SERP is the shortened way of saying Search Engine Results Page. When you search for something on Google, you’re then taken to a new page with all of the results that best match what you’ve searched for – this is the SERP.

There are a lot of ingredients that go into a solid marketing campaign, with SEO one of the major ones. Optimizing the way your business appears on the SERP is just one piece of the SEO puzzle and is perhaps one of the easiest things that you can do.

Showing potential customers clearly in the list of results that you have what they’re looking for through the title tag and meta description will drive clicks to your website and increase your leads/sales.

If you know where to go, you can update both the title tags and meta descriptions of each of the pages on your website. It is important to stay in line with the latest best practices when you’re writing them, as approaching them the wrong way may harm how your business is perceived.

A meta description serves as a longer description of what’s on a particular page of a website. When used in combination with a well-written title tag, it can be a great way to increase the number of click-throughs you get from the SERP.

Several factors go into creating an effective meta description such as sticking to a certain number of total characters and including the keyword/keyword phrase (exact or very similar) you’re looking to rank for.

On the results page after searching for something on Google, you’ll see a list of pages. Each page has a title tag, which is in the larger blue font. Title tags are also shown in the tab at the top of your browser window.

Writing a good title tag involves knowing the latest best practices, which are always changing.

For instance, it’s now advised to limit each title tag to 50–60 characters (including spaces), to use capital letters sparingly, and to avoid using all-caps that ‘yell’ at your customers.

A well-produced title tag can have a huge impact on the performance of your site, so be sure to spend enough time putting each of them together.

There are little snippets of text within a page’s HTML code that provide information about the content that’s on the page. This assists search engines to quickly crawl the HTML and learn what the page is about. While some are important for SEO purposes, others may not directly be (but can affect other areas like user experience).

There are several different types of meta tags, including (but not limited to):

• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Alt text tag
• Header tags
• Canonical tags
• Responsive design meta tags

While there are guides that suggest the recommended lengths for title tags (up to 50-60 characters) and meta descriptions (up to 160 characters), the way it actually appears on the Google SERP may result in either (or both) being cut off.

To check that both your title tags and meta descriptions won’t be cut off – and also look great – you can use our free Google SERP preview tool found at the top of this page!

We’ve made it nice and easy to use our Google SERP preview tool!

All you have to do is use the designated fields to type in the title tag, meta description and URL you want to check and it’ll show up directly in the SERP snippet.

You can also choose to include a date stamp and star rating if you’d like to see everything looks together.

If you’re still unsure of how to use the tool, we’re can help you through it all. Simply call our friendly team on 1800 556 726 and we’ll talk you through the steps.