Meta Description on Webflow Websites
Doesn't matter if you work with clients or simply run your own Webflow website, knowing how to structure your website sitemap and creating right custom Webflow fields for SEO can be a hard task. Especially if Webflow SEO is not your superpower!
We put this article together for Webflow developers and designers that want to step up their SEO game. After you read this short intro to Meta Descriptions, you will know how to improve your next Webflow project with better structure that might help your clients (or you) to reach better positions in SERPs.
What is Meta Description on Webflow?
Every page on Webflow, doesn't matter if it's static page or CMS page will have a Meta Description field. This Meta Description field is a basically a short description about what is inside that URL. Meta Description will be visible on Google or other search engines, when this exact URL is being served for any search query (as one of the search results).
Meta Description in HTML?
Every published Webflow page will have <meta content="..." name="description"> published inside <head> tag. This information is not rendered on the frontend of the page, though it is very important for web crawlers that search engines use to crawl your Webflow website.
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Is Meta Description a Ranking Factor on Google?
Yes. Meta description tag is one of 200 known ranking factors that determine your webpage position in relevant SERPs (search results). Together with Page Title, Page URL and H1 - they form what some SEOs call "ranking basics of any webpage".
Experienced SEOs usually start their SEO strategy planning and content clustering journey by determining these 4 page elements and matching them with all other URLs on given website (published or planned!). Being aware of how meta description for this page differs from all other meta descriptions on other pages on your Webflow website, can help to avoid keyword cannibalization that would negatively affect your Webflow website.
Read our Keyword Cannibalization Guide for Webflow Websites if you want to learn more about best practices to make sure that your pages are not competing against each other!
Meta Descriptions for Static Pages
Setting up meta description for any static page is as simple as typing a sentence or two into meta description page field on your webflow project. You will find this field in your page settings by pressing gear icon next to any Webflow project page.
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Meta Descriptions for CMS Pages
Just as any static page must have a meta description, so does CMS template. The only difference between CMS and static page is that CMS page can have a formula that will create different met descriptions for different CMS pages.
Meta description formulas can inherit different fields from your CMS fields. This works similarly to most popular SEO plugins like Rank Math that are commonly used on other website building platforms.
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While most experienced SEOs will find ways how to use this powerful functionality to create very strategic meta title outputs...
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Beginners can start with a single field called Meta Description and don't rely on a specific formula. Using a single field to customize each page meta description is especially good practise when:
- All pages in CMS are not very similar when it comes to search intent (example, blog)
- You can't construct a single logical structure for all pages within the CMS
Meta Descriptions for Blog Posts
Most blog posts are unique enough to deserve unique meta description field. Example of fields that I will fill out below this blog post would be:
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As you can see from the image above, title tag and meta description simply copies whole text field from CMS and publishes it inside head code of every CMS item.
Can Meta Description Field be Used as a Summary?
No. Or, in other words... Better no! Why? Here's an example of SEO optimized meta descriptions also used as summary fields for blog posts.
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While they can be formulaic and programmatic, because in each case they will show up on completely different search results, when put together in one place - they look spammy and fake.
What would happen if each one of them are unique and we use summaries instead of dedicated meta descriptions? Then SEO might suffer. Here's why...
Keywords Inside Meta Descriptions
Have you ever noticed that Google makes your search keywords bold within each result meta description? No? Here's an example.
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Even if you noticed this before, you might be surprised about one more meta description fact from Google.
Google Can Rewrite Your Meta Description and Page Title
Yes. In certain cases, Google can pick a selection of content within your page and use it as page title or meta description. Even more spectacular is to know that sometimes Google algorithm creates their own Meta Description when showing your page to users. Meaning algorithm "pitches your page" to users by making a summary of what's inside your page. On its own.
But this is not a reason to stop writing meta descriptions, they still have two very important goals on your Webflow page:
- Inform Google about what keywords you want to rank for by intentionally using them to describe value on this page
- Convert users searching for answers to your page visitors
Remember, you are competing with other similar websites for valuable SERP positions. If more users decide to click on your page after reading your meta description, this might give signals to Google to rank you even higher.
This is exactly why SEOs review meta descriptions of older pages, to check how they look when compared to other pages competing for the same keywords.
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