Meta Descriptions For Your Burnaby Business

When you’ve done SEO for as long as we have, you learn an important truth: it’s the little things that matter.

Maybe that’s something you’ve found to be true for your business, too.

If you’re looking to stand out from other businesses in Burnaby, you want to optimize the meta descriptions for all of your pages. In this piece, we’ll teach you what meta descriptions are, the guidelines for writing them, and how you can optimize meta descriptions for Burnaby.

Let’s get started: 

What are meta descriptions?

Meta descriptions are brief descriptions of a page. They show up as a part of the search results for a page, below the meta title (which links to the page): 

*Kudos to Vancouver Trails – this is a fantastic meta description.

Meta descriptions can also appear below social media posts, like so:

You’ll notice that meta descriptions exist for pretty much every page on the web – even if you’ve never heard of meta descriptions in your life, if you look at search results for your business, you’ll see meta descriptions for the pages.

That’s because search engines and social media platforms will auto-generate descriptions if none have been created by the user. More often than not, they’re simply generated by using the first ~155 characters of a page (for Google – it’s less than that for Facebook and other social media platforms).

That’s a wasted marketing opportunity. Think of meta descriptions as an elevator pitch for a page – exciting copy will encourage people to click. When they do, it can help your SEO efforts (more clicks + lower bounce rates = a happy algorithm). For product and service pages, those extra clicks can lead directly to more sales.

Meta descriptions are a snippet of code found in theof your HTML code. They look like this:

That’s the code for the meta description of the article you’re reading right now! 

Meta description guidelines

With all that in mind, let’s start crafting high-quality meta descriptions.

The first thing you need to know is that platforms are not obligated to use your meta description. Meta descriptions are more akin to a strong suggestion as to what should be displayed in search results and social media posts.

If you don’t follow meta description best practices and guidelines, your description might simply be rejected in favour of whatever description the platform in question auto-generated.

Here are the guidelines:

• Make a unique meta description for every page.
• Make sure your meta description accurately describes the page.
• Keep your meta description at ~155 characters.

Simple enough. Keep in mind that when you update your meta description, your results on SERPs won’t automatically update – it takes some time for bots to crawl the page, pull the new description, and display it.

You should also know that even if you follow all of these rules, you might still not get your meta description displayed – the algorithm works in mysterious ways. If after a few months, your meta description hasn’t impacted what’s displayed, consider rewriting it. Want more information? Take a look at Google’s good titles and snippets page – they have a whole section on meta descriptions. 

Optimizing your meta descriptions

What Google’s page won’t tell you is how to optimize meta description – they’re not in the business of teaching you how to write sales copy.

Fortunately, we are.

Let’s assume you’re trying to outrank other local Burnaby businesses. A great first step is to include Burnaby in your page descriptions. You’ll also want to include your targeted keywords. Imagine you’ve got a fish + chips shop – your homepage’s meta description should include the phrase “fish + chips”. 

You should also include a call-to-action, and any relevant services your business might offer. Putting it all together, our fish + chips shop in Burnaby might have a homepage meta description like this:

“The home of fish + chips in Burnaby since 1986, now offering delivery.  Our recipes are made with only the highest quality ingredients. Try them today!”

That checks off all of our boxes: our keywords and location, a service we offer, a brief description of what makes us unique, and a call-to-action. 

It’s worth noting that product and services pages will be different from the homepage – on those pages, you’ll describe the product or service being offered, while still including the word Burnaby and keywords you want to target.

Let’s get meta

For many businesses, the prospect of going through hundreds of pages to create unique meta descriptions for each one can be daunting, to say the least. 

When you hire First Rank for your Burnaby SEO, we can write your meta descriptions for you. We’ll also work on page titles, and all kinds of other small details that most business owners don’t think about when they create a website. Want to up your meta game? Give us a call.