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Supercharging your meta descriptions with copywriter Lewis Folkard
65 Plays2 years ago
Meta Descriptions are an essential part of SEO. They can motivate or repel potential visitors to your website. When your site appears in search engine results, you need to ensure the meta description shown for your site is more appealing than the meta descriptions your competitors have written.
So how do you write compelling, exciting and motivating meta descriptions? In this episode of the untitled SEO podcast, we talk to advert copywriter Lewis Folkard.
Lewis breaks down what it takes to write an effective advert and how pertinent ad-writing theory is to writing perfect meta descriptions.
We heartily recommend you visit Lewis's website and sign up for his brilliant email newsletter. In his newsletter, Lewis breaks apart classic adverts to show how they work and which elements are worth considering when marketing your own company.
https://lewisfolkard.co.uk/
Find Lewis on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lewisfolkard-copywriter/
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast. This episode, I have a guess. I have a guess. Actually, you've got to introduce yourself. Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. But my name is Lewis Volkup, and I am a freelance copywriter. Now, the reason I've invited Lewis along, we've worked together for about 10 years now. The reason I've brought Lewis along is I think one of the greatest strengths is he has a copywriter.
00:00:29
Speaker
Is that be fair? It's definitely where I spend most of my time, put it that way. Lewis does a very good series of outbreak hours that you can find a link in or subscribe for on Lewis' website. We'll include the link in the show notes.
00:00:48
Speaker
So the reason I brought you here today is to talk about writing meta descriptions.
Importance of Meta Descriptions for SEO
00:00:54
Speaker
Because meta descriptions are very important for SEO, but not a direct thing for ranking factors, because Google doesn't really review meta descriptions and put a lot of emphasis on that, affecting the way you rank.
00:01:06
Speaker
But it has a really important knock-on effect if you write good meta descriptions, because in SEO success breeds success, and the more people read your meta descriptions and then click the link through to your website, the more times that happens, the more successful people see you are, and the more important that you need to be. So we'd better start just with a complete kind of 101.
00:01:30
Speaker
of meta descriptions. A meta description is the little bit of text that you'll see underneath the link to your website or another website when you look at searching results. In a WordPress site you can edit this using Yoast or RankMath
00:01:45
Speaker
in a number of other methods. It's just as easy to edit in Squarespace or almost any other, almost any other way, CMS on your website, the order or editor. So the reason I have you here, Lewis, is I've always seen meta descriptions as an advert. They are your opportunity to make your proposition on your website look better than those of your competitors.
00:02:12
Speaker
That makes perfect sense as well. I like the fact that we've clearly spoken before. I like you acting along the... Oh, that's new information to me. That's fantastic. Well, it's my pleasure. I haven't told you who I am. I'm Andrew Dawes. I'm the founder of the SEO chief human at the SEO. Right.
The 4Us Framework for Meta Descriptions
00:02:35
Speaker
So what's the first thing we need to consider about the language we use when
00:02:41
Speaker
Again, I'm going to go on as though this wasn't pre-planned, but the 4Us is something that I think are very relevant to better descriptions and just any kind of copyright and communication really. I'll explain what the 4Us are, so we have useful, ultra-specific
00:03:03
Speaker
urgent and unique and you need to kind of embody those four components into your meta description to make sure that you are talking to the right people and you are sparing them on to click through to your site and you do that by making something that's very useful.
00:03:20
Speaker
Excellent. So the whole point is, as I said earlier, when your website appears next to those of your competitors, anyone who hasn't written a message description, they'll message description when you say things like, copyright 2009. So can you talk us through each of the four U's please? Let's see how they apply to message descriptions.
00:03:42
Speaker
Yeah. So we'll, we'll start with useful. I feel like that is your opportunity to give some kind of value to build trust and credibility with your audience, people that are about to or potentially going to click on your website. Um, but it's just sort of to have a bit of skin in the game and to show that, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about. This is a little snippet of the value that I can give you. Um, and it's kind of just an actual, I guess, heuristic to, to want to find out more from that. Um,
00:04:11
Speaker
If we take on to the next one, do you want to talk about that one in a bit more detail, or do you want to keep going through them? If you lay them out, and then we'll just sort of have, we'll pull them around a bit after that, so you've got them useful. Ultra-specific, a little bit of a play there, but it's to make sure that we are talking, talking in clear language, and ultimately, yes, being as specific as we can be with what they're about to find out when they click through to the page.
00:04:40
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, unique. So yeah, we need to consider what other messages are out there and what your reader could be seeing and to make sure that we stand out and it's the uniqueness that's going to help us stand out. And the last one is the urgent or urgency is to make sure that they click through to the site now and not 5, 10, 20,
00:05:09
Speaker
three days later because you kind of have one shot at it and you need to make sure that you're doing everything you can in that moment to bring them through to your website. I can see a lot of this is based in fairly traditional marketing, I guess. If you're thinking back to sort of magazine adversaries and newspaper adverts, these are the core things that you need to get people's attention. Yeah, direct response side of things. Yeah, exactly. But I can also see that from a paid advertising background, this is being core to it.
00:05:39
Speaker
for many years, but I've yet to find anyone talk about meta descriptions in these terms. Because we only have 160-ish characters. I say ish because it kind of depends on how big the characters are. If you were to write a meta description that was just the number one over and over again, you'd fit more than 160 characters in. But let's assume it's roughly 160 characters. That's not
00:06:09
Speaker
unique and urgent, all rolled into one or two neat sentences.
00:06:16
Speaker
I guess you just have to use everything you've got available. You've got a headline, you can sort of go through and cater for two of the use, for example, and your sub-copy can then go through and sort of cover the other two. I guess it's probably best not to think of it as a checklist because naturally you're not going to be able to get all four in all the time. But sometimes when the opportunity presents itself, you should make the most of it. It's sort of like things that run through your copy rather than tick box exercises.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, you mentioned something really interesting there. You mentioned headline kind of talking very much in terms of PPC ads or print ads. And in this context, from SEO context, your headline is going to be your page title, isn't it? So if you can cover off, say, not check this, but you can cover off one or two of those things in your page title,
00:07:07
Speaker
As long as that's optimized, because having a keyword in your page type is important, you can actually cover some of that off in the page type, which will appear above your message
Lewis's Digital Nomad Lifestyle
00:07:16
Speaker
description. So if you've covered off maybe useful and ultra-specific, but in your actual message description, then you can cover off the unique and urgent. Are we going to see your dad walk in there? There's one more door. Here we go.
00:07:30
Speaker
Anyway, this is the reality. Working from home, this one. It's not just working. I'm a listener. I've worked with this for a long time. I've had meetings repeatedly while this is in Colombia or Mexico or somewhere in the Far East. This is fairly normal for us. Would you call yourself a digital nomad or are you just a woman?
00:07:55
Speaker
Part-time no mad, shall we say? Part-time, so is that just a mad? Yeah, I say eight months or so of the year I'm thought about other places in the world. So you're just a mad rather than a mad?
00:08:11
Speaker
I want to try and come up with some examples here for how we could use the title and the description to write what in reality is an advert for a website.
Applying the 4Us Framework to Real Examples
00:08:21
Speaker
Unless you've got any examples prepared, should we just pull one out of thin air? I haven't got any examples prepared, no, so let's wipe our brains. Really putting you on the spot here. There we go.
00:08:31
Speaker
Okay, so if somebody, let's use a client that we've worked with mutually, okay? So we've both mutually worked with a company called Wood Farm Farms. Hello, Carl. And they do dog-friendly holiday days. So they have these kind of modern barns. They're not huge old barns, but modern barns all have hot tubs, all have one before eating. They're all very nice and you can take your dog.
00:08:59
Speaker
So if there was a page on that website about the things you get, if you go and stay at this place, it's called Wood Farm Barnes, just in case I didn't say that already. Then the title, I'm going to leave this and you can, you can optimize it, criticize it or correct it. So I would leave the title that says, Wood Farm Barnes,
00:09:27
Speaker
I'm going to make this deliberately poor so you have to optimize it. So I would set the page title as Wood Farm Barns, Dog Holidays, The Extra Things, and in the meta description I would put, nice duvets, hot tubs, you get a breakfast basket, come and stay with us.
00:09:58
Speaker
like to say forever any of my clients that that's not me that's me deliberately not doing my best work there. I'm deliberately making some opportunities there voice to improve. So obviously kind of your craft and skill isn't something you kind of click your fingers and pull out a thin air and good copyright requires an awful lot of thought and they both subscribe to the psychosynthetics kind of school of letting your brain run things over for a while but
00:10:17
Speaker
It's certainly unique. I think it takes one of the years off there.
00:10:26
Speaker
Just off the top of your head, could you think of a better page title than Woodfarm Barnes, the extra stuff you get? Let me just write this down as well, because once I see it visually, I'm able to write a word file into the method. Woodfarm Barnes, what was it, sorry? Dog friendly, the extra stuff you get.
00:10:51
Speaker
dog friendly, the extra stuff we get. Nice. And then my meta description was, nice place to stay, hot tubs, breakfast basket. It's getting worse by the minute. New doormats, dog spoken.
00:11:09
Speaker
I mean, yeah, there's definitely some stuff there, so we can, one, the extra stuff you get. It depends on how much space we've got left really for the page style, but we need to make that more specific. An example we could do with the sub copy, a nice place to stay, a nice is very vague, and we can, again, pick something that's more specific and talks to a desirable emotion. Nice is, yeah, just way too vague. Dog basket, we could go into details on what kind of dog baskets.
00:11:38
Speaker
and whether they cater for all sizes and shapes. Even the materials they've made out of, anything that's kind of got that specificness, specificity, I guess is the correct way, just is a lot more believable as well. It just helps paint a clearer picture in your reader's mind. That's all to say as well, that any time we write this kind of thing, or whether we get Lewis's help,
00:12:06
Speaker
is always led by how well you know your own client. So you'd never write an advert or an article for a client who you didn't fully understand. I don't know, I don't need to make caveats. I mean, I make clear that it is a daft example. But one of the things that any good marketer would know is what it is that motivates their audience, their potential customers. And there are certain psychological prompts that work almost across the board, as I understand it.
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much. Just some evolutionary things that, yeah, flaws, I'd say not flaws. They're good for us. Always marketers. Only flaws everyone else. Okay, so let me kind of focus this in a bit more, because obviously I do know about this guy. So this page on their website about the extra bits you get, we know for a fact that people like
00:13:01
Speaker
like that there are facilities in these 4-day letters that are specifically for dog owners. So they have a doggy shower station, where the dog comes back, it's all muddy, you can hose it down. It's like a little shower head on, it's got warm water and whatever.
00:13:20
Speaker
But also, they get organic dog treats, so they get, I don't know, snouts and hemuses or whatever. I've seen them in my videos. Big tears and all. That's probably more polite where I've put it in.
00:13:35
Speaker
So yeah, let's just imagine we were leading with that we were saying that the dog treats are the most popular thing and we know that guests have stayed really all focusing on that and love it and the fact that they can wash the dog. So how about for a title we have dog friendly holidays, organic treats,
00:13:59
Speaker
tasty organic treat. No, it wouldn't be tasty from the human's perspective, but even though it's even more tasty. I'm waiting to float to your boat. So not for any holidays.
00:14:13
Speaker
I mean, some things that come into mind at the minute, just a few words. A doggy spa is a way, a good way of framing it. A lot of existing imagery already we can build upon there. Us humans know what a spa is, but it's sort of like one for your dog, obviously. Even that they're not just dog tolerant, but dog friendly. I know from my experience before, that was a lot of worries from people.
00:14:39
Speaker
Um, was that, you know, a lot of places that say they're dog friendly, but they're not actually dog friendly. They just let you bring your dog along. Yeah. So that's something else. It's probably a message that they're not seeing, which is they're going to stand out or, um, just sort of lure, lure them into the page, basically.
00:14:58
Speaker
I'm not going to go all the way to the finished product here, but introducing something in the title that meets with the SEO requirement, which is dog friendly cottages or nets or whichever we choose, but also putting in something that inspires some mental imagery.
Using Imagery and Urgency in Meta Descriptions
00:15:18
Speaker
in the reader. I think it's an easy way to get more out of less characters as well. If you've got things that already exist in our minds, you know, aspires to any three characters and you're going to get a lot of pre-existing emotions and thoughts and feelings from that that you can build upon. So pre-existing emotions. I love the phrases you use. I'm going to answer the breaks on that part. Pre-existing emotions. So somebody's looking at Google search results and they're scrolling down things. Can you give us some other examples of pre-existing emotions?
00:15:48
Speaker
I mean, if we delve into that a bit more, we know what a spire is, we know what it represents and how it makes us feel going through that. And then rather than trying to explain a whole new concept of what's at Wood Farm Barns, we're just using something that we can already build upon, I guess, but just sort of give it a little unique twist in a way that favours who we're trying to talk to.
00:16:13
Speaker
That's lovely. So I think I say we're not going to drill it all the way to the end, but I think, yeah, we've got a title now that has some emotion. It has some connection with the people who are reading it. They're going to look at it and understand what it is. They know what's going on. It's a proposition they understand. So for the, what do you call the sub, do you call it a sub copy? Sub copy. I'm not sure what the correct term is. We'll just call it sub copy. So for meta description. So in our title, out of the four things, we've got unique.
00:16:44
Speaker
And we've got, I think that's almost, is that ultra-specific saying, you know, there are treats or? I guess so, yeah. I mean, local snouts and anuses. I'll put that as the podcast title. Suffolk-based dog snouts and anuses. No, but the message is still the same that we need it to be as specific as possible, just so it's believable and
00:17:12
Speaker
carries a bit more impact than just dog treats and dog pillows and dog cushions. We can, okay, we've got cashmere dog cushions or something, I don't know. Just take it into much detail and yeah. So I know that these, the full use isn't a checkbox, but I'm trying to think of a way that, how would you roll urgency into that? I've got an idea, but I'm going to let you... I guess I'll give them a reason to click through now.
00:17:37
Speaker
Um, depends on, I guess, what, what the actual search term is that they're looking for and how we can play on that. Um, if we put, my idea would be to put something like, you know, something that gets across posting, sending me scarcity. Um, so something like, if you have the time to keep up to date, you know,
00:18:05
Speaker
I don't say bookings going fast because that's an awful use of English, but something that hints at the fact that if you don't take action now, tell you what. In high demand or something like that. I don't like using discounts with premium brands, but say this wasn't a premium brand, then 10% off, blah, blah, blah, 10% off for the month of February.
00:18:32
Speaker
or whatever you are. So that would put in some urgency. And we've got unique and we've got ultra-specific, useful, useful with implied. Yeah, I said that it's not always going to work. It does depend on the page that we're taking them to. So yeah, there's a way that we can provide a little bit of value. But again, the nature of what we're pushing here is this,
00:18:58
Speaker
How do we give value in such a short space? Probably not possible, but something that we could go into more detail on the actual page itself. Well, I guess for a better description, you don't have to deliver all the value.
00:19:11
Speaker
at that point, because that is only the start of the journey. It needs to be enough to get people to click through. And I'm, I'm trying to equate it in my head to another old copywriting rule, which I think I read for sort of a book, which was recommended by you. And it said, the purpose of a headline is to get somebody to read the subject line.
00:19:32
Speaker
But I think Overby said something very similar as well. So the purpose of the headline is to get someone to read the sub headline. The purpose of the sub headline is to get somebody to read the first paragraph, the first paragraph is to get somebody to read.
00:19:48
Speaker
for an extra nice unit. So like a little invisible thread that sort of runs through all your copy that ties all together and just pulls them along. That works perfectly for this context we're talking about, because your title, well, it is a title, and your meta description, if we treat that as the subheading, that should be enough to want people to then click through to a page, I mean, at which point that journey continues.
Ensuring Relevance and Specificity in Meta Descriptions
00:20:13
Speaker
but brighten that type of met description so that it's more motivating when you're competitive. I'll keep going on about this, but anyone listening to this who is interested in SEO without being massively focused on it, that's a really key thing to remember here, I think. So I think actually relevance becomes a really important thing there as well. So just from an SEO perspective, you can't
00:20:42
Speaker
have a pig in the wolf's clothing. That's not the right phrase. Your page that you're linking through to has to be wholly relevant.
00:20:52
Speaker
to your title headline because people get through and it's not perfectly aligned and they're going to leave your website very fast anyway. I tell you what, I'm padding a bit now. Let's change the four U's to four U's in an R. There we are. The last bit is just relevancy to the page that it's clicking through to. I feel like that makes a lot of sense. Excellent. Now, as is my style in these situations, I can't really really hold it because I'm hopeful. Can you think of
00:21:20
Speaker
a really straightforward example that wouldn't have the smell to it. For which bit, sorry? For the type of meta description. I'm personally trying to think of an example I really like that I've seen recently. Probably a quick Google. See what's on there at the minute. Let's critique some unanimous
00:21:52
Speaker
It's a popular search term, blog friendly, cottages. Let's just fast skateboard. Let's just move to something else. What's coming?
00:22:11
Speaker
It's a bit tricky. I won't say the business names, but I will say at XYZ, we offer plenty of dog friendly cottages in the UK's or in some of the UK's most perfect places for pets with outdoor space for exploring and indoor space dot, dot, dot. That's really nice. I like that. What's the what's the title? What's the headline? Dog Friendly Holidays UK dash XYZ.
00:22:41
Speaker
That kind of sums it up quite nicely. That's quite a nice one. Now, if you were to look at that, how would you tweak that? I would like a bit more specific specificity, so it's such an awful word to say. Well, yeah, we'll go for choosing a word because it's both of us probably to say. I'd like this just a little more detail about what we've got.
00:23:06
Speaker
Again, it says the business name in the headline and the sub copy, which I feel like you could probably do away with one of them. You're constantly beating yourself. Also, unless you are like a household brand, at that point, if someone's never ever heard of you before, the name of your business isn't necessarily going to be a draw. No. Because there's no recognition. There's no, oh look, it's this company and you'll be safe with them. So yeah, you probably could drop it.
00:23:36
Speaker
Again, it's like, for this one, probably 30 or so characters, I would say, that you've got back that you can jump straight into it. Have a look, it's just redundant copy, app, x, y, z, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just don't need it. I mean, we could see in the URL who it is as well. So that's the first bit I would change. There's no real reason to click through.
00:24:09
Speaker
In my opinion, obviously when you're looking, I guess a lot of marketers fail to do that, but it's just to see it in context. On the search page, there's 10, 15, 20 different options here, and you need to stand out with something.
00:24:27
Speaker
And I've honestly I think the dogs but I hate to be a little bit biased because it's my own idea. I feel like jumps jumps away from all of what's here because every single one here has has dog friendly in the title. And an immediate way to stand out is to do something that everybody else is not doing. Literally every single one on the search page begins with dog friendly.
00:24:51
Speaker
Okay, so that's, I mean, sometimes that just has to happen, especially in the title for SEO reasons. Can you read the next one down? Just... Can we not change the position of dog friendly? Would that work? It depends how strong... Or does that have to come first?
00:25:07
Speaker
There's a thing in SEO called keyword prominence, and I don't think it's as important as it used to be. When Google was struggling a bit more to figure out what pages were about, the closer you put your primary keyword to the beginning of a paragraph or a title or a H tag, it kind of helped. I'm not convinced it does anymore. So tell me what you think.
00:25:31
Speaker
Yeah, just like it is the same pattern every search result. Oh, so as you're looking down the page, everything is just dog friendly, dog friendly, dog friendly, dog friendly. Let's just have dog friendly at the end of the headline maybe instead and immediately you've broken a pattern.
00:25:46
Speaker
or disrupt the page. Right, I like this. This isn't something I know a great deal about. So what's the advantage of disrupting the path? Well, you get attention. That's an easy way of, I don't think who said the line, but it's when the world digs, zag, do the opposite. We need to stand out from everyone else because we just blend in and that's
00:26:09
Speaker
The main of most businesses now is they just blend in with everyone else and it's an easy way to get more eyes on your business without having to do it, without having to spend anything extra. That's really neat. I really like that. I can see that just from a visual point of view, you are the zag for everyone else. That's me. I like that. Okay. What else? Just look at other ones we've got here.
00:26:37
Speaker
any that do it particularly well. I've got one here using a social proof, so I browse more than 11,000 bug-friendly holiday cottages in the UK and booked today with XYZ.
Using Social Proof in Meta Descriptions
00:26:49
Speaker
They've also got rated excellent by TripAdvisor, so that's a nice
00:26:55
Speaker
a nice use of probability just away from the four years, but I feel like it's a good, that's the only one that I could see that's actually using something that's going to build trust. Right. Two key things that you mentioned there that I'd like you to explain with just a little bit. Social proof and building trust.
00:27:12
Speaker
Social proof is ultimately that we follow the actions of others, and we tend to trust what most people do. So an example is if there's a street performer playing at the tower, you get a few people, and then the more people that get there, gradually it becomes more and more popular. Or another way of saying it short-hand is that popularity begets more popularity. And as marketers, it's our job to find unique ways of
00:27:41
Speaker
demonstrating that popularity because it's not always obvious. You want to always have 7,000 customers to pick from, but you could be maybe the fastest growing company in your sector or there's something normally that you can state or reframe to show your popularity basically.
00:28:03
Speaker
8 out of 10 cats. It's one of those things that when you learn the phrase, you will start to see it everywhere. Yeah. And again, there are like literal uses and lateral uses. So a literal use is to simply state that we have XYZ customers or the most popular business in Suffolk or something like that. And a lateral use is kind of doing it.
00:28:31
Speaker
I guess discreetly, an example are Apple's headphones. They're white headphones when they first came on the scene. They were the only ones, the only brand at that time to have white headphones. So whenever you saw them, you assumed that they were Apple and it gave the impression of popularity without actually saying, I guess it's just implicit and explicit ways of doing it.
00:28:51
Speaker
And the implicit is generally more believable than the explicit. And because we've got such a short amount of space in the meta-description being explicit is the great one, it is, 305 dollar view. What have we got there? Okay, cool. Anything else you can spot there? It's a simple fact that they put that they are rated excellent by TripAdvisor. That's something that nobody else has done. There's no other
00:29:19
Speaker
to ask you after is who this is, because I'm always interested when somebody is doing it really well. And obviously, people already trust your advisor, so it's an easy way to gain trust. I mean, to definitely make sense from a selling point of view, maybe not from an SEO point of view, I don't know. But yeah, from a persuasive point, it makes sense.
Conclusion: Key Takeaways on Meta Descriptions
00:29:40
Speaker
I always say that you can't be 100% SEO because unless you are a genius, you just become
00:29:50
Speaker
You still want to balance brands and things like that. It's always a balancing act. I found this really interesting actually and I'd like to dig more into this kind of thing in the future. We're running out of time a little bit here, Lewis.
00:30:10
Speaker
If you have a summary, do you have a nice little... Have you prepared a nice little... I think the four years... Well, I'll leave it up to you. You're the copywriting guy. Yeah, I guess in a nutshell, the principles of communication don't really change depending on what medium or...
00:30:29
Speaker
context, however you're using it, they always apply the same. And yeah, to use the foreuse, which are unique, useful, urgent, and ultra-specific, and kind of integrate them in your message, whether that's in your headline and your sub-copy or the longer form copy, however you want to use it. Or we did say that we were adding an R for the SEO foreuse, so we've also got relevancy in there to make sure that we sync up with the page that we're directing to.
00:30:57
Speaker
That's absolutely great. OK, well, Lewis, everyone live deerlessness. I'll put links to Lewis's website and I half the recommend you sign up to his newsletter and breaks down. We shouldn't record these things like late in the afternoon. I'm going to call it quits and say goodbye there. Do you want to say goodbye, Lewis? Oh, thank you for having me again and hopefully speak to you soon.