Stand out

Fili says: “Stand out – it is super important. You need to make your websites stand out from your competition, improve content quality, and have a Unique Sales Proposition that helps you to get the user to come to your website.”

Is it the SEO’s job to have a Unique Sales Proposition?

“It’s not the SEO’s job as such, it’s actually businesses’ job. The CEO and everyone else in the company should know what the company or organisation’s Unique Sales Proposition is. It doesn’t need to be a business - it could be a non-profit or just an individual - but you need to stand out.

If you don’t have a USP, you have a bigger problem. You need to go higher up in the chain of your organisation and figure that out before you tackle SEO. Once you do have it, it will automatically fill in the blanks for your SEO.

You need to make sure that every indexable page (every page that ranks in the search engines) has a USP. You need to convince users so that they click on the search result, and those pages actually deliver for that user’s intent.”

How can each individual page on a website have a USP? What are the key elements on pages that can make them unique?

“First, you need to start at the level where the user first encounters the page, assuming they don’t know the brand yet and don’t know the page itself. This is often from a search engine source like Google, so I’ll focus on that for now.

When we’re talking about first exposure, we’re generally talking about Google search results. At this point, when a user types in a query they come across, say 10 links. Some might be enriched, there might be a Q&A, etc., but they will see 10 organic search results. Of those 10 organic search results, they’re going to pick one. Which one are they going to pick? This is where you need to start standing out, and where you need to have a Unique Sales Proposition.

You can do this by optimising the page title and meta description. Make sure that both of these elements contain the right messaging. What makes this particular search result better than the other main search results? Is it a call to action? On top of that, the benefit for the user is very important. What is in it for them? Why should they click on your link instead of one of the other nine?

Of course, the meta description and the page title also need to be descriptive of the actual content on the page. It can’t just be a call to action, like ‘Hey, click me!’, it really needs to be descriptive of the content. Once the user clicks, you also need to deliver - so you actually need to have the content and match the user’s expectation that you created in the search results. This is where you start to show a USP, and it has to be on an individual page level.”

How can you ensure that you do stand out?

“It’s twofold. First, it is good to have a general sense of what the competition is doing on the SERP, but that’s not a big source of information on how to improve your overall USP. Again, the USP has to come from higher up. You already need to ask yourself, as a business, ‘How am I better than my competitor?’ Forget SEO for a second, you need to solve that first.

Then, you can go down to the individual SEO pages and try to communicate this to the user. ‘We have free deliveries’ is a benefit for the user, as is ‘We have the best items as reviewed by X number of users’. ‘We are a market leader’ is a way of communicating authority and thereby standing out. These are all types of messaging that you can use within the SERP to stand out. That’s where you start.

Then, you look at the user intent of people who come to your page. If you have a query that you are ranking for, but no one is clicking, you can definitely improve that. It’s a quick and easy win to experiment with and see where you can improve that page with different snippets. The problem is that some of these things take time, especially in SEO.

One of the big caveats in SEO is time. You make a change, hopefully it gets implemented and you get developer resources, then it gets launched, then Google has to crawl it, then Google has to test it and see if it actually benefits the user or if their automated solutions like automated snippet generation are performing better. All of this needs to happen, and it takes time.

What you could do, as a quick experiment to find areas for improvements, is take a query that you’re currently ranking highly for in Google Search Console, where you are getting a lot of exposure. Look in those stats for places where you perform well when it comes to impressions, but your click-through rates are non-existent. Maybe you have 100,000 impressions but 20 clicks in total. This is something that can be improved.

Assuming that your niche allows for it, you can take a very limited budget, go through something like AdWords, and experiment with a couple of different variations of ad tags and ad titles - the length of which are similar to what we see with meta descriptions and page titles. With that, you can quickly test what works and what doesn’t. The cost can be extremely low, especially if it’s a query that is a bit more long-tail where you have less competition from other advertisers. You can still test what will work better in that case, and then you can try to implement that across the website.

I often hear the question of whether or not you can use templates to make your meta descriptions stand out. The word ‘templates’ is a misunderstood word. Yes, you can template how you make your meta description but that’s an action, not an item that is being used. You can template it, as an action, and thereby improve things. Your overall business USP can be templated through every single representation in the SERP.”

How many SERP results nowadays are actually using the meta description versus text that has been selected by Google from the webpage?

“I don’t know the exact percentage, but I don’t think we need to worry about that too much right now. From what I’ve seen, it’s still more than 50% that are displaying the original meta description. Whenever possible, Google will try to use that - although there are caveats, of course, with Google automating more and more around this.

The one thing we have control over as webmasters is what goes into those algorithms. Part of that is the meta description. This is something that we do have control of.

You should use your salespeople to help out with defining some of these meta descriptions. Ask them what helps convert when they’re talking to a customer. Does reminding them about free delivery often close the sale? If yes, why is that not in the meta description? You can replace this with any other benefit, of course, but the idea is there and that’s something you absolutely can use.

It’s also very important, if you are active in any kind of advertising, that you talk to people within the ad team. They often already know what converts and what doesn’t convert. They already know how to manage expectations, especially when they’re active with things like AdWords.

For anyone who doesn’t know, AdWords is paid search - which basically means paid advertising on top of the organic search results. This is something that you do not need to spend a lot of money on for SEO purposes. It is another acquisition channel. It’s not SEO, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use it as a tool for SEO - to run short-term, limited-budget experiments. Depending on the keyword (and depending on the long-tail part of the target query) you could potentially run a successful experiment for less than 100 bucks, and significantly improve your overall SEO over time.

There’s one other element that we haven’t discussed as much and that is the delivery on the page. You want to make sure that, when you experiment like this, you also measure success. One way to measure that success is within Google Search Console. You can see the CTR going up, and the clicks coming through, and you can potentially even see the clicks coming through within your log files or within your analytics programmes. However, that doesn’t mean that you actually had a conversion.

Anyone can make any page rank - if it’s related to certain topics. If you’re targeting sensitive areas (like adult-themed or copyright infringement-related topics) it’s relatively easy to rank and get absolutely no conversion out of it. People can drive traffic to your website - they can have botnets, etc., working on these things - but that doesn’t mean that traffic will actually convert. In the end, our business runs on conversions and even SEO is a tool to drive conversions. This could be a direct conversion, or it could be an indirect conversion, like brand recognition, rather than an actual sale. At the end of the day, SEO supports the business, not the other way around.

You do need to track conversions as well. When you run these experiments, did your conversions actually go up? Did your conversion rate improve? Sometimes you may end up with less traffic, but higher conversions, and that’s perfectly fine. If you show up 70 times for a search query instead of 1,000 times, but you have a 20% conversion rate rather than 1% - I would rather have the 270 than the 1,000, because that drives more conversions.”

What shouldn’t SEOs be doing in 2023? What’s seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive?

“Don’t postpone SEO audits. It’s important to keep on regularly auditing your website - even if it’s just for defensive purposes - to know what is wrong and what you can improve. Google is pushing out updates all the time, even daily. Most of them are unannounced, so you need to keep an eye on what’s going on.

If you don’t audit your website, you will lose out, and you set yourself up for failure in the future. Even though you need to be careful about where you spend your efforts and your time, you need to make sure that you audit your websites regularly. It should be at least an annual cycle, if not more frequently for some other sites, just to figure out what needs to be improved.

So much changes in SEO and in the industry. Even the title of this series already tells you that things change yearly and, because of that, you need to audit. You need to check and double-check because, without it, you don’t have enough information to make business-critical decisions.

When you’re looking at what to cut to save time, I would definitely look at the pages within your website. This may sound like a technical issue, but the fewer pages you have to focus on means fewer pages that you have to improve and fewer resources that need to be put in.

There are a lot of things that you can do to improve your website. You can add data to each individual indexable page that you collected from your own users. You can just focus on the pages that really convert and make you stand out. Just because you can have 100,000 pages on the Google SERP doesn’t mean that you should. It’s better to have a few really high-performing pages (and we’re talking maybe 100, 500, or 1,000) versus having 100,000 or 1,000,000 pages that don’t perform - even if you have the data.

Just because it’s long-tail doesn’t mean that everyone’s going to look for it. If it shows up only once or twice in a search result, that doesn’t mean it’s actually going to be ranking or people are going to click on it. In the meantime, you’re wasting crawl budget, you’re wasting effort, and you’re spending money on content writing and other things like that. Refocus on the pages that actually do matter. Prune the pages that don’t need to exist on your website. It comes back to standing out. Don’t have rubbish content.”

Fili Wiese is an SEO Expert and you can find him over at seo.services.