Boosting SERP Click Through Rates (CTR) with Persuasive Meta Descriptions

A lot of people dismiss meta descriptions as an outdated SEO tool – one that the search engines have long since devalued following years of keyword stuffing and other outright scams.  However, these people are missing out an incredible opportunity to present search users with a snippet of persuasive text and increase the odds of generating traffic back to their sites from the SERPs.

Here’s how my company Single Grain is using meta descriptions to boost organic traffic…

1 – Understand the new role of meta descriptions

Our goal as marketers is to get more people to respond to our communications – preferably by pulling out their credit cards, in most cases.  However, in order to get them to this buying stage, we first need to get them onto our site, which means making our snippets that appear in the SERPs as attractive as possible.

Obviously, our goal is to get our site ranked as highly as possible in the SERPs, using a combination of on-page and off-page SEO.  However, there’s no arguing with the fact that Google Search Plus Your World, enhanced blended SERPs and a number of other factors have made gaining top positions through traditional SEO more difficult than ever.

And that’s unfortunate, as a recent study by Slingshot SEO – published on SEOMoz – demonstrated a huge decrease in click through rate that falls steeply in accordance with SERP position:

According to their results, although a top ranking site has over an 18% chance of being clicked through to, that likelihood falls to 4% or less as soon as the fourth position in the SERPs.  That’s a pretty big deal, as in many cases, the recent inclusion of additional mixed media SERP results and personalized results has bumped traditionally high ranking sites by at least this many positions.

So if we aren’t able to earn high click through rates by securing top positions in the SERPs, we need to encourage traffic to choose our listing over others using the only other means available – ensuring that the text contained in our SERP snippets is as persuasive as possible!

This is where the meta descriptions referenced earlier come in…  Because the SERP snippets pull their text directly from a site’s meta tags, we can control how persuasive our SERPs listings by simply changing the meta descriptions on our sites.

2 – Find persuasive ad copy for our meta descriptions

Since we know that our meta descriptions will display in the SERPs every time our site appears, one trick we can use to get more people to respond to us is to make a note of our best performing ad copy and place that in the meta description.

But where can we find this ideal copy?  In fact, both our PPC and Facebook ads serve as a good indication of what people will respond well to.

What we can do is to take the ads that are getting the most people to respond on Facebook and Google Adwords, and then use them in our meta description tags.  As these meta descriptions will then show up in the SERPs, more people will engage with our listings in the search results – leading to more traffic coming in to our site, more conversions and higher search engine results rankings due to a corresponding increase in CTR.

3 – Identify our best performing ads

Now that we know to look in our Google Adwords and Facebook Ads accounts to find the high performing copy needed to entice visitors in the natural SERPs, we’ll need to determine which of our ads are best suited for use as meta descriptions.

Obviously some of our ads will be better suited to this usage than others, so we’ll want to take advantage of the messages that resonate most with users in these settings.  Look for ads from within your account that meet the following criteria:

  • High impression rates – The more an ad has been seen in a live setting, the better able we are to assess other measures of its worth, including its click through rate and conversion percentage.  Newer ads may not be as well-tested, resulting in insufficient data to make a judgment call on.
  • High click through rates – Ads that have generated clicks in a PPC setting are likely to pull in the same level of interest from within the natural SERPs.  It isn’t quite as important that these ads result in conversions as in a PPC setting (since you don’t pay anything to appear in the natural SERPs), so instead look for ads that demonstrate a high level of engagement through their click through rates.
  • High conversion rates – Ads that result in conversions should be especially valued as potential meta description options, as they’ve already proven their ability to attract buyers.  Finding existing ads with high conversion rates (and correspondingly high impressions rates to validate their performance over time) should be your first priority for transforming ad copy to meta description tags.

To see a visual example of how this process looks in practice, check out the following screenshot:  http://screencast.com/t/TYh6nXAyXZH

4 – Tailor our best performing ads to fit the meta description tag

Finally, once you’ve decided which specific ad copy versions to use in your meta description tags, you may need to do a little tailoring to make your text fit the unique parameters associated with this usage.  Consider all of the following recommendations when adjusting your ad copy to appear in natural SERP snippets:

  • The meta description only has room for 155-160 characters total, so you may need to cut your ad text down to size (consider writing your meta descriptions in Twitter to see exactly how many characters you’ve used).
  • Consider incorporating any target keywords you have into your meta description as well (if they aren’t already used in your ad copy) in order to procure a small SEO benefit.
  • Keep a close eye on your organic SERP click through rates after making changes to your meta descriptions.  Although these recommendations should improve the amount of traffic you earn from the natural search results, nothing can be applied across industries with 100% accuracy, so it’s important to ensure any changes made don’t diminish your existing traffic flow.

Ideally, adjusting your meta descriptions using proven ad copy should result in higher click through rates from the natural SERPs and a new flow of motivated, engaged visitors back to your site.  As you’ll likely find, these visitors often have a higher motivation to purchase because the copy in the ad was engineered for the specific purpose of increasing sales, resulting in higher conversions – and more profit – for your business.

Image: edkohler

Entrepreneur & Digital Marketing Strategist

I build and grow SaaS companies.

“When it comes to marketing, Sujan is the best. I’ve never met someone with such creative tactics and deep domain knowledge not just in one channel, but in every flavor of marketing. From content, to scrappy guerrilla tactics, to PR, Sujan always blows my mind with what he comes up with.”

RYAN FARLEY Co-Founder of Lawn Starter

Comment (44) - Cancel Reply

Per Eriksson 152 months ago

Great article Sujan, thanks! I can’t understand why I had not thought of using PPC / facebook ads as description texts before. Really brilliant! Will test it immediately!

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Elizabeth Joss 152 months ago

Great and extremely useful article! I definitely learnt something! Thank you very much 🙂

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Afzal Khan 152 months ago

Positively your webpage meta title & description plays vital role not only in rankings but it does helps a lot in CTR as you described in your article. Often SEO’s tries to stuff or spam both of this 2 elements with keyword, instead they need to think in a creative manner stuffing doesn’t work.

It’s your Ad copy displayed at SERP’s so think creatively and get them optimized for a human first.

Loved your article and insights…Thanks 🙂

Reply
Rafael Montilla 152 months ago

Your right.

tIf we want to get the right title and description, we must do some testint, testing and more testing

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Jansen Jones 152 months ago

Well, meta description never dies because this is the first thing to identify what your website is all about..

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Lisa R. Drayton 152 months ago

Meta Description is our first impression for search engine user, which encourage view our website.

Grate job Sujan.

Reply
Ramenos 152 months ago

Great article. You did a good summary. I like the idea of using Adwords meta description for SEO even if we could add more info for SEO :). Anyway, we test, test and test…

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CE2011 149 months ago

As summery describe the article. Meta description defines the websites. Meta description helps search engine to identifies the site, that what is it all about.

Meta description is the first impression of our site on Search Engine

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Ferdinand Tan 146 months ago

I’ve noticed that a good meta description really helps even if you’re not ranked 1,2,3 in Google. An eye catching meta descrip usually has a high CTR based on experience working with different kinds of niche sites.

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[…] Remember, your title tags and meta descriptions aren’t just fields that you’re optimizing in the hopes of receiving some nebulous SEO boost. Instead, these fields often go on to form your snippet in the natural search results, which means that they must be written to be as compelling as possible! […]

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gems 143 months ago

Awesome information. Thank You very much

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raj savani @ YourNewsBook 138 months ago

nice article . really thank you.

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Martijn 138 months ago

Thanks for the information, we are using it on our webshops, works well in the first tests!

Reply
Daniel Sanchez 138 months ago

Awesome article, I never thought of actually using adwords ad text as your pages meta desc. I’m going to try some of these things out.

Reply
gaurav 137 months ago

That’s well described content.Meta description does play a good role in attracting people towards their needs so its words should be arranged very carefully.

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that the first paragraph of your write-up is the most important one.
This approach calls for both SEO and PPC initiatives running at full speed.

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Naturally good meta description attract people to visit as it displayed on the search engine result pages. Thank You for this intelligent post.

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[…] Meta descriptions matter – Even if they don’t have any SEO value now, they’re still useful from a CTR standpoint. […]

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Webentwicklung 134 months ago

good idea with the ads.

I wonder if it would help to create a crazy text with special characters.

like
[<[]>] Don’t miss out on our GREAT PRODUCTS.

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Webapplikationen 134 months ago

ok it swallowed some of my special signs. but you get the idea. just make something crazy in the text.

has anyone done something similar?

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Zach Gilford 130 months ago

For increasing CTR i missed few things.. your tips are great.. I will follow

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Jared 130 months ago

Great article

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Corey Willey 130 months ago

Good information and I too can not believe the amount of people who don’t seem to care about their meta’s.

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schilderwerken 130 months ago

fine website thanks

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Vivek Singh 128 months ago

Can U Please Tell Me What is the Problem in My Blog Because Every time when I publish any article day by day the SERP Position going far away from Top position

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