Emoji in Meta Descriptions SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

Emoji in Meta Descriptions SEO Split Testing Lessons from SearchPilot

For this edition of the #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they expected to have happened when we replaced numbers with emoji in meta descriptions. The response was mixed:

Result of Twitter poll on emoji meta descriptions

No answer gained an overall majority of votes, but the largest group thought that this change wouldn’t have a significant impact on organic traffic. Only one in four of our Twitter followers thought that this change would be negative. In this case, it turns out that the minority was correct. As you’ll read below, this change was negative for organic traffic in this case, a fact that 75% of people got wrong!

The Case Study

The use of emoji can be a divisive topic in SEO, especially in the context of trying to get them shown in search results. On the one hand, they can be eye-catching, and an easy way to get people to notice your result and potentially click on it. On the other hand, they can come across as gimmicky, and some searchers may be put off from clicking because it looks unprofessional.

Before we get into the details of this particular test, a bit of background information on emoji and how they can be used for SEO purposes. Emoji are characters that form part of the Unicode standard for text, alongside letters, numbers, punctuation and all other characters in a wide range of writing systems.

Since they are just Unicode characters, they can be used within HTML elements the same way as any other character. As such they can be included in title tags, meta descriptions and even structured data markup. In general, Google will pull these characters through into the search results as it would for any other character. Note that the emoji will be displayed in the default font of a user’s browser, and as such may be displayed differently to how you might expect.

In this particular test (launched in July 2020), we wanted to test replacing the number of items listed in a website’s category page meta descriptions with the equivalent numerical emoji. For example, 125 would be replaced with 1️⃣2️⃣5️⃣. Below is an example of how this would look in an analogous website’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) snippets.*