Screaming Cow

The SEO crawler that won't stay quiet about your site's problems.

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Titles and descriptions

No meta description: what you are giving up

In your audit this appears as Pages with missing meta description

The page has no <meta name="description"> tag, or it is empty. This is the grey paragraph that appears under the title in search results.

Why it matters

Worth saying plainly: it is not a ranking factor. Google has confirmed this, and writing one will not move you up. What it does decide is how many of the people who already see you come in, which in practice is worth the same.

Leave it empty and Google fills the gap with some stray piece of the page: sometimes that works, and sometimes it pulls in the cookie notice or the navigation menu. It is your ad copy, and you are letting a machine write it.

How to fix it

  • Write a unique description per page, about 150-160 characters.
  • Say what they will find and why it helps. One or two sentences, no waffle.
  • Include a reason to click: "compare prices", "check the sizes", "read the guide".
  • Do not copy it across a hundred pages: a repeated description signals a template, not content.
Watch out for this

Google does not always use the one you write. If it thinks a snippet from the page answers that person's query better, it shows that instead. This is not your mistake: the description is a proposal, not an instruction.

Where to start

You do not need to write them all at once. Start with the pages that already get visits — the home page, your service pages, your best-selling products — because that is where a better sentence shows up in the click-through numbers.

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Related issues

Titles and descriptions Pages with no title: what it means and how to fix it Titles and descriptions Duplicate titles: why your pages compete