Titles or Description: What Do You Read?
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The other day I was searching for a new office chair and noticed something that I think I was only vaguely aware of before. As I search, I tend to look only at the descriptions when reviewing natural results and only the titles when viewing PPC results. This was all unconscious, (until I became aware of it) so it got me thinking as to why.
I know PPC allows titles to be easily manipulated therefore I might expect more of the keywords to appear in the ad title. If not, I would no more expect them to be in the description assuming that a single ad is covering many keywords. Those descriptions just tend to be sales fodder, not necessarily the specifics that I’m looking for.
On the other hand, with the natural results I know that while titles can often tend to be geared for more general keywords, some of the specific features I was looking for might be pulled into the search engine description snippets. Result after result I found myself ignoring the title almost entirely and focusing on the descriptions to see if my keywords were highlighted in the description area or not.
I know search patterns are different for different people, but I wonder if I’m an odd man out or if more people have the same tendencies as me. What do you read in your search results?
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[...] on my own personal search habits, where I spend more time looking at, and therefore reading, the descriptions rather than the titles in SERPs, I think search engines would better serve their audience by giving longer descriptions in [...]
June 6th, 2008 at 8:23 am