Titles & descriptions
Duplicate meta descriptions
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on a whole site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth knowing. Small, or only matters in some cases. Read it and decide.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
Meta descriptions are the short text snippets that appear below your page title in search results. When multiple pages on your site use the same meta description, you are wasting space—Google may show a generic summary instead because it cannot tell the pages apart.
Why it costs you
The cost is subtle but real. Visitors scanning search results cannot quickly see what each page offers, so they may click a competitor's result instead. Over time, pages with identical descriptions get less traffic than they should, particularly when they target slightly different topics or audiences.
How to fix it
To fix this, open each page's HTML template or editing interface and locate the `<meta name="description">` tag in the head section. Write a unique summary for each page—one or two sentences explaining what makes that particular page different. Descriptions do not need to match your body text; write them as short advertisements for why someone should click. If your site uses a template system, check whether descriptions are being generated automatically, and adjust the template to create distinct descriptions for each page type.
What the audit tests
- No two indexable pages share the same meta description
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