Mild-mannered designer by day…
I don’t actually think I’m a superhero. I mean, many people have this notion that superheroes have genetic mutations and have superpowers. Neither of which I have. Unless you count being a triplet as a genetic mutation 😉
Crafting converting meta descriptions for your Shopify store
Yesterday a customer emailed me for some advice on what to put in his homepage meta description. Since this content is shown in the search results for your homepage, it’s a highly visible piece.
This advice also applies to the meta descriptions on your products and every other page.
- Treat the meta description as a short piece of sales copy. If you approach it as a copywriting task, you’ll write much more persuasively.
- Meta descriptions will be the first exposure searchers have to your company so make sure you attract their attention.
- Write about the benefits a customer would receive from your products. e.g. How will their life be better after purchasing? What makes your products unique?
- But balance the copy with actual description. If you go too heavy into the superlatives and into sales-pitch-land, Google will ignore your description and use some other content.
- Keep the copy to around 160 characters. For a short time Google supported 320 characters but that’s been changed back now.
- Remember your funnel. The meta description isn’t there to sell the product all by itself. It’s there to sell the click. Get them to click and then let the product page sell the product.
- Most importantly… this it just one part of your SEO strategy. If you feel stuck trying get it perfect, create something “decent”, update it to “good” next month, and make it “great” in a few months. You get as many attempts at this as you want.
Meta descriptions are different than structured data but they both have a dramatic impact on how your search results app. Meta descriptions are the text you see under the search result, structured data is the extra data that some results have including the number of reviews, prices, and stock availability.
Most Shopify themes have poor structured data so they don’t quality for any improvements in Google.
JSON-LD for SEO provides high-quality data that will let your store qualify for many types of Google’s Rich Results. Often times faster than the industry averages.
JSON-LD for SEO
Get more organic search traffic from Google without having to fight for better rankings by utilizing search enhancements called Rich Results.
Linking Llama
Link discontinued products to their best substitute. Keep discontinued products published on your website and continue to benefit from traffic to these pages.