How to Make Your SERP Listings More Attractive to Searchers
On Friday, Search Engine Land confirmed that Google is testing frames for search options and results. If this becomes a permanent change, it will give searchers even more control over finding exactly what they want.
Because of Google’s push towards giving users even more control over searches and the fact that SERP CTR can influence your rankings, it’s more important than ever to ensure your SERP listings are as appealing as possible.
To accomplish this important goal, here are effective options you can implement today:
Microformats
Have a page that includes reviews? What about dates? Since Google supports 5 different microformats, you should be able to incorporate this option on quite a few of your pages.
Because microformats can add rich details like stars or dates directly to your SERP listings, they can make your listings stand out from others and attract clicks from interested searchers.
Google +1
SEO Effect did a study in June to determine the impact of the Google +1 button. In addition to their other findings, the study determined that “the Google +1 button saw a 20% increase in rankings which led to a corresponding lift in Clickthrough rate (CTR).”
Even though the exact measurements of this study are likely far from perfect, the bottom line is it’s well worth taking the time to install this Google feature on your blog or site.
Include a Price
While this won’t apply to every page of your website, it is relevant for listings tied to products or services. If a page is showcasing something that a visitor can purchase, include the price in your title or description tag.
Although including a price in your title tag can provide the biggest boost, there is a potential downside. According to RedFly Marketing, “if you’re not the cheapest, your CTR will suffer.” To minimize the potential for this problem, you probably want to stick with including the price in the description.
Entice Searchers to Click
Your title tag isn’t only for including a relevant keyword phrase. It’s also the perfect opportunity for you to entice searchers to click.
You should put the same amount of effort into writing a title for each page of your website as you would for writing a blog post or newspaper article title.
If you don’t have much experience writing persuasive titles, Copyblogger has a great crash course that will show you how to craft juicy ones for your SERP listings.
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Tyler,
Great points here. You mentioned including a price in the meta description.
Allow me to take that a step further. I generally include an offer and a call to action along with a phone number in the meta description.
Basically the meta description should be treated as ad copy. Just as if you are creating an Ad for Adwords. It’s just that valuable.
This adding the phone number to the meta description dramatically increases my phone web conversion for clients. I do call tracking so I can see the results and it’s really quite amazing how much this can make a clients phone ring.
Excellent addition. Including a phone number can also be useful when people are searching on their iPhone – http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/iphone-search-result-optimization-tip-1-phone-numbers-in-meta-tags.html
Also, I think the subject of call tracking could make for one or more great posts in the future.
Good points. Although I think putting prices in meta descriptions is good in many cases, I think that there are number in which it’s not, e.g. competitors prices are much lower (as was mentioned).
If you are a service provider, as opposed to a seller of goods, you may well attract those looking for the lowest price option, causing many more phone calls (wasting limited resources) that don’t lead to customers/clients if you’re not the lowest cost provider, and you may deter those from cost is not the primary consideration (although I don’t know if this often occurs).
I’m no expert, but that’s been my experience as a service provider.
Steve recently posted..Business Succession Planning & Life Insurance
Thanks for your thoughts from your experience. Another option worth testing would be including something along the lines of “Starting at $”
This could make it possible for you to include an attractive price without putting yourself into a pricing race to the bottom.
I think you give all the points here and the good thing is you share it through your own experience. Thanks for sharing this.
Sheemay recently posted..cheap auto insurance
Your post is attractive as your lists emphasized here. There are lots of strategies in getting high traffic and your SERP listings were well-defined and clear.
Brent recently posted..The Unbelievable World Of New Mexico And Rural Satellite Internet
TY Ty
for referring my article on SEOPPCSMM.com. Nice idea for a blog.
Recently Google introduced Rel Author: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFb6Y-UJUI
This also can be a good ornamental item in your SERP listing. Because, it includes a pic of the original author beside the link.
Asif Anwar recently posted..LinkedIn Wishlist – Part I: User Generated Search Tags to Create Narrow Searching, Keyword Channels for Profiles, & Virtual Directory of Interest Groups
All of them will work well for us except putting prices as we sell retail and whole from our website. Thank you Tyler for the great information.
I was pleased to learn of this article
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