Meta titles and descriptions and the psychology of search

Posted September 23rd, 2010 in HTML and CSS

I run a New Zealand Running Calendar website and it's made me realise something quite interesting when it comes to SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages): you don't need to be first to get good clicks - just make sure your meta title says "I am the authority website" to the searcher.

Example

The Pelorus Trust Half Marathon was run last Sunday (i.e. the Sunday before this article was posted) and doing a search for "pelorus trust half marathon" and other variants produces the following first page SERP (as at the time this article was posted, and over the last weekend):

The authority website is first (with a really crap description which comes from the extremely limited page content and no meta description), showing a web page and a PDF, and my website is second. On Saturday, Sunday and Monday I got almost 500 clicks from being second/third.

Obviously I have no way of knowing how many people clicked through to the actual authority website, but given that 946 people participated in the event I think I probably got almost everyone searching for it using the search engines.

My conclusions

Using the above example, the first result doesn't really speak authority, even though the event is in bold in the title and there are a couple of search entries. It doesn't speak authority because the event name isn't first; the Hutt Valley Marathon Clinic (or their web developers) have chosen vanity first and put their name in the meta title.

This effectively makes it look like it's the HVMC website (which of course it is) rather than (also) the authority for this event. For someone participating in the event, they might not know it's organised by the HMVC so seeing that in the result title makes it look like it could be Joe Bloggs' website talking about the event.

Compare that with my SERP listing which doesn't say anything other than the event name, the distances relating directly to that event, and the date it's being run on, and which one looks like the authority website to you?

Basically, what I am trying to say with this post is that if you structure your meta data better than the competiton, you probably don't need to get a higher SERP result than they do: as long as you look authoritative (and preferably more authoritative than they do and are still relatively high in the SERPS) then you'll get the clicks.

In my case, the bounce rate is high ( > 75% ) but I don't care. They're not actually a competitior, I link directly to them, I want people to go through to the authority website for more info; but they have become aware of my website which consolidates information about running events in New Zealand, and they will hopefully come back again.

For your website you probably want to make sure that when they click through they don't leave, so make it compelling and give them a reason to justify the click and stay.

Note: the above example is just one of many (and the most recent) I could provide for my Running Calendar website. Every weekend I get tons of traffic from people searching for their particular event even though the event website appears in the SERPs above mine.

Your conclusions and counter arguments

Discuss in the comments section below :)

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