A practical checklist for meta descriptions

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Run through this the next time meta descriptions comes up.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The checklist

• 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
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about meta descriptions before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Write them as ad copy, not as a summary — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.