Every time a search engine results page displays a snippet of one of your web pages it is an advertisement for your website. In one way it is a free advert, but another way of looking at it is that you have paid for it through the cost of creating, publishing and marketing your content.

The search engines provide you with two lines to get your unique selling proposition across to the user and it is amazing the number of sites that rank well but fail to take advantage of this. The two lines I’m talking about are the content below the title and above the URL in the search results.

RevaHealth.com - Google Search Result

Companies agonize over their Google AdWords text, endlessly tweaking and A/B testing, determined to egg out every last cent of value. These same companies don’t expend the same effort in optimizing the flavour text that the search engines display in their search results.  This makes no sense! Increasing the click through rate of a well ranking organic search result, one that appears in the top five results say, will always have a greater effect on your traffic than any increases you can bring about using CPC traffic for the same keyword.

So How Do You Control The Flavour Text That Google Displays?

The bad news is that you can’t completely. Google will typically take a section of text off your page that is most relevant to the user’s query.

The good news is that while you can’t control it completely you can control it for your main keywords. This is done through the Meta Description field on your page. If Google trusts your site then there is a very good chance that it will display your Meta Description as the flavour text in its search results.

If Google isn’t displaying your Meta Description for your main keywords then look at the section that it is displaying. You should now modify this section so that you get the most from your listing in Google.

What Should Your Advert Look Like?

Make It Eye-catching. When you buy a newspaper ad in your local newspaper they charge for two things: the size of the advert and the position in the paper. Size matters. The bigger your advert is the better, so make sure you use up all of the available space that the search engines allow. After all they’ve given it to you – use it. Just make sure you don’t use more space that they have given you and have half your killer sales message cut off.

Get Your Keywords In. Even though it doesn’t matter from a ranking perspective Google will bold any words that match the keywords that the user has searched for.  Take a look at the flowers example below and notice in the flavour text that the words buy and flowers are highlighted. Google does this so users will easily be able to see which results are relevant to them.  The bold words stand out and attract the eye. Don’t forget that your search result is an advert for your site – you want it to stand out as much as possible.

Include A Call to Action. Whatever your site does – tell the user to do it. If you sell books say ‘Buy books’, if you process tax refunds say ‘Get your tax back’, if you do restaurant bookings say ‘Book a table at your favourite restaurant’.

Include Your Main Selling Points.

Online flower retailing is a highly competitive business, and it is easy to see which companies get it right when it comes to their search results. Take a look at the example below; the three companies shown have clear unique selling points in their search results.

Make The Advert Unique And Relevant

Each page on your site should have a unique Meta Description.  If you don’t make them unique you are reducing the chances that Google will use them. This is because if they aren’t unique Google knows that they don’t accurately reflect the actual content on your page (Google Webmaster Tools will tell you which of your pages have duplicate descriptions).

Worked Example – Online Flower Retailers

The online flower business is highly competitive and as an industry SEO is absolutely vital so we should expect these guys to get it right.

Eye-Catching – All three get the main keyword ‘buy flowers’ in their results text and therefore get good bolding. Similarly all three sites use close to all of the available space without any loss of meaning.

Call To Action – Interestingly 1800flowers.com doesn’t start with a call to action. Instead they focus on a sales message. This wouldn’t be what I would do. That said, I have to assume that they do it because it works.  Both of the other two start with strong calls to action: ‘Order Flowers’ and ‘Buy Flowers’. If I was in the market to buy some flowers I think I would have a strong positive reaction to these calls to action.

Main Selling Points – Buyflowersonline.com gets three selling points in addition to their call to action. Proflowers (which incidentally has one of the highest conversion rate of any website at 42%) gets four selling points in.

In my opinion 1800flowers.com is getting fewer clicks than its position would merit because they aren’t using the space Google has given them as effectively as their competition.

As an interesting aside you may like to know that the letters ‘e’ and ‘r’ are commonly mistyped when they appear beside each other in a word. If you look at the second listing above you will see that buyflowersonline.com is targeting these errors by putting ‘flowres’ at the end of their page title (the first line of the search results) and when you search for this in Google they jump straight to the top.

Have you any tips for what to include in your Page Title, Meta Description or URL to make your search result more clickable?