My old website went from page 8 to page 2 in 3 months with one simple change

I run a small used bookstore in Portland and my website was basically invisible on Google. Nobody was clicking through at all. I spent about a year just throwing blog posts up hoping something would stick. Then I noticed my meta descriptions were all auto-generated junk like "Welcome to our site!" stuff that says nothing. I rewrote every single one to be a short sentence about what the page actually offers. Three months later my traffic from search went up something like 40 percent. It was the only thing I changed so it had to be that. Has anyone else seen results from something as boring as meta descriptions?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_roberts419d ago

You rewrote every single one" - did you actually track which pages got the biggest jumps after that? I'm curious if it helped the homepage more or the category pages for stuff like mystery or sci fi. In my experience with old content, sometimes just one or two pages carry all the weight while the rest stay dead.

ellis.diana8d ago

Tracked it all actually... used to think you just needed to hit the main pages and the rest would follow, but that sci fi category page alone went up like 300% after I rewrote it, while the homepage barely moved. The mystery page stayed flat until I rewrote the product descriptions too, then it jumped. Really changed my mind about spreading the work around instead of just chasing the biggest pages.