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Don’t treat your meta description like an afterthought. It’s what makes your content visible on Google. Before I explain why, let’s look at yours (it takes ten seconds).
Go to Google. In the search box, type site: followed by your web address, with no space between them. For example: site:yourbusiness.com.
Press enter.
What you’ll find is most of the pages on your website that Google knows about. Under each blue headline, there’s a line or two of grey text. That’s what a customer sees before deciding whether to visit your site.
Somebody wrote those lines. (Spoiler alert: for Kudzu Brands clients, that somebody was me.)
If no one wrote those lines, Google picked something off the page instead.
See for yourself. I’ll wait…
What you’re probably seeing if no one wrote your meta descriptions
- The same sentence under every page. One description got applied when your site launched. Your services page, about page, and contact page all say the identical thing.
- Your address,phone number, and hours. Or your hours run together with no punctuation. That’s Google scraping your footer because there was nothing else to use, and it’s the most common problem.
- Nothing at all. Just a blue headline and a gap.
- A sentence that gets cut off. Someone wrote a meta description, but it ran too long to display in full. Google clipped it right before the most important thing you wanted to get across.
- Your page title, showing up twice. Sometimes with whatever your site builder left behind, like “Home Page 2.”
- Your keywords, over and over. Somebody stuffed the field with the same word five times, and now the line says nothing whatsoever.
The grey text is the page’s meta description. It’s a field on your website where someone can type a reason for a customer to click. If nobody ever did, it’s empty.
The meta description problem you can’t see
Fix the duplicates, the scraped footer, the empty fields, and the cut-off sentences, and you can still end up with descriptions that sound like the same tired person wrote them in one sitting—because they were. What happens is that every description becomes repetitive, starting with the name of your city and how your business can be “trusted.” And every third one ends with, “contact us today!”
Here’s the thing, you won’t catch it while you’re writing, because your website won’t show them to you side by side. Squarespace gives you one page at a time behind a settings icon. WordPress will show you a list, but only if you find the right plugin screen, which takes a while even if you know where you’re going. No one, not even the professionals, can keep up with what they’re writing page after page.
So you write one, save it, click to the next page, and write another. You never see them lined up next to each other, which is the only way the repetition shows.
That’s why so many small business listings sound alike. It isn’t that nobody tried. It’s that nobody could keep track.
The fix is uncomplicated: write them all in one place first, in a single column you can read down. Spreadsheet, notes app, legal pad. Then read the first four words of each one out loud. The repetition jumps out immediately.
TIP: If you want to see all the details at a glance, make a spreadsheet with:
- Page name
- URL
- Meta description
- BONUS: enter a formula that adds the number of characters for you as you go.
Or you can download this handy sheet.
How to write meta descriptions people actually click
- Get your page list from your website, not from Google. The Pages panel in Squarespace, the Pages screen in WordPress. Skip drafts and anything marked “no index.”
- Pick ten. Your services, your homepage, and your contact page. Ten good descriptions beat sixty rushed ones, and you’ll actually finish ten.
- Write them all in one place. Aim for 120 to 155 characters, roughly one long sentence or two short ones, but don’t wreck a good line just to hit a number. Say what the page is, then why someone should click. Write it the way you’d say it to a customer standing in front of you. (Yoast flags anything under 120 as too short and anything over 156 as too long.)
- Read down the column. Fix the repetition before anything goes live on your site.
- Paste them in.
- Squarespace: Pages panel, click the page, gear icon, SEO tab.
- WordPress: open the page and look for a box labeled Meta Description, usually near the bottom.
What the difference looks like:
Weak:
“Quality service and friendly staff. Stop by today and see what we can do for you.”
Better:
“Wedding gowns from size 0 to 32, most under $2,000, with 90-minute appointments and alterations done in-house. Book online or call any afternoon.”
The second one belongs to one specific bridal shop. The first could belong to a funeral home.
Two things nobody tells you about meta descriptions
- Google rewrites meta descriptions roughly 60 to 70 percent of the time. Ahrefs measured 62.78 percent across 20,000 keywords, and Portent found 68 percent on desktop and 71 percent on mobile. That isn’t a sign you did it wrong (it happened to me as recently as two weeks ago). Google swaps in a sentence from your page when it thinks that one fits the search better. A good description is what it falls back on the rest of the time.
- A meta description won’t change where you rank. What it changes is whether someone picks you once you’re already there.
Most SEO advice promises to move you up the search.
This exercise won’t.
All it does is make more people choose you once you’re already there. It’s a smaller thing to promise and it’s worth the time. Right now that grey text is what everyone searching for what you do reads about you before they decide. There’s a decent chance it currently says “Home Page 2.”
That’s the whole job, and it’s one you can do yourself in an evening. If you’d rather spend that evening on your business, we’ll take it off your hands.
Courtenay is the agency’s Creative Content Director. Need an Oxford comma-obsessed, track-changing wordchopper? You’ve found her.