Signs it is time to revisit meta descriptions
Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. A few signals that meta descriptions is due some attention.
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
The signals
- Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
- The answer depends on who you ask
- Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click
- Write them as ad copy, not as a summary
The practical version
Around 155 characters survives most truncation. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
What this looks like day to day
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about meta descriptions before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Around 155 characters survives most truncation — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.