What a meta description is actually for
It is not a ranking factor and has not been one for years. It is advertising copy for a listing you do not control the placement of, and its only job is to make the right person click and the wrong person not. That second half gets forgotten: a description that overpromises buys a click and loses the reader in four seconds, which helps nobody.
Search engines also rewrite it. If your description does not match the query well, you will see a snippet pulled from the page instead. That is not a failure — it is the engine doing its job — but it means the description you write is a strong suggestion rather than a guarantee, and it is worth writing for the query you most want rather than for all of them.
The practical length is around 155 to 160 characters, because that is roughly where desktop results crop. Mobile crops earlier, so the first ninety characters have to carry the point on their own.
- It does not affect ranking. It affects whether a listing is clicked.
- Front-load the point: the first ninety characters are what mobile shows.
- A description that overpromises costs you more than a boring one.
Four patterns that work, and when
Most good descriptions are one of these. The tool will usually give you two of them and one hybrid; pick by what the page actually is.
| Pattern | Shape | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| The direct answer | States the answer, then what else is inside | The page answers one clear question |
| The specific promise | Names the number, the output or the artefact | The page contains a list, a template or a checklist |
| The qualifier | Says who it is for, and implicitly who it is not for | The subject attracts the wrong readers |
| The honest limit | Names what the page does not cover | A competitive query where everyone else overpromises |
How to choose between the three
Read them as a stranger who has just typed the query. The question is not which is best written — it is which one makes the right reader think "that is what I wanted" and the wrong reader keep scrolling. A description that could sit under any of six results is the one to discard, however smooth it reads.
Then check three mechanical things. Is the keyword in there once, naturally, and not twice? Does the first half stand alone, in case it is cropped? And does it promise only what the page delivers? That last one is worth being strict about: the cost of an overpromise is paid by the reader, and then by you.
Finally, edit it. All three options are drafts: they do not know your audience, your tone, or the thing about this page that is genuinely better than the other nine results. Adding that is thirty seconds of work and it is the thirty seconds that matters.
Doing it from the finished article instead
The reason this tool needs you to describe the page is that it cannot see it. That is the wrong way round: a meta description is best written from the finished article, when the thing being described actually exists and you know what it ended up promising.
In PrismDraft that is how it works. The meta title and the meta description are written from the completed draft, not from the brief, and both are editable before you approve the article. They travel with it when it publishes — as Ghost's own SEO fields, or as the post excerpt on WordPress and the summary on Shopify — so there is no second step where someone pastes a description into a CMS field and gets it slightly wrong.
Questions
How long should a meta description be?
Aim for 140 to 160 characters. Past about 160 desktop results crop it; mobile crops earlier still, so the first ninety characters have to carry the point.
Does a meta description help my ranking?
No. It has not been a ranking factor for years. It affects the click, which affects your traffic — a different and more immediate thing.
Why did Google ignore the one I wrote?
Because it judged a snippet from your page a better answer to that query. It happens most when a page covers several questions and your description picked one of them.
Should every page have one?
Every page you care about the click on. For a page with hundreds of near-identical variants, a well-chosen template beats writing each one, and leaving it to the engine beats a bad template.
Is my input stored?
No. The request is read, answered and forgotten. Copy what you want to keep.
Can it write the title too?
Not on this page. PrismDraft writes both the meta title and the meta description from the finished article, and both are editable before you approve it.