What Is a Meta Description, and Does It Still Matter for Your Website?

Short answer: a meta description is a short summary of a page, written in the page's code, that search engines may show under your title in results. It is not a ranking factor on its own, but a clear, accurate one can earn more clicks. Write a unique one for each important page, about one or two sentences long.

What is a meta description?

Every web page can include a short description in its code, in the head section that visitors don't see on the page itself. It looks something like this:

<meta name="description" content="A short summary of what this page offers.">

When your page appears in search results, that description may be shown as the line or two of text under the page title. That text is often called the snippet. It's your chance to tell searchers, in your own words, what they'll find if they click.

Does a meta description help you rank?

Not directly. Google has said on its Search Central blog that, even though it sometimes uses the description meta tag for the snippets it shows, it doesn't use the description meta tag in its ranking. Its own guidance on search snippets explains how descriptions are used to create the text people see in results.

So the job of a meta description isn't to push a page up the results. Its job is to earn the click once the page is there. A searcher choosing between several results reads those few lines, and a clear, relevant description can make yours the one they pick.

Why do search engines sometimes show different text?

You might write a careful description and then see something else under your page in results. That's normal. Search engines create snippets mainly from the page content, and they may use your meta description when it describes the page better than other text. If another part of your page better matches what someone searched for, they may show that instead.

This is another reason to write descriptions that genuinely summarise the page. The closer the description is to what the page actually offers, the more likely it is to be used.

How do you write a good one?

• Describe the page honestly. Say what the page covers or offers, in plain words.
• Lead with what the reader gets. An answer, a service, a guide, a product.
• Make each one unique. Every important page should have its own description, written for that page.
• Keep it to one or two sentences. Roughly 150 to 160 characters is a useful guide, because longer text may be cut off in results. Treat it as a guide, not a rule.
• Use natural language. Include the words people would use to describe what they want, but write for people, not for search engines.

Which pages need one first?

If you're starting from scratch, begin with the pages people are most likely to find through search:

• Your home page.
• Service or product pages, which are often what searchers are looking for.
• Your contact page.
• Your most important blog posts or guides.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• The same description on every page. This often happens when a website template fills in one default description. It tells searchers nothing about each page.
• Keyword stuffing. A list of search terms reads badly and doesn't help anyone choose your result.
• Promises the page doesn't keep. If the description says one thing and the page delivers another, visitors leave quickly.
• Leaving it blank. Search engines will pick some text for you, but you lose the chance to say it in your own words.

How do you check what yours say?

The quickest check is to search for your own business or pages and read the text under each result. You can also view a page's source in a desktop browser and search for "description" to see what's set.

For a fuller picture, a site audit can list every page that's missing a description or shares one with another page. This sits alongside the other technical basics, such as canonical tags, your XML sitemap and your robots.txt file.

Want your pages set up properly for search?

We write meta descriptions and set up the technical basics so each page is described clearly in search results. See our technical search set-up service, or message us on WhatsApp.