Your website’s face value is the immediate effect it has on users when they see your website in search results.
Improving your website’s face value for search engine’s search results will increase the click-through rate and lead to more traffic on your website. It is the first impression that matters so much because of the amount of search results a user can sort through. With one glance, you want the user to know your name, what you do, and an amount of credibility that makes the user feel comfortable choosing your website.
The Basics
By now everyone knows the standard search result layout for any given website. There is a title, description and link to the website’s home page. Every website needs to take advantage of the title and description, to make it eye catching, informative and appealing to any user that may be searching keywords related to the website. Doing this requires putting your main topic, or purpose, of your website in the title and description. This will make it easier for search engine robots, to understand what the website is about, and when to display it in search results, and for users to understand right away if it is what they are searching for.
The Extras
There is always more that can be done to give search engines more information about your website for it to display in search results. This is where Schema markup comes in handy. Adding Schema markup to your html, or including it using JSON, will pass extra information to search engines to be displayed in the special search results, such as rich snippets and rich cards on Google. This can be extremely useful to show users a review, or average rating of your business, in the search results, giving them another reason to click through to the website. If your website is the only website on a given search results page, that has an average user rating displayed, users are more likely to click the search results based on the credibility your search results provides at first glance, compared to the competition.
Summary
Google and other search engines giants are continually improving their algorithms and search results to always provide users with the most relevant information. Rich cards and rich snippets are just two examples of how search results are progressing to show the best search results possible. Website’s that have strong SEO and take advantage of new search engine features will have a greater face value and higher click-through rate.