How to use online ad copy principles for organic search

PPC advertisers learn how to target their ad copy to get qualified clicks. There are recognised principles such as repeating the keywords in the headline, using words your target customers respond to and inserting a call to action. In addition, good advertisers test different ads on an ongoing basis to improve the ROI. Good click through rates are rewarded with a higher quality score which means cheaper costs per click. The incentives are there to put the work into targeted, compelling ad copy.

So do the same principles apply to the organic listings? More people click on the organic listings anyway and there is no cost per click but there is still competition for each click. There’s no point having a good ranking and then not capitalising on the opportunity to then attract targeted visitors in the same way that paid advertisers do.

If you take a look at this listing from Wotif in the organic listings, it has a lot in common with the paid ads. The search query is for “mooloolaba accommodation”.

Compare this with another unpaid listing for the same search query.

In both cases the two lines of text after the title is from the description meta tag for the web page. Wotif have worded their description to state their offer and attract clicks. The second example is a throw back to when meta tags were important for good rankings and were stuffed with keywords in order to help this aim. Now Google ignores the meta tags for ranking purposes so its time to optimise them for targeted clicks and not for the search engines.

1. Every web page should have a unique description designed to attract targeted visitors.
2. Keep the description short enough so that all the information is displayed. Google displays about 155 characters including spaces.
3. Be aware of how the title and description work together in order to maximum the available space.
4. You don’t have complete control over whether Google uses the description meta tag or uses something else instead such as text from the web page itself. If the keywords from the users search query are in the description meta tag then it is likely that this is what will be used. Therefore, even though keywords in the description are unimportant from a ranking point of view, it does affect when the description is displayed.
5. Test to see what gets the best results.