What is a meta description?
A meta description is a short summary a page gives about itself, written in the page's code and used by search engines as the grey line of text under the blue link. It does not appear on the page itself, and a search engine may replace it with wording taken from the page.
Why it matters to a shop
Two shops can sit next to each other in the same list of results. The one whose line reads “Open until 9pm, walk-ins welcome, a five-minute walk from the station” gets the click; the one that reads “Home - Welcome to our website” does not. That sentence is the only thing you get to say before a customer decides whether to come at all. It is also the fastest item on this list to fix: one field per page, and once you publish again, the new wording is live at your hosted address.
How to write one
- Write one per page, not one for the whole site. The home page says what the business is; the contact page says where you are and when you open; a service page describes that service. The same sentence copied across ten pages tells a reader nothing about which one to open.
- Stay under about 155 characters — roughly 25 words. A search engine cuts the rest off mid-sentence, so put what you sell and where you are at the front, and treat everything after that as a bonus nobody may read.
- Write it as the sentence you would say to a customer standing at your door, and include one concrete detail: a neighbourhood, an opening hour, a speciality. Then search for your own shop name and read the result out loud.
Common mistake: Assuming the search engine must show what you wrote. It often rewrites the line to match the words someone typed — your version is a strong suggestion, not a setting.