Why is a good meta description important?

Posted on July 14, 2022

SEO

Meta description is a tag usually used in HTML to detail or define the content of a web page. This description will be placed below the URL and the title of your site, as it appears in Google search engines. To remain visible on Google, your meta description must contain between 140 and 160 characters, this without forgetting your keyword. Example:

Since these meta descriptions show the title and your URL in search results, they have the opportunity to benefit or hurt your click-through rate (CTR). Research tells us that, placing the right keyword within the description is a positioning signal for search engines. It may not be something highly relevant, but it can certainly help your meta description to be placed naturally without cluttering it with keywords. So, your meta description is the one that contains the most information compared to the URL or title, so get your imagination going and sell your site with the right message to the search engines.

How to write a good meta description

The SERP rate nowadays is considered a factor to rank better, a good way to make your meta descriptions SEO friendly would be to write them so that people will click on them. Let's think about one thing, search results should be taken as traditional ads in a magazine or newspaper. Traditional print advertising had as elements headlines and slogans to make them more attractive and thus capture the attention of people, which aimed to call a number or go to some address to learn or purchase a service or product. Now, with web searches, the title of your site becomes a headline, the meta description is your tagline, and the URL becomes the address where people are going to go.

Tips for your meta description

Call to action. With this, people will be interested in discovering what you are pointing out in your description. Always be honest. Never promise something that people will not find when they enter the site, this will make people leave the site immediately and thus increase our bounce rate. Limit characters.

As we said before, abusing characters could be detrimental when it comes to searches, since Google does not take more than 160 characters and our description could appear incomplete, so you already know between 140 and 160 characters. Make them meaningful and descriptive so that they match the content of our site and people know exactly what to find. A 2014 study, by Glasgow University's Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, suggested that human emotion falls into 4 main categories:

  • Happy
  • Sad
  • Angry/Disgusted
  • Frightened/Surprised

Companies have known how to exploit this, since playing with emotions and using them to our advantage helps to execute emotional advertising, so don't be afraid to make an emotional allusion in your description and make the most of it.

If meta description it is too long, Google will have problems and will cut it, people will not know what information your site has to give. On the contrary, if it is too short or quite vague, people will not be interested and will not end up clicking. Remember, there are always more websites to visit. You have to connect with people's emotions with one or two sentences. Do not forget that each page must have a unique description and not a repeated one. Studies show that 30% of websites have repeated meta descriptions and 25% had pages without any description.

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