How Google Wants You to Create Meta Descriptions

How Google wants you to create meta descriptions. Have you ever done a search on Google and notice for each result there is a title and a description? That description is called the meta description. Usually a website creates one for each and every single page on the website, but sometimes they don’t. And search engines can use yours if you provide one, or they can come up with their own for each of your webpages if you don’t provide one. So what makes an ideal meta description?

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Well, let’s see what Google has to say. As you can see here, Google gives quite a bit of feedback.

First, they don’t want you to just list keywords in your meta description. Here’s the example of what Google doesn’t like. As you can see they’re just listing tones and tones of different keywords. That’s really not what they like.

Second, Google doesn’t want you to use the same meta description on each page. Such as this one. If you use this description on each and every single page, it doesn’t really help Google know how one page is different than another.

Third, they don’t want you to just summarize the page. Here’s a summary example that Google provided. And the issue is, if you just use the summary, it doesn’t really provide much value. They can figure that out on their own. You got to make it more compelling.

Fourth, don’t make your meta description too short. And here’s the example of a short meta description. It’s so short that people really aren’t going to know what they’re going to get when they click on your listing. And if they don’t know what they’re going to get, do you think they’re going to click? Well, some may, but a lot won’t. So if you follow Google’s rules you’ll create an amazing meta description, right? Well, it helps you, but it doesn’t really give you enough information to separate yourself from the crowd.

Now, here’s some data that we have on what creates amazing meta description. Keep in mind with our Ubersuggest tool, we track over 900 million domains and we’re looking at things like click through rates and rankings. So we see patterns.

So this data here is from those patterns. And when I break down this data, you’ll notice that the percentage gains you get from implementing one or two or three of these tactics isn’t that much. But if you implement a lot of them, all those small percentages will add up and that’s enough for you to win.

So let’s dive into the data. You can get roughly a 3.4% higher click through rate for meta description tags that are roughly 119 characters to 135 characters. We found that descriptions that are too long or too short don’t get as many clicks. And you can get up to a 5.7% increase in click throughs when the exact query that someone is searching for is also in your meta description.

Makes sense, right? Someone searching for something, they see it within your title, the description as well, even your url, it all helps. Power words increase click throughs by roughly 2.18% when you add them to the meta description.

A great example of a power is effortless, such as check out these seven effortless ways to boost your rankings. If you implement at least three of them, you should see quick results. Hopefully that helps you use power words and implement it into your meta descriptions. You can also get roughly a 2 to a 3% higher click through rate for meta descriptions that contain emotions versus ones that don’t have emotions.

And the simple one, if you add a meta description versus not having one at all, keep in mind if you don’t have one, search engines can just pull it from your site or make up their own. But what we found is websites that have a meta description no matter what it is, what it says, how short or how long it is, or whether it has a keyword or not, they get roughly a 5.8% higher click through rate versus ones that don’t even have meta descriptions.

So make sure you come up with a meta description for each and every single page. As I mentioned, I know the percentages aren’t that big, but every little bit adds up. The slightest difference could mean a few extra spots in your rankings. Now, we have tons of data on this kind of stuff, not just for meta descriptions, but title tags, URLs, even on-page SEO, link building.

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