Jewelry ECOMM Tech
SEO Tips For Jewelers Who Aren’t Tech Experts: Meta Description (Part 3) October 01, 2018 (0 comments)
I've been writing about SEO fundamentals to help jewelers who haven't had much education in this area prior. I hope you're finding value in it!
You'll start to see a pattern here - the way you write/structure the articles on your page play a huge role in how Google ranks your page. This is why blogging and producing content throughout your page is so beneficial.
First I reviewed some overall general SEO info here. Then I covered how to format our content with the right title and headers in the second part of the series. Now I'm going to review your page's "meta description". All of these revolve around formatting our content properly, and as such, fall under the "on-page" SEO category.
What Is A Meta Description?
The meta description is a snippet of up to about 155 characters – a tag in HTML – which summarizes a page’s content for search engines. Every page or article in your website has one, and it's what appears under your page Title in the search engine results page. Here:
Optimizing the meta description is crucial for your on-page SEO because it's really what gets people to click your page in Google's results page (if someone searched for "jewelry e-commerce strategies" in Google and our page's meta description talked about something off-topic, nobody would click on it - even if Google decided to display it).
Google supposedly doesn't factor your page meta descriptions into their page rankings, but they DO use your monthly site visits and click-through rate to determine how they rank your page. So your meta description may not tie into your page rank directly, but it will effect your click through rates - and that does effect your page ranking. Make sense?
Editing Your Meta Description
Now that we know the impact your meta description has on your pages, it's time to optimize. But how do we edit the meta description on our pages, anyway? This will depend on the type of website platform you're using (another reason to choose your site platform wisely). I create all my clients' websites in Wordpress. Wordpress powers roughly 30% of the websites online. The main reason I use Wordpress as my platform of choice is not just because of it's versatility or capabilities, but really because it is extremely easy for my clients to use. They can easily post their own content and Wordpress formats a lot of it for you. I don't care if you use Wordpress or not - my point is, the right website needs to be built with content as a focus. When I post an article, my interface gives me a specific box to write the meta description so I can't screw it up. Super easy huh? Your website likely has a similar way to edit your content easily. Otherwise you're going to have to mess with code. The meta description is an HTML tag, which looks like this in the HTML code for the page:<meta name="description" content="Your page's content."/>
Avoid having to mess with website code by having the right type of website to begin with.
Optimizing Our Meta Description
Hopefully you've figured out how to edit your page's meta description. Now it's time to format it properly. There is a pretty widely accepted set of guidelines for optimizing your meta description. Here are the important points: Character Limit: 155 characters. There is no steadfast rule for how long your meta description should be, but 155 characters is the general recommendation. Google may display your meta description shorter on occasion, like if they add a date to the article. Simple and Clear: Your meta description will heavily determine if someone clicks on your page in Google's search results. Therefore, it's important to be specific and clear. Tell the reader what they'll find on the page. Include The Focus Keyword: Google will rank your page higher if your keyword matches the exact terms. They'll even highlight words in your meta description that match the search words used. Here, I searched for "Jewelry Marketing E-Commerce", and Google highlighted "jewelry" and "ecommerce" that appear in our meta description.
Call To Actions Help: Your meta description is essentially your sales pitch to convince someone to click your page. So a call to action is a great idea. Let's look at what happens when I search "new Nike shoes":
The first result tells me EXACTLY what I want. I'll find new Nike shoes, which is exactly what I searched for, and then they invite me to come check it out. The second two listings entice me with free shipping.
Write For Your Customer: What type of info do you think your visitor wants to see? Are you writing for someone in a specific city? Will your customer more likely click-through if you include materials and sizing info in your meta description? These are important things to test out. Your meta description should be written for the type of person you're trying to attract.
It Should Be Accurate: You need to make sure that your meta description is actually about what's on that page. Google is smart, and will penalize sites that use misleading or inaccurate meta descriptions.
Meta Descriptions Should Be Unique Across Your Pages: Having duplicate meta descriptions is confusing for searchers. If you look at the Nike example above, each link has a unique meta description so it is extremely clear what to expect on that page. They could have just named each page "buy nike shoes" because every page is about buying shoes. However, the link to the Women's shoes has a clear meta description about women's shoes, specifically.
In the next article we'll learn how to structure the actual content on each page!