Are titles and description tags helpful to increase the organic CTR – clicks generated from organic (unpaid) search – which in turn will help in better ranking with a personalized search perspective?

Great question! So many people think about rankings, and stop right there. That’s not the right way to think about things. You want to think about your rankings and then you want to think about maximizing your click through, which means making your title and your snippet very, very compelling, not deceptive, but something that invites the users to click on it because they know they’ll find what they want.

Then you want to think about conversion rates and you want to get good ROI. So, titles and description tags absolutely can increase your organic click through rates.

Try to optimize for that because it doesn’t really matter how often you show up, it matters how often you get clicked on, and how often you take those clicked-on visits and convert them to whatever you want; sales, purchases, subscriptions etc.

I wouldn’t think about it in terms of ‘Oh, it gets me more visitors and that helps me in terms of personalized search’. Just think of it in terms ‘I get more visitors and they convert better’.

Do spend some time looking at your title, looking at your URL, looking at your snippet that Google generates and see if you can find ways to improve that and make it better for users, because they’re more likely to click.

You’ll get more visitors, you’ll get better return on your investment.

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