Ads in the organic listings? You’re probably thinking I’m crazy. “There aren’t ads in the organic area of the Search Engine Results Pages - those are naturally ranked listings”, is what I imagine you saying. But wait…

Back up and think about it, not from an Search Engine’s point of view, but from the point of view of the human searcher. A query indicates a person is looking for something among the search results and they will click on the listing that holds the most promise of delivering the answer they seek.

The purpose of your listings is to entice searchers to click on them and go to your web site. Your listing competes for that click with all the other listings and sponsored ads on the page. Your page title and description are copy you publish on the web to promote your online goals. So, if you aren’t thinking of them as ads, you should be.

Here are a few examples of page titles and meta descriptions that don’t do a very good job soliciting searchers:

You get much more space in your page title than you do in an AdWords ad title, which can give you the opportunity to do a fine job of both Search Engine Optimization and selling your click to the searcher. Google currently displays no more than 70 title characters in their SERPs, but err on the cautious side with 63 or less to avoid truncated page titles. A safe number of characters to use in the metadescription is 156 or less., for the same reason.

Here are examples of the title and description doing double duty as honest optimization and effective ad copy:

Do you prefer this one?

Or this one?

Enough said?

So, check all of your listings in the SERPs. It’s easy to do by using the site: command in the Google search bar, with your URL instead of mine, of course:

Check your competitors’ listings, too, to learn what you can from them.

Make note of which ads should be improved and get to work rewriting your organic ad copy now!