Competition for businesses of every kind is fierce in Mississauga. Your business has to compete for customers not only with other Mississauga businesses, but with businesses throughout the GTA.
That’s one of the reasons SEO is so important for businesses in Mississauga. Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s related to SEO, and directly tied to your online marketing. It’s not going to influence your ranking directly, but it can improve the amount of traffic you get from search engines and social media. It will also reduce the bounce rate on your pages.
The something we’re talking about? Meta descriptions. Let’s get meta!
What are meta descriptions?
Meta descriptions are a snippet of code that tells search engines and other sites what you’d like to display as the description for your page. The snippet will always be found in the <head> of your code. It looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Mississauga businesses need meta descriptions to stand out. What are meta descriptions? You’re reading one right now! Learn more here. “>
If you found this page from Google or shared on social media, you might recognize the phrase that’s being used in that example: it’s the meta description for this page!
Mississauga News has a great example of a meta description:
In the next sections, we’ll take a look at why that meta description is so great, and how you can write meta descriptions that drive traffic to your pages.
One quick note before we go on: you may have noticed that you’ve created pages without meta descriptions, but that descriptions for those pages still pop up below the page title on SERPs or social media. That’s because if you haven’t created your own meta description, other sites will auto-generate a description for you – usually from the first few lines of text on the page.
Guidelines for meta descriptions
You don’t want sites auto-generating meta descriptions for you. You’ll be missing out on an opportunity to craft your own great copy to drive traffic to your page.
We’ll talk about writing copy in the next section – first, we need to cover the basics. Your meta descriptions should always:
Be ~155 characters in length
Be unique
Accurately describe your page
That means each one of your web pages needs to have its own unique meta description. Going back and adding meta descriptions for all of your pages can seem like a lot of work, but it’s well worth it.
We can see that, in the Mississauga News example, all of the above boxes are checked. The meta description is exactly 155 characters, it’s unique (trust us – we checked), and it accurately describes the page (it’s their homepage, and it acts as a hub).
Optimizing meta descriptions in Mississauga
What else makes that Mississauga News meta description so great? For one, there’s a clear call-to-action at the end, asking you to visit their site.
While you’ll rarely include the URL in the meta description (because the user looking at the meta description can just click the link), it works well here. Mississauga.com is a great URL, but it’s very close to the City’s URL of mississauga.ca. It helps the user distinguish between the two.
Your own meta descriptions should all have enticing CTAs at the end. You’ll also want to put keywords toward the beginning of the descriptions – avoid keyword stuffing, but include the keyword you want the page to rank for.
The rest of your meta description should be compelling ad copy that accurately describes the page. That’s why it’s a good idea to get your writers to create meta descriptions as part of content creation.
Because you’re trying to outrank other Mississauga businesses, it’s almost always a good idea to include the word “Mississauga” in your meta descriptions.
We’ll handle your meta descriptions for you
When you work with First Rank for your Mississauga SEO, we handle all of the meta descriptions on your site for you. Our writers will create meta descriptions for any content we create for you, and we can even go back through your old pages to create meta descriptions.
Hassle-free, ad copy quality descriptions for all of your pages! Give us a call.
Jacob Kettner is the owner and CEO of First Rank Inc., a digital marketing agency based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He currently sits on Manitoba Chamber of Commerce Small Business Advisor Council which assists people grow their small businesses in Manitoba.
