Meta description

A meta description is a short summary of a page, stored in the page's HTML, that search engines can show as the grey snippet under your title in results. Its job is to earn the click.

When Google shows it

Google does not always use it. It states that it "primarily uses the content on the page to automatically determine the appropriate snippet" and uses your meta description only "when it describes the page better than other parts of the content". A good description raises the odds that Google uses your words instead of an extracted sentence.

How long it should be

Google sets no limit. Its snippet documentation says: "There's no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." The familiar 150 to 160 characters is an estimate of what fits on a desktop result, and phones show less, so put the point of the page in the first 110 to 120 characters.

How to write one

• Write a different description for each page. Google warns that identical descriptions across pages are not helpful.

• Say what the page delivers in plain words. Include the topic words a searcher used and what they get from clicking. A list of keywords is, in Google's words, "less likely to be displayed as a snippet".

• Fill it in on every page you care about. With nothing to work with, the snippet becomes whatever text Google extracts from the page, which can be a navigation label or a cookie notice.

How to write a meta description has worked examples for four kinds of page.

Meta descriptions in BeeRanked

Every page in BeeRanked has a meta title and meta description field in Content Enrichment, with a live preview of how the result will look. A page without a description is listed in our SEO checklist until you write one.