Problems with meta descriptions
Learn what is checked in this report and how to fix any issues found
This report shows you pages with meta description problems.
Why meta descriptions are important for SEO:
Although a page's meta description doesn't directly affect the ranking of a page, it's an important element for SEO because it's displayed in the search results snippet in the SERPs.
It should encourage searchers to click on your snippet as it is the first contact they have with your website. For this reason, you should write an engaging meta description for each relevant page of your website.
If there's no meta description, or if Google thinks your description is not relevant enough, Google will usually display a text snippet from the page that contains the terms that a user was searching for.
What the notes in the "Meta description" column mean:
- Missing: No meta description was found on the page.
- Empty: The meta description tag for this page contains no content.
- Too short: The page's meta description is very short and leaves room for optimization.
- Only 1 word: The meta description consists of only one word and leaves room for optimization.
- Multiple descriptions: Multiple meta descriptions were found on the page.
- Too long: The meta description is very long and is likely to be truncated in the search results.
How to optimize your meta descriptions:
- Keep to a maximum length of around 1000 pixels (Tip: You can easily optimize the length of your meta descriptions with the SERP Snippet Generator from Seobility).
- Provide a description of the page content that is as precise and understandable as possible and that encourages users to take action ("buy", "inform", "compare", "download", etc.).
- Avoid very generic descriptions that reveal little about the content of the page.
- Use keywords that are relevant to the page. They will be displayed in bold in your search snippet when users search for these terms, highlighting the relevance of your result.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Create a unique meta description for each relevant page.
You can find a full guide to optimizing your meta descriptions on our blog.