The two lines under your title in a search result

What it is and is not

It is a short summary you write, stored in the page, offered to search engines as the description to display. It is not used to decide where you rank, and it has not been for many years.

What it does affect is whether somebody clicks. Two results side by side, similar titles, and the description is the only thing separating them.

So treat it as ad copy rather than as a technical field. It is read by people, not scored by machines.

Treat it as advertising copy rather than a technical field. It is read by people deciding between ten results, not scored by a machine.

Length

Search engines cut descriptions by width rather than character count, and the practical working range is roughly a hundred and fifty characters.

Longer is not punished, it is simply truncated, so anything important has to arrive early. A description whose point lands at the end frequently loses it.

Too short wastes the space. A single clause under a strong title leaves room you could have used to answer the searcher's next question.

What to put in it

The specific thing this page gives somebody. Not a description of your company, which is the same on every page and tells a searcher nothing about this one.

Answer the implied question. If the search is what does a roof inspection cover, the description should begin to answer that rather than describing that you offer inspections.

Include the distinguishing detail. The service area, the trade, the format. Anything that lets a searcher decide this is the right result rather than the one above it.

• The specific thing this page gives somebody
• The start of an answer to the implied question
• The distinguishing detail: the trade, the area, the format
• A reason to choose this result over the one above it
• Not a description of your company
• Not marketing adjectives, which persuade nobody in a result list

Why yours gets replaced

Search engines rewrite descriptions very often, usually by pulling a passage from the page that matches the search more closely than your summary did.

That is not a failure. A well written page with strong passages will often supply a better answer than any single description could, because the engine can match the exact search.

It is a failure when the replacement is a scrap of navigation or a fragment of boilerplate. That usually means the page has no clear passage answering the subject.

It becomes a failure when the replacement is a scrap of navigation, which usually means the page has no clear passage answering the subject.

Make each one different

Every page needs its own. Duplicated descriptions waste the space and make a set of pages look like one page repeated.

This is the second most common on page fault after duplicate titles, and it comes from the same cause: a template filled it in and nobody edited.

Near duplicates count too. Twenty descriptions differing only by a place name read as a template to a searcher scanning results.

This is the second commonest on-page fault after duplicate titles, and it has the same cause: a template filled it in and nobody edited.

Writing them quickly

Write the page first, then read your own opening answer and compress it. The description is usually already in the page, in the paragraph that answers the question.

Avoid starting with your business name. Avoid marketing adjectives, which take space and persuade nobody in a result list.

Read it back as though you were choosing between ten results. If it does not make you want to click, rewrite it.

The description is usually already in the page, in the paragraph that answers the question — which is the case for the pattern in title tags too.

How ours are handled

Every page written by Website Builder Studio carries its own description, checked for length and checked to be unique across the site.

The description is written from the page's own answer rather than from a pattern, which is what stops a set of sibling pages producing twenty variations of one sentence.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, and a duplicate description stops the page publishing.