SEOMadHatter
Elite Member
- Aug 15, 2015
- 1,808
- 2,467
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How long do you spend writing meta descriptions for your blog posts and product pages?
No matter how long you’re spending, it might all be a waste of time.
The importance of meta descriptions is just another SEO debate making noise in SEO Facebook groups and everywhere else SEOs can find a platform to debate things – but it’s a relevant debate.
However, rather than reading opinions on Facebook groups, you could just have a look at this research done by Evan Hall at Portent and let the data do the talking.
They used a list of 30,000 keywords taken from their clients with brand terms filtered out. They then entered the keywords into STAT Search Analytics and pulled rankings for both desktop and mobile search results.
The goal? To find out if Google’s actually using the meta descriptions you’re writing.
Here are some results of the research:
These are just some of the different stats you can find in Evan’s article.
- First-page rewrite rate: 71% for mobile and 68% for desktop. In other words, Google uses the meta description tag for the snippet around 30% of the time when the page ranks on the first page.
- Rewrite rate by search volume: the higher the search volume of the keyword, the less likely Google is to rewrite the meta description.
- Rewrite rate by query length: like search volume, long-tail queries tend to have search result snippets that don’t use the page’s meta description.
But you’re probably wondering what you should do with your own meta descriptions.
As Evan says, you shouldn’t give up on writing good meta descriptions. But, you can just be smart about it.
For example, as per the study, if you’re targeting high search volume keywords, it is better that you put more time in coming up with a better meta description.
And for more scenarios, just give a look at the stats in the research.
Yep, this is a complete copy paste from Stacked Marketer today but I was actually going to post about this the other day. I though it was maybe because I've been spending so much of my time in longtails lately but I've mostly stopped bothering with the meta description.
I was comparing some rankings lately from old freelance writers from sometime last year. One writer practiced good technical SEO and had the keywords in the meta etc... The other was a better writer but a worse SEO. Looking at the rankings Google's picked up on interesting bits from the better writer to use in the SERP and those pieces are doing much better.
Just because Google isn't showing the meta description in the SERP doesn't mean they're completely ignoring it but I know I'm certainly paying less attention to it.