01Two problems that look identical
When enquiries are thin, people reach for the same explanation: we need to rank higher. Sometimes that is right. Often it is not, and acting on it means paying for months of work aimed at a problem you did not have.
There are two separate things happening when somebody searches. First, does your business appear at all. Second, of the people who see it, does anybody pick it. Search engines call the second one click through rate, and it is the number almost nobody looks at.
You can be third on the page and be ignored by ninety-eight people out of a hundred. That is not a ranking failure. That is a failure to give anybody a reason to choose you, in the two lines you get.
02How to tell which one you have
Open Google Search Console, go to the Performance report and make sure both Impressions and Average position are switched on alongside Clicks.
Now look for rows with a lot of impressions and very few clicks. An impression means Google showed your page to somebody. If a page has been shown two thousand times in three months and has thirty clicks, that is one and a half per cent, and something is wrong with the listing rather than the ranking.
As a rough guide, a page in the top three positions should be picking up somewhere around a quarter of the clicks for that search. If you are up there and getting a few per cent, the ranking is doing its job and the words are not.
03What the two lines actually are
What you see in a search result is a title and a description. Both come from your page, and both can be rewritten in about a minute.
The title is the blue clickable line. It has room for about sixty characters before Google cuts it off with an ellipsis, and a title that has been cut off mid-sentence is one of the most reliable ways to lose clicks. People read a half finished sentence as a half finished business.
The description is the grey text underneath, and you get about a hundred and sixty characters. Google does not always use what you write, but it usually does when what you wrote is relevant to the search.
04What a good one looks like
The commonest failure is a title that describes the page rather than helping the reader. "Services | Company Name Ltd" tells somebody nothing they did not already know from searching.
A title that works usually contains the thing they searched for, the place, and one reason to pick you. "Boiler Servicing in Uckfield from £95 | Same Week Booking" is not elegant prose, but every part of it is doing work. The person scanning the page can see it is the right service, the right town, an affordable price and a quick appointment, before they have clicked anything.
The description is where you answer the unspoken question, which is usually a worry rather than a fact. Nervous about cost, nervous about being sold to, nervous about the mess. Addressing that in one sentence beats another paragraph of features.
05Why this is the cheapest work available
Rewriting titles and descriptions changes nothing about your ranking. You are not competing for a better position. You are converting attention you already have.
It also shows up fast. Google usually recrawls a page within a week or two, and the effect appears in the same report you used to diagnose it. Compared with the three to six months a genuine ranking improvement takes, this is close to immediate.
If somebody has quoted you for months of search work and has not mentioned your click through rate, ask them about it before you sign anything. It is the first place I look, because sometimes the honest answer is that a morning’s writing is all you need.
Written by Morgan Loughton at Ferris Creative in Forest Row. If something here does not match what you are seeing on your own site, email me and I will take a look.