Table of Contents
- What's a meta description?
- Examples of meta descriptions
- How much impact does a meta description have on SEO? (Zero.)
- How do you edit a meta description for a collection on Shopify?
- What should you do to optimize your meta descriptions?
- Should you worry about optimizing your meta descriptions? (No.)
What’s a meta description?
A meta description is a tiny bit of text that appears under your site title and URL in the search results. This is like flavor text in a video game or on a trading card, because Meta Descriptions don’t impact your SEO or rankings.
Let’s say that one more time:
Meta Descriptions don’t impact your SEO or rankings.
Examples of Meta Descriptions
Here’s an example Shopify meta description for a collection on Lake Champlain Chocolate for a collection targeting Vegan Chocolate Gifts:
Shop our tempting selection of vegan chocolate gifts. Discover thoughtful options perfect for you or anyone devoted to the benefits of dark chocolate.
And here’s a Shopify meta description example for a collection from Mac Case , a provider of cases for apple products.
See the affordable and innovative Apple laptop cases, sleeves, bags and backpacks from the company the created the market. Shop for mac cases now!
In both cases, we can see that these meta descriptions describe the content to expect and help ‘sell the click’ to the visitor.
An important point: a meta description is 100% different from a collection description.
- A meta description only shows up in the search results. It has no impact on your SEO.
- A collection description shows up in the page content on the collection page. It has a lot of impact on your SEO.
How much impact do meta descriptions have on SEO and rankings? (Spoiler: None! Nada! Zip!)
Meta descriptions do not affect your rankings and do not affect your SEO.
A meta description is a bit of flavorful text (320 characters long) that describes a page.
Meta Descriptions do not impact your SEO or rankings.
They do help:
- Sell the click.
- Optimize the ‘search experience’ for your store.
- The searcher understand what the page is about before they click.
How do you edit a meta description for a collection on a Shopify store?
- Go to a collection page (or create a new collection page.
- Scroll down to the ‘Search engine listing’ and click ‘edit.’
3. Update the Meta description listed for your store.
What should you do to optimize your meta descriptions?
Big picture, these do not significantly affect your SEO, and they only help with the presentation of your site in the results and your click-through rate (very slightly).
If you’re going to optimize your meta descriptions?
- Work from a prioritized list. Don’t optimize all of your meta descriptions all at once. Pick the top ~five-ten pages on your site earning traffic through Google, and write optimized meta descriptions for those pages. In this case, you’re optimizing the search experience for your site.
- Consider ending your meta description with a call to action like ‘Free Shipping,’ ‘Read more,’ or ‘Over X happy customers.’
- Work from a template, if possible. That lets you get some relevant content without stressing about its uniqueness.
Bottom line, should you worry about optimizing your collections’ meta descriptions? (No.)
No. Focus on other things instead. Once you optimize everything else, you’re fine to come back and tackle this. There are more important things to optimize before you get into optimizing your meta descriptions.
At most, update the meta descriptions for your homepage and the ~three or ~five collections getting the most Organic traffic from Google.
Otherwise? Don’t worry about optimizing meta descriptions. Meta Descriptions don’t impact your SEO rankings. There are many other things for you to focus on (like collection descriptions or internal linking).
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