Why use emoji?

Emoji in your page title, meta description, or even your URL lets you stand out from the crowd. This way, you are one step ahead in the search results, and there’s a higher chance your target group will click on your search result and will visit your website.

Besides that, people can now search with emoji. You might think the same search results will appear when searching with emoji instead of text, but the reality proves otherwise. Search queries with emoji show search results where this emoji is used. When you’ve added emoji to your page title and description, you can be the first to show.

To know how popular the emoji is that you want to use, you can use Google Trends. Fill in your ‘key emoji’, and it shows you how frequently it is used.

Emoji in search engines

Bing was the first search engine to show emoji in its search results and to support searching with emoji. Nowadays, every search engine has the functionality to search with and show emoji.

To prevent people from abusing this functionality by using emoji in every single description, Google has created an algorithm when it does and doesn’t show emoji. Google doesn’t show emoji when:

• The emoji doesn’t fit the content;
• The emoji is misleading;
• The emoji is too spammy.

Luckily, Google doesn’t punish the search results that don’t fit the demands of Google. The only thing Google does with these kinds of search results is removing the emoji and only show the text.

Besides that, it’s good to know that not all search engines understand it when you use emoticons like 🙂 (smiley-face emoticon) instead of emoji. Most search engines will show no results when using emoticons. So make sure you only use emoji in your page title and meta description, and not emoticons.

Finally, Google only shows emoji in its organic search results and not in its Text and Shopping Ads. So don’t try to put emoji in your ads. Google My Business advises not to use emoji in the company name unless this represents your company.

Emoji in video

Because people can search with emoji, and Google shows videos in its search results, you can also use emoji in your video marketing strategy. Google will show videos with the same emoji as the one search with before the videos that didn’t use the emoji¹.

Emoji in social media

Meta descriptions and page titles do not only show in search results but in social media too. Whenever you place a link in your social post, the title and description will show underneath it. That’s how emoji can even make your link inside a social post stand out.

Besides that, when someone searches with emoji within search engines, social accounts with this emoji will also show. So adding emoji to your social account’s name will get more visibility online too.

How to optimize your search results?

Other ways to make your website stand out in all the search results are:

1. Length

The length of your page title and meta description is essential. Although you probably want to add as many keywords and triggers to your search result, you don’t want Google to break them off. Unbroken page titles and meta descriptions even score better in Google than the search results that are too long and broken off.

Keep in mind that Google can only show page titles that are a maximum of  70 characters, and the optimal length is 30-70 characters. Meta descriptions can only be 160 characters, but the perfect length is 70-130 characters².

Our MODX Extra SEO Pro helps you to optimize your page title and meta description.

2. Keywords

Place the most important and relevant keyword for a specific page first in the page title and meta description. Make sure that when you put this keyword first, you still get a correct sentence.

3. Call to action

Using a Call to Action is an effective way to make searchers click on your search result. The best calls to action to put in the page title are ‘Buy’, ‘Shop’ and ‘Now’, and the ones for the meta description are ‘View’, ‘Order’ and ‘Now’².

4. USP

Unique Selling Points show what makes your company different or better than your competitors. USPs make sure you stand out, also in search results. Find out what makes your company unique and add this to the page title or meta description. The best USPs in search results’ page titles are ‘Free’, ‘Cheap’ and ‘Customized’ and for the meta description are ‘Free’, ‘Fast’ and ‘Assortment’.

5. Brackets/Parenthesis

Adding brackets or parenthesis to your page title can also rise the traffic to your website⁴. This is because it helps to improve the readability of the search result, so searchers understand faster what the webpage is about and what they get when they click on the link.

6. Summary

The last optimization is adding an overview, which you can perfectly combine with your USPs and for showing lists. Lists seem to end up on top of all search results, so adding a summary or show the number of tips you give seems to help with that. Summaries can be shown with a horizontal (-) or vertical (|) line, or you can use emoji like checkmarks and plus signs.

Featured snippets

Besides optimizing your page title and meta description, you can also optimize your content and let your search result stand out with a featured snippet. A featured snippet is a block with some text that quickly answers the search query. A huge benefit is that this featured snippet is shown on top of all the other organic search results. It also takes up a significant amount of space on the search results page. Do you want to optimize your content for featured snippets? Read all about it in our blog about featured snippet optimization.