Why Result Snippets (aka. Meta Tags) Are Important & How to Update Them

Would you like to boost traffic to your website and improve your SEO? One way to accomplish this is to make sure you edit your meta title and meta description for your website.

Whenever someone enters a search on Google, your meta description, title, and slug will appear on Google’s result page listing. It’ll look like this:

Meta descriptions, which are sometimes called search descriptions, are short pieces of copy that sum up your website’s content. Meta descriptions are shown underneath the page title in search results. For example, in the screenshot above, the meta description says:

“Marketing worth shouting about! We get your brand and message in front of your target customers with engaging, cost-effective marketing and a proven return.”

The title is: “Digital Marketing Agency – Barker Social Marketing

The slug is: https://barkersocial.com/

How Metadata Descriptions Boost SEO

Although your search rankings won’t be directly affected by your metadata information, it will affect your click-through-rate. When you use the snippet editor on your website builder (ex: WordPress or Squarespace) to modify your posts’ description, you have the chance to write copy that will grab your reader’s attention, which in turn, improves your click-through-rate. The more clicks you receive, the higher your website will rank on Google.

Google’s algorithms determine what appears on a page for any given search query. It’s impossible to keep descriptions exactly the same for every potential search but making sure these descriptions are filled out will impact how your site ranks on search engines like Google. If for some reason, the wrong information is displaying in search results you can request a re-index using Google Search Console.

How to Write Proper Metadata Descriptions

You always want to put yourself in your visitor’s shoes, what is your ideal audience searching for? When you’re writing your metadata think about what your business does. What problems are you solving for your target market? How can you encourage them to click on your website?

The answers to these questions should be included in your metadata.

Best practices for metadata include:

• Using keywords to optimize your descriptions while avoiding keyword stuffing
• Making sure the text stays between 50-300 characters
• Ensuring your descriptions are short, relevant, and easily readable

How to Update Your Metadata

All metadata can be updated through your website builder such as WordPress or Squarespace. Each time you create a new post you can modify the meta description, title, and slug so that it’s easily readable and gives your reader a nice taste of what your post is about—prompting them to click on it and boosting your SEO.

Here’s a helpful guide to update your metadata with WordPress

Here’s a helpful guide to update your metadata with Squarespace.

Need Help?

If you’d like a comprehensive digital marketing and content creation strategy with a focus on SEO get in touch with Barker Social today. Our team of experts will be more than happy to offer you a FREE consultation and find out precisely what you need to accomplish all your business goals.