What is a meta description, and does mine matter?
Worth a look
It's the two-line summary shown beneath your link in search results. It is not a ranking factor — writing a good one won't move you up the page. What it does is decide how many people click your result once they've seen it, which is a different and often more useful lever.
What actually appears in search results
Google uses your meta description perhaps half the time. The rest of the time it writes its own snippet by pulling whatever text on the page best matches what the person searched for — and it's often right to do so, because it can tailor the snippet to the search in a way a fixed description can't.
So the accurate way to think about it is: your meta description is a strong suggestion, used when it fits. Without one, Google always improvises, and its improvisation on a page with no clear introductory text can be genuinely poor — a cookie notice, a navigation menu, or the first line of your address.
Where it's worth the effort
On the handful of pages that actually earn you money: your home page, your main service or product pages, your contact page. Writing twenty of those well is worth more than generating three hundred automatically.
Keep them to roughly 150 characters — beyond that they get cut off mid-sentence on most screens. Write them as an invitation rather than a description: what the person gets by clicking, and something that distinguishes you from the four results around you.
Include your location if you serve one. “Emergency plumber in Leicester, out within the hour” does more work than “We are a family-run plumbing business established in 1998”.
What not to bother with
Stuffing keywords in. It won't help you rank, and it reads badly to the human deciding whether to click.
Writing unique descriptions for every page of a large site by hand. Duplicate or missing descriptions on deep pages are a minor issue; missing ones on your main pages are the thing to fix.
How to check this yourself
- Search Google for your business name and read the two lines under your link. That's what people actually see — start there rather than in your site's settings.
- To see what your page declares, right-click the page, choose “View page source”, and search (Ctrl+F) for “description”.
- On WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math installed, it's the “meta description” box below the editor on each page.
- Check on a phone as well as a desktop — mobile results truncate more aggressively.
What to ask your web person
Copy this. It's phrased so you don't have to know the jargon to ask for the right thing.
Could you check which of our main pages are missing meta descriptions — home, services and contact especially — and add them? I'm happy to write the copy if you can tell me where it goes.
Want to know if this applies to your site?
This one is measured by Google's Lighthouse, which takes minutes rather than seconds — so it comes with the in-depth assessment rather than the free check-up. The free check-up still covers your security, your email protection and how search engines see you, in about a minute and with no account.