Meta descriptions: what to get right first

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. If you only fix one thing about meta descriptions this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Start here

Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Then this

Write them as ad copy, not as a summary. 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.

Eventually

Around 155 characters survives most truncation. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.