How to get more clicks/traffic out of your top search engine rankings?

If you already have top 10 rankings for your most important keywords this article will teach you how to get more clicks (better CTR) out of your organic rankings. If you have run AdWords or other PPC campaigns you have probably noticed how very small changes in the ad text can lead to massive changes in the ad's CTR (click-through rate).

Naturally, it stands to reason that changes in organic search engine results' descriptions can lead to different CTRs. When search engines list results, they show keyword rich text snippets taken from the page text, meta description tags or DMOZ/Yahoo directory listings. These keyword rich snippets are shown together with the titles of your pages.

Search for your keywords on Google and notice what text descriptions does Google show for your top ranked pages. Think about it - can you improve the link description so that more surfers click on your link? Most often, you can.

There are two issues here - which description will lead to the highest CTR and how to make Google show exactly this optimal text snippet. Let's tackle these two problems one by one.

How to write a link description that improves the CTR?
First rule here is that the description must contain your keywords. This is important because surfers like to see the keywords in the description and if the description lacks the keywords, Google may not show it at all (remember, Google chooses to show link descriptions that have the keywords it them).

The link description will have more clicks when it offers benefits and when there is a call to action (example: download something free). The best way to test it is to run an AdWords campaign. I use text that has proven to offer the highest CTR on my AdWords campaigns.
You can also use common sense. Write down a couple of text descriptions and try them for a period of time (either on AdWords or on your pages). I prefer AdWords because I can test different texts simultaneously.

How to make Google show your preferred link description?
Write the keyword rich link description in your meta description tag. Most often when Google finds the keywords in the meta description tag, it shows the text in the tag as a link description. That works on the premise that the meta description tag will provide a better human edited description than text snippets taken out from the page text (often text snippets lead to low CTR descriptions).

Your meta description tag must use a short well written keyword rich description that targets the most important/competitive/highest conversion keywords.
If the page targets many keywords then you will use the meta description tag for the most important keywords and edit the page text for your less important keywords until it produces a better description. In this case, you will need to edit the text around the targeted keywords.

Testing the idea
On one of my top ranked pages, I plugged a meta description from my AdWords campaign and I immediately saw better CTR (19% higher than before). On another page I got a 50% boost because the link description shown previously by Google was screaming "buy this stuff" and now the description looks like an interesting article title (actually it is a sales letter disguised as an article). Surely numbers will vary from page to page and from one link description to another.
All in all I think it is in many cases easier to increase your organic listings' CTR than to move up in the rankings for competitive keywords.
One last tip for your page titles - use a title of the type "list of your keywords - yoursite.com", not "yoursite.com - list of your keywords". The first title type has a higher CTR.

Articles From seoguide.org