The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears beneath the title in a Google search result. It is the shop’s two-line pitch, rendered at the precise moment a customer is deciding which of ten results to click. And the Goblin must, before defending it, concede an uncomfortable truth.
The uncomfortable truth.
Google rewrites most meta descriptions. Studies that the Goblin trusts put the figure somewhere between sixty and seventy per cent. You write a careful description; Google decides a sentence pulled from somewhere on your page would serve the searcher better; Google shows its version instead of yours. Your careful description is, in the majority of cases, never seen.
This fact has led a number of people — some of them loud, some of them even correct about other things — to declare the meta description dead, not worth writing, a relic. The Goblin disagrees, and will now explain why.
Reason the first: the thirty per cent.
If Google rewrites sixty-five per cent of descriptions, it shows the original for the other thirty-five. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, a third of every impression your shop earns, displaying exactly the words you chose. A shop owner who neglects the meta description on the grounds that it is “usually rewritten” is neglecting a third of their search presence on the grounds that the other two-thirds is uncertain. The Goblin finds this arithmetic unpersuasive.
Reason the second: Google rewrites worse when you give it nothing.
When you leave the meta description blank, Google does not decline to show one. It generates one, by grabbing whatever sentence from your page it judges relevant. Sometimes this is fine. Often it is a fragment of your shipping policy, or a navigation menu rendered as text, or the first sentence of a description that was never written to stand alone.
Writing a meta description is not, therefore, a choice between “my words” and “Google’s words.” It is a choice between “my words, shown a third of the time, and a sensible fallback the rest” versus “a fragment of my shipping policy, shown unpredictably.”
Reason the third: the description travels.
The meta description is not used only by Google. It is, on many platforms, the text that appears when your page is shared — in a message, on a social network, in a chat. Google may rewrite what it shows in search; it has no say over what appears when a customer pastes your link to a friend. That preview is yours, and it is built from the meta description you did or did not write.
How to write one, briefly.
The rules are close to those for the title tag, with one addition.
- Around 150 characters. Longer and Google truncates it with an ellipsis.
- Describe, then entice. Say what the page offers, then give one reason to choose it over the nine other results.
- Include the search term once, naturally. When Google does show your description, it bolds the words that match the search; a description containing the term simply looks more relevant.
- Write a sentence, not a list. Keyword-stuffed descriptions read as spam to the customer even when Google tolerates them.
- The addition: do not duplicate the title. The title and description are read together. Use the description to say something the title did not have room for.
The meta description is a small field, and the temptation to ignore it — given that Google so often overrides it — is understandable. But “often overridden” is not “always overridden,” and the cost of writing one is two minutes. The Goblin does not know many two-minute tasks that touch a third of a shop’s search impressions. He suggests you do not either.
In an audit, the Goblin notes which of your descriptions are blank, which are auto-generated nonsense, and which are merely dull, and he rewrites a representative handful so you have a pattern to follow.
— The Goblin, in defence of a much-maligned field.