How To Write A Meta Description For Better CTR (aka hidden SEO)

0:00Why Click-Through Rate Optimization Matters

Hey, let me explain this video before we get into it. This is a module from our e-commerce marketing and optimization course, the Pareto E-commerce Blueprint. It's a module that talks about click-through rate, or CTR, optimization from an SEO or an e-commerce SEO perspective. This is a huge win for most sites, and most people aren't aware of how powerful meta descriptions are, and of optimizing meta descriptions for click-through rate. I have an example in here of a client who saw some insane results. For a site that's even doing moderate traffic, this simple SEO improvement could easily boost traffic by 20 to even 50 percent, without any more backlinks and without doing anything else to the site. For a big site it might take a few hours, and for a small site less than an hour's worth of work, and you're seeing these huge traffic wins.

I'll leave you with the module, so have a look. It goes for about eight to ten minutes and has some examples in there. It has some basic copy that you can almost just swipe, copy and paste. See how you go, make the change, and if you have any questions just post in the comment section. I'm happy to come back to you and explain, or if you need any clarification on bits and pieces in there, I'm happy to come back to you on that. It's relevant no matter what CMS you're using. I have some examples in here of how we do it for Shopify and also WordPress and WooCommerce, but even if you're using Magento or BigCommerce or something else, the same principles apply, and you can use a similar template approach to get this done really quickly. I would love your feedback once you've gone through it. If you have some success with this once you make the change, shoot me an email or post a comment on the video, I would love to hear those stories. Anyway, I'll leave you with it, enjoy.

One thing we're fanatical about is click-through rate, and specifically organic click-through rate. It almost gets no attention at all in the SEO space outside of AdWords. No one's really talking about click-through rate, which is really strange because it's so easy, and the clients we work with are sitting on so much low-hanging fruit it's crazy. What I'm going to do here is show you some examples of where we have optimized meta descriptions for click-through rate, the results we've gotten, and a really, really simple way to optimize the meta descriptions across your entire e-commerce site in a very short amount of time. We're talking 15 or 20 minutes. I don't have a lot of time here, so let's get into it.

The typical SEO approach is that rankings equal traffic: I rank number one in Google and I get all the traffic, I win, right? But if you go and have a look at the SERP today, if you search any e-commerce terms, any sort of buying term, the SERP is four AdWords listings on the left, Google Shopping results on the right, and Google local results underneath the four sets of AdWords. Everything above the fold is almost paid. The number one spot, the traditional number one SEO spot, is almost always below the fold. On a smartphone you're not appearing unless you're paying.

This old approach, rankings equals traffic, is outdated. It really is not working, and it's not serving you in today's SEO environment. To win today you really need to focus on getting the rankings and the clicks. That's what we're going to be talking about here: focusing on how we can increase our click-through rate very simply and very easily. When you see how easy this stuff is, you'll be kicking yourself.

3:45CTR Optimization Results

Let me show you some results we've gotten doing this for clients. This is one of my favorite examples, and you may have seen it if you've been to one of my workshops or looked at anything I do online, podcasts or whatever. This is a client that was ranking in the top three spots for almost every single search term relevant to them. They wanted more traffic, so we suggested that we could optimize the meta descriptions and get more traffic. They didn't really believe it, so we went ahead and did it anyway. What we did here was optimize only the top 20 pages and the top 20 blog posts on the site. You can see a 54 percent increase in traffic, a really easy, really big win. This is a moderate size site, it's not huge but it's not small. We've gone from 15,000 visits up to 23,000 visits over the same comparison time period.

Here's another one. This one's a bit more recent, and it's a smaller e-commerce site. This is a local business that also has an online store, so they have a physical retail store and an online store component. Around about the start of September, so this is just over a month ago, I really like this one because all we did is optimize meta descriptions. Around the start of September we used the exact technique I'm going to show you. It's hard to see on the graph here, but if you look at the numbers closely, they've gone from 40 to 50 sessions a day up to between 80 and 100. That's pretty much doubling the traffic, and all we have done here is optimize the meta descriptions with this exact technique. We spent no more than 20 minutes on it.

5:16CTR Optimization: How To Write Better Meta Descriptions

So how do we optimize our meta descriptions for click-through rate? It's pretty simple. I've got three steps here, a framework of broad ideas for writing better copy and optimizing meta descriptions, and I actually have some examples as well that you can just copy. Basically, all you need to do is write better copy. Meta descriptions really, really matter. Look at your competitors and see what they're saying in the meta description. If you look at a SERP, you'll probably see that the AdWords ads, particularly in competitive niches, have been optimized to death, but half the organic rankings get almost no love when it comes to meta descriptions. They're an afterthought. SEOs think that as long as they put something in there they'll be right, or the descriptions are just not very well written. They're not written from a copywriter's perspective.

Right now it's actually really easy to outsell competitors in the copy, particularly if you're in the top one to five spots. It's really easy to look better than competitors and get more traffic by optimizing the meta description. What we've seen is that if you get a higher click-through rate, the rankings will start to go up, particularly in low to medium competition niches. From everything we've seen in our testing, bounce rate is not part of the algo, but click-through rate definitely is.

Capitalize the start of all the words. This is a really simple one, and I'll show you in a minute what I mean by this. It works really well in AdWords. I don't know why it works, it just works. If it's relevant, particularly for a local business, or if you have a 1800 number, or a phone number for an e-commerce business, putting the phone number in the title tag really works well. In the meta description it really stands out. If we get the phone call from the SERP without even getting the visit, that's a conversion with fewer steps. We're shortening the conversion path, so that's a win in most cases. Some other sites, like affiliate sites and things like that, actually need the traffic to make the money, but we're talking about e-commerce and online stores, and some of that might bleed into local business as well.

One of the big ones is to use all caps where it's appropriate, for power words and the important words: FREE, BONUS, FAST, GUARANTEED, 100 percent, INSURED, things like that. You can't do it in AdWords, but you can for SEO, and it's a really easy way to stand out. Here's an example. This is Natural Stacks, and this is an old screenshot so it's a little bit blurry, but you can see this is a vitamin D product page. It's super boring and doesn't entice us to click. It's just telling us what vitamin D is, and we already know what vitamin D is if we're searching for it, so it's kind of pointless. It's not doing anything. Here's our rewritten version. You can see we've rewritten it with CTR in mind. We've changed it to premium high potency vitamin D3 with cold pressed organic coconut oil for rapid, see it's all in all caps, ABSORPTION, with fast insured worldwide shipping and 100 percent guaranteed. That's way better for click through, way more salesy, and a really nice piece of copy compared to what we had before, which was kind of just rubbish and really didn't say anything.

8:16CTR Optimization: Template Your Meta Descriptions And Do It

So how do we do this? Really simple: we template it. This is Yoast, so if you're using WooCommerce then you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to do this. A lot of SEO plugins do this. We just template it. This is under the Titles and Meta section in the Yoast SEO plugin. All in One SEO, I think, does this as well. Under the Post Types tab, just stick it in there. You can template it, and whether you've got a hundred or a thousand products, spend 10 to 15 minutes writing the copy, put it in here, and you've all of a sudden optimized all your products for click-through rate. Really simple. Here we have the product title in the meta description with a nice little blurb there, and we do the same for categories. Here we go, same thing again. This is under the Taxonomies tab. I've blanked out the stuff there so you can't see who the client is, but you get the point.

For Shopify there's a plugin called Smart SEO that does exactly the same thing. Magento and all the other CMSs have SEO plugins where you can template it. Most of the time, on Yoast and on this Shopify plugin, if you've hand written the meta description for the product page or the category page, it won't use the template, so you get the best of both worlds.

That's pretty much it. Give it a try and see how it goes. If you're working fast, you can get this knocked out in 10 or 15 minutes. It'll take anywhere from two to four weeks for the new pages to get indexed. It's probably wise to have the site in Google Webmaster Tools and put the sitemap in there. Once you've added that in, make sure you clear the cache of your caching plugin, do a fetch and render in Webmaster Tools, and resubmit the site to the index. That's probably the quickest way to get this change implemented across the board. As Google goes through the site and re-indexes it, you'll start to see the traffic go up and the click-through rate go up if you look under Search Analytics in Google Webmaster Tools.

So that's it, I hope you find this useful. We've got heaps more stuff like this inside the Lab. It's really simple stuff, obvious quick wins that are right in front of your nose. Yeah, look forward to having you on board.