Tweaking your SEO Google snippet

When searches are carried out on Google the results are displayed in a list of what are called “Google snippets”. If I search for cphtwebsites on Google.co.uk I get the following results display :

Google snippets are made up of a blue SEO title, a green page link, and a grey SEO description. By default Google will create its own SEO description of your page – usually excerpts from various paragraphs – and sometimes this renders nonsensical. It is therefore a good idea to make sure the SEO description of your homepage is 100% pertinent to your practice.

Start by searching for your practice domain name in Google and see what SEO description appears in the snippet. If the description is nonsensical then you need to manually enter your own SEO description. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and Edit the homepage. Scroll down to the All in One SEO Pack box and manually fill in the Description field (see image below). A good homepage description would be (for example) :

John Smith HPD AfSFH is a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist based in Peckham, London. Tel 0123 456 789 to book a free initial consultation.

… but it’s entirely up to you. As you can see below the SEO description entered manually for the CPHT Websites homepage is “CPHT Websites provides an all-in-one Websites for Hypnotherapists Package which includes website+hosting+domain name for only £450 + £49/year”. You can also enter key words for your homepage. Once finished, Update the page. There is also a shortcut to defining the SEO descriptions / keywords for all pages by going to Pages / All pages.

You don’t have to manually define the SEO description for all of your pages but it’s a good idea to do this at least for the homepage, which is the page that Google will usually show first in the search results.

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