New Survey Highlights the Importance of SEO Basics

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an indispensable tool for businesses striving to make their mark in the online world.

While many aspects of SEO have gained widespread attention, some fundamental elements often go overlooked. In particular, SEOs and content marketers do not pay enough attention to meta titles and meta descriptions anymore.

These seemingly small elements wield immense power in boosting your website’s visibility and driving organic traffic. And a recent survey highlights the importance of these basic SEO fundamentals once again.

Here are a few key findings from that survey that can help you improve your page titles and search engine rankings.

The correlation between keyword-rich meta titles and top Google positions

According to a new survey by BrightEdge, 85% of meta titles that feature keywords rank on Google’s first 5 positions.

This proves the importance of keyword-rich meta titles and how they can benefit pages wanting to rank higher on the SERPs.

In our own experiments, we have been able to improve search engine rankings of certain pages by rewriting meta titles and strategically incorporating relevant keywords in the titles.

Sentence or title case

This survey also helped clarify an important debate — whether the titles should be in sentence case or title case.

The results showed that 90% of the top pages that rank between positions 1 and 5 either use sentence case or title case consistently. So it’s not important to pick one over another. However, it is important to stick to your chosen style consistently.

Correlation between grammatical mistakes and lower search engine rankings

Although Google said in 2017 that grammar is not a search engine ranking signal, the survey revealed that 25% of the pages that appear lower on the search engine results page (SERP) are more likely to have grammatical errors in their meta titles and meta descriptions.

While it does not necessarily establish causation, it is interesting nevertheless and highlights the possibility that grammatical errors in meta titles and meta descriptions may affect search engine rankings — possibly because of the lower click-through rate.

Crafting perfect meta titles and meta descriptions takes time

The survey also revealed an interesting tidbit that 50% of marketers spend 4-6 hours every week writing and perfecting meta titles and meta descriptions.

Here is the full breakdown:

• 50% of marketers invest 4-6 hours per week on meta titles and meta descriptions.
• 30% of marketers invest 7-9 hours per week on meta titles and meta descriptions.
• 20% of marketers invest 1-3 hours per week on meta titles and meta descriptions.

100% of SEOs agree on the importance of meta content

In the world of SEO, it is nearly impossible for everyone to agree on something.

But this survey changed that.

100% of the SEO professionals who were surveyed agree that meta content — meta titles and meta descriptions — is important.

70% of surveyed marketers said that having correct meta content is a key priority. The rest of the 30% said it was either “important” or “very important.”

The takeaways

Although the survey was of 300 enterprise marketers, it reveals interesting insights into what’s working and what’s not — especially when it comes to meta titles and meta descriptions.

In today’s modern-day SEO, it is easy to neglect the importance of these two SEO fundamentals. But that shouldn’t be the case.

Are you utilizing meta titles and meta descriptions as effectively as you can? Let us know in the comment section.