Increasing traffic to your website is always a top priority as the more visitors, the more people are aware of your offering and that leads to more sales. Your website your online home base that receives a lot of attention from your visitors who peruse the site to learn more about you to assist in their purchasing decisions and also your developer through creating a search friendly site, optimizing to increase page ranks, and monitoring for mentions across the web and also from the search engine crawlers as they try to match pages with search queries. A website, when you look at it that way is a pretty powerful tool at your fingertips. A well designed site that is aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate and contains useful and valuable information increases the user experience but a site that is optimized effectively increases the page rankings which is useful and valuable to you. Getting found online is not very difficult as we know that the search engines need fresh new content regularly and the better the content, the more inbound links it receives which garner higher rankings. What is much more difficult is having the stickiness and relevance to the user when the search results are displayed so that they click on your site and find what they are looking for eliminating the need to go elsewhere.
How to Increase Traffic with Meta Descriptions
1. Create Precise Descriptions. Have you ever clicked on a page after glancing at the meta description and clicked off so fast at the page failed to provide the information that you needed? It is frustrating as when searching you want answers and the description seemed promising but was not. Think if this was their first impression of your company. Being precise in what the page is about and what the information is contained on the page creates that stickiness.
2. Create Page Level and Not Site Level Descriptions. Resist the urge to try and tell everything about your company in the meta description for your pages and especially your blog articles. Each page is unique but is part of the overall site that flow into each other but only web pages are displayed in search results. Of course for the meta description for the home page of your website, you do want to create that to be more overall site.
3. Include Data. If you have a product include pertinent information that users seek such as dimensions, price, etc. Include what matters most to consumers as they are possibly looking to buy and why send them to a competitor when you can bring them to your site? Meta descriptions do not have to be in sentence format. If a series of words best describe the page, then use that. You want the user to click on your site as they feel it best satisfies their search inquiry.
4. Modify to Include to Search Terms. Notice a page that is getting a decent amount of clicks from the search engines but you think it can perform better. After analyzing the terms that were associated with the user finding the site, and optimizing for that search term, modify the meta description to include the search terms. The goal is to rank higher for that term and get in front of the user.
5. Be Readable. Just because the meta description does not have to be in sentence form does not promote using a string of keywords or synonyms. Users have just a few seconds to decide to click on your site or go down the site beneath as they see that description meeting their search needs.
These are some simple ways to increase your traffic with meta descriptions as people searching want to click on sites that they feel will help them. When searching we do not want to have to click on 4-5 sites to get the information that we need. We want to get the results and fast. A site that seems to over-promise in the meta description but does not solve our problem is an instant click off and while it may be a visit to the website, it never gave the site a chance to become a trusted source for the user. We create content that is asking the user to act or behave in a certain way. If your site is not helping them they will never even get to the point where they are even engaging the site enough to see what you are asking of them. The meta description is your first impression. Now, we know that your description is not always what is displayed. The search engines do pull information from the page itself which you can do nothing about except have precise topical content that is optimized with the user in mind so that when the search engines ignore your meta description that the information selected from the page is a reflection of what is really contained on the page.
People click on sites that they trust and buy from people they trust. Appearing high in the search results and a meta description that is well thought out and written are the first steps in becoming trustworthy. Your website is an extension of your branding efforts and a means to create brand loyalty though being trusted.
Have you found that meta descriptions increase your traffic? Do you read the descriptions before clicking on a site?
photo credit: Simon-K