How to get meta descriptions right
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The short answer to meta descriptions is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
What it costs to ignore
Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Write them as ad copy, not as a summary
- Around 155 characters survives most truncation
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Around 155 characters survives most truncation. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
What to do next
What this looks like day to day
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
None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.