Why meta descriptions matters more than it looks

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Meta descriptions is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The reason this keeps coming up

Descriptions do not rank you, but they win the click. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

Write them as ad copy, not as a summary. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The mistakes we see most

Around 155 characters survives most truncation. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

How to tell if yours is fine

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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.