Building a strong online presence is a complex process. There are so many different elements that need to fit in together to help you build the right picture and attract the right audience. That includes mastering both on-page and off-page SEO. And one of the most important on-page SEO elements is your meta description.

A great meta description can help you stand out from your competitors and have more people visit your website. Let’s break it down further to see why you need a killer meta description and how to write it.

What is a Meta Description

Before we dig any deeper into the writing tips, let’s clarify the notion of meta descriptions. What is it, and why do you need it?

• A meta description is a short text that appears on the Google search results page, right under the page title.

The meta description describes what the page is about and helps your target audience decide whether or not to visit it. It answers these questions:

• What is the page about?
• Why should you visit it?
• What information will it provide?

And, unless you write compelling, quality meta descriptions, your audience will pick a different result and skip your page entirely.

Now, let’s take a look at the writing tips that will help you nail each meta description and always stand out from the rest of the search results.

1. Strong Opening

When you’re writing your meta description, you have to understand that your target audience isn’t going to read the whole thing.

Instead, they’re just going to take a quick look. If they like what they see, they might continue reading. If you fail to intrigue, they’ll move one.

This is why you need to open your meta descriptions with the most important information. Let’s compare:

• Your business’ growth is our concern- we will help you generate leads that will convert to customers
• Our company will make sure that your business has a strong and scalable growth strategy

The most important information is placed at the beginning, in the first example, making this meta description far more effective and influential.

2. Conciseness

You only have a limited number of characters to convey a strong message and impress potential page visitors.

We suggest you keep your meta descriptions up to 160 characters long.

That means you need to stick to conciseness:

• short sentences
• to the point
• remove redundancy

Think of a clear message and find the simplest way to say it. Make sure every word adds value and is necessary. This is the best way to write a strong, powerful meta description.

3. Keywords

If your page is ranking for a certain keyword, you need to make sure it’s in your meta description as well. To your target audience, it will be a signal that they are in the right place.

Make sure to include keywords following these principles:

• include the main keyword
• include the secondary keywords if possible
• implement them naturally
• don’t overstuff with keywords

Make sure the keywords are a part of a coherent sentence structure, and not just a bunch of words listed one after the other.

4. Strong CTA

Picture your target audience member. They’re reading your meta description. It’s informative, it’s concise, but they don’t feel the urge to click your page.

This is because you didn’t give them a reason.

A strong CTA is:

• catchy
• motivating
• inspiring

You need to include a message such as “Hire a digital marketing specialist today!” to ensure you provide that extra push to your potential customers and stop them from second-guessing.

5. Friendly Tone

Your meta descriptions need to sound like one friend talking to another. They’re chatting and having a laid-back conversation.

You don’t want to make it into a promotional, marketing message.

This is why you should:

• use everyday vocabulary
• use a friendly tone
• avoid technical terminology

Let’s compare:

• Our highly-professional and exquisite digital marketing specialists will ensure your company’s online presence is transformed into customers…
• Our digital marketing team will ensure your company’s online presence is converting into revenue.

Make it natural, simple, and conversational, just like in the second example.

6. No Tricks

Another super-important element of your meta description is honesty. If you think for a second that you can trick your audience into becoming your customer, you’re wrong.

Some marketers feel like they should write ambiguous or untrue meta descriptions to trick people into clicking their page.

But, once they realize the meta description doesn’t honestly describe the page content, they’ll be:

• frustrated
• confused
• angry

And, you’ll lose them forever.

Keep it honest and don’t play any games.

7. Uniqueness

There is no such thing as a one, ultimate, meta description template you can create and apply to all your pages.

On the contrary, each meta description needs to be unique. Make sure that you always:

• start from scratch
• think of something new
• convey a new dominating message

Final Thoughts

Writing compelling meta descriptions is a seriously responsible task that requires your full attention and dedication. Make sure you develop a clear strategy for always nailing each new meta description and showing your professionalism in every aspect of it.

Hopefully, the tips above will help you improve your writing skills and create meta descriptions that work with you on achieving your goals.

Schedule a FREE consultation

Schedule a FREE consultation

Schedule a FREE consultation

Introduction – analyze your backlinks profile

A healthy backlinks profile is an essential part of your brand’s SEO strategy.

All too often, many companies find themselves frustrated when they are obtaining backlinks according to plan, but failing to get traction in search results.

Though the guidelines for websites in all shapes and sizes remain, the perfect backlinks profile is different for every single site. What makes for a perfect backlink profile for a small blog won’t work for a B2B website. A popular DIY blog can’t seek the same links a SaaS company might seek. Companies are neglecting the big picture of their backlinking strategies, and their backlink profiles suffer for it. This post will walk you through the basics step to analyze your backlinks profile.

Once upon a time (about 20 years ago), SEO was all about keyword quantity and density. Those then called webmasters, used a whole lot of shady methods such as placing white text on a white background and stuffing that “invisible” text with keywords. Users couldn’t see it, but the search engines could. That was called cloaking. Other similar levels of blackhat SEO existed and flourished with backlinks, such as a site going from zero backlinks to 100,000 virtually overnight.

Since then, Google and other search engines have become much more sophisticated in detecting various spam links and tactics. All sorts of exotic animals (Penguin, Panda, Possum and Hummingbird if to only name a few) shook and changed the very foundations and face of the SEO industry in those two decades.

These days, if a company wants to rank well on Google, the currency is quality.

Quality content, quality (and topically) related backlinks, quality website code. The bottom line is that Google want to send their user base to a spam free environment.

Links are basically being used by search engines as “votes” and endorsements for websites, that help arrange its rankings and authority. The more authoritative and trusted domains there are in your backlink profile, the stronger your website will become and higher it will rank.

In short, backline quality means that you’re linked from good neighborhood websites that are trusted by Google and their users.

If your website is brand new, this may not be a big deal. Probably because you don’t yet have any links pointing to it. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean you should not consider quality over quantity right from the very start.

If your website’s been around for a few months or longer, there is a good chance that you have some links pointing to it. Some may be good, some may be mentions of your brand (on social media for example) and some may even be harmful for your site.

Because of this, it is essential to audit your backlinks profile and analyze it regularly.

Essentially, a kick ass profile should include:

• Natural diversity of links from smaller and larger, authoritative sites
• Relevant niche/industry links
• Relevant local links
• Social mentions/Reviews

So, how do you carry out a professional analysis process for your backlinks profile?

1. Choose your Backlinks Analysis Tool

Before you master the art of creating the perfect backlinks profile,  start by choosing a backlinks analysis tool.  There are a lot of tools out there offering backlinks tracking, as well as other cool features. Some of the favourites among SEOs and Digital Marketers are:  Ahrefs, Majestic SEO and SEO Powersuite (to name a few…).

Personally, I recommend testing two or three tools over a period of time and choosing the most accurate one that best suites your needs (and budget).

You can check out this article by Neil Patel that gathers 9 Backlink Analysis Tools to choose from.

2. Look for the Root Domains within the backlinks

“The root domain is the overarching structure which contains the subdomains and every URL of a site. If you want the data for an entire site, sticking with the root domain will likely be the easiest way to access this data. An example of a root domain would be example.com ” – Check this definition by Majestic for further explanation of domain levels.

You should look out for root domains because they are typically with higher authority and trustworthiness than subdomains or folders. You want as many root domains telling Google that you’re awesome at what you do. However!  Not all root domain backlinks are a win, they should be topically related to your expertise or field. For example, a link from a major news site is great, since they are usually considered high authority and getting loads of traffic. But those sites may not always be contextual and relevant and therefore might not contribute as much as you’d like to imagine. Try and put your efforts on getting referred by relevant sites for your niche.

Most of the analysis tools mentioned above offer the option to view referring root domains to your site.  You can also check for root domains on your Google Search Console dashboard:

3. Understand MozRank, Trust Flow and Citation Flow

To fully evaluate the profitability of a site linking to you, there are number of metrics to consider.

If you have a friend who has a tendency to tell you a lie every once in awhile, then every time that person gives you information, you will tend to take it less seriously, correct? Google appreciates relationships between websites in the same manner

If Website A links to Website B, it’s like Website A is vouching for Website B and telling Google “Hey, this guy knows something about this subject, you should definitely check what he has to say”. Google’s is not so gullible, though – quite the opposite. Google trusts websites that people visit, interact with and share on social media the most. If Website A is a trusted site, then Website B will receive a boost in status.

With the extinction of Google PageRank, secondary metrics matters a lot. Metrics like MozRank, Trust flow, and Citation flow are becoming more and more important ranking factors.

MozRank – represents a trademark metric for a page’s authority score by MOZ. It reflects the importance of a given webpage. It’s earned by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the backlink, the higher the MozRank.

Citation Flow – represents a trademark Majestic SEO metric for how influential the backlinks to your page are based on how many sites link to and from it. Majestic use it in conjunction with the:

Trust Flow – which is the metric representing the overall page’s authority score. It’s designed to decide how trustworthy the webpage is, based on the quality of backlinks pointing to the link (the Citation Flow).

4. Understand the difference between Dofollow or Nofollow links

Essentially, there are two types of links that point to your site. To understand do/nofollow links, one must understand the term SEO Juice. Which is the power or equity passed to a site via links from external or internal sources. This power is interpreted as a vote of recommendation towards your site and is one of the most important factors in determining your site’s SERP ranking.

Introduction – remove unwanted results from Google

Discovering your business has a bad search result associated with it, is a business owner’s worst nightmare. All of the hard work you’ve put into ensuring your customers are satisfied with your product or service, may be thrown out the window as a result of one review which found it’s way to the top of your branded Search Engine Results Page (aka SERP).

If you notice a bad review, slanderous remarks, or other negative content showing up at the top of your branded search results, instinctively you would want it removed. Right?

Luckily, there are a handful of techniques and strategies, used primarily by companies in the ORM (Online Reputation Management) industry, to remove unwanted results from Google and make defamatory content vanish.

They are two ways to approach this issue:

1. Entirely removing the unwanted result or
2. Suppressing the unwanted result

This post will walk you through both.

1. Removal

There’s a difference between removing content you have control over, vs. content that’s out of your control. Let’s start with the former:

Removing Content from Web Pages You Own/ Control

The need for this might arise when you’ve realized that you have pages that are no longer relevant for various reasons: old products or staff members, tour options you no longer offer, or pages that are simply causing duplicate content on your site.

The majority of website owners choose to simply delete the unwanted content. They probably do so because they don’t know any better. The problem with entirely deleting pages from your website is that since you’ve already established the pages on the net, they’re likely to be linked from other pages on your own site as well as external links from other sites (such as social media mentions, bookmarks, shares, or even plain old linkage).

When you delete the content, Google (and other crawl bots) immediately identify that page as a missing page, which may harm your SEO efforts and overall rankings.

There are three way to overcome this issue:

1. remove pages with the Google Remove URLs Tool via your Search Console account
2. exclude pages from being crawled using your Robots.txt file (if you’re using WordPress, Yoast SEO is a wonderful tool for this)
3. indicate that the page should not to be indexed using the “noindex meta tag” (this method is not as secure as the two methods above and may be a little tricky if you don’t know your way around coding).

Make sure to clean up after you and never leave a missing page by applying one of the three solutions above.

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Removing Content from Web Pages You Don’t Control

More often than not, a negative search result will appear on a page you don’t own. Somebody may post a negative personal experience they had with your product, a bad review on social media, and so on. You know the drill. (Since this post is about removing negative results from Google, I won’t go into the hidden opportunity behind bad reviews, but rather recommend reading this article by Joel Goldstein on Lifehack on ways to turn negative reviews into positive results).

Since you don’t own those sites, you’ll need help removing the negative content. It’s not easy, but in many cases, it can be done. There are two ways to do this:

1. Contact the website owner

Simply Reach out and ask them directly (but politely). For example, you can ask a blogger to remove their negative post. If you can explain why they should remove it, or how you can improve their experience with your product or brand, they may reconsider their stance on your company and even turn the bad review into a positive one.

Remember: Bad reviews don’t mean bad business, they create buzz (did anyone say Miley Cyrus?) and when handled right may even help future prospects in their purchase decisions by showing them you care about your customers.

2. Contact Google

Google offers several ways for website owners to remove wrong, personal, harmful or outdated content from their search results.

For example, publishing sensitive financial or personal information is against Google policies. Anything that can be used to commit fraud is not allowed. Offensive images or videos are also a violation. If you notice negative content that violates any of these policies, contact Google and ask for it to be removed. Bear in mind, the page will still exist, it would be just blocked from appearing in Google search results.

If the content you want removed is simply outdated OR the page no longer exists, simply use the Remove outdated content tool. Google is very strict about how to use and not use this tool, so use it only if the result snippet or the cached (stored) result in SERPs is different from the current page.

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2. Suppression

Suppress Negative Content with Reverse SEO

Reverse SEO, also referred to as search engine suppression, is a method used in the ORM industry to minimize the reputation damage of negative content.

Very much like SEO, which uses strategies to make your business more visible in SERPs, Reverse SEO uses a variety of techniques to suppress negative results on Google Search and other search engines, causing the positive pages to move above the negative ones so that nobody searching the name of your business will see the unwanted results.

This is the backbone of how ORM experts mitigate the impact of negative content about your brand. Much like fighting fire with fire. Instead of trying to remove content, you create more in an effort to bury the negative content in the search results.

In most cases, Reverse SEO is not only effective at removing negative content from the first few pages of search results, but it also works to strengthen your online branding and promote your business in a positive light.

Most searchers will only visit the first few links on SERPs. As you create SEO-focused content, your page rises to the top of the search ranks, while other pages move down. If you can get the negative content pushed to the third or fourth page, it’s likely that consumers won’t even see it.

Suppressing the Bad Links

There are plenty of ways to bury bad links, all of which are very manageable and very effective:

• Start a company blog and post excellent content regularly.
• Optimize content you already have on the web, like pages on your company site.
• Create quality content and link it to and from a variety of authoritative websites that are topically relevant to web pages you’re promoting
• Set up social media profiles and make sure you’re active on all of them (leverage bad reviews to show proper customer care).
• Publish and promote other types of media like videos, images, and podcasts.
• Leave useful or positive comments on other influential websites within your industry.
• Become a thought leader by publishing expert advice in professional forums.

Suppressing negative content is much like traditional SEO, because the new content you create should be optimized to outrank the negative results. The more types of content you create, and the better the quality is, the more likely it will be to rank above the negative content and thus make it less visible.

Conclusion

When dealing with negative content about your business, don’t panic. Channel that negative energy into creating a strategy to make that content disappear by getting it removed or pushing it into the depths of search results.

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