A meta description won’t directly improve your search rankings — but it will directly affect how many people click your results when they do appear. For travel brands competing against OTAs and other operators for the same SERP real estate, a strong meta description is one of the simplest and most effective ways to improve your organic click-through rate without any additional link building or technical SEO work. Here’s how to write them well.
Keep it around 155 characters
Google truncates meta descriptions beyond around 155–160 characters in search results, cutting off your message mid-sentence. Keep descriptions concise and front-loaded — put the most important information first. For travel pages, that typically means the destination or trip type in the first half of the description, followed by your differentiator and CTA. In our experience, descriptions that try to cram in too much information lose impact and often get cut at a confusing point.
Use an active voice and include a CTA
Active, direct language performs better in meta descriptions than passive or vague copy. For travel brands, that means something like “Explore expert-led small group tours to Morocco with guaranteed departures” rather than “Information about tours to Morocco can be found here.” Include a soft CTA — “find out more”, “discover our itineraries”, “browse departures” — to give the reader a clear next action. What we’ve found is that descriptions with a clear CTA consistently outperform those without one on click-through rate.
Always use your keyword or phrase
Including your target keyword in the meta description serves two functions. First, Google bolds matching terms in search results, making your result more visually prominent. Second, it confirms to the searcher that your page matches their query. For tour operator pages targeting specific destination or trip type searches, including the destination name and trip type in the meta description is a simple way to improve relevance signals and CTR simultaneously.
Make sure it aligns with your content
Your meta description should accurately reflect what’s on the page. A misleading or over-promising description may generate clicks but will produce high bounce rates — users who feel misled leave immediately. For travel, this means your description should match the specific trip or destination covered, not describe a broader offering than the page actually delivers. A mismatch between meta description and page content hurts both user experience and SEO performance over time.
Make it unique
Every page on your site should have a unique meta description. Duplicate descriptions across multiple tour or destination pages make it harder for both Google and searchers to understand what differentiates each page. Clients often ask us about quick SEO wins for travel sites, and writing unique, well-crafted meta descriptions for key commercial pages is consistently one of our first recommendations — it’s high-impact and doesn’t require technical resource to implement.
Don’t duplicate your own meta descriptions
Related to uniqueness: avoid using similar or templated descriptions across groups of similar pages. If your Morocco tours page and your Italy tours page have near-identical meta descriptions with just the destination name swapped, you’re missing an opportunity to make each page’s specific value proposition clear to searchers. Each destination and trip type page deserves a description that reflects what’s genuinely distinctive about that specific offering.
How to use Yoast SEO to write better meta descriptions
Yoast SEO (and its equivalent, RankMath) provides a meta description field directly in the WordPress page editor. It shows you a real-time character count and a preview of how your description will appear in search results. The traffic light system highlights whether your description meets length and keyword requirements. What we’ve found is that these tools are most useful as a quality check and formatting guide — but the quality of the writing itself still matters more than ticking Yoast’s green lights.
Aiming for a green bullet for your meta description
Yoast’s green bullet for meta descriptions indicates that your description falls within the recommended character range and includes your focus keyword. Meeting these criteria is a baseline quality check, not a guarantee of performance. In our experience, a description that scores green in Yoast but reads poorly — generic, uninspiring, or mismatched to what the page actually delivers — will underperform against a well-written description that meets the same technical criteria.
Optimising your meta descriptions
For travel sites with large numbers of tour and destination pages, meta description optimisation is best approached as a prioritised programme. Start with your highest-traffic commercial pages — key destination pages, tour listing pages, and your homepage — and work outward. Use Google Search Console to identify pages with high impressions but low CTR; these are the best candidates for meta description testing. A 1–2% improvement in CTR on a high-impression page can drive meaningful additional organic traffic without any change to your rankings.