Meta Description Rewriter

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor and have not been for many years, which leads people to neglect them. They still matter, because they are advertising copy for the click: two results ranking adjacently can see meaningfully different click-through rates on the strength of the description alone. The job is not to rank the page but to make the listing the most appealing option on the screen.

Google shows the description you wrote perhaps 60 to 70% of the time and substitutes its own extract from the page for the rest, usually when a passage matches the query better. That is worth accepting rather than fighting: it means a well-written description covers the primary query while the page body handles the long tail. Writing a description that duplicates the opening sentence of the page wastes the opportunity entirely.

Aim for roughly 120 to 160 characters — long enough to say something, short enough to survive truncation on most result layouts. Include the search term naturally, since matched words are bolded and that bolding is what draws the eye. And make sure the promise matches what the page delivers: an overstated description buys a click and loses it again within seconds, which is worse for the page than no click at all.