With 75% of users never scrolling past the first page of Google search results, the importance of your site creating and maintaining a strong position within SERPs is crucial. While it’s true that, for your site to list in the top few results, a wide reaching, all encompassing SEO strategy is needed; without strong metadata behind your site, it will continue to be held back in the search results as your competitors are found before you.
Why is metadata so important?
93% of online experiences now begin with a search engine, meaning that if you don’t optimise your site for search engine results pages, it is possible that you could miss out on a large amount of potential customers. Metadata is central to this due to the fact that it is what appears in search results. Your page’s meta title and description will indicate to the user what the page is about and goes most of the way to helping consumers decide whether or not they trust your site and its pages. If this is neglected, your site’s overall professionalism could be questioned by consumers.
Tips for writing effective metadata
In order for the metadata you write for your pages to be effective within search results, you will need to ensure that it complies with Google’s guidelines. As a general rule, your page’s meta titles should be no longer than 55 characters with descriptions no longer than 160 characters. It is important to stick to these guidelines as Google will only display your titles and descriptions up to this point; should you go over the limit, vital text could not be displayed.
In terms of the actual content, you need to ensure that each page on your site has its own unique meta title and description to differentiate each page and also indicate to consumers and to Google what content is on the page. It is good practice to include your company name within the meta title as this will strengthen your brand within search results by making it clear that you have posted the content online. The rest of your title should be a short, snappy statement of what content is on the page. Where possible, keyword phrases you want your site to rank for should be included.
Your meta description should succinctly describe the page’s content and again should include keywords, however the meta description should be written for human readers first and for search engines second. It should not be used to simply list your keyword terms; the fact that it will be displayed in search results means that it needs to read well and entice internet users to visit the page.
Here at Ascensor, we ensure that every single new site we build has strong meta data behind it to give it the best chance of ranking highly in Google’s results. Get in touch with our marketing team today to check the strength of your sites metadata and discover what improvements could be made!