Meta Description Checker

Meta descriptions are the short blurbs that appear under the title of your web page in search engine results pages (SERPs). A meta description is your 3-second elevator pitch. Based on what you say (or don't say), potential readers will decide whether or not they want to click on your page or keep scrolling.

While meta descriptions are not a ranking signal, they hugely impact your user's behavior. You may have the best content on your pages, but if your page title and meta description suck, you are not going to get that all-important click.

Meta descriptions provide potential readers with a summary of what your page is about and encourage them to click through to your site. Meta descriptions are important because:

• They help improve your click-through rate (CTR) from SERPs.
• They give you an opportunity to communicate what your page is about to potential clients.
• They can help improve your SEO by including relevant keywords. Google tends to highlight keywords that are searched in the meta description, giving more confidence to your potential reader that your page has what they are looking for.
• As much as it is important to increase your CTR, it is also important to prevent people who are not within your target audience to click on your page. You only want people within your target audience to click and land on your pages. So having a compelling meta description will discourage people who are not in your target audience - this is a good thing.

Still not convinced that meta descriptions are important? Here are a few more reasons:

• They can help to improve your organic search traffic.
• They can be used to target specific keywords.
• They can be used to persuade potential clients to visit your site.
• They can also dissuade people who are not in your target audience from clicking and coming to your pages.

Here are some tips for creating a compelling, click-worthy meta description.

• Start by writing a brief summary of your page in just a few sentences. Describe and summarize what they are going to get from the page. Highlight the benefits, results, and outcomes someone's going to get by reading your page.
• In those sentences, include the most important points that your page will cover.
• Use keywords that are relevant to your page's topic.
• Write in an engaging style and encourage potential clients to click through to your site.
• Try to keep your meta descriptions around 150-160 characters. Google will cut off lengthy meta descriptions. The Google SERP container has a pixel-width limit on desktop and mobile, so they'll show whatever text they can display within that container. Any text that doesn't fit gets truncated.
  
• Don't stuff keywords for the sake of ranking. Meta descriptions aren't a ranking factor. Write them for humans - to read and understand what the page is about.
• Don't duplicate your meta descriptions. All your pages must have unique meta descriptions. Duplicate meta descriptions confuse search engines.
• 60%-70% of the time, Google overrides your meta descriptions to help users understand why a particular page is relevant to what they searched for, but it's still best practice to write a compelling meta description.