CTR | The Blog Pros

May 28, 2019

How to Craft Meta Tags for SEO and CTR

Creating content is hard work.

It takes time, effort, and resources to make landing pages, write blogs, build custom infographics, and create videos for your website. But all of that hard work will go to waste if people aren’t navigating to your site.

Creating the content itself is only half of the battle. Now you need to make sure that it’s optimized for search engines so you can drive organic traffic to your pages.

That’s why you need to understand the importance of meta tags.

Once you learn how meta tags work, you can optimize them to boost your Google search ranking. The higher you rank, the more clicks you’ll get; it’s really that simple.

In fact, 75% of all clicks go to the first page of Google search results.

The top result of any given search gets roughly 33% of clicks. While positions two and three get 15% of clicks and 9% of clicks, respectively.

What happens if your site is on page two of Google? That’s close enough, right? Wrong.

According to Forbes, the second page of search results only gets 6% of all clicks—and that’s distributed throughout the entire page.

We’ve reached a point in the world of SEO where websites can no longer afford to ignore meta tags. I’ll explain everything you need to know about crafting title tags and description tags that will maximize your SEO value and boost your click-through rates.

What are meta tags?

Let’s start with the basics.

Meta tags are basically just HTML text that describes the content on a particular page. However, you won’t see the tags on the front-end site of any web page.

Instead, these tags are written on a page’s code.

The purpose of a meta tag is to give search engines additional information for what the page is all about. Crawlers will be able to get a good idea of what type of content is on your page by the text and heading tags. But the meta tags give these crawlers even more to work with.

Furthermore, your meta tags can appear in the SERPs, even though they aren’t actually part of the page. Let me show you an example so you can see what I’m referring to.

We’ll keep things simple here.

If you search for Quick Sprout on Google, our homepage will be the top result. I took a screenshot so you can verify this.

But instead of the search engine just providing a link to our site, there is some additional text underneath the URL in the search results.

This is the meta description of our homepage.

Now, let’s navigate to the page itself. If you land on the Quick Sprout homepage, you’ll see that the text in the SERPs is nowhere to be found on the page.

Look what happens when I search for that text. There are zero results.

How is this possible?

That’s because the meta description is in the code. Anyone can look at the code of a page to see if it has meta tags. You just need to know where to look.

So if we right click on the Quick Sprout homepage (or any page on any website) you can click “view page source” to see the code.

You’ll be redirected to a new window where you’ll see a bunch of syntaxes that can tough to decipher.

Rather than looking for those tags manually, you can use the “Command + F” search function to your advantage.

This time when you search for that exact text, you can see that it’s on the page. I highlighted this meta description tag in the screenshot above so it’s easier for you to see.

If you click closely, you’ll see other meta tags in this code as well. We’ll discuss some of these other tags in greater detail as we continue through this guide.

Types of meta tags

As I just said, there are several different types of meta tags that can appear in the code of a web page.According to Google, there are actually nine meta tags and related items that their search engine recognizes.

With that said, some of these are pretty technical. I don’t want to spend time diving deep into all of them. So instead, we’re going to focus on the most important meta tags that have the biggest impact on SEO and CTR.

Title tags

Technically, title tags are not actually meta tags. But they’re treated the same way and recognized by Google, just like a meta tag.

Your title tag will still appear in the <head> of your HTML code, along with the rest of the meta tags on that page.

Title tags are usually used jointly with a description to provide a high SEO value for a web page.

Here’s something else that you need to understand about a title tag. This is not the same as the header of a page or the title of a post.

In fact, the two can be completely different from each other. Here’s an example so you can see exactly what I mean.

This is a screenshot of search results for a page on Search Engine Land.

I highlighted the title tag, which is how it looks on search engines. Here is that same title tag, except written in the code of that page.

As I knew it would, this title tag in the page source matches exactly how it’s displayed in the Google results.

This is very easy to follow so far.

But now let’s take a look at the page itself.

The heading on this page doesn’t match the search title, nor does it match the code.

Simply put, the title tag and headline does not need to be the same. You can use alternative title tags for SEO value.

In this case, “SEO Guide” will have a much better SEO value than “Chapter 1” for searches. I’m sure that’s why Search Engine Land made the change for their title tag.

You need to realize that the title tag will be the first thing that people see in the search results. That’s why it needs to be a clear indication of what that landing page will be about.

Title tags should be crafted in a way that can be understood by real people, while still speaking to search engines.

Meta description

We talked about meta descriptions earlier when I showed you the example from Quick Sprout.

These snippets are meant to tell crawlers, as well as humans, what they can expect to see on a page. Again, this won’t appear on the page itself, but it will show up in the SERPs.

Here’s the thing. Technically, your meta description won’t automatically be the snippet shown in the search results.

According to Google, there are two ways that these snippets are determined.

Rich results
Meta description tags

Google “sometimes uses meta tags to generate snippets.” This is the exact wording from Google a webmasters support page.

But in my experience, if your page has a meta tag, that’s what will be used in the SERPs. This is a great way to control how your site appears in search engines, in addition to showing crawlers what your page is about.

Use your meta description as a way to differentiate your page from other websites in the results. Explain why your website is offering exactly what the user is looking for, based on their particular search.

Robots meta tags

Robots tags are a little bit more technical, so I don’t want to spend a ton of time on them. But these tags are definitely worth bringing up since they have an impact on both SEO and CTR.

Examples of the type of controls used with robots meta tags include:

noindex
nofollow
nosnippet
noarchive
unavailable_after
noimageindex

For those of you who want a more advanced way of improving your site’s technical SEO value, review my guide on how to optimize your robots.txt file.

Meta tags best practices

As I said before, you’re going to want to focus primarily on title tags and meta descriptions.

So use this as a checklist, guide, or reference to make sure you’re optimizing these two tags the right way for SEO and CTR.

Don’t use keyword tags

If you look at other online guides about meta tags, you’ll see that some “experts” will tell you to include keyword tags. That’s a waste of time.

Keyword tags are an outdated SEO tactic. In fact, it’s been nearly a decade since Google announced that they don’t use keyword tags as a factor for rankings.

You can even refer back to the page I referenced earlier about the types of tags that Google recognizes. Keywords aren’t on the list.

That’s because their crawlers are so advanced that they can extract keywords from the content without needing those tags. Plus, it prevents people from adding irrelevant keywords to their HTML code just for the sake of ranking.

With that said, you’ll still want to use keywords in your title tag, meta description, and heading tags. But having separate keyword tags won’t give you any added SEO benefit.

Avoid duplicate descriptions

Every page on your website should have a meta description.

But if you’re using the same meta description (or slightly different versions of the same meta description) on more than one page, it won’t be helpful when those pages appear next to each other in the search results.

Here’s an example.

Users won’t know what to click here.

The meta descriptions don’t add any value, so they’ll probably just skip over the results and move on to another option. This would definitely damage your CTR.

Plus, Google always tries to prioritize the user experience. So if they notice duplicate or similar descriptions on your website, they may just eliminate those snippets from the search results altogether when your site is being indexed, which would be another harmful scenario for your CTR.

Meta descriptions are so valuable to users when they’re making a decision of what site to click on in a list of search results.

For those of you who are using duplicate descriptions as a shortcut since you’re strapped for time and don’t want to create one for every page, you need to learn how to prioritize.

At the very least, have unique descriptions for the most important pages on your site. Eliminate weak meta descriptions and just rely on rich snippets to appear in the SERPs.

Be descriptive

It may sound redundant for a meta description to be descriptive, but you’d be surprised how often I see people make this mistake.

This is not an opportunity for you to just blindly stuff as many keywords as possible into your page code. The meta description needs to make sense.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that it always has to be in a complete sentence format. But with that said, it has to add value to real people, as well as crawlers. Keyword stuffing for bots can result in Google removing your snippet from the search results.

Prioritize quality.

Give people a glimpse at something that isn’t displayed on your pages. Don’t just take the shortcut and make your meta description the same as your subheader. That’s not the best way to maximize SEO value.

Don’t use quotation marks

Remember, your meta description is going to be in your HTML code. So certain characters will impact the way it’s displayed.

Whenever a double quotation mark is added to a meta description, the remaining text that appears after the quotation mark will be cut off when it appears in the search results.

So just be aware of this when you’re writing a description. It’s probably in your best interest to avoid special characters and just stick to plain text.

Conclusion

Great content alone won’t maximize your SEO value. There are lots of other factors at play when it comes to your search ranking and CTR metrics.

You need to learn how to use meta tags to your advantage. The three meta tags that have the biggest impact on SEO and CTR are:

Title tags
Meta description
Robots meta tags

For the most part, you’ll want to prioritize title tags and meta descriptions. You can move on to robots.txt files when you’re ready for a more advanced strategy.

Use this guide of best practices for crafting title tags and meta descriptions that will positively impact your SEO ranking.

April 4, 2019

How To A/B Test Ads In Google Ads

Considering that Quality Score is based mostly on your ad’s CTR, it makes sense to figure out which ads tend to perform best.

Fortunately, Google Ads has a built-in A/B testing feature so you don’t need to guess

I’ll show you how the two approaches that PPC professionals use to split test their ads, and how to know when you’ve found a winning ad.

Your first step is to log into your Google AdWords account and click on “Campaigns.” And then you want to choose an ad group under one of your campaigns. So I’m going to choose “White Hat SEO” and then you want to click on the “Ads,” tab. And as you can see, I already have two ads set up. So you want to have at least two ads set up so you can split-test them against one another.

So basically, there are four things that you can test within an ad. There’s your title, or your headline, the first line, the second line, and the display URL. And Google will show you a preview of what this will look like, depending on where your ad is positioned. And in general the one thing that you don’t want to change when you’re split-testing two ad variations is the landing page.

You can have different display URLs, for example, you could put “www” and then have another ad that didn’t have this, but you’d want them to land on the same page, and that’s important, because if you have different ads going to different pages, it’s very difficult to figure out conversions. It doesn’t make a difference for the click-through rate, but it makes a huge difference for conversions, which is ultimately one of the things that you want to be testing when you split-test ads.

So there’s basically two approaches that you can take to split-testing. You can split-test two different ads and that’s what I’ve done here. Half the time, approximately, Google will show this ad and the other half of the time Google will show this ad and then I’ll get to see which one has a better click-through rate and a lower cost-per-click.

Now there’s one important thing to keep in mind when you’re split-testing two different ads and that’s when you’re first starting split-testing you want the ads to be very different. So when you create a new ad, by default Google will give you one of the ads that you’ve already created. And what you want to do is change this as much as possible. This is not where you want to take one small variable like this and test it against one another because then it will take forever to figure out which one is actually the better ad which is ultimately what you want to find. So what you want to do is create a completely different headline, a completely different description line one, a completely different description line two, and a different display URL.

And when that’s all set, click on “Save Ad.” And as you can see, this ad is quite a bit different from this one so this has a totally different headline, a totally different first line, a totally different second line, and a different display URL because the first character of the display URL is capitalized in this one and it’s lower-cased here. So that’s the approach that you should take if you want to split-test two ads against one another.

The other approach you can take is to split-test several ads against one another and put in a different variable for each one. So, for example, you click on “New Ad,” just like normal, and what you do is you change one thing. So you add a different headline, “Cool SEOK study,” instead of the other one and then you would add that as an ad. And then you create another ad and you would change something here. So, “How to increase traffic.”

So you keep making these slight variations until you have a different headline, first line, second line and display URL combination for all of your ads. And then you just want to run them. And you can see, based on the click-through rate and the cost-per-conversion and the average cost-per-click, which elements of the ad are performing best, and you can incorporate those into your advertising copy for future ads or other advertising that you do online or offline.

So there’s one other important thing to keep in mind and it’s whether or not you’re getting statistically significant results. So let’s say that you had these two ads running against one another and one has a click-through rate of 10%, another one of 5%. You might think that this one’s better. And that could be the case. But you need to make sure that you’re getting enough results that they’re actually significant. And to do that you can use a cool little tool called splittester.com.

So just go to splittester.com, and what you do is, you put the number of clicks from your first ad and the number of clicks of your second ad here. So this is right here, clicks. So you put, let’s say, 150 and then 200, and then you put the click-through rate of the first ads. So click-through rate is here. So let’s say one is 5% and the other one’s 10% and click the “Calculate” button. So, as you can see, we are 99% confident that ad number two is better than ad number one. But if you didn’t have as many clicks to go by, or if the click-through rate wasn’t as big of a difference… in this case, it was more than double… you might not be as confident and if that’s the case, you want to run the test for longer, until you get enough clicks to get a statistically significant result.

So finally, you want to start keeping track of the changes that you make and this isn’t as important if you’re running 15 ads against one another because then you’re just going to eliminate 14 of them and you can just see that this is a winner and then create another one. But if you’re doing several split-tests with two different ads, a lot of times you’ll forget five tests ago the things that you changed, and you might want to incorporate some of those things into your ads. So what you want to do is scroll up and click on “View Change History,” and this will show you all the changes that you made to that ad group.

Now if you want to keep things organized, because by default it shows you information about changes that you made to bids and keywords and things like that, you just want to click on “Add” and it will show you all the changes that you made to “Add.” So, for example, on September 23rd at 7:34 there was a text ad change and to see what exactly what that change was you can click on “Show Details” and it says “Display URL Change” from this to that. Now this is great if you’ve been doing split-testing for a while and you want to go back and see what elements of ads have worked for you and which haven’t.

So that’s all there is to split-testing ads within Google AdWords. As you can see, there are two different approaches that you can take. You can split-test two very different ads against one another, or you can split-test several ads against one another, each one slightly different, and you want to make sure that the differences are statistically significant.

August 20, 2017August 22, 2017

But First, A Word From Our Sponsors…

Yesterday Google shared they see greater mobile than desktop search volumes in 10 countries including Japan and the United States.

3 years ago RKG shared CTR data which highlighted how mobile search ads were getting over double the CTR as desktop search ads.

The basic formula: less screen real estate = higher proportion of user clicks on ads.

Google made a big deal of their “mobilepocalypse” update to scare other webmasters into making their sites mobile friendly. Part of the goal of making sites “mobile friendly” is to ensure it isn’t too ad dense (which in turn lowers accidental ad clicks & lowers monetization). Not only does Google have an “ad heavy” relevancy algorithm which demotes ad heavy sites, but they also explicitly claim even using a moderate sized ad unit on mobile devices above the fold is against their policy guidelines:

Is placing a 300×250 ad unit on top of a high-end mobile optimized page considered a policy violation?

Yes, this would be considered a policy violation as it falls under our ad placement policies for site layout that pushes content below the fold. This implementation would take up too much space on a mobile optimized site’s first view screen with ads and provides a poor experience to users. Always try to think of the users experience on your site – this will help ensure that users continue to visit.

So if you make your site mobile friendly you can’t run Google ads above the fold unless you are a large enough publisher that the guidelines don’t actually matter.

If you spend the extra money to make your site mobile friendly, you then must also go out of your way to lower your income.

What is the goal of the above sort of scenario? Defunding content publishers to ensure most the ad revenues flow to Google.

If you think otherwise, consider the layout of the auto ads & hotel ads Google announced yesterday. Top of the search results, larger than 300×250.

If you do X, you are a spammer. If Google does X, they are improving the user experience.

@aaronwall they will personally do everything they penalize others for doing; penalties are just another way to weaken the market.— Cygnus SEO (@CygnusSEO) May 5, 2015

The above sort of contrast is something noticed by non-SEOs. The WSJ article about Google’s new ad units had a user response stating:

With this strategy, Google has made the mistake of an egregious use of precious mobile screen space in search results. This entails much extra fingering/scrolling to acquire useful results and bypass often not-needed coincident advertising. Perhaps a moneymaker by brute force; not a good idea for utility’s sake.

That content displacement with ads is both against Google’s guidelines and algorithmically targeted for demotion – unless you are Google.

How is that working for Google partners?

According to eMarketer, by 2019 mobile will account for 72% of US digital ad spend. Almost all that growth in ad spend flows into the big ad networks while other online publishers struggle to monetize their audiences:

Facebook and Google accounted for a majority of mobile ad market growth worldwide last year. Combined, the two companies saw net mobile ad revenues increase by $6.92 billion, claiming 75.2% of the additional $9.2 billion that went toward mobile in 2013.

Back to the data RKG shared. Mobile is where the growth is…

…and the smaller the screen size the more partners are squeezed out of the ecosystem…

The high-intent, high-value search traffic is siphoned off by ads.

What does that leave for the rest of the ecosystem?

It is hard to build a sustainable business when you have to rely almost exclusively on traffic with no commercial intent.

One of the few areas that works well is perhaps with evergreen content which has little cost of maintenance, but even many of those pockets of opportunity are disappearing due to the combination of the Panda algorithm and Google’s scrape-n-displace knowledge graph.

.@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014

Even companies with direct ad sales teams struggle to monetize mobile:

At The New York Times, for instance, more than half its digital audience comes from mobile, yet just 10% of its digital-ad revenue is attributed to these devices.

Other news websites also get the majority of their search traffic from mobile.

Why do news sites get so much mobile search traffic? A lot of it is navigational & beyond that most of it is on informational search queries which are hard to monetize (and thus have few search ads) and hard to structure into the knowledge graph (because they are about news items which only just recently happened).

If you look at the organic search traffic breakdown in your analytics account & you run a site which isn’t a news site you will likely see a far lower share of search traffic from mobile. Websites outside of the news vertical typically see far less mobile traffic. This goes back to Google dominating the mobile search interface with ads.

Mobile search ecosystem breakdown

traffic with commercial intent = heavy ads
limited commercial intent but easy answer = knowledge graph
limited commercial intent & hard to answer = traffic flows to news sites

Not only is Google monetizing a far higher share of mobile search traffic, but they are also aggressively increasing minimum bids.

As Google continues to gut the broader web publishing ecosystem, they can afford to throw a few hundred million in “innovation” bribery kickback slush funds. That will earn them some praise in the short term with some of the bigger publishers, but it will make those publishers more beholden to Google. And it is even worse for smaller publishers. It means the smaller publishers are not only competing against algorithmic brand bias, confirmation bias expressed in the remote rater documents, & wholesale result set displacement, but some of their bigger publishing competitors are also subsidized directly by Google.

Ignore the broader ecosystem shifts.

Ignore the hypocrisy.

Focus on the user.

Until you are eating cat food.

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