Description is missing issue means that there is no meta description tag found on the page.
The Importance of the Issue
Well-written meta descriptions are simply vital for your site given that they briefly announce the content that the visitor is expected to find here. For potential visitors, it is a chance to check whether the content of the page is of relevance. One way is by checking whether the keywords used by them to query the web appear in this short extract (keywords typically appear in bold).
Given all these, a meta description is an important focus area in SEO. One could achieve a high ranking page by investing massive effort in optimizing the site but if the meta-description looks unintelligible, unprofessional, or irrelevant, it will prevent users from accessing the page, which would impact the traffic.
If a meta description is completely lacking, search engines would auto-complete it, however, this is hit-and-miss, with the latter occurring more often. As part of this process, search engines might just pick the first 160 characters from your page – this could be the navigation menu or other irrelevant text. Consequently, you will lose control over what potential visitors see while browsing their query results. Given how much competition there is for user attention, this is simply unaffordable.
That is what Google advises to webmasters:
<…>Google will sometimes use the <meta> description tag from a page to generate a search results snippet if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. A meta description tag should generally inform and interest users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about.<…>
Also, you can check out the full video guide: “How to Fix Description is Missing?”.
How to Check the Issue
Look into the source code of the page either by using this simple online tool https://codebeautify.org/source-code-viewer or by using the functionality of your browser – in Chrome, it is enough to right-click and select “View Page Source.”
In the source code, look for the tag <meta name=description to locate the meta description.
For an easier and automated process, consider using Sitechecker. It scans your website and identifies pages with missing descriptions.
Following the scan, you’ll receive a comprehensive list of affected pages, along with the ability to review their source code.
How to Fix the Issue
Write a meta description that is unique, relevant for the content of the site, and highly appealing to the user.
Below is a sample from Sitechecker.pro:
<meta name=description content="Get FREE SEO report by 100+ parameters with the best website checker. Detailed SEO analysis for a website will help to find technical issues and calculate SEO score."/>When writing a meta description, consider the guidelines below:
- View the meta description as a brief advertisement, hence, try to make it appealing to attract visitors.
- In each meta description, convey the content of the corresponding page rather than that of the entire site.
- In the same line of thought, make each meta description on your site unique.
- Meta descriptions should be in the form of complete sentences that are both easily readable and natural sounding.
- Try to guess what the visitor would be looking for on your page and mention this in the description.
- Ensure that targeted keywords are included – when users run a query with these words, they would appear in bold on the SERP snippet.
- However, don’t overstuff your meta description with keywords.
- To avoid truncation, don’t exceed 160 characters in length.
- Avoid using non-alphanumeric symbols (such as double quotes) in the middle of your text – these can trigger aberrant truncation by search engines.
Detect pages where description is missing
Crawl the website to collect all pages that have no meta description tags
