SEO glossary
Meta description
A meta description is a short summary in a page's HTML that search engines may use as the snippet beneath its title in results.
It has not been a ranking factor for well over a decade, and keywords in it do not help you rank. What it does is sell the click, which is why it still matters on pages where you already rank and are not being clicked.
Google rewrites the majority of them, taking text from the page when that answers the query better than your summary does. That is not a failure — it means the page had a better sentence in it. You are writing a strong default, not a guarantee.
Practically: around 150 characters before mobile truncation, one page's description never reused on another, and a specific promise rather than a description of the category. "Compare up to three competitors and see only the keywords they rank for" earns clicks that "Learn about content gap analysis" does not.
Common question
- Why is Google showing a different description?
- Because it found text on the page that matched the query better. It happens on most pages and is usually fine.
Check this on your own site
- Site Audit
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Definitions are the easy part
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