Think about the very first point of contact most customers will have with your company. It will be online, but it probably won’t be your website. It will be the search listing that appears when the customer searches for your company in Google. You probably know this, but what are you doing to made that first exposure a good one?

Many companies assume that because all is well on their website, their search listing will convey the right things. But unless you’ve made an effort to optimize your site’s description, Google may be deciding for you what to show to customers. For example, if your website is about water fountains and you haven’t inserted water fountain keywords in your description tag, Google will pull from other areas on your website to create a snippet of text when someone searches on water fountains. You may or may not like what it picks.

If you want your search listing to really speak to people, then first insert your most important keywords and a good call to action in your description tag. If you do that, Google will most likely use that as the text for the search listing. If Google feels that some other text on your site is more relevant to the searcher’s search, you can guide it to other parts of your page by inserting more keywords there too. The more you optimize content to what searchers are looking for, the more likely your search listing will show something polished instead of some random piece of text that does nothing for you.

First touches are important, and in the online marketing world, it just takes a little digging into website code to polish your presentation.

Image credit to Victoria Pickering

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