For Service Sites, having a phone number in meta description ALWAYS a good idea?
-
If you have a site that offers a same day service, e.g. plumbing, electrical, computer support: do you think it would always be a good idea to stick the phone # in the meta description?
-
Always keep the phone number there. It's not going to give any SEO help, however it's good practise for marketing
-
Sure, say what you want. People say lots of things. You are talking about marketing which is NOT SEO. My original post did state that yes, it would not harm the site, which was your question. But to say that clicking a link in a SERP is conversion is not technically correct. Now if they call your number in your description, then yes, you converted them.
My ONLY issue was to that was the fact that you might reduce CTR as there is no need to click through, as I have the information I want and was converted.
That was all. People are mixing terms here and calling it all SEO. Which is incorrect as the acronym stand for Search Engine Optimization.
I am closing this out on my end,
Best of luck
-
Richard
That assumes that 'wanting to buy' is an off or on state inside a person's mind; there are stages in the buying process. A person is nudged along in the process by various techniques in each stage. In the service searches, most of the initial steps have been done for you; the need has been created, the customer NEEDS your service, the question is will they choose you or your competitors; That's where committment and consistency come into play. Get the customer to commit to your brand even a little bit and they're more likely to buy. Every step that you get the customer to take towards you is a step towards a sale, which is why clicking on your site is DEFINITELY a step towards that. So I would say yes CTR is a BIG part of Conversion Rate Optimization.
-
No, that is not a conversion. You converted them to nothing they are still visiting. To convert is to change.
the act or an instance of converting or the process of being converted
Converting someone is the intent to make tangible contact. Purchase a product, sign up for an email list, get them to watch a video, contact the company. Something besides a static visitor. There has to be an interaction stronger than clicking on a pages within a website.
CTR is just that. Optimizing so you get the person onto the site. Once there, you try to convert them to [enter your goal for that visitor]
-
Click through rate is part of conversion....you've successfully converted a visitor who is picking between 10 websites to click on yours.....by having a better meta description tag.......that's conversion.....
-
ok, conversion is not click through rate, but converting to an sale, sign up, or other process. An SEO would actually do all of these things including probably SEM, SMM, and more which is NOT SEO!
Although David, I think you were talking about CTR and not CRO.
-
An SEO who does not optimize for conversions should be fired. That is their job. What good is a ranking if half the people do not click it because the SEO failed to use text that would convert. Getting rankings is only part of the battle. SEO's cannot be 1-dimensional, this industry is not meant for 1-dimensional people.
-
No, SEO is Search Engine Optimization which is to optimize for Search Engines. CRO is Conversion Rate Optimization, and that is different.
SEOs might work on both disciplines, but they are different.
-
Just to add though that I think having your phone number in the SERPS would result in less click throughs, so if CTR is or becomes an important factor (I don't think it is or Google wouldn't be trying to show more and more in the SERPS) but you're still going to get less visitors.
So if you rely on showing traffic to prove SEO is working go with David's idea of a trackable number.
-
Richard, I disagree that SEO is just all about 'rankings'. Conversion is also a big part of SEO and in fact may be an indirect factor to rankings, since more visitors equates more natural links.......so yes, a higher conversion would be an seo WIN.
-
A a user yes, I'll often use a phone number from the SERPS rather than click a page and David's idea to make it a trackable number is brilliant for justifing SEO efforts.
Also check out this post from Patrick Altoft on numbers showing up in rich snippets - http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/google-testing-phone-numbers-h1-tags-in-rich-snippets/
I've not seen it out in the wild yet but I'd say it's definitely worth doing.
-
Hi David,
I said nothing about adding to the Title tag. I do all the time, more for the geotagging and in the about us or contact us pages.
Higher rankings through CTR is speculative at best, although I also believe this is probable. However, as I pointed out, this could make them call instead of click and that would GREATLY reduce your CTR and therefore your rankings if that metric were strong.
Is it a good idea, sure, why not. Will it helps rankings, I doubt it.
-
I've never seen a phone number in the title tag hurt rankings at all. In fact, there is a chance it adds relevancy to the query and could increase your rankings, possibly.
Beyond that, while the meta description is not used for rankings directly, I am of the personal belief that it does influence rankings using CTR.
Since we do not know every piece of the algo, I would venture to guess that Google uses CTR as a determining factor for rankings. So by providing a piece of content that could increase CTR, it could increase ranking.
-
Well, not for SEO purposes but for marketing yes. SEs do not count descriptions as a metric for rankings. However, for marketing, when someone sees your phone number, it may give them a higher level of confidence to click. Or they might just call instead of clicking?
-
YES!!!
This is critical and a common mistake many SEO's overlook. Make sure you use a number that is trackable so you can see the kind of return it generates and go from there.
You can even put it in the title, depending upon the circumstances. I have specific experience utilizing both of these methods and they both worked well for generating leads for my clients!
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
-
Old DMOZ description showing up in SERP meta description.
I have a client whose home page meta description on the SERPs is not matching the description n the meta data. The SERP description is from an old DMOZ description. Any idea about the best way to update this?
On-Page Optimization | | bdcseo0 -
Thoughts on archiving content on an event site?
I have a few sites that are used exclusively to promote live events (ex. tradeshows, conference, etc). In most cases these sites content fewer than 100 pages and include information for the upcoming event with links to register. Some time after the event has ended, we would redesign the site and start promoting next years event...essentially starting over with a new site (same domain). We understand the value that many of these past event pages have for users who are looking for info from the past event and we're looking for advice on how best to archive this content to preserve for SEO. We tend to use concise urls for pages on these sites. Ex. www.event.com/agenda or www.event.com/speakers. What are your thoughts on archiving the content from these pages so we can reuse the url with content for the new event? My first thought is to put these pages into an archive, like www.event.com/2015/speakers. Is there a better way to do this to preserve the SEO value of this content?
On-Page Optimization | | accessintel0 -
Strange SERP's descriptions
Hey, when I googled one of our products i came up with this strange result, see attachment. I searched for: kurs praktische psychologie on google germany. These words also come up in the meta description of this page:** Praktische Psychologie** Fernkurs mit professioneller Betreuung. Testen Sie den praxisorientierten Kurs über die Grundlagen der Psychologie 4 Wochen kostenlos. and in the body: _Sie glauben der Mensch lässt sich trotz all seiner Facetten durchschauen, wenn man sich nur Mühe gibt ihn zu verstehen? Da liegen Sie vollkommen richtig! Der Kurs "Praktische Psychologie" vermittelt Ihnen hierfür alle Kenntnisse und Fähigkeiten, sodass Sie schon bald das Mysterium Mensch ergründen. _ Why is Google still showing this description which i obviously don't want to be shown, and why does it state _spring naar (jump to) Kursgeburh _and how can i avoid this? yd1DStW
On-Page Optimization | | NHA_DistanceLearning0 -
Good idea to use hidden text for SEO purposes due to picky clients not allowing additional content?
I do SEO for eCommerce websites both in-house and for clients. A few of our clients want increased rankings but are not willing to allow us to make the changes internally to help make that happen. One of which is adding content to the webpages since 90% of them have very little to none. I have a couple clients that are extremely picky about what can be seen on their eCommerce website. They have the site setup the way they want it but it is not SEO friendly in the slightest. The pages (including homepage) have little to no content, and the only things they want changed are things visitors CANNOT see on the webpages (META, ALT Tags etc). The tactic i am wanting to use is often used by spammers but i have a legitimate reason to use this and wanted to know if this would be a good idea. They are wanting to target fairly competitive keywords but are unwilling to allow any on-page changes to add any information and keywords to help with rankings. I was thinking about adding text behind images or hide the text in whatever ways to prevent the end user from viewing it (except for the search engines). My idea was simply to add a paragraph or two of content for the search engines purely to help in ranking because they have a lot of pages that have zero content except for product image and title listings. Is this tactic recommended or does anyone have any other ideas for these type of situations. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | VITALBGS
Stephen0 -
Flickr v. On-Site Images
My apologies in that I have searched for this, have seen discussions on it and haven't seen a definitive answer on the question of hosting & displaying on-domain images v. using a source like flickr to host all of your images. I have a client that is mostly a local search play in a very tourism heavy area. I'm investigating this option for a few reasons. 1. Ease of use. The new flickr app is brilliant. So if he's out giving a tour, takes a picture, it can be seamlessly integrated to his account & then shot off to all of his portals (website, facebook, twitter, etc.). It's a small client & he's not tech savvy, so this option suits him very well. 2. SEO. With all of the tagging, geo components, and it playing nice with Google Images search, I thought this was a viable option in hosting the majority of his on-site images. I've seen opinions on this before. But I was wondering if there any further opinions on the subject. Not sure if there's anything 'definitive', but any help or insight would be appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | BrianWhitaker0 -
Do I need a Meta description for every page?
HI Guys, We have just developed a new website and I'm looking to add meta descriptions with relevant key words to the pages . As the site has over 80 pages it is quite an undertaking and i was wandering if pages, such as the shopping cart and FAQ's etc, need meta descriptions as well? Thanks in advance : ) Pete
On-Page Optimization | | dawsonski0 -
Blocked By Meta Robots
Hi I logged in the other day to find that over night I received 8347 notices saying certain pages are being kept out of the search engine indexes by meta-robots. I have not changed my robots.txt in years and I certainly didn't block Google from visiting those pages. Is this a fault on Roger Mozbot behalf? Or is there a bot preventing 8000+ pages being indexed? Is there a way to find out what meta-robot is doing this and where? And how I can get rid of it? I usually rank between #3 and #5 for the term 'sex toys' on google.com.au, but I now rank #7 to #9 so it would seem some of my pages/content is being blocked. My website is www.theloveshop.com THIS IS AN ADULT TOYS SITE. There is no porn videos or anything like that on it, but just in case you don't wish to look at sex toys or are around kids I thought I would mention it. Blake
On-Page Optimization | | wayne10 -
Should we create separate product descriptions for our customers' web sites?
Still got my SEO learner plates on, but I'm trying to help a small e-commerce site which makes and sells baby products . They have upwards of 150 independent retailers also selling their products. Mindful of the fact that many of these retailers are copying the same product descriptions to use on their own web sites, I wondered if there was any value in creating separate sets of product descriptions, one for our web site and one for all their trade customers, in order to minimise the amount of duplicated content devaluing our site. In theory Google ought to know that ours is the original source of the content, but some testing has shown customers ranking higher for the same product descriptions. We have a separate area on the site for trade, which contains lots of media information they can use, and we could include a set of product descriptions in this area for trade customers to download, keeping a unique set of product descriptions for ourselves. We won't stop duplicate content entirely, I realise - but do you think it's worth the effort of trying to implement? Our web developer thinks it's a total waste of time and not worth bothering with for the miniscule benefit he thinks we'll gain. Grateful for any pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | Mandy_Cochrane0