Recently a customer was asking about Shopify increasing the length of the SEO descriptions (or meta descriptions in HTML-speak).
I noticed shopify increased the number of characters available for the meta description on product pages, but in the search engine itself I didn't noticed longer descriptions. Is there a planned update from google? Should we make use of those extra characters?
Google started showing the longer descriptions around November/December in 2017 but from what I can tell they aren't shown all the time in the search results yet.
You could start using longer SEO descriptions in Shopify now in the hope that Google starts to use the longer descriptions for your store. Worst case, Google will automatically generate the descriptions based on your page content.
One point to remember, these SEO descriptions are only a suggestion to Google. Just because you've filled one out a specific way doesn't guarantee that it'll be used at all.
With the holidays over and the new year started, have you thought about getting your SEO ready for the upcoming year?
Proper structured data is one easy SEO option that can get you more and higher quality traffic through Google's Rich Snippets program.
And JSON-LD for SEO is the easiest and safest option in the Shopify app store to automatically add that data.
Already trusted by over two thousand stores, it's among the top SEO apps overall.
Eric Davis