Missing meta description: what it is and how to fix it
What it is
No summary text for the search result snippet.
Why it matters to a client
The description is the two lines under the headline in Google. Written well it is a free advert; left blank, Google pulls a random sentence from the page.
How to find it
Any crawler will list this per URL. In AuditOpti it appears in the Issues tab of the site, grouped so you see every affected page at once rather than one row per URL.
How to fix it
Write 140–155 characters per page saying what the visitor gets and why it is worth a click. Include a reason to choose this business.
- 1In the SEO plugin (Yoast, Rank Math or SEOPress), open the page's SEO panel and write a 140–155 character description for that page.
- 2If the problem repeats across a post type, change it once in the plugin's template settings rather than page by page.
- 3Clear any caching plugin afterwards, then re-check the live page in a private window.
How AuditOpti prioritizes it
AuditOpti scores this as medium severity by default, then multiplies it by how many pages are affected — one page is not the same problem as a hundred. After that, the AI re-ranks it against everything else on the site by likely business impact, so a medium-severity problem on a service page can outrank a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Check a site for this
Run a free audit and we'll tell you whether this issue is present — along with everything else worth fixing.