Realized my meta descriptions were just keyword soup for 2 years straight

I was looking at some old client reports from 2022 and noticed my click-through rates were awful. Like under 2% on most pages. Then I saw a post on Twitter where someone said meta descriptions are basically ad copy, not a place to dump keywords. That hit me hard. I rewrote 15 descriptions last week with actual benefits and calls to action and saw a 4% jump already. Has anyone else had this click-through awakening later than they should?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_laura17d ago

Yeah a friend finally stopped doing that last year and their traffic jumped too.

danielowens17d ago

Hold on, I gotta push back on this a little. I've been running tests on pages where I kept the meta descriptions as just keyword lists with no fluff and my CTR stayed around 3 to 4 percent consistently. The theory is that if someone is searching for "plumber Chicago emergency," they see those exact words in the snippet and they know instantly that's what they're getting. When you write a cutesy sentence like "Need a trustworthy plumber in Chicago fast? Call us today," you're adding unnecessary words that might actually confuse the searcher or make them hesitate. Google sometimes even rewrites your description anyway, so all that effort into crafting the perfect hook could just get thrown out by the algorithm. I'm not saying bad keyword stuffing is good, but there's a middle ground between that and treating it like a TV commercial.

taylor_wells17d ago

Under 2% on most pages" holy crap lol. That is brutal but honestly I've been there too. I had a client where I was basically writing the same 3 keywords in every meta description thinking Google would love it. Turns out nobody wants to click on "buy cheap widgets cheap widgets buy now cheap widgets" lmao. It took me like a year to realize meta descriptions are literally the free billboard for your page. Once I started writing them like actual sentences with a hook and a tiny benefit my CTR went from like 1.5% to 5% in like two weeks. It's wild how something so simple can make that big of a difference but it totally does.