Editorial Staff
Meta description is a brief summary of a web page that are displayed in the SERP.
This snippet of text will appear under your headline or title tag.
In the SERP, here is how it displayed:
And this is how it looks in the HTML code page:
The meta description function is to assist the title tag in describing what your web page about and encourage the visitor to click it.
Take a look on below example:
If you are searching for best website builder comparison, which one you will click based on the meta description?
More likely for the second one, right?
The first example shows an unoptimized description while the second one shows a well optimized description.
If you don’t optimize your meta description, Google will just pick the snippet from your page that containing the keyword in user query.
Why Meta Description is Important in SEO?
Google says that there is no direct SEO benefit from meta description since they don’t use it in the ranking algorithm.
However, there are a hidden indirect benefit to the SEO.
If you can set a great meta description, you definitely can increase your click-to rate in the SERP.
And the higher the click-to rate, it giving signal to Google that your webpage is a good result and answer the search query – and Google will boost up your ranking.
This is why optimizing your meta description is as important as optimizing your page title.
If you want to increase your CTR to the max, you should optimize both title tag and meta description.
A good title tag won’t have high CTR with poor description.
And a good description won’t have high CTR with poor title tag.
How to Write Good Meta Description?
Based on our research, here are some of the factors to write a good meta description:
1. Write Not More or Less than 120-155 Characters
120 to 155 characters is the ideal length of a good meta description.
Not too short that will waste you a valuable space provided by Google.
Not too long that Google need to cut it short.
2. Use Focus Keyword
When writing your meta description, don’t forget to include your focus keyword.
In the below example, we were aiming for the keywords “What will happen if bees go extinct”.
Hence, we included those words in the description.
With the keyword in your description, Google will be more inclined and highlight it in the search result and it will help you to rank for that specific focus keyword.
3. Make it Outstanding and Unique
If your description shows similarly with other pages in the SERP, you will just create a boring and mainstream brief summary that people won’t bother to click.
Hence, do a research of what your competitors put in their description for the keyword that you aim for ranking and then make an outstanding and catchy one.
4. Ensure it Matches The Content Page
Let’s say you have write a compelling description that you sure the visitor will click it.
And then after they click it and go to your web page, it does not meet the expectation they see from the description.
So what will happen next?
They will quit your web page straight away.
This is what we called as bounce rate.
The higher your bounce rate is, the more Google sees that your content did not meet the user’s want.
Hence, your web page will be gone from the SERP ranking soon.
5. Always Create a Unique Meta Description For Each Page
If you have multiple pages with the same description, it will make the bot crawler difficult to crawl your site.
In some case, Google will give a penalty since they do not know which page is the original.
Creating a unique description for each page is crucial since it will give the search engine an idea what is your web page about and how it compares to other pages.
