Three myths about meta descriptions

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. A few things about meta descriptions that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

“It only matters for big sites”

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 practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one.

“Our platform handles it”

Around 155 characters survives most truncation. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.