Back in 2016, my colleague Christopher Ratcliff wrote an excellent how-to guide about meta descriptions here at Search Engine Watch.
Much of what is included in that article is still useful. The good and bad examples Chris analyses are still on point and you would do a lot worse than to write your own descriptions according to his takeaway checklist even two years down the line.
But as is case in the world of search, things are always changing. SEO copywriters and marketers need to be adapting to an ever-evolving SERP landscape across multiple screens and taking into consideration Google’s oft-tweaked algorithm.
Google is increasingly unpredictable with how it displays meta descriptions. Today, the length at which it truncates descriptions can vary significantly from result to result. Sometimes the service will auto-generate descriptions or amend them. We are even seeing SERPs with far less descriptions in use at all with the rise of other rich features such as answer boxes and carousels.
Let’s take a look at some examples and consider meta description best practice for 2018.
First things first – what are meta descriptions?
Meta descriptions are a short piece of written content marked up in the HTML of a webpage.
Good examples typically elaborate on the information given in the title tag and aim to entice the searcher to click through. They might give a flavour of the content on that particular page by describing it…
The above example SERPs (for the phrase ‘best baby led weaning foods’) include a meta description for Netmums being truncated at around 330 characters, as well as shorter descriptions more in keeping with the classic 135-160 character length.
We can also infer from this that Google’s algorithm is judging the usefulness of the meta description – choosing to include more if it’s likely to answer the query of the searcher quickly.
We can also see the Mother & Baby result clearly looking like it has been written with traditional character limits in mind. It is still, I’d argue, the most persuasive description of the bunch in terms of making me want to click. But, we can clearly see from this results page that experimenting with longer meta descriptions is now an option for marketers.
