Adding CTAs in Meta Descriptions

[Donsimong]

Whats peoples opinions about putting Call To Cations CTAs in Meta Descriptions, and does this ever occur a Google penalty, as it can sometimes look a bit clickbait.

For example I am looking at a site which currently has this meta description

Meta Description: For more information on our sustainable, natural office furniture, click here to get in contact.

Is this kind of description ranking unfriendly, Ive seen them used a lot but IM not a big fan of this myself.

Any thoughts?

[Nozzle]

Meta descriptions do not affect your rankings whatsoever. Well...at least not directly. Some argue that higher click through rates can increase your rankings.

Whether that is true or not, you want to write meta descriptions that do entice people to click on your listing so that you get more traffic from the SERPs and a lot of times  including a call to action can increase your click through rate.

My suggestion is to test different meta descriptions on pages that have good rankings until you find the one that has the highest click through rate. You can monitor a specific page's click through rate in Google Search Console.

Keep track of when Google re-crawls your page so you know what dates to analyze when trying to figure out the CTR of each meta description test. Keep in mind that title tag changes will affect your CTR as well so only change one or the other at a time to get an accurate reading.

[jasongmcmahon]

IMHO use meta descriptions to sell what's on the webpage, learn from the good Google Ads copy, including CTA's isn't necessary I personally focus on keyword insertion instead.

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

Improving Meta descriptions in order to get higher CTR won't be penalized by Google unless you do something black hat or include some forbidden words.
My experience showed:
1- There is always a set of title+meta description that can optimize CTR for a single page. Remember to focus on the main keyword, as a page can rank for several search terms.
2- Improving CTR doesn't always get better rankings, but hell it brings more traffic! That's what you should be aiming, not only better rankings.

As Nozzle said, experiment carefully and make one change at a time.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
Gaston

[ClaytonJ]

CTA's in MD's work, so we use them often, but usually at the end.  So a full MD with details about the page and then a CTA at the end.  "Contact us today for a free Quote" etc.  But I agree with Joe I also try and use the targetted customer query once in the MD together with synonyms if it works...

Hope that assists.