Meta descriptions: the questions we get asked most

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. The questions about meta descriptions that come up most often on our calls.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Do we need to care about this?

Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How do we know it is working?

Around 155 characters survives most truncation. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

How to tell if yours is fine

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about meta descriptions before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.