Big Meta Description Update

Recently, the SERP has followed in the footsteps of Twitter's increased character length and had made a significant change to their meta description's length. But, is it as big as the SEO wizards think? Here's our take on the apparent new optimised length and whether it has made any 'big' changes.

The Old vs The New length

Before the significant change, search engines only allowed between 160 and 180 characters in your meta description tags. It allowed very little to be explained and made the need to tailor your description for relevancy. Now, according to some publications; new length allows anything between 230-260 characters which only means more talking to SEO'ers.

So, how will this affect SEO?

Things have to change all the time and keep up with the times to get the best result out. The fundamentals of SEO won't change massively, but a few tweaks will have to be made to optimise things to their best standard.

A different style of writing

As there will be more space to write, our meta descriptions may come across a little differently. With a constant effort of trying to entice the users in without waffling but answering their search query. The page could be ranked higher if done successfully which could result in a sacrifice of clicks.

Click-through rate 

Depending on the query, the number of clicks may decrease as the user finds out the answer in the search engine as previously mentioned. Although, more complicated queries may increase the number of clicks. Because the longer description entices them in.

What should SEO'ers do?

It's time to get updated.

Write a priority list of all of your most important backed up with data such as your search traffic.Then go and optimise those meta descriptions as these are the pages you want to focus on and could get the most return from.

Get descriptive

With more space given to you, why not use it? Use more keywords to attract more traffic and with this, excite the user and make them want to know more for a better click-through rate.

Don't go below 100 characters

Less than 100 characters in your meta descriptions will make your description equal to just one line. This will make your search result appear smaller on the screen and take up less space, making it less visible to users and therefore, affect your click-through rate. As you can see, Google's 'big' change isn't half a big as we thought. Think of the new update as a magic potion that just needs tweaking a little to make your spell even better. If you need your SEO updating, why not get in touch with our wizards? They'd be more than happy to help out!