How do you write a meta description?

The description metadata is often neglected in favor of writing the content itself and building backlinks. It is still essential in marketing. It has no direct effect on how your web page ranks, but it does shape conversion rate and click-through rate. What is a meta description, and how do you write a good one? Our SEO agency walks through the rules to follow.

The strengths of the meta description

What is the point of writing a meta description? As an HTML attribute that gives a brief overview of the web page’s content, the description metadata has many advantages. Since 2018, it can be up to 300 characters, up from 150 characters. It appears in the SERPs, just below the “Title” tag. It is a few lines of text explaining what the targeted page of the website is about. Created to make navigation easier for users, the meta description is a comfort element that Google expects. If the author does not provide one, Google extracts a passage of text from the page itself.

What is the real value of a meta description? It plays a fundamental role in improving traffic to the site and encourages users to read the content, which in turn helps the website’s ranking. Taken on its own, however, the meta description is not part of Googlebot’s analysis for organic search.

In any case, this element is mainly useful for catching people’s attention. Written at the right length and with relevant information, the meta description tag therefore plays an advertising role. It is there to encourage readers to visit the site, read a piece of content, or make a purchase. The meta description should therefore catch the eye at first glance. We will go into the techniques for writing a meta description that converts later.

Social sharing sites such as Facebook also use the meta description tag as the description that appears when the page is shared. Pages that do not have one do not appear empty, though. Facebook picks the first text from the content to describe them.

Finally, this tag can influence the searcher’s decision to click or not. The more convincing it is, the more clicks it will attract.

Every aspect of a good meta description

Every meta description tag that converts a large number of users shares a few traits:

• The essentials come first. Even though Google now allows a high character count for meta descriptions, it sometimes displays only a few characters. It may replace the other words with a date or another piece of information. If you use Prestashop to build your site, make sure every essential word in your description is written first.

• The meta description tag is first of all an invitation to open the page and read the information on it. Do not write it in a monotone. Prefer an active voice, which is more engaging for the reader. Also avoid adding metaphorical or dull information. Prefer a call to action.

• Some sentences should be banned, such as those that have nothing to do with the solution you offer or the product you sell. The same goes for a misleading meta description. In that case, Google can penalize the site that wrote it. Content like that will also raise your bounce rate and push your position down in PageRank.

• The meta description tag, as a selling force, sticks to what is essential and necessary, without theatrical flourishes.

• If your meta description includes the keyword at the beginning, people will be more inclined to treat the content as relevant. That will strengthen the connection between the two. You also have every reason to include keyword variations in the meta descriptions.

As for the content, it depends on your field. For example, if your site or Shopify store offers highly technical products, focus your description on the technical specifications. Mention the manufacturer, the technology used, the size, the price, and information of that kind. If the visitor needs that specific product, there is a good chance you will not have to convince them further. For some items, details such as price or a discount are decisive.

Tips for writing a strong meta description

It is important to follow a few tips if you want to write a meta description tag that catches the reader and makes them want to visit your web page.

• Do not go over 300 characters. Concision and relevance are therefore required if you want to generate as many visits as possible.

• The hook has to land, in one or two well-built sentences. Remember that it should let people know whether the content is relevant and whether it contains the information they are looking for. That is why the meta description must use the target page’s keywords and contain a convincing description of the products or services offered. It must be original and more persuasive than the competition’s.

• Unique content that must not appear twice in the SERPs or look like another meta description on the web. As with the body of your text, the content of the meta description tag must never be copied from another site. One way to fight that is to use a dynamic creation method with checking tools. There are plenty of applications today that generate meta descriptions automatically. Visit Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements or use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check for duplicate meta descriptions. Also remember to write a different meta description for each page. Yoast is a tool that can help you produce a useful meta description.

• Remove every non-alphanumeric character from your meta description, especially quotation marks. Every time quotation marks are used in a meta description, Google cuts the text between those quotation marks. To avoid that, if they are important to the message, use the HTML entity instead of double quotes.

• In some situations, search engines may not display the meta description you specified in your HTML, even if it respects the character-count rule. That happens in particular when Google finds the passage a poor fit for the query associated with the page. It then replaces it with a more relevant snippet.

• Your meta description must provide a strong marketing argument, and it must always be precise.

• Use engaging verbs that push people to act.

• Do not write a list of keywords that makes no sense.

Difficulties related to meta descriptions

You may have to deal with certain difficulties related to meta descriptions. That is especially true when Google replaces your meta with its own, in particular if it considers that yours does not quite represent your content. That is why the relevance of the whole matters.

If you want other descriptions to appear when the page is shared on social networks, you can tell search engines to display other descriptions. Do you have Yoast SEO? In that case: check the social tab in the “Edit pages” box. Then enter your description for social media.

You can add a meta description in the HTML section of your site. If you use WordPress, you should have full control of your meta description in your CMS. If you use another SEO plugin such as Yoast, use that plugin’s meta description field. Then click add, edit, and finally “preview this part”.

If you want to add a meta description to your PDF files on Prestashop or on a non-commercial site, you have to go back to the tool you used to create that file. In Adobe Reader Pro, open the target PDF file, go to File, then Properties. Next, look for the Subject field and, when you find it, use it to edit your meta description. If a page uses a “head” keyword, a torso (medium long-tail) term, or a highly searched phrase, you need to write the meta description.

If the page uses long-tail keywords, it is wiser to let the engines generate the meta description themselves. The reason is simple: search engines associate a meta description with keywords. If a webmaster does not include all of those terms, the page may fail to appear for some queries that would otherwise be relevant.

Do you therefore need to go back through every page and generate new meta description tags? That task would be Herculean. It is better to focus on the pages that generate the most organic traffic. You can concentrate on about twenty pages, the ones considered the strongest performers. That is where you should do this work.