Making the Most of Your SERP Snippets

For us it’s not rocket science to figure out that we’re putting a lot of effort into improving our website’s Google rankings. We’re spending thousand of dollars hiring content marketing teams and creating link baiting strategies. We’re spending weeks and sometimes months improving our site speed and adding redirects between pages in order to support with higher rankings the most important pages. But do we really care about what happens after our page is ranking on the first page of results. Do we analyze and improve its click-through rates (CTR) performance in order to get the most out of our website’s perfect visibility?

Quite often SEOs only focus on adding titles, meta descriptions and relevant keywords in order to bring pages to the top positions in search engines.  But they rarely worry about CTRs or the human aspect, which causes users to react. Optimizing click-through rates for organic snippets is hardly a new topic in the SEO industry. We certainly are tremendously experienced with running A/B testing campaigns and experimenting with various calls-to-action in paid results, but we rarely consider doing the same thing for SEO. The issue is that you simply can’t run any test variations with SEO results in a live-time mode, so why not use AdWords or tools that are specially designed for this purpose.

In order to create fairly decent copies of your titles and meta descriptions, you need to understand what triggers users’ attention and persuades them to click. So, this means you need to have some basic strategies that you can use, and then test them in order to pick the winning Ad among them.

Use these ready-to-use strategies for your future testing campaigns

Begin a meta description with action verbs

By putting a verb at the beginning of your page’s meta description, you’re making your copy dynamic and eye-catching. You’re giving direct instruction to the user on how to act further. Also, this will help your potential customers better understand what kind of deals or content will be waiting for them on your website.

Put your brand name at the end of the snippet title for non-branded search queries

When a user searches using keywords that aren’t related to your brand, you need to persuade them that your page is 100% relevant to their search.  For sure, you can put a search keyword or phrase at the end of a page title, but this isn’t going to work. That’s because users browse pages in a specific manner–from left to right. This means the most important place is located right at the beginning of a snippet in a SERP; personalization is critical to success.

Eye-tracking research conducted by Mediative company revealed that users mostly focus on the left corner of a Google results page.

Add emotional triggers

In September of 2014, I delivered a speech at BrightonSEO where I shared the four most commonly used emotional triggers in UK advertising copy.

Appealing in your preview pages to any of those emotions will significantly boost your CTRs. Personally, I’ve found it extremely effective to use calls to action, which create a sense of urgency. Adding any reference to a limited time offer in your content will boost your CTRs instantly.

Selecting winners via testing

After you’ve developed all your content, it’s time for the real testing to begin. There are two different ways to proceed with testing:

AdWords

Today, I don’t want to focus on how to run an advertising campaign in Google in order to test ad copies. However, I highly recommend you to take a look at Stephanie Wallace Mozcon’s slides. In these slides, you can find a step-by-step guide to running an AdWords campaign in order to define the most clickable variant of a page preview in SERPs.

Using a third party tool

Honestly, I’m constantly searching for a solution with an easy-to-use environment and features for running test campaigns. Some time ago I gave SERP Turkey a try, which is a fairly good solution at the moment. It allows you to download a SERP by a specific keyword and then tweak on this page each entry’s title, description/URL, etc. Moreover, you can share your results with other users in order to run a survey.

Another software that I think is far more intelligent than SERP Turkey is Preddikta’s SERP Snippet Preview Tool. First of all, you don’t need to read any instructions or guides to begin using it. Just fill in the fields with the appropriate info and put a keyword by which your future snippet should be visible to searchers.

Compared to other similar solutions, Predikka’s Snippet Preview tool shows you immediately a real search engine result page with your page integrated in it:

After this, you’ll have a clear a vision of how various titles and meta descriptions will compare to your first-page competitors’ snippets.

In addition to SERP Snippet Preview Tool, Predikkta also offers an SERP Optimizer Self-Test. This provides the ability to run a test on thousands of possible combinations of organic search results, not limited to testing only 2 options at once.

According to a case study conducted by Predikkta for the online store CosmeticsNow, you can increase the click-through rates of your snippets with more than 40%, which means they got more organic traffic and conversions instantly!

I’m more than sure that the future of SEO is not in keywords, or even in content. It’s about user behavior and understanding what triggers users to react and click; in recent years there’s already been a huge shift from technical SEO to a more user-oriented approach, and this trend is definitely going to continue. SEO is already becoming more about conversions, rather than rankings. This means that monitoring your displayed SEO results in order to improve your CTRs is now a part of the modern SEO process.