Meta Descriptions and Calls To Action

The Meta Description is where you have the opportunity to “sell” your listing in search and get the click. For SEO purposes this is perhaps the single most important take-away there is. (if you do nothing else to improve your search performance). A great Call-To-Action (CTA) in your Meta Description will make the cash register ring.

The Meta Description is what you see in the SERP listing in black. It’s what people see and read that might cause them to click on your listing versus your competitor’s listing. While the Title tag, in purple here, is also an opportunity to include a CTA, the Title tag primarily servers to ranking the page for a search term, (and its much shorter) so sometimes you are limited with what you can make your Title tag do.

A good Call-To-Action is priceless. I have seen good CTAs increase clicks (CTR) by 300%. We achieved that 300% increase in CTR by simply adding “Sale Ends Monday” to the Description. There was no sale! Now you could call that false advertising, but it worked and there was not one customer complaint about “where is the sale?”.

This is where creativity is your secret weapon. This is nothing technical about it – no cookie-cutter advice can be effective in creating a great CTA. Creativity and experimentation are the only ingredients to this recipe.

Lots of noise out there about the length of your meta description tag. If you read about meta descriptions, you’ll find that Meta Description tags should be about 170 characters and in 2017 Google increased that limit to @ 300. But those are just good-too-know statistics. If you can increase your search rank by adding some keywords to your meta description tags, go for it. (Because if you are not in the SERPs, the best CTA won’t help.)

But if you are already in the SERPs for that keyword, who cares about the length of your meta description. Its the CTR that pays the bills and that means a great CTA is the holy-grail of on-page SEO.