Writing effective descriptions for users and search

So I got so much feedback from my post on writing an effective title for users and search that I decided I would cover a few other areas I don’t write about elsewhere. That brings me to today’s topic the creation of effective descriptions.

Simple and crisp descriptions are essential for clarifying and targeting your page’s topic for your readers. Just like titles, it can be the difference between clicking and not clicking on a result. I believe that descriptions are a branding 101 exercise. I was inspired by Chanpory Rith writing on the Small Business Marketing Guide when he stated:

“Your product is one among millions. With so many products, why should a customer choose yours?
Positioning answers this question.”

The description is the positioning statement for each of your pages. A successful “position” or description is text that is relevant to what the user is looking for and will articulate what makes your page/product unique. Before you ever open up a page in your CMS or HTML editor and attack a description you need to understand what the positioning for the page should be. This can be outcome driven as I described in the titles post or it can be a purely informative goal.

Meet the description

If you are new to the web or HTML, the description is placed in a meta tag at the head of your page. There are a number of uses for the meta tag, the most common being:

• Author
• Keywords
• Description

To add a description to a page you simply add the tag <meta>, identify it with the parameter name=”description” then add the description in the parameter content=”blah, blah, blah”. The outcome should look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”blah, blah, blah”>

The text in the content parameter is picked up by the crawlers and is rendered in search results below the title tag as regular text. If you forget to add a description, the search engines will leverage sampled text from links to the page or text from within your page that contains the keywords in the search. This creates a less than optimal experience for users. While it will not affect the rank for a page adding and optimizing your descriptions is about driving users to your page.

When your description = fail

Now that you know what a description is, is a good time to look at what happens when a description is missing or lacks proper positioning. For example, my favorite cameras are made by Leica, check out the less than stellar result for their site:

Looks super compelling, right? Almost all pages in the Leica site lack an articulate statement that describes what the page is about.  So if I am trying to find the product page the M8 and I see this result have I found the right page?

The answer if you haven’t guessed already is no. Getting a little better, the product page for Mamiya’s flagship camera has the following description:

Not perfect, but you know more information about the page topic; (You know the DL33 is a very expensive camera). This description is much better but not fully optimized because it is too long and could add more context to the searcher. Thus taking a “positioning” approach to the description can have a profound effect on page performance because the description will explains precisely what content is about and what the searcher will get by following the link.

For a good example, I looked to Canon:

The description identifies the page topic and tells me that it is product for me a “discerning” and “advanced” amateur photographer.  And to think I was willing to spend $4000 for a Leica M8.

A simple process

This brings us back to positioning; your pages need positioning because searchers have choices. There will be nine other blue links on the page and if your pages don’t stand out, you lose. To win, you will need to answer a simple question: What makes this page the “only” answer to page topic?

To get there, I take the following steps when looking at descriptions:

1. Don’t just identify the page topic, identify why the page topic matters (This is the hard part!)
2. Identify the keywords in the title tag or keywords you know your customers use to find the topic
3. Write a positioning statement using the keywords that reflects the outcome the page represents.
4. Keep it well formed. Live Search offers the most characters at 200 but Google only allows 160 so keep I would keep it at 160.
5. Ship it.
6. Rinse and repeat

I say rinse and repeat, because you should leverage your metrics from before and after the change to determine if the change was effective and measure over time. Some products have seasonal life cycles and you may want the positioning of a page to reflect the life cycle.

Jeremiah Andrick