Meta descriptions: a practical guide

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. This guide covers what meta descriptions actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why this earns attention

Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

Where to start

Write them as ad copy, not as a summary. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Around 155 characters survives most truncation. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click
• Write them as ad copy, not as a summary
• Around 155 characters survives most truncation
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

The mistakes we see most

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Turning this into a decision

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.