Meta Description Optimization
Meta description optimisation is not a search for the perfect length but a process: what to put in a description for each page type, how to do it across a site of thousands of addresses, and how to check the result without fooling yourself with averaged numbers. What Google does with a description is covered in the lesson on titles and descriptions; this one is practice.
It rests on the snippets documentation and the performance report.
What to put in a description by page type
The documentation advises not limiting yourself to a sentence: a description can bring together information scattered across a page — for articles the author and publication date, for products the price, age and manufacturer — as clearly tagged and separated data. Hence the scheme: description = the page's main point + facts that would not otherwise reach the snippet.
| Page type | Page facts for the description | An example scheme |
|---|---|---|
| Article | What about, for whom, author, date | What is covered, what the reader gets. Author, date |
| Product | Name, key specification, price, availability, manufacturer | Name — specification. Price, availability |
| Category | What is inside, how many, how the items differ | What the section holds, the number of items, the main differences |
| Home and aggregation pages | What the site does and for whom | A site-level description |
The distinction between levels is written down: site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and page-level descriptions everywhere else. The table gives example schemes, not Google rules; they have one test: does the description speak precisely about this page.
Drafts are easy to assemble in the meta tag generator, and how they will look in the results is shown by the snippet planner.
Descriptions at scale
On a site of thousands of pages writing by hand is unrealistic, and Google acknowledges it: for large sites where hand-written descriptions can be impossible, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged. The condition is named right there: good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, and page-specific data is a good candidate for generation. Strings of keywords, by contrast, give a poor picture of the content and are less likely to be displayed as a snippet.
A working template scheme substitutes the page's own fields, with no shared text in the tail:
Product: [name] — [main specification]. [Price], [availability].
Article: [topic in one phrase]. [For whom], [author], [date].
Section: [what is in the section]: [number] items, [main difference].The rules that follow from the documentation: every field comes from the page's data; if a field is missing the fragment is skipped, not filled with a generic phrase; and an identical ending on every page turns the set into identical or similar descriptions on every page, which the guidance calls unhelpful when individual pages appear in search results. If time is short, prioritise: at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
How to find problems
First, what not to look for. In the Search Console documentation "Search appearance" is a dimension tab in the performance report next to queries, pages, countries and devices; a "Meta descriptions" report is not described there. So empty and duplicate descriptions are found by crawling the site:
- Crawl the site with the site crawler and export the descriptions for every page.
- Find the empty and the duplicated: the meta tag checker does it for one page, the crawler for the whole site.
- For each group of duplicates determine the cause: a field was not substituted, a shared template tail, or the pages genuinely are the same in meaning.
- Prioritise by traffic: the pages report shows which addresses to start with.
How to check the description helped
A description is not a guaranteed snippet, so first confirm it is shown at all: open the live results for the page's main queries. After that, numbers:
- In the performance report the Pages tab gives impressions, clicks and CTR per address. Candidates for an edit are pages with many impressions and a CTR below what is usual for their position.
- "Usual for the position" means your own CTR by position bucket, not someone else's averages: how to build it is in the lesson on keyword valuation, and anomalies are found by CTR analysis and CTR anomalies.
- Position in the report is averaged: the field is defined as "average position in search results", so compare periods of comparable length and season. Fresh data may be incomplete — see the lesson on metrics.
- Change one element at a time and wait for the page to be crawled: Google uses several sources and may change what it shows, so editing the description and the title on the same day gives an inseparable result.
What is not in the documentation
These widespread claims do not appear in the documentation, so they cannot be presented as rules:
- pixel lengths (920 and 680) and "110–120 characters for mobile": the documentation says only that the snippet is truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width. What is known about mobile results is different: for most sites Google primarily indexes the mobile version;
- "Google replaces the description in 40–70% of cases";
- "Google bolds the keyword and CTR drops without it" and "a description containing the exact query is used";
- "duplicate descriptions are flagged and ignored": all that is said is that identical descriptions are not helpful when pages appear separately;
- a CTR rise "from 1.8% to 4.2%" and "2.3 times" from changing a description as proof.
That does not mean the opposite is true. It means such figures are observations from other people's sites. The practical conclusion: the most important part first, and the result checked on your own data.
Checklist
- The description speaks about this particular page and adds facts the snippet would not carry.
- Site-level descriptions for the home and aggregation pages, page-level for the rest.
- The template substitutes the page's fields and skips empty ones, with no shared tail.
- Empty and duplicate descriptions found by a crawl and sorted by cause.
- Prioritised by traffic: the home page and the important pages first.
- The live results checked: the description actually shows.
- An edit judged over comparable periods, one element at a time.
Mistakes
- Looking in Search Console for a meta description report the documentation does not describe.
- One template with the same ending across thousands of pages.
- A string of keywords instead of a description of the page.
- Assuming the description will necessarily become the snippet.
- Changing the title and the description together and crediting one of them.
- Comparing CTR at different positions and in different seasons.
What comes next
The next lesson is about keyword targeting on the page: where and how the words of the query appear in the content itself — keywords on the page.