Agonizing over Meta length or content seems to make no sense as Google seems to be ignoring them!
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Real frustrating for me to see Google ignoring my 'Meta Descriptions' and 'mining' my site for any description it chooses. For years my meta has always been displayed and was set up with best practices according to MOZ. My site snopro.co.nz and snopro.co.nz/wanaka-ski-hire have plenty of competition in the market but we are the only ones with a huge point of difference, we are web based only, and deliver the ski rental gear. My quality meta was a way I could control the text and use for a good CTR due to offering something unique in the 'Meta' (Rental Delivery). Seems the only way I can 'control' any text is with 'Adwords' ...funny that! Any others out there finding the same? Justin.
BTW my meta is - 'Snopro Ski Rental Delivery Wanaka. We deliver & custom fit ski hire in the comfort of your accommodation. Hassle Free. Multi-day save 10%. Book here'
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Hi Ed.
Well second time I have responded to this! MOZ had a little 'hiccup' and lost the entire response
Ill try remember! ahhh now it wont allow me to post a large response. so its in 3 parts...(1 of 3)Thanks for your insight I really appreciate it! Yes, as you said I do kill it for ski rental delivery queenstown/wanaka related searches but I am the only offering for this service and its not searched often. My most valuable keywords that I put most effort into are 'ski hire queenstown' and ski hire wanaka'. This puts me in the mix with my competition and I need to use the Meta and Title to 'sell' my point of difference (delivery and fitting) and generate a good CTR. Positions 1-3 for these searches on both google.co.nz and google.com.au would be ideal. I believe our site is far superior than our competitons and ranking it after 8 years in the game should not be too hard (BTW we are ranking pretty well esp. Local)In fact I have just spent a month updating our NAPs across the web to match and reflect our 2 physical trading locations in Wanaka and Queenstown. So the site is split in 2 locations already as you suggested. You will see this if you try to book or look at rates. ...contd -
contd...(2 of 3)
We started in 2011 as snopro.co.nz and just in Queenstown. All our efforts on and off page were to rank that site for ski hire queenstown related searches. 2014 we expanded to Wanaka. We needed to split the site. We then created snopro.co.nz/queenstown-ski-hire and snopro.co.nz/wanaka-ski-hire and focused the on page to reflect the individual locales. Snopro.co.nz became the 'homepage' and mentions our service is available in wanaka and queenstown (and everywhere in between). Thing is, Google never dropped snopro.co.nz for ranking to all queenstown related searches in favour of snopro.co.nz/queenstown-ski-hire. The sites history and backlinks made this the favourite in googles eyes. Issue is the snopro.co.nz as our homepage is optimized for wanaka and queenstown, (see the metas below) so it 'waters' down the impact of queenstown alone and prevents us killing it for 'ski hire queenstown' related searches (IMO).Anyways, none of this really explains why Google is not using my actual Metas.meta description for home page https://www.snopro.co.nz/ is the following:
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cont'd... (3 of 3)
https://www.snopro.co.nz/wanaka-ski-hirehttps://www.snopro.co.nz/queenstown-ski-hiremeta name="description" content="Snopro Ski Rental Delivery Queenstown. We deliver & custom fit ski hire in the comfort of your accommodation. Hassle Free. Multi-day save 10%. Book here."Thanks for the advice Ed, really appreciated! Yep Queenstown is a pretty magical part of the planet!Cheers
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Also you need one of these on your site if you don't already have it. People want information about the season and coming to NZ.
The sheer amount of people all over the world googling ski field opening dates is quite staggering. Put together a really great page (like this one) and you'll get a ton of traffic. Then use that page to do native advertising for your home boot, binding and board services.
You might even get the featured snippet if you use a nice table in wordpress or something that is really simple, fits on and looks good. Get some schema plugins failing that or just write out the code using a code generator (like this epic free one) You'll have to find out whether it's a service or an 'event' I haven't had much luck with events TBH but give it a go. Always be testing.
You're in a great position though because looking briefly at your numbers there's **nothing stopping you from overtaking all your competitors and becoming number one. **It's all about getting it right and there's no right answer, you just have to experiment.
Another thing is just because you do something a bit different (come to people's houses) doesn't mean you're not competing with those who don't do that or just have shops in town. I advertise for loads of things that we (as dentists) don't even offer. All types of old or obsolete braces and veneers and loads of stuff. We have pages associated with those products and tell the customer all about them, why we DON'T offer them (usually because they're rubbish or not made anymore) and then what the customer should be looking for. Like educating them.
So long as you're not misleading your customers and are remaining truly authentic you'll get lots of great success with this tactic. We even have people asking for the products that we've slammed in our unbiased reviews or said you literally can't get anymore because they haven't read the articles to the end and just see that we do x, y and z and then call up wanting it. These people always book in for something different.
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I feel your pain! It's highly frustrating when you spend time crafting a great meta description and then Google decides to use its own! Especially now that you can play around with up to 320 characters in that space!
From my knowledge, there is very little you can do. As Ed pointed out, you may want to review those lines of content from the block of text Google is currently pulling.
Other than that the best advice I can give you is to try different descriptions.
Goodluck!
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Hey Justin,
This is a very cool product and you're killing it for ski hire queenstown delivery but I'm sure the real money is in the broader ski hire queenstown. or ski here wanaka. You're constantly in the map pack which is great so there's nothing seemingly wrong with local (from a very short assessment and some googling) but for ski hire and snowboard hire your coming in at 3-5 position which is not great. you need to be 1-3.
Have you tested splitting things out? When I type ski hire queenstown in the meta comes:
"Looking forski hireor snowboard hire in Queenstown?"
This tells me that google considers ski and snowboard hire to be different things. So maybe a seperate page covering each and not trying to cram everything into your H1.
Ski Hire Queenstown & Wanaka | Rental Delivery | Snowboard Hire
Also have you tried splitting our QT and W as locations? You'll need a physical location or depot or address in each town but that might help with location specific signals and you can save space by using a headline with something more in it. Like:
Dependable, hassle free ski fitting and hire delivered to you in Wanaka (might just fit on) and then the same for Queenstown. This will make the H1 and SERP entry more attractive and get you to number one with the Click Through rate.
As for Meta descriptions, they take from the first paragraph usually. So get your terms into there in bold or google will just pick them naturally up from the first sentence (or most relevant sentence) you write. They will often be much longer so write a sort of 'featured snippet' as your first paragraph on each page.
But i'd say you need to get more granular with the pages. Without falling foul of maccabees update. So test it and see what happens. If you look above you NZSki and Snowrental are just Queenstown. That could be the key.
Also do some keyword density and top ten benchmarking with these pages and see if there are other problems that you can fix.
God I wish I was there now. Has the season started yet?
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