One of the great unrealised opportunities for many websites is optimising its ‘advertisement’ in search results; your site’s Search Engine Results Page or SERP.
The search results page display shows details about each website found to help the searcher decide which one best matches their needs.
We’ve all seen them, but maybe were not aware of the sales importance of these innocuous three lines of text so let’s look a little closer.
A SERP is typically formatted like this:
This is the SERP first line
This is the SERP’s second line which should contain a compelling reason to go to your website to read more about your services.
http://www.your_website_address
When your site is in a search result page, it is the SERP that will have greatest influence over the viewer; far greater than the the misnomer that website’s are chosen based on their ranking alone. Well OK – you have to be above the ‘fold-line’ on the first page of results, but once your site rnaks there your SERP will have more influence than those next 4 or 5 ranking positions.
If your SERP successfully influences the searcher and they click on your SERP, you get the opportunity to pitch your business and ultimately sell; if not you’ve lost a sale.
This is why the SERP is one of the most critical pieces of sales copy related to your website.
Managing your SERP
Search engines use information from your website’s title and description metatags to compose your SERP, but have you noticed how some SERPs are composed with apparently random text ?
If the contributing metatags are empty or inappropriately used the search engine will look elsewhere when trying to find something useful to show the searcher about your site. Unfortunately the text it finds might be meaningless and certainly not a compelling pitch for your site.
Given the critical nature of your website’s SERP, don’t leave it to chance. Randomly selected text is never going to be as effective as a carefully composed value proposition.
Make sure your sales proposition is stored in your meta tags correctly to ensure your SERP gives you the best possible chance to generate sales.
How bold is your SERP ?
Notice how any words in your search criteria are bolded in the SERP ?
Always use ‘keyword rich’ phrases in your SERP so successful search resutls have more bolded words and therefore more visually compelling than the competition.
How many SERPS does a site maketh ?
There’s a SERP for every page in your site, so make sure you make the most all of them !
For more SERP information check out Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serp
