3 Things That Affect How You Look in Google Search
Optimizing your Google appearance is important for a couple of reasons.
The first, and most obvious, is branding. Even before someone navigates to your site, they can start to form an opinion about who you are and what you do in the results.
It’s also important for getting organic clicks. Ranking for a given query is just the beginning. But you still need people to click on your site over your competitors in the SERPs.
For the purpose of this guide, I’m going to show you examples of people and businesses so you can see how each of these factors is a bit different.
Here are the three key factors that affect how you look in Google Search:
1. Images
If we search for an individual, the initial results will likely be image-heavy.
Here’s an example with Rand Fishkin:
Since we’re searching for a person, Google serves up personal information about Rand first.
So we can see that his LinkedIn profile appears before his business. However, we can also see that a photo used on SparkToro (the second result) is the primary image that’s being show to us as well.
These results will look completely different if we instead search for SparkToro (Rand’s business):
Since this is a software company, we aren’t getting any product images in the SERPs.
But we do have the favicon displayed, which is the SparkToro logo. This is definitely something that’s important to have for your website, as it directly aligns with your branding in the SERPs.
2. Meta Descriptions and Bios
Don’t overlook the importance of writing a good meta description. This is more important for businesses than individuals, but it’s still applicable for both.
Although for individual branding, it’s more likely that Google will pull insights from your bio to serve up as a meta description.
Here’s the meta description for SparkToro’s homepage:
And here’s one for Rand’s “Team” page on the SparkToro website:
It looks like Google didn’t actually serve up the meta description that SparkToro intended for this one.
If we go to the source code of this page and search for the meta description, we can see that it’s not aligned with what we’re seeing above.
But that’s totally fine, and it happens sometimes with meta descriptions. You should still have them on all of your pages.
3. Social Media
This is another big one.
For individuals, make sure you have links to your social pages on all of your company pages. This helps Google verify who you are and makes it easier for them to display those results in the SERPs.
As we can see with Rand, all of his social accounts are visible when we search for his name:
We don’t see social profiles in the sidebar for SparkToro, but they still dominate the search results.
The company website is the first thing we see organically in the SERPs. But after we scroll past the “People also ask” section of the page, four of the next six results are all social media profiles:
Now that you know what has the biggest impact on your Google search results, it’s time make sure all of this information is optimized for your personal brand and your business.
And as you can see from the examples we covered, this stuff matters a lot more than you might have initially realized.
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