Issue 22: VIDEO - Win The Click, Win More Business.
Because after awareness you need engagement.
👋 Hello Big Ponders!
There is power in keeping things simple. Often that means taking complex ideas and crystalising them into an easy to remember concept.
At Big Pond we say this every day: Win The Click
Most companies spend more time testing the performance of their paid ad results in Google than their organic results. This is a huge opportunity for improvement.
âš¡ Only Testing PPC Ad Copy Is A Missed Opportunity
Taglines and slogans are easy to underestimate.
NIKE has ‘Just Do It’. Elections have been won with ‘Get Brexit Done’. The power of a short memorable phrase repeated often can give your brand an edge.
If you pay money to talk to potential customers with ads, why wouldn’t you want to put the same level of effort into your organic search results?
Especially as no matter how many people click on your organic result, the cost remains fixed.
Your organic channel performance might not be entirely free given that you have to pay to have a website and invest in marketing but we can agree the cost is fixed. It doesn’t increase unless you get so much organic traffic that your server needs an upgrade! Unlike PPC where you pay by click or view and the cost increases as you reach more people.
This is why SEO offers highly cost effective scalability for new audiences.
Click to watch the video.
Here’s the video chat transcript in full.
Video Chat Transcript
Andrew: Hi there. Thanks for joining us for another Big Pond video. My name is Andrew McGarry and with us today is Ari Pournaras. Ari, the title here says, WIN THE CLICK WIN MORE BUSINESS. I'm a big fan of the phrase 'win the click', so what do we mean by win the click? Let's talk about that.
Ari: It's actually pretty simple. It's basically making your listings in Google, SERPs that's what we call them, stand out more and so they attract more business. And so obviously, you know, the point of SEO is getting your website up there in Google and get more traffic, but you also want to make that listing attractive. And so it's all about making it stand out because the way that people actually scan through results, you probably have like a split second to actually convince them to click on your listing and not click on the the other ten listings or whatever. And so yeah, win they click, you just need to make sure it stands out and attracts as many clicks as possible.
Andrew: That all makes sense. So moving on to this idea of engagement signals now let's talk a bit about engagement signals.
Ari: Exactly. So it's... I mean, obviously, you need to strike a balance between actually describing what a specific page is about... so that's including the relevant keywords... but you also want to maybe offer something that will attract other people to actually click on your listing. So we call that a CTA (CALL TO ACTION). So basically it could be something like an offer. For example, if it's a product listing and you offer free shipping, then that could be something they could actually get the user and people to actually click your listing. And it could be anything else that you're offering that maybe other businesses aren't offering... that if you put yourself in the position of the person looking for that product... and that may actually seem like a good offer. That's how you actually get them in. Then it's all about how you actually structure the page because obviously you want to get all that traffic to your page but if they don't stay on that page and bounce and go somewhere else, then there's no point because the idea here is you want to make more money out of your website, generate leads or sales or whatever it is you're trying to do.
Andrew: So if I was visiting, let's say, for a local car showroom or something like that, and I see lots of different SERPs, talk me through, what do you think is going to attract me to click on one result versus another?
Ari: Yeah. So basically you want to, you know, if somebody searches for something, you want to match that intent within the title and in the description. You need to format it in the correct way because if you don't Google will tend to actually re-write these descriptions and they just look really, really bad. And so one of the things is you want to get the length right. You want to make sure that it's not keyword stuffed and too spammy. You know, you want to write for humans. Yeah. Not search engines, but also you want to include some of those keywords to be able to trigger that and create those rankings. And, and then you, you want to include, as I said, like the CTAs.
Andrew: The CALL TO ACTION.
Ari: Yeah, call to action. A good way to go about it is to have a look at what the competition is doing and come up with a few examples on how you can improve that. And in terms of a more attractive listing and then you can even test that, you know, so you can maybe try, for example one, Title and Description for a week. To test how much interaction you get, then maybe test another one. And then you once you've tested three or four you can decide on which one has the best results.
Andrew: So again, for business owners or businesses that are trying to get their head around this, we've mentioned there CTR, can you explain to someone why is that such an important metric?
Ari: It's important because you want to get as much traffic as possible to your website. Right. And you could be ranking for something but if you're not mentioning the right things, the competitor that sits right above you, that does mention the right things might actually win the click. And so the more traffic you get, the more revenue you can make. And so CTR and related metrics like that may influence Google. And so the more traffic you get, the more engagement you get and the better potential for your overall rankings.
Andrew: Okay. So I mean, that ties in with this whole idea of growth, how we can win more clicks. I mean, we've got some bullet points here if you want to go through them.
Ari: Yeah. So obviously, you know, compelling relevant title tags and relevant meta descriptions and use CTRs / call to actions as discussed. You want to go through the competitor results and basically provide something that's better and more attractive. Structured data and schema is something you can use to enhance your listings. And, like, for example, when you look at product listings some of them have a star rating. And that's something you can do with schema, which we can discuss in another video. That improves CTR and using search console to test, measuring intent is something you want to be doing because you don't want to be changing things if they already provide good results. Exactly. You know, you want to make sure that you measure things before you change them, and you want to have a backup of what you had to be able to change it back if the result is not what you expected.
Andrew: Yeah, well, certainly in my experience, I've noticed that unless there is an active SEO project on the go, it is not unusual for companies to update their metadata very infrequently. And if you think about it from a PPC ad perspective, ads are continuously being tested for the best click through rates in order to win that click. So it kind of makes sense that the kind of focus and energy that you would put into PPC in terms of refining your copy, finding what will resonate with your target audience and win the click, well, it kind of makes sense that you would do something similar with your organic search result. So all of these points that you've made are excellent and they really go a long way to helping people understand the value of making sure that the title tag and the meta description is what will form your search result. And if you're going to put all that effort into your PPC ads, why not do the same thing organically? So yeah, Ari, those those are some great points today and thanks everyone for watching and we'll see you next time. Thanks.
Ari: Thank you.
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Until next time - good luck!
The Team @ Big Pond
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