February 5, 2009

How to Increase Click Through Rate (CTR) from Search Results

Ok, so you are getting some natural traffic to your website but you also run paid search (such as Adwords) and can see a massive discrepancy between impressions and actual visitors. So, what’s going on? Well typically the only reason people are not coming to your website from the search results is they feel something else is more relevant and can solve their question.
Here are some simple tips to stop any opportunities being missed.

1) Your Meta Description
Your meta description is a fantastic tool for increasing your page clicking through rate. Look for this in your source code:

You can customise exactly what appears in this snippet by applying some of the following suggestions:

• Include your keyword/phrases – These will become highlighted and attract more attention and visibility.

• Your message - Describe the content of your web page as accurately and succinctly as possible while adding in your target keyword/phrases. Make it unique to the page and keywords you are targeting. Many websites have the same content displayed in the meta description throughout all their pages which can often be totally useless. Think of each snippet as an advertisement for people to click on in the search results so it needs to be as compelling as possible. This can be tricky but it can be very much worth your time.

• Beware the character limit - Even though Yahoo and MSN allow for more text, try to keep it within 155 characters (including spaces) for Google otherwise your message will get cut off.

• Uniqueness - Differentiate the descriptions for different pages so it is an unique and relevant as possible.

• Analysis - Look at your traffic logs or sources to determine your typical keywords. If you feel you are mainly attracting long tail search terms (your keyword/phrase plus modifiers), consider letting Google decide what description they feel is relevant instead of focusing one instead.

• Testing - If you have a page which generates worthwhile traffic and is worth the time testing, one of the very best ways of testing which meta description snippet will work best for you without potentially weeks or even months of testing depending upon how long your page takes to get indexed, is running a targeted paid ad. Now granted this is an expense however, it could pay off big time. With Adwords you can set it up that you display different messages in your ad description. Simply see which wording yields the highest click through and rinse repeat with all your pages. This is not always relevant as some people who click on paid listings may have different motives than clicking on natural results but it might be worthwhile to test.

Some meta tag information to know about:

• “NOODP” – If your homepage is by default displaying the same meta description and title tag your website has in DMOZ (open directory project) and can’t get your new one to show then you can use “NOODP” to stop it being used on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
• For all search engines that support the meta tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”>
• For specifically Google: <meta name=”googlebot” content=”NOODP”>
• “NOYDIR” – This only works on Yahoo and has the same effect as “noodp” above has on DMOZ, except this works to prevent the Yahoo directory being used instead and overwriting your meta description and title tag.
• “NOSNIPPET” – This can be used if you do not want Google to generate a description based on on page text found.
• There are also other meta tags which can be used to tell Google what information to show such as using “NOARCHIVE” and “NOINDEX”.

2) Your Page Title Tag
Ensure your title tag is optimised correctly and conveys a message which is welcoming. This is double edged sword however, as if you mess around too much for your title tag, you may find it alters your search position (positively or negatively depending upon what you do) and rank for completely different terms than you intend to so be very gentle especially if you are in the top fold of the first page. Try to keep your title tag within 65 characters for Google so your entire message appears and does not get cut off with the typical ”…”.

3) Your URL
Another double edged sword as its usually too late unless you have a brand new website and don’t mind risking temporary loss of rankings is make your URL contain the keyword/phrase you are targeting. Apart from other benefits this will bring, Google will highlight the word/s and it will attract more attention than websites not doing it.

If you would like to discuss anything above with us in greater detail, we would very much like to hear from you.

Filed under SEO