You know when you are searching for information how frustrating it is when the information in the search results isn’t meaningful or you find yourself scrolling through screens of text to find the search word needle in the haystack? I don’t know about you, but my life is too short. Yes, surfing around is fun, but in a business environment it can be time-consuming - which costs money. Not only that but people can simply give up or try a different search term, and when you have spent a lot of time testing and choosing your search term this is not to your advantage.
So next time you go searching take note of what makes you click on a specific search result. According to a report by Jason Lee Miller, search result descriptive text should be short for people who are looking for a website but long for those looking for specific information. Research also suggests that we tend to look further down the page if we are looking for a URL rather than information. And finally we tend on average to view eight results before changing our query. This means that getting in the top ten rankings isn’t enough!
The search result descriptive text is something which the search engines find in the coding of your webpage. If you don’t have anything coded then the search engines will often display a few lines of your content containing the relevant word. This is not always useful or meaningful to the user. You may also find websites with the same descriptive text for each page on their site. This works if searchers are simply looking for your website but not if they are looking for specific information.
The ideal descriptive text needs to include your keywords for the page and also provide information about the page. This is where you have to spin the text a little; you want them to look at your site, so your text needs to be engaging and generate that click.
In this information-rich age businesses have so little time to get their message across, and if you leave it up to the search engines to create your descriptive text for you, you are missing out on a marketing opportunity. But don’t feel too ashamed - a quick trawl through the names of some major companies soon shows you that even they miss out on this opportunity!
If you would like to add specific descriptive text to your web pages or would like some advice on the type of wording to use, we are happy to help and will quote for any work, without obligation. >enquiries@footmark.com
Miranda Gray
