Writing Meta Descriptions With SEO In Mind To Increase CTR

A meta description is the short piece of content that potential visitors see when they find your website in search results. Like the copywriting on your website, you should spend time crafting and writing meta descriptions. A lot of businesses overlook the value of these SEO properties, thinking that if it doesn’t help to rank their website higher, then it shouldn’t have any focus put on it – wrong!

You wouldn’t spend £100,000 marketing a store and spend zero on a shop sign. You’d buy a shop sign that is to the point, bold and stands out from the crowd.

The same goes for your page descriptions. You are close to sealing the deal, now you need to persuade people to click through to your website. The only way you can do this is by writing compelling meta descriptions; it will help to increase the CTR for your website!

Search marketing is not just about ranking as high as possible. You need to convert your rankings into visitors that produce a revenue stream. Writing meta descriptions won’t improve your rankings, but it will increase website CTR; revenue will follow.

There are 3 things you need to consider…

Length

Keep them below 160 characters. In the example below, you can see that the meta description was not optimised and therefore, it is cut off mid-sentence; not very attractive!

Call-to-action

Like your web content, when writing meta descriptions to increase CTR, include a call to action. What do you want users to do and how will you get them to do it? Your usual “Click here to save 15%” might be worth including! Make your description really stand off the page in comparison to your competition. Take the example below for instance…

Quotes

If you use quotation marks in a description, some search engines will cut the description at the point of the quotation mark; avoid using them!