how do i write meta descriptions? the two lines that decide who clicks

seo · Mar 15, 2026 · 5 min read

the meta description is the two lines of grey text under your title in google's results. it does not affect ranking — google has said so for a decade, and it behaves that way — but it decides whether anyone clicks your ranking, which makes it the closest thing seo has to ad copy. same position, different sentence, twice the visits: that is the size of the lever.

the pattern that works

  • front-load the keyword in the first 120 characters. mobile truncates around 120; desktop around 155-160. the searcher scans for the words they typed — if your description does not show them early, google may rewrite the description entirely, taking the choice away from you.

  • answer the question the title opens. the title is the promise ("what is hosting?"); the description is the specific content ("the computer your website lives on, explained with the shop metaphor — shared, vps or builder, real yearly costs"). question + specific payoff beats clever vagueness every time.

  • one concrete detail. a number, a range, a named trade-off: "0-300 euro a year" outperforms "affordable options for every budget" because specificity reads as honesty — the same signal that makes a website look trustworthy.

  • close with the implicit ask. not "click here" — the description is the ask. end on the payoff, not on an instruction.

    the limits, so you can stop worrying about them

  • length: aim for 140-160 characters. longer gets truncated mid-sentence — the classic symptom being a description that ends "..." at an useless word. front-load anyway, so the cut never removes the payoff.

  • google often rewrites it. for a majority of queries, google composes its own description from page text — usually when the meta does not match the query. you cannot prevent it; you influence it by writing a description that matches the page's dominant intent. write it anyway: for your most important queries, the hand-written one survives, and on social shares and other surfaces yours is always the one shown.

  • no keyword stuffing, no all-caps salesmanship. a description that reads like a banner ad trains searchers to skip it — the same failure mode as keyword stuffing one line lower.

    a working procedure, five minutes per page

  1. write the query the page answers, as a searcher would type it.
  2. write one sentence containing that query that states what the page delivers, with one concrete detail.
  3. add the differentiating promise ("with real numbers", "the honest version", "in plain words").
  4. count characters; trim to ≤160 with the keyword intact in the first 120.
  5. check it against the neighboring results for that query — say something the others do not.

this is the exact checklist behind the audit this site ran on its own archive, which found a third of descriptions missing the keyword in the visible window — the fix took an afternoon and the pattern is now baked into every new post.

FAQ: the questions i actually get

does the meta description affect seo?

not ranking — clicks. the distinction and its arithmetic live in what counts as a conversion for my site: more clicks at the same rank is more customers from zero new work.

should every page have one?

every page you care about in search: service pages, money pages, the posts that target real queries. the cookie policy can go without.

title tag or description — which first?

title first: it carries the keyword that ranks and the first half of the click promise. the description completes the pitch the title opens — the pair is one sentence split across two fields.