When it comes to doing search engine optimization for your website, one area that’s often overlooked is how your website appears to users in the search engine search results. Here are some tips for making your website more click-worthy.
It’s all well and good to focus on keyword selection and optimizing your content for SEO. And sure, your rankings might be high, but are they doing enough to catch people’s attention in the SERPs?
You’re probably asking, what do I mean by, doing enough?
Well, I mean do your search engine listings make people want to click on them? Are they click-worthy?
If not, there are some things that you can do to make them more compelling, so they stand out and attract more clicks.
By the way, if you’re reading this and have no idea what I mean by SERP listings, SERP stands for Search Engine Result Pages.
Here’s an example of a few listings in a SERP, or results page in Google search –
One of those posts is actually one from my blog over at Magnet4Blogging.
Your search engine listings are also called snippets, which you might have heard already. And these are what people see when they search for anything online using a search engine.
A SERP listing consists of many Metadata, but the three I want to focus on in this post are –
- Meta title
- Post/Page URL
- Post date, or last updated date
Here’s the thing:
If you’re spending countless hours crafting amazing content for your blog or copywriting for your website design project, I’m betting that whatever your objective might be, you probably want people to click on your search engine listings and land on your website, right?
Of course, and probably more so than clicking on your competitor’s listings.
So, as well as optimizing for your keywords and everything else, what you’ve also got to do is make sure that your search engine listing title stands out and your description is compelling and relevant.
That’s what we’re going to focus on now. Because at the end of the day, your amazing blog post or strong sales page might rank high, but if people aren’t clicking on the listings in the SERPs, it could be because the title and description are simply not compelling enough.
So, let’s get started on making your website and content more click-worthy in search engines.
1. Crafting your snippet headline to make your website more click-worthy
Let’s start with the all-important title of your SERP listing.
Regardless of the SEO plugin you use, the first thing you want to do is create a title that does several things, asides from including your target keywords.
Your title has to –
- Grab people’s attention quickly
- Describe your content in the simplest possible way
- Be 100% relevant and informative
Now, creating a title can be more challenging than you think, and whilst it’s OK to just copy the page or article headline to use as the meta title, you can get a little more creative with it.
Here’s what you can do –
First, take one of your existing blog posts or pages that already rank high up in the search engine search results for your target keyword. Take a look at the other similar listings on the same page.
Next, make a note of the headline titles of those similar listings, and then find ways to make yours better. It’s so easy.
You can use a balance of common, uncommon, power, and emotional words to convey your message.
Also, don’t forget that it doesn’t matter how catchy you make your headline, it has to be 100% relevant and somewhat informative.
All of this can be pretty hard to achieve, especially now that you can only fit so many characters in your snippet title.
Here’s a little something to help you:
Take a look at the two headline examples below, tell me, which one sounds the most appealing to you?
Example 1: How To Build A Big Email List
Example 2: How To Add 1,000 Subscribers To Your Email List In Just 7 Days
Which one did you choose?
The first one is pretty short and to the point. But it’s also very dull, boring, and generic. I hope you’d agree.
The second one, however, is a lot more revealing and informative, and it contains some click-worthy power and emotive words.
So just spend some time crafting your snippet title for your next blog post and see what you can come up with.
There are some great tools that you can use to help you craft great headlines, such as CoSchedule’s headline analyzer.
Another tactic you could try is doing some simple A/B split testing for your post/page headline titles using the Thrive Headline Optimizer plugin. This tool is available from Thrive Themes.
Or, you can try out these headline optimization tools.
2. Crafting your listing description to make your website more click-worthy
Next up is your listing or snippet description.
Now, if you’ve made your title a great hook for your readers, then writing a compelling description is your next and last opportunity to really make your search listing stand out and get people clicking on it.
So, your description should do the following –
- Provide relevant information about what your content is all about
- Reveal something unique or must-read about your content, perhaps a solution to a problem
- Contain a call-to-action.
Again, it can be a challenge to fit all of those essential elements into your SERP description, especially now that you have a limited number of characters to play with.
Begin by taking a look at other listings similar to your own in the search results, then craft the most informative and attractive description for your listing.
Create something that will blow everything else out of the water.
Remember, tell people why they should click on your listing. Tease them by revealing one or two issues or problems your content aims to solve.
Don’t forget to add that all-important call to action. Sometimes people forget to click, so make sure you use something that is not too spammy.
An ideal call-to-action would be something like, “click here to learn how to do X”. or “Read this post on how to do XYZ”
Plugins to help you create awesome SERP snippets
I want to end by mentioning a couple of great SEO plugins that I think are worth using. One of which you might already be using, in fact.
The first one is Rank Math. I use Rank Math on all of my websites because it comes with a snippet editor. This means you can customize the SERP snippet and directly control how it is shown in the search engines. Here’s a screenshot of the snippet for this blog post
With Rank Math, you can also edit the social snippet as well as generate a preview on desktop and mobile.
Final words of wisdom
I’m not an SEO expert. I’m a designer and content creator. But, these tactics have helped me make my content stand out in the search engines. So, when optimizing your content for Google or Bing, don’t forget that it is humans that use these search engines to find solutions and answers for whatever problem they might be experiencing.
So, make your listings compelling enough that it stands out above everything else and gets clicked on, and also make them sound like a human being has written them and not a bot, and you will enjoy a lot more traffic and even get a few more customers to your website.
Best of luck.
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