Use Paid Search to Tune-up Your Meta Description
The following tip was kindly provided by Matt Leonard, follow Matt on Twitter or watch his awesome contributions on SEJ!
One of the most important elements in your organic SERP is the meta description. While it’s well known that bolded keywords increase click through, many SEO professionals fail to take advantage of the surrounding message.
Since tracking CTR is extremely difficult to accurately do with natural search (unknown amount of keyword searches on a given day, seasonality, etc.), it becomes equally difficult to determine the real effectiveness of your meta description.
To combat this, I suggest testing various ideas and keywords using paid search. For example, customers may click through more when your paid search ad offers free shipping instead of mentioning product reviews. They may prefer a coupon over a money-back guarantee. Maybe they simply want to know about your secure checkout.
Whatever the different options may be for your site, if you find the ones performing best in paid search you can then be sure to include those words (ideas) in your meta description. Doing so will insure your organic ranking reaches its potential.
Do you have any success stories using this tactic? Do you have the control, or enough communication with a paid search department, to pull this off? Please leave a comment and share any ideas you have as to how paid search and SEO can work together for maximum success.
Also, here’s the related post on how to test your keywords with PPC.
29 Responses to “Use Paid Search to Tune-up Your Meta Description”
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This is a great idea and is widely used by many companies already. Running a PPC campaign for 30-60 days while testing out different ad copy is a great way to determine the most effective keywords for inclusion in your website and meta data.
Because PPC has tremendous speed compared to SEO it’s perfect to test. Not only for the meta description, but also for which keywords to target (the ones that result in most conversions), how to write your titles and how to optimize the page for maximum conversion.
You can also use PPC to test a market. Does it have enough buyers? What conversion rates do the market get? Is it a profitable market?
Matt Leonard Reply:
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
You are absolutely correct. Ironically, a followup to this post was written discussing exactly that point. Be on the lookout. Since your comment beat the post, I’m sure you’ll get a mention. Please let me know what you think of the post. Thanks. Matt
This is a pretty good idea. I’ll have to give it a try as I launch my boutique clothing company within my digital search/social agency.
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Excellent tips and ideas. Ann, you are such a smarty… : -0
That would work for a few pages, but how about a large site with hundreds of thousands of pages?
Matt Leonard Reply:
June 4th, 2009 at 2:48 am
Good question. Large sites are always trickier at a glance, but end up being just as easy. The key to handling a large site is sectioning. Once you establish what keywords customers/users are respond to (by identifying conversion), look to apply that and scale it in other places where applicable. If ‘Free Shipping’ is your winning call to action, test it across similar (price/demo) items and see if it holds up. It most likely will, and then you can apply it in scale.
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That does make a lot of sense. I have used PPC and SEO to cross-fertilize each other and although I know all about matching ads to keywords in Adwords, I never even thought of using PPC as a testing ground for meta-descriptions.
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Great, but would you choose the ad copy that has a better conversion rate over the copy with a solid CTR?
Matt Leonard Reply:
June 4th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Depends if your goal is traffic or revenue. If I want more people, CTR. If I just want to make a few bucks, conversion. I’d choose whichever one better suited my desired metric.
Thank you for this simple but smart idea
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Another handy tip, thanks! The competition for organic and paid listings are usually similar in the same market, and seeing as so much information is available for the paid search sector regarding competition, demand, etc. it certainly is a great way to test the waters.
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This is great advice but bear in mind that PPC and organic search don’t always work the same. My top keyword in PPC is “utah injury attorney” however this same keyword does not pull at all in organic search results. But it is certainly worth experimenting with and the only way to know for sure is to test.
Great Post, PPC really need a good keyword research to make it possible, and your trick is really help me and other people in great manner. Thanks
Great post. wonderful
hImm..
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Sounds interesting. Thanks for info .I like You Now! (sounds weird.. should say I follow you Now!.. )
This is a great article. I’m new to blogging but still learning. Thanks for the great resource.
Great ideas used extensively by many companies ……
Even I agree with the point that meta description plays a very vital role in SE mostly affecting the CTR. Coz if you have well written meta description users are likely to click your url compared to your competitors listings in SERPs. So my view is we must always add meta description to our important pages and let users and SE know what the page is about.
Nofollow” attribute is being used by more and more people now. It is a good idea to spot other people’s tactics on how they are using it on their web pages.
Thanks a lot..
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Nofollow” attribute is being used by more and more people now. It is a good idea to spot other people’s tactics on how they are using it on their web pages.
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Sounds interesting. Thanks for info .I like You Now! (sounds weird.. should say I follow you Now!.. )
Thanks for the tip. I am wondering if this tip could work also for non-english language websites?
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