iProspect's director of paid search explains how to boost clicks and ROI by turning meta tags into ad copy.
It's the end of the first quarter. The big game stops. Now's the part everyone's been waiting for-- a commercial rolls. It's… (drum roll please)... a bad home video with a cheesy voice-over.
What? You've got to be kidding me. Surely, a spot like that would dumbfound everyone from Madison Avenue execs to armchair quarterbacks everywhere. Why would anyone spend so much money and waste so much opportunity on such a poorly executed advertisement? Well believe it or not, the same happens in organic search every day.
Today, a number one ranking on a broad keyword can provide enormous exposure. For example, consider the keyword "car rentals." A number one ranking on this keyword in Google can drive 35,000 clicks to a website in a single month.
But forget about clicks for a moment. To compare this to a Super Bowl ad, we need to talk impressions. A conservative two percent clickthrough rate on 35,000 clicks would translate into 1,750,000 impressions per month! And that's only one keyword in one search engine. Clearly, with results like that, such broad keywords could be considered the "Super Bowl ads" of search.
While the raw number of searchers on any one keyword isn't in the same arena as Super Bowl viewership, consider the difference in audience quality. A Super Bowl ad incurs costs-- regardless of whether anyone is watching it or not. However, when someone launches a search, right off the bat you know you have a live person looking for your product. Given that, surely it would be worth putting some effort into ensuring the quality of the actual search listing, right?
Not always. Often, potential customers are greeted by organic listings that are choppy at best, and look more like irrelevant, broken English. But in the world of search, there are some legitimate historical reasons for this.
The organic listings that users see in the search results are usually pulled from the title and description meta tags of a web page. Some companies ignore the importance of these altogether, and instead opt to put the same meta information on every page of their site.
Other companies have engaged in search engine optimization in the past and have strategically positioned important keywords in the title and description, but often at the expense of readability. Because it was relatively easy to change meta data and "game" the engine's algorithms, the engines have responded with improved algorithms. As a result, this meta information has been devalued over time. By and large, it's still a reasonable practice to put an important keyword in your title tag, but it certainly doesn't have the impact it once did.
In my opinion, this is actually a positive development. Today, companies no longer need to stuff meta information with keywords. Now marketers can use the meta data as it should be used-- to communicate with, and persuade, potential customers. Quite simply, now it's ad copy-- something that marketers know exactly how to use!
My advice is to start giving your meta tags the attention they deserve. While testing is difficult and it takes a while for the changes to be reflected in the search results, it's well worth it. Think about it this way-- getting more users to click your organic results doesn't just get you more clicks; it deprives your competitors (with their broken English listings) of those same clicks. Moreover, it enhances the ROI of your overall search program. Why? Because in natural search results, those incremental clicks don't cost you a dime.
Testing in organic search is more difficult because you don't have exact impression counts (or in most cases, any impression counts at all). Granted, this makes testing clickthrough rates a pretty soft science, but it's still worth pursuing. Here's a general six-step testing plan to help move you in the right direction:
- Choose a few of your most important organic keywords to test. Choose high traffic keywords because you'll get data more quickly.
- Take a baseline measurement of the number of organic referrals you receive on those keywords in an average week. Typically, the referrals that you get on those words will come from just one or two URLs on your site. Jot down those URLs.
- Find some better creative to test than that keyword-stuffed junk you have up there right now. A good place to look is your paid campaign. Take the best performing ads from your paid campaign that map to the keywords you selected for testing.
- Use paid inclusion to test. If you want results before next year's Super Bowl, you need to use paid inclusion. It gets your listings in and out of the natural search index quickly and gives you complete control over the copy.
- Swap out the old creative for the new and check your search referrals against your baseline for the keywords you chose on the URLs you jotted down.
- Determine a winner. Remember to control for overall site performance when choosing a winner (e.g., if your clicks increase by five percent during the testing period but your total organic referrals also increased by five percent over the same period, don't declare that a winner). When you find a clear winner, apply the learnings to all your meta tags and repeat the whole process.
The days of over-stuffed, broken-English meta tags are gone. Now they're ad copy. The truth is, meta tags have the makings of a champion. And once you give them the attention they deserve, they will repay you in kind by drawing the attention of more potential customers viewing them in the search results.
Ben Perry, Ph.D., is paid search director at iProspect. Read full bio.