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Friday, May 21st, 2010
3 steps to help improve your search engine click-through rateBy Tyler King
There's a lot more to Search Engine Optimization than just getting your site to rank well on search engine result pages. After all, having the #1 Google result doesn't matter if no one clicks through to your site!
Most SEO advice focuses on making your site look good to Google, but you also need to make sure it looks good to your potential visitors. In this post I'll explain the three steps you can take to increase the chances that someone will click through to your site from search engine results pages. I'll also show you how we implemented this strategy with our main company site so that you can see a real-life example.
Step 1: Identify your audience Not all search engine traffic is created equal. You should only worry about people that might actually be interested in your site (and hopefully buy your product), so it's important to understand just who your audience is.
For example, because our company name is "Less Annoying Software", we show up in a lot of irrelevant searches such as "how to be less annoying". Even though that gets us a lot of search impressions, that traffic is worthless because none of those people want to buy business software. Instead, we decided that our ideal audience is a small business looking for simple customer management software.
Step 2: Pick an engaging and targeted title
You might already know that the <title> tag on your website is very important for your search engine rankings, but it's also the first thing a person will see about your website. The title shows up in big bold text on the search engine results page, so you want to write it in a way that will catch the attention of the audience you picked in the first step.
In our case, we already decided that we wanted to target people looking for customer management software, so we wrote a title that would appeal to those people ("Easy Customer Management") and we included our company name ("Less Annoying Software") because it's pretty unique and that might set us apart from the other results on the page.
Step 3: Demonstrate your value in the meta description
The "Meta Description" is a tag that goes in the head of your html file. It never shows up on the actual web page, but search engines will normally show it under the title of your site on results pages.
People will probably only read the description if they found your title relatively interesting, so this is where you really rope people in. Your title already described what your company does, and now you get about 125 characters to convince them to visit your website. This section should explain what's different about your company and why the visitor will benefit from clicking through to your site.
So how did we approach this with our site? We already told people in the title that we make customer management software, so we wanted to use this description to stand out to our specific niche. Our two distinguishing features are that our software is only for small businesses, and that it's very simple. Sure a lot of people will skip over our site if they don't work at a small business, but as we mentioned in the first step, those people probably wouldn't buy our product anyway so we don't mind losing their traffic.
By focusing on our niche and explaining how we add value, we pretty much guarantee that any legitimate prospects will visit our site.
So there you have it. These three steps should help you convert search engine results into real leads. Remember, being the number one result in Google doesn't matter if no one clicks through to your site. If you found this post interesting, Check back next week because I'll be posting some tips on how to make an effective landing page for your search engine traffic.
Bonus Tip: for those of you that have a great title and meta description, but don't know how to write the html, it's simple. You just need to add a <title> and <meta> tag in the <head> of your html document. Here's an example of the code we use:
<head>
<title>Easy Customer Management | Less Annoying Software</title>
<meta name="description" content="Customer management software for
small businesses - We make organizing customer
information and tracking leads simple." />
</head>
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About this blog
This blog helps small businesses find and use easy, effective software. Most technology is meant
either for individual consumers, or huge corporations. We'll help you find the tools that are
powerful enough to help run your business, but simple enough that you can start using them by
yourself.
This blog is written by the co-founders of Less Annoying Software. We build an easy customer management tool that helps small businesses organize customer information and track leads. If you have any feedback about this blog, please feel free to contact us.
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