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SEO Guide · Chapter 4 of 30
How to write a meta description that gets the click
This page is for an owner whose search results show a random sentence pulled from the page, or nothing useful at all. After reading it you will know what a meta description should say and how to find every blank one on your site.
In one paragraph
A meta description is the two-line summary Google shows under your headline in search results, and it gets the click when it states in 120 to 155 characters what the page offers, where, and one concrete fact a competitor's description does not have. It does not affect ranking, but it decides which of the results a searcher chooses once they are looking at the page. Every page needs its own description, written for that page, and when one is missing Google pulls a sentence from the page at random.
What a meta description is
The meta description is a sentence or two stored in the HTML of each page that Google shows in grey under the blue headline in search results. Like the title tag, it lives in the part of the page a visitor never sees, and it is set in a field in your site editor or SEO plugin.
Google has said for years that the description does not affect where a page ranks. What it affects is whether a searcher picks your result or the one above or below it. On a results page with three home builders, the descriptions are the only place a searcher can compare them before clicking, and the one that names a price, a place, and something specific gets picked.
Google shows around 155 characters on a desktop and fewer on a phone. When a page has no description, or when the one it has does not contain the words the person searched for, Google ignores it and shows a fragment from the page instead, which may be a menu item or the middle of a sentence, so the opening paragraph of the page has to read well on its own.
What a weak meta description looks like on a home builder site
Sawtooth Ridge Homes builds in Kuna, with lots in its Silver Creek community starting at $410,000 and homes from 1,900 to 3,100 square feet. The site has fourteen pages. Eight of them had no description at all, and the six that did all used the same one, written once for the homepage and pasted everywhere.
For a search like “new homes kuna idaho”, Google showed the community page with a description it had pulled from the page itself: “Skip to content. Communities. Floor Plans. Design Center. About. Contact. Silver Creek.” That is the site’s menu, because the page’s first real paragraph was inside an image slider and Google took the first text it could find.
The floor plans page did better only because its pasted description happened to be a sentence: “Sawtooth Ridge Homes is a family-owned builder committed to quality craftsmanship and customer satisfaction.” Every builder on the results page could have said the same thing, and none of it told a buyer what the page contained, what the homes cost, or where they were.
A worked example: rewriting the descriptions for a Kuna home builder
Each description was written for its own page and holds three things: what the page offers, the town, and one figure or fact a buyer would compare on. Character counts are shown because everything past about 155 is dropped.
| Page | Old description | Characters | New description | Characters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | Sawtooth Ridge Homes is a family-owned builder committed to quality craftsmanship and customer satisfaction. | 108 | New homes in Kuna, Idaho from Sawtooth Ridge Homes. Lots at Silver Creek from $410,000, six floor plans from 1,900 to 3,100 square feet, model open daily. | 154 |
| Silver Creek community | None (Google showed the menu) | 0 | Silver Creek is a 64-lot community in Kuna with quarter-acre lots from $410,000, Kuna schools, and 15 minutes to Meridian. Twelve lots left in phase two. | 153 |
| Floor plans | Same as home | 108 | Six Sawtooth Ridge floor plans in Kuna, 1,900 to 3,100 square feet, three to five bedrooms, with a three-car garage standard on four of the six. | 144 |
| Design center | Same as home | 108 | The Sawtooth Ridge design center in Kuna, where buyers choose cabinets, counters, flooring, and fixtures with a designer over two visits, at no added cost. | 155 |
| Contact | None | 0 | Contact Sawtooth Ridge Homes in Kuna, Idaho. Model home at Silver Creek open 10 to 5 daily, or call to walk a lot with our sales manager. | 137 |
The community page result, as a searcher saw it before and after.
Silver Creek | Sawtooth Ridge Homes
Skip to content. Communities. Floor Plans. Design Center. About. Contact. Silver Creek. Sawtooth Ridge Homes is a family-owned builder committed to quality …
New Homes in Kuna, Idaho at Silver Creek | Sawtooth Ridge Homes
Silver Creek is a 64-lot community in Kuna with quarter-acre lots from $410,000, Kuna schools, and 15 minutes to Meridian. Twelve lots left in phase two.
The figures do the work. A buyer comparing three results will click the one that already told them the price and the lot size, because it has answered the question they were about to ask.
How to check your own meta descriptions
- Search Google for
site:yourdomain.comand read the grey text under each result. A menu, a fragment ending in three dots, or the same sentence under several results means the description is missing or duplicated. - Crawl the site with the free Screaming Frog SEO Spider and open the Meta Description tab. The filter lists Missing, Duplicate, Over 155 Characters, and Below 70 Characters with a count for each.
- In Search Console, open the Performance report and compare impressions with clicks page by page. A page with hundreds of impressions and a click rate under 2 percent is being seen and passed over, and the description is the first thing to change.
- Search Google for one of your services with your town and look at the descriptions of the three results above yours. Yours needs one fact theirs do not have.
- On a WordPress site the description is edited in the Rank Math or Yoast box below the page editor. Type it there, not in the page body. The Search Console guide shows how to watch the click rate change afterwards.
What we do about meta descriptions
You will get a sheet with every page on your site, its current description or a note that it is blank, and a new description written for that page with the town and one figure a customer would compare on. The figures come from your site, your Google Business Profile, or you, never from us. Once the sheet is approved the descriptions go live, and the click rate for each page is tracked in Search Console so you can see which ones the change moved. Descriptions are written alongside the titles in the first month of the SEO work we do for local businesses.
Questions people ask about SEO: how to write a meta description that gets the click
How long should a meta description be?
A meta description should be 120 to 155 characters, which is what Google shows on a desktop before cutting it off. Phones show less, so the most useful fact belongs in the first 100 characters. A description under 70 characters is often replaced by text Google pulls from the page.
Do meta descriptions affect SEO ranking?
No, Google does not use the meta description to decide where a page ranks. It does affect how many of the people who see your result click it, which is why a page can move from three clicks a month to thirty without changing position. The description is written for the searcher, not for Google.
Why is Google showing a different description than the one I wrote?
Google replaces a description when it does not contain the words the person searched for or when it judges the description does not match the page. This happens most with one description pasted across many pages. A description written for the specific page, naming its service and town, is shown as written most of the time.
Can two pages have the same meta description?
No, every page should have its own description, because a duplicated one tells Google and the searcher nothing about what makes that page different. Duplicate descriptions are among the first things Google replaces with its own text. Screaming Frog lists them in one click.
What should a meta description say for a local business?
It should say what the page offers, the town, and one concrete fact such as a price, a size, a count, or hours, in one or two full sentences. The fact is what makes a searcher choose your result over the one above it. Slogans and words like quality and trusted appear in every competitor's description and give the searcher nothing to compare.
This page is part of the The SEO guide for local businesses. The other guides: SEO, AEO, GEO.
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