Hi, I'm Nikki Pilkington. My site is https://nikki-pilkington.com/ and in this episode of "SEO F**king What", I'm talking about the one bit of SEO that isn't a ranking factor but is absolutely the thing that decides whether anyone actually clicks on your listing — your meta descriptions. You've probably never written one, duplicated the same one across your whole site, or let Yoast bully you into stuffing it with keywords. All three are fucked.

Here's what I'm covering:

— Why your meta description isn't a ranking factor — but still decides whether anyone clicks

— What a good meta description actually does (and the 155-character rule)

— Why Google bolds search terms, and why that matters for getting clicks

— The parade of horrors: missing descriptions, duplicate descriptions, and corporate waffle

— Why the Yoast green light isn't the goal — writing for a human is

— A proper before-and-after for an HR consultant that shows you exactly what to write

— The Mark Williams-Cook argument for not writing them at all — and why I still say you should, for small B2B sites

I also give you proper homework. Three things to do this week that will sort out your meta descriptions without taking all day.

If you know someone whose search result description reads like it was written by a committee, send them this. It might be the reason they're not getting the clicks they deserve.

Get found. Make money. Stop stressing. Write it for a human.

Links mentioned:

Non-Wanky SEO Courses: https://nonwankyseo.com

SearchPilot meta description research: https://www.searchpilot.com

Follow Nikki:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkipilkington/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikkipilkington/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nikkipilkington.bsky.social

Mentioned in this episode:

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You've sorted your meta title, you've sorted your H1s, but there's one

more thing showing up in those search results that you're almost certainly

getting wrong, and it's the thing that could make someone click on your link

instead of the one above or below it.

This is SEO Fucking What. I'm Nikki, and I've been doing SEO for over 30 years

before it was even called SEO. I help people like you get found on search

and make money from your website.

Today we're talking meta descriptions.

What they are, what they're not, why yours are probably either missing,

duplicated, or written like a corporate brochure and what to do about it. Right?

Let's get one thing out of the way straight away,

because I know someone out there has been told that meta descriptions are

a ranking factor and has spent hours agonizing over keyword density in them.

They're not.

Google has said so repeatedly.

Your meta description does not directly affect where you rank.

So why am I talking about it for a full episode?

Well, because it can affect whether anyone clicks on your listing once

you're ranking, and a page that ranks, but nobody clicks on is a

waste of everyone's fucking time.

Think about it this way.

You've done the work, you fix your meta titles like I talked about in episode 21.

You've sorted your H1s, Google's now showing your page in the results.

Someone searches for whatever it is you do.

They see your link, they see the text underneath it, and they

make a split second decision.

Click or keep scrolling.

Your meta description is doing a huge chunk of that work, or it

isn't because you've never written one or you wrote it in 2019

and haven't looked at it since.

So what is it?

Your meta description is the short bit of text that appears under your

page title in search results, usually two or three lines, depending on whether

you're on a desktop or a mobile.

It's around 150 ish characters before Google cuts it off, which looks

terrible and unprofessional and happens constantly on sites that haven't

bothered to keep it under the limit.

Now, Google doesn't always use what you write.

Sometimes it pulls a random bit of text from your page

instead, if it decides that's more relevant to the search. You

can't fully control this, and I'm not gonna pretend you can.

But writing a good meta description gives Google something decent to

work with, and often it'll use it.

So what does a good meta description look like?

There are a few things it needs to do.

It needs to describe what's actually on the page, not what your business does in

general, not a company mission statement.

What is on this specific page, and why should the person who just

searched for something click on it?

That's the brief.

It should include your target key phrase or search intent, or a close

variation, not because it helps you rank.

Remember?

Because Google bolds the search terms in the description

when they match what someone typed, and bolded text stands out, bolded text

gets attention, bolded text gets clicks.

It needs a reason to click.

What are they going to get if they land on this page?

Be specific.

Not find out more about our services.

No one's clicking on that.

Fixed fee bookkeeping packages for UK small businesses.

No surprises, no jargon.

Give someone an actual reason to choose your result over the one next to it,

and it needs to be under 155 characters.

I know that sounds tight.

It is tight.

It includes punctuation and spaces.

Write it, count it, trim it.

If Google cuts it off halfway through a sentence, it looks sloppy.

And sloppy

doesn't inspire confidence.

Now let's talk about what website owners usually do with meta descriptions,

'cause it's a parade of horrors out there.

The most common thing is nothing, no meta description at all,

which means Google picks whatever text it fancies from your page.

Sometimes the first paragraph, which is often welcome to our website or some other

absolute waste of space. You've given up your one chance to write the sales pitch

and handed it to an algorithm or something.

The second most common thing is duplicate meta descriptions, the

same text on every page of the site.

I've seen this everywhere, and I mentioned it back in episode 14

when I went through all the ways people sabotage their own SEO.

It's the same problem as having every page title

say home.

If every page has the same meta description, none of your pages have

a description that matches what is on the page, except maybe the first one.

Write a different description for every page.

All of them.

Even the blog posts.

Especially the blog posts.

The other thing I see constantly is descriptions written for the

business owner, not the searcher, full of internal language, vague claims,

self-congratulation.

We're an award-winning leading provider of innovative solutions

for forward thinking businesses.

What does that mean?

What? Who are you talking to?

Write for the person who's about to click, not for whoever

approved your brand guidelines.

And then there's the Yoast problem.

Yoast and the SEO plugins will wave a little red flag at you if your meta

description doesn't hit certain keyword density or length.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it.

Those tools are a checklist, not a brain.

Don't stuff your meta description with keywords to make a plugin happy.

Write it for a human.

A human who is one click away from landing on your page or

scrolling straight past you.

Lemme give you a quick before and after, so this lands a bit better.

Here's a bad meta description for an HR consultant.

We offer a range of HR services to businesses of all sizes.

Contact us today to find out how we can help your organization achieve its goals.

It's a shitload of characters, so it gets cut off anyway.

It won't match search intent.

It tells the searcher nothing specific.

It could be anyone.

It will get scrolled past.

A better version is outsourced HR support for UK small businesses.

Employment contracts our specialty.

There's fewer characters, but it tells you what they do, who it's

for, how it works, what you get.

Someone searching for employment contracts with a small business is clicking on that.

Now, before I give you your homework, I wanna be straight with you about

something, 'cause there's a pretty interesting argument that's been going

on in the SEO world for quite a while and I think you deserve to hear it.

Mark Williams-Cook, who has over 20 years of SEO experience and is someone I have a lot of time for,

put out a LinkedIn post quite a while back now, saying he doesn't recommend

writing meta descriptions at all anymore.

His testing through SEOTesting showed a small but statistically significant uplift

in organic traffic on pages with no meta description versus pages that had one.

His argument is that Google is doing something you can't do, which is writing

a dynamic description tailored to the specific query that someone searched for.

If you write one meta description for a page, it has to try and work for

every possible search that lands on it.

Google can write a different one depending on what someone actually

typed in, and he's not alone.

SearchPilot did a study showing that with around 90% confidence, removing meta

descriptions resulted in more traffic.

And on top of all that, Google is now increasingly using AI to rewrite or

generate meta descriptions on the fly.

So even if you write something you're proud of, there's a real chance that

what actually appears in the search results isn't your wording at all.

This isn't exactly new.

Mark's been on about meta descriptions for years.

The AI rewriting piece has kind of taken it to another level.

So what do I think you should do? If you've got a small business to business site

and you have the time, I say write them.

And here's why.

The people doing this research, amazing though

they are, aren't working on small B2B service websites.

They're working with e-commerce, they're working with retail, they're working with

your money, your life type sites, usually, and I've not seen anything in the small

tests that I've done that backs this up.

That's not to say that Mark and other people are wrong, not in the slightest.

Just that I think for a B2B site with 10 main pages and a blog, the risk of Google

pulling something you don't want into your meta description isn't worth taking.

I've seen it happen so many times where Google picks a tiny little

bit of your page that has nothing to do with your meta description.

It could be a list from your navigation.

It could be a testimonial or a part of a testimonial or some random

words that are on your page that don't make sense on their own.

It's not gonna give you something that someone wants to click on, at

least for your main website pages.

Write the descriptions.

Ignore.

It may rewrite them.

It may generate something completely different using AI,

but it definitely won't use them if they're not fucking there.

Give Google something decent to work with.

It's still better than giving it nothing and hoping the algorithm picks

a good paragraph from your page.

And for a small site,

we're not talking hundreds of pages, we're talking your homepage,

a handful of service pages,

maybe a few popular blog posts.

That's a couple of hours' work.

You can do it.

If you've got a massive site with thousands of pages, then

this calculation changes and it's probably not worth your time.

But that's not most of the people listening to this podcast.

And while we're at it, make sure the opening paragraph

of your page is decent too.

If Google decides to pull text from that instead of your meta description,

you want it to pull something that actually makes sense, not in today's

fast-paced digital landscape or whatever

AI waffle someone published and never edited.

I talked about this in episode 18 when we did the content audit, and

it's worth keeping in mind here. Coming up: your actual homework.

Three things to do this week that will sort out your meta

descriptions without taking all day.

Don't go anywhere.

[Advert]

Right.

Here's what you're doing this week.

First, go through your main pages —

homepage, service pages, about page, if it's indexed.

Open a private browser window and Google your own business name or your main

key phrase that brings up those pages.

Look at what appears under your link in the results.

Is it the meta description you wrote, or has Google grabbed

a random chunk of your page?

Is it cut off?

Does it make any sense?

Does it give someone a reason to click?

Secondly, check for duplicates.

If you're on WordPress, Yoast, or whichever plugin you use, will show

you the meta description for each page

when you're in the editor. Go through your main pages and check

they're all different. If they're the same or blank, fix the most important

ones first — homepage, service pages, about page, maybe your top three blog posts.

Rewrite the worst offenders.

That's your third task.

You don't have to do every page this week.

Pick the three pages you most want people to land on.

Write a meta description for each one that describes what's on the page.

It should naturally include your target phrases and your search intent.

Make sure it gives a reason to click.

Make sure it comes in around 150 characters.

That last bit matters.

Count it.

Use a character counter if you need to.

There are free ones all over the place.

That's it.

Three things.

Any of them, all of them, will make a difference.

If this episode has made you realize your on-page SEO needs more than a quick

tweak, go and have a look at my Non-Wanky On-Page SEO course at nonwankyseo.com.

Everything I do for clients when I'm optimizing their pages laid

out, so you can do it yourself.

There's a 20 pound a month option too, if you'd rather spread it out.

Go and have a look at nonwankyseo.com.

Make sure you're following SEO Fucking What, wherever you're listening,

so you don't miss the next episode.

And if you know someone whose search result description either doesn't make

sense or reads like it was written by a committee, send them this.