriptions.
Sitelinks are pulled automatically by Google, and they will generally be relevant to the specific search query.
Optimising your page titles will be covered in a different post, so we’ll focus on your meta description here.
Our top tips for writing effective meta descriptions that are optimised for click-throughs are:
If you’re looking to check and adjust the meta descriptions currently on your site, it can seem like a pretty big task. Here’s one method you can use to make your job easier:
1. Crawl your website using a tool like Screaming Frog.
2. Enter your website’s domain to get a full list of pages.
3. Order the pages by status code so that you can focus on pages with a ‘200’ code.
4. Go to the ‘Meta Description’ tab and use the filters to identify any pages that need attention.
If you’ve already exported the raw data into Excel, no worries. Apply the same filters listed above, then add a new column for length and input a formula to count characters. (Simply input =LEN(cell) where “cell” is replaced by the cell you want to count, for example, B2. Then drag the formula down the column to autofill for all meta descriptions.
5. Get to editing or creating those succinct but informative meta descriptions! If you have a heap to do, you could prioritise by value to the website or most popular pages.
Hopefully you’re feeling armed and ready to go forth and write some amazing meta descriptions now and optimise your SERP listings for clicks! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team or check out our infographic for other quick SEO wins.