How to Write a Click-Worthy Meta Description
Nonprofit SEO Must Do More than ‘Show Up’ In Search Results
SEO involves far too many components to address them all in one article. Today, we’re going to focus on the meta description – what it is, where it is, and how to write it so web searchers respond to it.
Sound like fun? Did you wake up today and excitedly tell yourself, “Yes! I’m gonna learn how to write meta descriptions!”? Probably not – but you know what? As you’re about to see, learning how to write a good meta description can lead to dramatic increases in traffic for your nonprofit’s website.
More traffic means more email list signups, more donors, and more of everything else your website is capable of achieving.
The meta description and the page title are what make people click through to your website. They are like your billboard, or your display window, as shoppers drive or walk by. They are what web searchers see and use to decide if they want to ‘go in’ the store – your website.
Study Reveals Importance of Meta Descriptions
How much do web searchers rely on meta descriptions?
One study tried to find out and asked 500 people what affected their decision to click on a particular search result. The survey responses are striking.
13% used the page title.
24.2% relied on the brand name.
And a whopping 62.9% said the meta description was the greatest factor in helping them decide which sites to click on.
Why? Probably because the description contains much more detail than the page title, which is limited to 65 characters, most of which get used up by the targeted keywords.
Image by amyelizabethquinn from Pixabay
Meet Mr. Meta Description
Meta descriptions can be thought of as the Page Title’s little brother. Together, the title and the meta make up the two most visible and influential components of SEO. They are what web searchers see when they search for anything in a search engine like Google or Bing.
Here’s a screenshot of one, which came up first when I searched for the keyword ‘youth mentoring programs.’
The page title is the larger purple text (normally blue, before you click on it) that says ‘Starting a Youth Mentoring Program – MENTOR – mentoring.org.’ The meta description is the black text below that.
The important thing to note here is that when done properly, neither of these two components are visible on your actual website… almost.
Where Meta Descriptions Appear
In the next screenshot, which is the home page for the nonprofit I reached when I clicked through to the mentoring site, notice the red box in the top left? It has the same language as the page title from the search results.
That is where you can see the page title, and it shows up on every web page on every site. Each page should have its own title and its own meta.
The meta description will not be visible anywhere, in most cases. However, on this mentoring nonprofit’s page, the meta is the same as the first few lines of text on the screen. That means one of two things. Either they don’t have a meta description which is a big mistake, or Google is lame and isn’t showing the one they wrote.
How to find out?
Right-click anywhere on the web page and click the ‘View Page Source’ option from the box that appears. A whole bunch of scary-looking code will appear. Don’t worry, I don’t know what most of it means either. But clearly whoever wrote it never learned how to write a topic sentence in school.
What you’re looking for is shown in the red box and the text that follows it in this screenshot:
I didn’t include all the text in the screenshot so you can see the details. The blue text following the word “content” next to the red box is the meta description written by the nonprofit. That’s the text that should be showing up in the search results. But if you compare that text to the earlier screenshot showing the search results, you will see that they do not match.
That means, as I suspected, Google is lame.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
For some reason, their great, wise, and all-powerful bots and algorithms decided it was better to show the first few lines of text on the web page rather than the carefully considered meta description written by the nonprofit. While this is distressing, it’s not uncommon, and here are a few reasons why it might happen. Reason #4 is the most likely one – Google simply ignored what you wrote, because they can.
But let’s not get too distracted – something VERY easy to do when you get into the weeds of SEO. Google will show your preferred meta description when it feels like it, and in those instances, you want it to do its job, which is to sell your page, and motivate web searchers to click on your page instead of all the other ones showing up in their search results.
That is the singular goal of a meta description – to make people click through from search results to the website.
“Meta Descriptions Don’t Matter Because Google Doesn’t Use Them”
If you spend any time learning about meta descriptions, at some point you’ll come across statements like this. They’re wrong, but here’s what they mean:
Google search algorithms are complex and always changing. They use the page title as part of their process for deciding which websites to show in the search results. So, keywords in the page title play a critical role in ranking on page one. Google used to use the meta description for this purpose too, but some time ago, they removed it from their algorithm.
In other words, the meta no longer ‘counts’ for SEO.
But recall the data you saw at the outset. The meta may not affect whether your site shows up in search results, but it does affect whether people click on your pages!
Showing up in search results does little good if no one clicks.
SEO writer, educator, and authority Heather Lloyd Martin says she hears frequently that “it doesn’t matter what we put there,” referring to meta descriptions. Other clients of hers use the same meta across all pages, and others just leave them blank. If you do that, Google will usually show the first lines of text on a page, which are usually not very effective as meta descriptions.
Heather makes clear what you’ve read up to this point.
A blank billboard won’t get much business. An empty storefront attracts no customers.
Write a good meta description, and you will get more site visitors.
How to Write Effective Meta Descriptions
First, keep them at about 156 characters, including spaces, because anything beyond that won’t show up in search results. If you’re using WordPress and have installed the Yoast SEO plugin or any other SEO plugin on your website, you can easily insert the meta description when you write the page title and enter the focus keyphrase for each page.
Here’s how to write them:
1. Don’t Leave the Meta Blank
As mentioned earlier, this leaves it to a computer to decide what it thinks web searchers should see. While that might happen anyway, you don’t want to cede all control to Google. You want to tell Google what your page is about and motivate people to click on it.
2. Don’t Stuff the Meta with Keywords – Write Sentences
While you do want to try to get one primary keyphrase, more or less, into the description to help Google see its relevance, your main goal is to write meta descriptions that are composed of a clear sentence or two, using about 156 characters, and that is easy to read and motivates someone to click. This is not the place for keyword stuffing.
For example, suppose someone searched for the keyphrase ‘how can I stop racial bias’.
Imagine seeing these two meta descriptions for different websites:
Stopping racial bias, racial oppression, racism, and racial injustice. Racial bias causes and solutions. Racial injustice workshops. How to stop racism.
Is racial bias influencing your thinking or causing harm to you or someone close to you? What can you do? See 7 ways you can combat racial bias.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
If you weren’t sure what was meant by ‘keyword stuffing,’ now you get it. The first meta is terrible. It doesn’t really SAY anything. It just regurgitates a bunch of related words and maybe the site offers some workshops.
But the second one poses a problem the searcher appears to want to solve (very important), and then promises seven potential solutions. It is clear what to expect from that page. For a searcher looking for help with racial bias, that page offers what they’re looking for, and it’s the meta description that makes that clear.
3. Try to Appeal to Search Intent
The previous example showed one way to do this. Each page on your site should have a primary or focus keyphrase. When someone searches for that phrase or a closely related one, what are they really searching for? What do they want help with? What problem do they want solved, or question do they want answered?
Write meta descriptions that promises answers and solutions.
4. Include a Call to Action
In short, that means use an active verb. In the above example, the call to action was to ‘see 7 ways…’ Other good CTA verbs include get, learn, find out, discover, uncover, and explore. Notice what isn’t on that list. It does not include buy, subscribe, sign up, join, or any other ‘conversion’ level call to actions.
Why? Because it is extremely unlikely that a web searcher is already prepared to take an action of that sort just from a page title and meta description. Most web searchers are in the browsing and exploring and researching phase. If they are looking for something more specific, like a specific product, or a nonprofit they already know and want to donate to, then you can include those CTA verbs because they will be appropriate for those pages.
Your donation page, in other words, should include the words ‘give’ or ‘donate’ in the meta description.
5. Use the Focus Keyword
You do want to include the focus keyword, or a close variation of it, when you write meta descriptions. Supposedly, this increases the chances that Google will choose to show your version. The caveat is, don’t try so hard to cram in a keyphrase – especially a longer one – and reduce the clarity of writing or quality of the call to action.
Some keyphrases don’t work in sentences.
6. Make a Promise
In marketing, this is referred to as the benefits of whatever you’re selling. How will it change your life? What will be better after you buy this?
The same thinking applies to web searchers. They have a problem or question, and they are looking for help, for answers, for useful information.
In the above example, the promise was made in the form of a question. The problem is that racial bias is either hurting me, or hurting someone I know. The promise of help comes in the question, ‘What can you do?’ This implies that I CAN do something about it and make the situation better. And if I click, I will find seven things that I might be able to try.
This part is harder to do well in so few characters, but when you can fit it a promise or a picture of something better for the person if they click here, you will draw more traffic to your nonprofit’s website.
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