Charleston Writes More Meta Descriptions Than Any City I Checked

For two solid years, the sentence Google printed underneath my own business name in the search results said “Home”.

I sell websites to Charleston businesses for a living. I had rewritten that exact field for other people something like two hundred times by then, and my own said “Home”, in the middle of a page selling my services to strangers.

So when a client tells me hers is fine, I nod politely and then go and look anyway, because the author of a sentence is the last person on earth who can judge it.

Call this client Dana. She came in through the free audit form with a note saying her website was probably fine, just a bit quiet lately.

What I found when I looked

Dana had a description on every single page, which already put her ahead of most of the country and squarely in the middle of her own town.

83.3% of small business websites in Charleston hand one in against 77.9% across the country, 5.4 points clear.

Dana had done the thing her whole city is best at, in a town that finishes first of all 24 cities I ranked, and she was still losing customers over it.

Charleston pulls this trick twice. It tops every city on social links too, and the places those links actually land are not where you would hope.

Her sentence read the same on the homepage and on the thirty-odd pages behind it, word for word identical every time.

“Welcome to our website. We are a family run business serving the Lowcountry since 2004.”

Why that sentence was costing her money

The two lines of grey text under your name are the only advertisement you will ever write that gets read by every single person considering hiring you.

A stranger opens ten results, gives each one about a second, and picks. Dana spent her second on the word “Welcome” and on a date from before some of her customers could drive.

That is the moment the sale walks off. Not on her website, which is lovely, but four inches above it, in a sentence she had never read.

There is a wrinkle, too, and it changes how you ought to write the thing. You do not own that space.

Google says the text it displays is built mostly out of the page itself, and that it reaches for your description when it decides yours describes the page better than the page does.

So you hand in a sentence, Google reads your page, reads your sentence, and picks a winner. Nothing has ever told me which way it went, so I go and look. Your description has to beat your own page at describing your own page.

Dana was losing that competition on every page she had, which is why she had never once seen her own words in a search result.

The other thing I do while I am in there

I searched her business name on my phone, then searched a handful of the pages behind it, and read what Google had printed under each one.

Not one of those lines was hers. Google had written all of them itself, lifted out of whatever the pages already said, and on the services page it had taken half a sentence from her cookie notice.

Dana had never gone looking. Hardly any owner does, because your search result is the one page about your business you never visit.

So that sentence can go wrong, and stay wrong for years, without a single person ever telling you.

What we changed

We wrote her homepage sentence in about twenty minutes and it was not complicated work.

What she does and where she does it, right at the front, because a stranger scanning ten results reads the beginning of a sentence and almost never reaches the end of one.

Then what happens next, whether that is booking, quoting or walking through the rooms, because a description that only describes has wasted the single line she was handed.

Then we stopped, at about a line and a half, since Google chops the tail off anything much longer, and our first draft had parked the booking line right out in that tail.

Then we did it again for the pages that actually earn her money. Thirty of them is a long afternoon, so she wrote twelve herself and left the rest, which I still count as a win.

What happened afterward

Three weeks later Google was using Dana’s sentence on most of the pages we had rewritten and still writing its own on the ones we had left alone.

Which is useful information, honestly. It means the machine agreed with us on the twelve and disagreed on everything else, and it told us that without either of us having to guess.

And then Dana asked the reasonable question. Did any of it actually bring anybody through the door?

She could not tell me, because there was nothing on her site counting. 57.9% of businesses here run analytics, against 58% nationally, which puts the city 10 of 24.

We fixed that in an afternoon as well. While I was in there I put her line up against the city’s, since picking Charleston in the explorer on my report, with the trade menu left alone, shows how many websites each of these rates was drawn from, and I wanted her to see how ordinary her before picture had been.

What my audit can see, and what it cannot

My script opens your page and hunts for the tag. Are there words inside it? Pass.

“Welcome to our website” sails straight through that check without slowing down. So does “Home”, as I know better than anybody alive.

So when I tell you 83.3% of this city wrote one, what I am telling you is that 83.3% of the city has a tag with words inside it, and I would not hand out a trophy for that on its own.

Counting is easy and I can do it at scale across thousands of websites. Judging is a human job, and there were far too many pages in that sample for it.

Presence, never quality. That limit runs through every check in my report, and Dana is the reason I say it out loud instead of letting a flattering percentage sit there unchallenged.

Windsor shows you the same thing from the other end. Nearly every website in that city hands in a page title, and Windsor still finishes last of 24 on them.

Dana’s website was never broken. Neither are most of the Charleston sites that land in my inbox. They are just unread, in the one spot a stranger reads first.

The ones that are broken are usually just slow, and I have heard every excuse this city offers for that.

The question Dana asked me last

Her best question came at the end of the whole job, and it was better than any of mine.

She wanted to know how long that sentence had been sitting there. Neither of us could work it out. It had arrived with the website, written by a stranger, in a hurry, about a version of the business that stopped existing years ago.

A line going stale like that is exactly what looking after a site after launch is meant to catch.

Mine said “Home” for two years and I am supposed to be the professional here.

So who wrote the sentence underneath your name, and what were they trying to sell when they wrote it?