SiteAud!tLint Support

Warning On-Page SEO

Missing meta description

Severity
Warning
Impact
Medium
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
desc_missing

Why it matters

Search engines will generate a snippet themselves, which is often less compelling and lowers click-through rate.

How to fix it

Write a unique meta description of roughly 70 to 160 characters that summarises the page and invites the click.

What this means

The page has no meta description, or it is empty.

<meta name="description" content="A one or two sentence summary of the page.">

Why it matters

The meta description is not a ranking factor. It is your suggestion for the text under the title in search results. Without one, Google picks a passage from the page, which can be a cookie notice, a navigation label or a sentence cut off mid-thought. Many apps also use it as the preview text when the page is shared, if there is no Open Graph description.

Google rewrites descriptions often, even good ones, to match the search. A written description still wins whenever it matches the searcher's intent better than any passage on the page.

How to write one

  • Summarise what the page offers in one or two sentences, roughly 70 to 160 characters.
  • Write for the person searching: what they will find and why this page is the right one.
  • Include the main topic naturally. Google bolds words that match the search.
  • Make it unique to the page. See Duplicate meta description.
  • Avoid generic phrases like "Welcome to our website".

How to fix it

  1. Prioritise pages that earn impressions in search: the home page, main categories, top products and top articles.
  2. For large sets of similar pages, such as products, generate descriptions from the page's own data in the template: name, key attribute, price or availability, and one benefit.
  3. Do not copy the same description to every page. A missing description is better than a duplicated one.

Verify the fix

Recrawl. The URL details show the description found for each page. Search results update after Google recrawls the page, which can take days to weeks.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the On-Page SEO score 3 points, plus up to 12 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. Weakens rankings, crawling or measurement. Fix after critical issues.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Missing meta description. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (medium) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code desc_missing. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.