How to check meta description tags (missing, duplicate, too long etc)
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⚠ (Reminder : meta descriptions are not a ranking factor taken into account by Google, so this part is of lesser importance compared to Title and H1 tags). Nontheless, they can still be important for conversion.⚠
- Open Screaming Frog
- Start the crawl
You will see three main scenarios in the Meta description tab in Screaming Frog (attached screen)
- Meta description is missing (very common)
- Meta description is duplicated
- Meta description is is too long/too short
- (There are multiple meta descriptions -very unusual-)
1. Meta description is missing
Unlike missing meta titles and H1s, missing meta description is not as critical. In fact, 99% of the time, Google will write an automatic meta description taken from the content of your article (see example below)
Also, you should keep in mind that meta description is not a criteria used by Google to rank websites. Still, having a custom and incentive meta description can be a nice way to improve your Click Through Rate (CTR). As such, writing custom meta description is only useful for your prio pages that already have good rankings.
How to solve it ?
👉 Export the data to create a task and assign it to your content manager. Keep in mind that prio pages (= betting-related pages) are the only important ones (unless there are not too many pages with missing meta descriptions (>15)
2. Meta description is duplicated
As mentioned before, having duplicated meta descriptions will not really affect your rankings but it's still a good practice to have different meta descriptions whenever it is possible.
How to solve it ?
👉 Edit them yourself or export the data and to create Asana task and assign it to your content manager to write different meta descriptions. This only applies to prio pages
3. Meta description is too long/too short
If your meta description is longer than 155 characters or shorter than 70 characters, Screaming Frog will list them. If a prio page is concerned, you might want to write a shorter or longer meta description to make sure Google does not rewrite it.
How to solve it ?
👉 Edit them yourself or export the data and to create Asana task and assign it to your content manager to write different meta descriptions. This only applies to prio pages