What is a meta description and does it help SEO?
The meta description is the grey text under your listing in search results. It does not affect ranking directly, but it decides whether people click. Without one, Google picks a sentence from the page, which is rarely the one you would choose. Write 50 to 160 characters that say what the page offers and why someone should click, and give each page its own.
Why it matters
Ranking gets you onto the page; the description gets you the click. Two businesses side by side in the results, one with "We are a family run business established in 1987 and pride ourselves" and one with "Same-day boiler repairs across Maidstone. Gas Safe registered, fixed prices, no call-out fee", do not get the same number of visitors. Google also bolds the words that match the search, so a description written in customers' language stands out.
Writing a good one
- Say what the page offers and who it is for, in plain words.
- Include the place if you serve a local market.
- Give a reason to click: a price, a guarantee, a timescale, a distinctive feature.
- Stay under 160 characters; Google cuts longer ones off.
- Write a different one for every page, matching what that page is about.
How to check
Our check reads the meta description on your home page and reports its length, or notes that it is missing. Search for your business and read the grey text under the listing; if it looks like a random sentence from the page, Google wrote it because you did not.
How to fix it
On WordPress, an SEO plugin adds a description field to every page with a live preview. Without one, WordPress does not output a description at all. On other platforms it is a field in the page settings, sometimes called "SEO description" or "search snippet". Google does not always use the description you write, but it uses it most of the time and never uses a missing one.
Not sure how your own site does on this? Run the free check: it takes about twenty seconds and reports on this and thirty other things.