Measure impact from new meta descriptions
-
Hi guys,
I'm looking to implement new meta descriptions across a site and i want to measure the impact.
So far I'm thinking of extracting the CTR data from GWT for the last 90 days to get the most accurate CTR averages for each URL. Then once the new meta descriptions have been implemented, compare the CTR with the old CTR averages accross URLs.
Do you think this would be the most accurate way of measuring the impact?
Cheers,
Chris
-
Hey Chris,
I recently did the same thing, I looked at traffic from organic to the specific pages I changed the meta descriptions for. I did 20 for my top sellers and 20 for my slow sellers and watched for incremental increases YoY and WoW through GA. I did see increases although small, will impact my overall traffic in bulk - I have educated the rest of the business and now we write better meta descriptions.
Although your method seems sound and as Matt said ultimately you want to make sure you are converting those people too.
All the best,
K
-
If you have goal tracking set up, it may make sense to compare conversions as well. While I like to use meta desc to improve CTR, I'd much rather improve conversions. If I can get someone to click through AND take action, that's the best meta desc.
Step 1 - CTR
Step 2 - Conversion/Goal Conversion
If your CTRs are super-low, improving them may not help conversion a ton. If they're already decently high, you may only see a small increase but you could double conversions. I think using the two together makes the most sense.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How does product category description affect SEO?
Hi - we are a website that sells tours. We have category pages that list the tours in that category (by city, by length of time, theme, etc). At the top of each category page, before the buttons linking to the tours, there is a category description. It is a pretty long paragraph. We are redesigning the website and think it would look nicer to show 2-3 lines of text and then have a down arrow and 'read' more so people can click and it would expand to show the full category description if they want to read it and it won't take up so much room that way. My question is - will this affect SEA at all? Or because the text is still there, just hidden, it won't do anything? Our site ranks very high in organic searches on google and we do not want to do anything that will hurt SEO. thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shirapn0 -
Importance - meta title keyword
HI I want to find out how important people think it is to have the keyword as the first word in the meta title? Is this something that would even make a difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Tools to test meta descriptions?
Hey does anyone know of any tools which can test your meta descriptions against competitors meta descriptions for specific keyword terms. I know one tool called SERP Turkey which uses mechanical turk, i was wondering if there is any others on the market? Even a tool which can automatically score your meta description against others on the SERP results page. E..g optimised, keyword, call to action, etc. Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Remove Google penalty or make a new website, Which is better??
My local website was hit by google and I have done all steps to remove the penalty, But it's still not ranked. So it is better to make a new website with new content and start working on it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dan_Brown10 -
Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.
Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question: "We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?" Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing. Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content. Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well." What is your opinion on that answer?0 -
Using PushState for Meta Data?
Wondering if anyone has had any experience using pushstate to update meta data on a AJAX page. What we are trying to is have one really long page that users can scroll through to see different portfolio pieces. We want each portfolio piece to be represented in Google as a separate page when they are technically all on the same page. An example of how the page will work is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lsujoe
http://www.scozzese.com/2011/en/#annasafroncik If you notice you scroll down and the url will update for the next piece but you are still on the same page. So if we do this for meta title, meta description - will Google be able to recognize it? Any help to achieve quality results would be helpful! If I didn't explain anything clearly please let me know!0 -
Need bullet points for a new website on what to do for SEO
Hello, My company just launched a new website and its a competitve market it looks like. Its for moving boxes and moving supplies. They want a bullet point list (nothing real specific) of what I will be doing for SEO for the new website. I have been out of the loop for more than a year with SEO so not sure what the best things to do first are. Any help would be great. Thanks John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | maximumrank0 -
Google Not Indexing Description or correct title (very technical)
Hey guys, I am managing the site: http://www.theattractionforums.com/ If you search the keyword "PUA Forums", it will be in the top 10 results, however the title of the forum will be "PUA Forums" rather than using the code in the title tag, and no description will display at all (despite there being one in the code). Any page other than the home-page that ranks shows the correct title and description. We're completely baffled! Here are some interesting bits and pieces: It shows up fine on Bing If I go into GWT and Fetch as Google Bot, it shows up as "Unreachable" when I try to pull the home-page. We previously found that it was pulling 'index.htm' before 'index.php' - and this was pulling a blank page. I've fixed this in the .htaccess however to make it redirect, however this hasn't solved the problem. I've disallowed it from pulling the description .etc from the Open Directory with the use of meta tags - didn't change anything. It's vBulletin and is running vBSEO Any suggestions at all guys? I'll be forever in anyones debt who can solve this, it's proving to be near impossible to fix. Here is the .htaccess file, it may be a part of the issue: RewriteEngine On DirectoryIndex index.php index.html Redirect /index.html http://www.theattractionforums.com/index.php RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.theattractionforums.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trx
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap_).*.(xml|txt)(.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(admincp/|modcp/|cron|vbseo_sitemap/)
RewriteRule ^((archive/)?(..php(/.)?)?)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^(admincp|modcp|clientscript|cpstyles|images)/
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ vbseo.php [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^forum/(.*)$ http://www.theattractionforums.com/$1 [R=301,L]0