Even though the meta description attribute is not a ranking factor and Google shows it in search results only 37% of the time, it’s still a part of on-page SEO that content publishers often encounter. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create great meta descriptions fast and how to audit them efficiently. But first, let me explain why meta descriptions still matter despite their seemingly low SEO importance. For example, if your page gets 50,000 impressions a month, How to Write Google shows the meta description for 18,500 of those impressions on average. Increasing your CTR from 4% to just 4.5% in this instance would result in almost 100 more clicks.
So while you shouldn’t
Obsess over meta descriptions, it’s still worth spending a minute of your time on pages where ‘yes’ is the answer to at least one of these questions: Is the page meant to executive data drive organic traffic? Is it likely to be shared on social media? That second question probably needs an explanation. You see, when a page is shared on social media, it pulls the description from Open Graph meta tags. You can see that there’s a mix of results here. Some are blog posts reviewing the best standing desks, and others are product category pages from online stores. In cases like this, you should take inspiration from the page snippets that most closely align with the type of content you’re publishing. If you’ve written a blog post about standing desks, look at the review and comparison posts.
How to Write created
An ecommerce category page, look at those. Compared to the first example, it’s dull and demotivating. That’s because it’s written in the passive voice. SIDENOTE. I wrote Aero Leads that as a bad example to make the point. It’s not a real description. Of course, it’s not always wise to write meta descriptions in an active voice. Case in point: definition-style descriptions. But as a general rule of thumb, passive voice is more the exception than the rule. Learn more about the difference between active and passive voice here. 4. Be concise Meta descriptions are not a place for storytelling. Every word matters because users quickly decide what to click on by skimming the results and because descriptions truncate after a certain length.
