What Is A Meta Description

A meta description is an HTML tag used to describe the content of a web page. This is the information about your page in SERP. This description will show up below the title and URL of your page as it appears in the search engine results. In order to remain visible within Google, your meta description should be kept somewhere between 140-160 characters.

Meta descriptions will appear below the page title and URL in the search results.

Why Do Meta Descriptions Matter?

Meta description tags can have a significant impact on your search engine optimization efforts. The meta description has one central value:

Your meta description acts as “organic ad text.”

What this means is that when your ad ranks for a keyword, Google and other engines will often show the meta description as a summary of the page.

This makes the meta description as important as ad text.

A compelling meta description has the power to raise the click-through rate of your organic search results. That means more of the people who see your page in the search results will actually click through and land on your site. That means more traffic for you, even if your ranking stays the same!

Meta-Description Example

You want to write a description that conveys your website’s unique selling point (USP). 

Think: why is my page specifically better than all the other pages in the results? 

Don’t be afraid to make an emotional appeal with your message. Emotional advertising has traditionally found a lot of success tapping into people’s feelings.

Let’s look at an example: 

From this simple description in the SERP, we see this company can repair and install air conditioning (a needed service in Florida). More importantly, they “provide comfort and trusted advice when people need it most” — imagine your A/C is broken while sweating in a hot and humid area. Who do you trust? 

A study in 2014 conducted by the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow suggested that human emotion can be categorized into four main buckets:

• Happy
• Sad
• Angry/disgusted
• Afraid/surprised

This company used emotion the right way to pull in potential customers. Very smart. 

Meta Description Tips 

Google gives room for about a 1-2 sentence (160-character) summary below every search result. So, in one to two sentences, your descriptions should offer a compelling reason to visit the webpage. Add a clear call to action, address an emotional pain point, or offer a specific benefit to visitors.

• If it is too long, it won’t fit, Google will truncate it, and people will not understand what your site can provide.
• If it is too vague, people just won’t care. There are always other results to click on.

You should aim to connect with a searcher’s emotion in two sentences or less. 

It is also important to have unique descriptions for every page on your website. Our on-site SEO study found that nearly 30% of the sites had duplicate meta descriptions and 25% had pages with no meta description at all.

Meta Description Length: Make it SEO Friendly

To encourage clicks and bring visitors from search to your website, do the following with your descriptions:

1. Aim for about 1-2 sentences (140-160 characters) long
2. Include your target keyword
3. Target an emotion
4. Add a call-to-action to entice opening the link
5. Avoid duplicate meta descriptions
6. Make it meaningful and descriptive, matching your content
7. Double check how it looks with a SERP view generator tool

Purposefully Using Multiple Meta Descriptions

The aim of their use is to match the search engine queries with an appropriate meta description tag, which in turn could help improve the click-through rate.

For example, at Semrush we might build a post that explores the various aspects of keyword research. Within this post we might look to target the following search terms:

• “What is keyword research”
• “Keyword research tools”

Naturally, these have two significantly different search intents but are inherently related to one another. The idea of having multiple meta descriptions is then to craft two separate descriptions that relate to each phrase.

Therefore, if a user queries “what is keyword research” search engines would display our result with the meta description tailored to the “what is keyword research” search query. Equally, if a user was to search for “keyword research tools”, the second tailored meta description would maybe be displayed.

It is worth noting that there is no guarantee that a search engine will adhere to picking your desired meta description so it is at your own risk to implement multiple descriptions.

A meta description tag is required to sit between the head tags in the HTML code, and for best practice, below the title tag of the page.

 For example:

<head>

<title>Title of the page</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Enter description here.”>

</head>

This will add one meta description to your page. In order to add multiple, you must repeat this process, adding a second meta description between the <head> tags. This would appear as follows:

<head>

<title>Title of the page</title> 

<meta name=”description” content=”Enter description one.”>

<meta name=”description” content=”Enter description two.”>

</head>

To maximize the effectiveness of multiple meta descriptions, they should reflect the search intent of the highest volume keywords the pages rank for or are trying to rank for. This will then give search engines the opportunity to select the most relevant meta description for the user’s search.