We had some fun with the meta titles and thought this would be an opportunity to show something cool with meta descriptions. The advice most often given with meta descriptions is to keep them at approximately 300 characters. The reason is that, 300 characters is about all that Google will display. Anything beyond that will be clipped by Google in the SERPs. We’ve known for a few years that Google will display relevant content from your meta description even if that content is beyond what is clipped at 155 characters or the now expanded 300- character limit. After the results from the meta title test, we wanted to see what Google would pull from the description area and if it would alter the meta title.
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Adding into the too long meta titles, we went in to the too long meta descriptions. This is something that I have known a little bit but I wanted to see how the serps would react. You can write a meta description that is too long and it can target a different keyword or perhaps a variation of your keyword on the page and Google will actually pull from the “hidden” meta description area. Say for example, in this situation you have two locations. You can write one meta description for location one and then you could write an additional meta description for location two and when somebody searches for the location with your service or product, Google will pull the proper meta description, the one that is most relevant to that keyword. You could do that for say, you have different buyer personas on your page where people would be coming to that page and clicking or using that product or service for different reasons, you can write different meta descriptions for each one of those personas especially if they were going to search for that term a little bit differently. In that situation, you could then write a description for each of those personas in a way that they are searching for that target keyword. I wanted to see how that would respond what that too long meta title. What I did was I took a too long meta description and again used Yoast and in the area that is too long, I put in the same keyword that was used for the meta title and ran the search again. You can see our keyword and it is still clipped in the meta title but the proper meta description shows.
This is pretty cool. It is the same thing that I have discussed with what you could do with the meta title. You could then implement things in this meta description. When you have a page that you are spending a lot of time, money, and effort to optimize, it only makes sense to do something like this in order to capture those clicks that you want, by writing a meta description what is most fitting for particular keywords on a page. You might have a top level keyword that you are optimizing for and then in your H2s or H3s or how you have broken up the page, you might have variations on the keyword or you might find something that is very similar or different ways that you are trying to capture the secondary terms. For the most important ones, you can write multiple meta descriptions so that when somebody is looking for that secondary keyword, you can provide an on point meta description. When you are in a situation where there is something a little off brand, you can still hide that keyword in the meta title and get a description that you want.