Meta Description
A Meta Description is the short HTML metadata snippet that summarizes a webpage — typically 140-160 characters — displayed by search engines below the page title in search results.
What is Meta Description?
Meta Descriptions don't directly affect rankings, but they affect click-through rate on the rank you already have. A well-written meta description matches the user's search intent, contains the keyword they searched, and ends with a click-earning hook. The 140-160 character limit is real — longer descriptions get truncated in SERPs. Modern Meta Description optimization also has to consider AI Overview, which sometimes uses the meta description as the snippet basis.
Why it matters
- Doesn't affect rank but does affect click-through on the rank you have.
- Often the difference between earning the click at position 3 vs being skipped.
- Auto-generated meta descriptions usually underperform human-written ones by 20-30%.
Use cases
- Money-page optimization. Every high-traffic page has a hand-written meta description.
- CTR recovery. Rewriting meta descriptions on existing rankings to lift CTR without changing rank.
- Comparison-page hooks. Meta description sells the click on competitive-comparison pages.
How turgo helps
turgo's content templates require a hand-written meta description per page — no auto-generated fallbacks — and the publish gate validates length and keyword match before going live.
See turgo in action →
