What’s a Search Presentation Snippet and Why it’s Important for your Site

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Google Is Your Homepage – Part 2 -”The Snippet Text”

by Rusty Bishop,PhD

Search Presentation is the way your relevant page links appear to searchers in Organic Search results. In normal person speak, those are all the links that Google serves up in “blue, black, and green” when you search, not the ads that you never click.

In the Google-driven internet, it is critical that your Search Presentation contains appealing, information-rich text to attract visitors to your site.

I recently wrote about the three parts of the Search Presentation. Let’s quickly review based on the example below.

1. Page Title

2.Snippet

3. URL (web address)

Importance of the Snippets – Think Abstract

Studies show that many searchers rapidly scan snippets looking for key information (Google actually published 1 sec as the average time) about the relevancy of your offering.

The snippet is a great place to capture visitors with targeted key phrases and information that explains exactly what the visitor can expect to find when they choose your webpage.

In science terms, consider it the Abstract of your product or service page. For those not familiar, take a look at any scientific manuscript, the Abstracts are the first content you see.

Like any good Abstract, the snippet should contain easily readable text that entices the searcher to click through to your site.

Most companies we see in our QuickChecks fail to capitalize on the snippet opportunity. So let’s fix it!

Where does the Search Snippet Come From?

Snippets mostly come from two places on your webpage.

1. The meta description – in your site’s code, but only seen in Search Presentation

2. The page content – in your site’s content, can be shown in Search Presentation

In both cases, the text is copied by a search spider and indexed along with the page.

When someone enters a search string, Google presents the text usually containing one or more terms from the search in the snippet (see the example above my search terms are in bold in the snippet).

Why is the Snippet Broken or Showing Non-Sense Text?

Google and other engines will give preference to the meta description only when it contains terms entered in the search by the searcher.

Otherwise, Google will show random snippets of text from the page it “thinks” is relevant to the search in an attempt to query this searcher.

The meta description and snippet are limited to 157 characters.

For this reason, you see broken text strings like the above example ending in “…” when the words in a searchers query are contained in different parts of your content or you write meta descriptions longer than 157 characters.

How Do I get Google to Show What I Want?

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

I like to imagine the Google Organic Results are saying – “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Our job as marketers then is to help search engines associate our products with what our customers might enter into their search query.

For example, if your product is an antibody, an academic scientist might enter western blot or anti-mouse along with a specific protein name.  Those terms can be added into the meta description underlying your product page to grab the attention of the searcher.

I might restate the above as – - By anticipating what terms scientists might search for to find your product you can provide attractive words to entice clicks to your page.

Of course you won’t get them all in 157 characters, so you have to target correctly based on research and market segmentation.

Sounds like work, huh?

It is work, but if you do it correctly you will get more relevant click throughs from Organic Searchers that drives more sales and leads.

Once again-

Remember the job of Search Companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is to return the most relevant results to their customer, the searcher.

They want people to keep using their search engine.

The more that people use their search engine, the more money they make.

It’s also how you make money, because Google is Your Homepage!

In our next article, we’ll show you how we work with our clients to write great meta descriptions to attract scientists.