Meta descriptions are like silly old Uncle Bob who gets ignored at Thanksgiving get-togethers. But did you know that Uncle Bob is actually a multi-millionaire looking for a decent niece or nephew to include in his will? Like Bob, meta descriptions are often ignored or duplicated on multiple pages by website page creators and editors because they just don’t care. This is a huge mistake. If you care about capturing sales leads from targeted search, you should pay close attention to getting your meta descriptions right.
For those of you who don’t dream in HTML or SEO, the meta description tag is a standard component of a web page’s <head> section. It’s supposed to be a brief description of the content on the page with a syntax as follows.
Search engines read your web page from top to bottom. They pay close attention to the <title> tag and other on-page SEO factors on your page. Meta descriptions are more important for human searchers. The title tag is the first line of each result with larger font size and the searched keywords or phrases highlighted in bold. Depending on which search engine you’re using, the second or third line shows the meta description. This is where the rubber meets the road for lead generation from search.
While the ranking of your page in search engines depends on many factors, in Google the meta description tag doesn’t contribute. What it does, however, is equally important from a lead generation perspective. Your meta description tells the searcher three important things.
In short, meta descriptions are used to decide which search results are worthy of further investigation. Most of us spend very little time reading them. We glance at them looking for relevance and value. The first results we pick are the most valuable to us from the organic search results. We glance at the paid search results and we may click on one, but usually not unless we can't find what we seek in the organic results. Ranking is still important, because we will click the first result that meets our criteria. If we are satisfied by the content of the page we click to, we may end our search there. Then we will explore the website further or immediately buy, sign up or otherwise become a sales lead. We need to treat each meta description tag with the same care that goes into crafting the page itself. We also need to pay attention to the on-page SEO factors that contribute to its rank in the search engine results pages or SERPs.
Looking at our Home page result above, we have chosen to optimize our Home page on “inbound marketing agency,” which establishes relevance for searchers who have searched that keyword phrase and tells them who we are. Next, we tell them what we do – “offers a dedicated inbound marketing team.” Finally, we tell them why they should click through to our website – “delivering an average 200% return on investment.” We have given them a brief summary of the page content and why it’s important to them.
It’s not the flashiest meta description in the world, but it works. Our traffic and lead conversion rates for “inbound marketing agency” are second only to branded search terms like “Kuno Creative.” So don’t forget about the lowly meta description tag. It’s one of your best friends for lead conversion from search. Make them unique, relevant and attractive, and you will see the click-throughs improve dramatically.
