Meta description — how to create a description that encourages clicks?

<meta description> is a brief description of a webpage that usually includes one of the keywords, a selected product feature, and a call to action, enabling potential customers to decide to visit the site. The meta description is an HTML attribute displayed just below the page title in the search engine and communicates the page’s content.

If you do not add your own meta description, the search engine algorithms will do it for you, using the content present on the page. This may result in reduced traffic to your site. How do you properly prepare a meta description? And how do you create a description that encourages users to click?

What does a meta description look like?

A meta description in Google search results appears as a few lines of plain text displayed under the title and link to the page. To make it more attractive, colorful emojis or user reviews in the form of stars are sometimes added. However, it may happen that the search engine completely omits emojis and does not display them in the description. Some words in the meta description will be bolded. These are phrases entered by the user in the search engine – the algorithm bolds them to facilitate finding the best-matched results. To check the meta tags on your site, you can use the Google Search Console tool, which helps monitor the site’s status and communication with the search engine.

A description that encourages the user

When preparing a meta description, follow the rule: quality over quantity. The description should fit within 150-160 characters including spaces, roughly the length of an average SMS message. Longer texts are truncated by the search engine, which replaces the cut-off part with an ellipsis. Such an interruption may appear in the middle of the text if you do not fill in the meta description yourself and the search engine selects fragments from your page. The description should be precise and truly inform potential customers about what the company does or what products they can buy in the online store. Avoid stuffing the entire meta description with keywords. Using too many keywords will not improve the page’s ranking and may discourage visitors from clicking through.

When writing the meta description, pay attention to good syntax and use so-called call to action phrases, such as “buy now,” “check,” or “try.” Treat the description as a short sales text that does not offer a specific product but skillfully promotes the entire site. If you are creating meta descriptions for product subpages, focus on technical parameters—provide information such as brand, price, and manufacturer’s name.

Each subpage should have its own unique meta description, but for very extensive e-commerce sites, this may be difficult to complete quickly. Therefore, it is worth starting by selecting the most important pages and preparing attractive descriptions for them.

Meta description and SEO

For some time, meta descriptions played a significant role in the process of website SEO. However, this led to many abuses by users. Meta descriptions often contained content unrelated to the actual profile of the site, and as a result, pages with poor content frequently appeared in high positions in search results. Currently, meta descriptions do not influence SEO rankings. Nevertheless, a well-crafted and engaging description can effectively attract potential customers and ultimately improve organic traffic.

An interesting and professional meta description is an excellent way to gain new customers and generate organic traffic to your site. Although it does not directly improve SEO rankings, it should never be left empty. A good description enhances conversion rates and the click-through rate (CTR), which in turn positively impacts the site’s visibility in search results.