The Importance of Meta Descriptions

Imagine this: you’ve made progress in your online marketing efforts. You have optimized your website for the search engines. You’ve written product descriptions and provided images. But you’re still not getting the results you want. Perhaps you’re not giving meta descriptions enough attention.

What are meta descriptions?

A meta description summarizes the content of a webpage. It is short, with a maximum of 320 characters in length. It is typically shown in the search results of search engines. It helps in enticing users to click a link. It is, without a doubt, critical in effective SEO.

Writing good meta descriptions

In writing a meta description, there are two questions you need to answer – what product or service are you offering, and why should the customer buy from you?

You should also highlight the unique selling proposition of your website. It’s best to be brazen about it because the meta description, especially in the home page of your website, is not a section for subtlety.

When writing a meta description, think of it as an elevator pitch. It should be short and direct to the point. Moreover, it must have all the important details that you would want your customer to learn. Be cautious in writing the description. If possible, write a couple of drafts before finalizing the meta description.

When to write meta descriptions?

Given the importance of a meta description, you may be tempted to go back and write descriptions for every single page in your website.
However, if your online store has hundreds of pages, writing meta descriptions can be very exhausting even for the most prolific copywriter.

One way to approach this is to list down your 10 most important pages and see if writing a description can help in improve the click-through rates.
Moving forward, you can then make it SOP to write a meta description once a new page of content is uploaded in your website.

The bottom line is that a good meta description can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts.