Meta Description Tool or Analysis Technique

[dsinger]

Hi All,

I am performing a full scale SEO audit for 5 websites that I manage, and part of that SEO audit includes evaluating the effectiveness of each page's meta description for relevancy and engagement.

I am curious to know if there are any tools out there that will let me know that if my site(s) show in organic results, if they are shown with the programmed meta-description, or if the search engine has replaced the planned description with what it thinks is a more relevant description taken from the content of the page, DMOZ, etc.  Anyone know of a tool that will help me get at this type of information?

With knowing this information, such as rate at which meta-description is shown, the lower the percentage, the better the opportunity to optomize it and measure the result.

[MonicaOConnor]

Sometimes if you search for something in the AdWords preview tool you can pickup your organic listing. I am extremely OCD about Meta descriptions so I manually research them in Google. I look for my keyword + my company name to make sure I find my exact page and then I see what is there. However, if you don't know what your users are typing in for their searches it is really hard to predict what they will see. For example, Generators in Illinois gets a different meta description than Illinois Generators. Google shows snippets they think is relevant.

I would take a few, maybe 10 keywords and search for them in several different variations to get an idea of what might be showing. Using your landing pages report might be able to help you too. You will see what pages people are landing on, take a look at the content and descriptions on those pages to see if there can give you some insight.

[dsinger]

Thanks for the response Monica,

This is already my current approach, but since my search results are localized and based on my search history, etc, my results may be different than the next person.  I was just curious to know if there was a tool that scrapes our site and looks at our planned description.  Then it monitors over time how often that description is shown when that page is part of the organic search result, regardless of keyword.  That would give me an indication that the page and description is showing and relevant to searchers or if work needs to be done.

for example, if 100 keywords cause my page to show in search results, 87 of those searches show a snippet of content from the page instead of the meta description.  That would tell me that either my description is not relevant to the majority of ways Google thinks my page is relevant based on query, the page is too broad and should be broken up into smaller topics, etc.

make sense?

[MonicaOConnor]

I would make sure when you do those searches that you are logged out of everything, using IE (I know, that is ridiculous, but trust me on that one) and have deleted all of your browsing history. You can change your search settings to not display local results, or you can change your location in your search settings if you wanted more local results.

What your saying does make sense. I have no idea if a tool like this exists, I really don't think it does unfortunately. It is so hard to predict a SERP that I don't know how someone would create a program to do it.

Sorry I couldn't be more helpful. Good Luck!