As a website owner or digital marketer, you’ve probably heard about the importance of meta descriptions and titles for search engine optimization (SEO).
These elements provide a brief summary of your page’s content and help search engines understand what your site is about.
When done right, they can also entice users to click through to your site from search results.
However, when meta descriptions and titles are duplicated across multiple pages, it can harm your SEO efforts.
Why Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Titles Are a Problem
When multiple pages have the same meta information, search engines can’t tell which page is the most relevant to a user’s search query.
As a result, they may choose to display a page with unique meta information instead, even if it’s less relevant to the user’s search.
In addition, duplicate meta information can make your site appear less professional and trustworthy.
For instance, if users see the same title across multiple pages, they may assume that your site has little unique content and isn’t worth their time.
How Squirrly SEO Can Help
Squirrly SEO is a powerful tool that can help you avoid duplicate meta descriptions and titles on your site.
Here are some of the features it offers:
1. On-Page SEO METAs
With its SEO METAs feature, Squirrly SEO can automatically add all the required on-page SEO METAs for Google and other Search Engines, including <title> ; <description> elements, and much more.
This ensures that Google can easily find relevant information about your site and understand what a page is about.
Plus, Squirrly goes even deeper and it also removes old Open Graph, Twitter Card and even rich pins meta which might appear from other themes or plugins you have previously used.
2. SEO Snippet Tool
Squirrly’s Snippet Tool helps you avoid any further duplicate meta descriptions and titles by allowing you to create unique meta titles and descriptions, instead of auto-generated ones.
You can easily customize your meta information for each page and therefore ensure that no two pages have the same meta information.
3. Advanced Patterns in SEO Automation
Squirrly SEO’s advanced Patterns feature allows you to prevent Title and Description duplicates between posts.
When you’re using Squirrly for your website, you’ll notice that each post type comes with a predefined posting pattern when displayed on your website.
However, you can also customize these patterns to only include the information you want – at the level of every single Post Type created by your WordPress.
Once you set up a pattern for a particular post type, only the content required by your custom sequence will be displayed.
4. SEO Audit
Squirrly SEO will notify you if you have any duplicate titles or meta descriptions via the SEO section of the Audit.
The section of the Audit takes into account over 20 critical aspects that heavily influence your chances of ranking, including:
- Duplicate Titles
- Duplicate Descriptions
- Empty Titles
- Empty Descriptions
As already mentioned, Squirrly SEO will add all necessary SEO METAs to your pages.
Therefore, many of the tasks outlined in this part of the Audit will already be done if you use Squirrly for this.
But, let’s say you prefer to use a different plugin to manage your page’s METAs.
That’s cool too!
You can still benefit from this section of the Audit by using it to verify that everything is set up correctly.
Using Squirrly SEO to Fix Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Titles
Now that you know how Squirrly SEO can help you fix duplicate meta information, let’s look at how to use it.
Step 1: Install and Activate Squirrly SEO
First, you need to install and activate Squirrly SEO on your WordPress site.
Once you’ve done that, navigate to the Squirrly SEO to configure the plugin.
Step 2: Configure SEO METAs
Go to Squirrly SEO > SEO Configuration > SEO METAs from your WordPress Dashboard.
From this section, you can enable Squirrly to add multiple types of METAs, but the MOST IMPORTANT ones are:
- Optimize the Titles;
- Optimize Description;
- Add Canonical META Link;
- Optimize Keywords;
- Add Robots META.
To make sure everything’s working smoothly, we suggest keeping all these options turned on. When you activate these settings, Squirrly will take care of adding all the necessary on-page METAs for you.
This way, Google can easily find relevant information about your pages.
Step 3: Use the Snippet Tool
To use the Snippet Tool, navigate to the SEO Snippet tab at the bottom of your blog post/page. You can also access this from the front-end of your article/page via Custom SEO.
From here, you can customize the meta title and description for each page on your site.
Step 4: Customize Advanced Patterns
By default, Squirrly SEO adds all the commonly-known and used Post Types to Automation in order to automate the optimization for them (to do this, Squirrly also adds default Patterns to each of those Post types).
But you can also add new post types for custom automation (as long as Squirrly SEO detects it on your website).
To add a new post type for custom automation, go to: Squirrly SEO > Automation> Automation, select the post type from the list, and click on the Add Post Type button.
Then you can begin the customization for that post type.
Customize the automation for any post type and edit the default patterns, by first going to: Squirrly SEO > Automation> Automation – Configurations.
To access the available Patterns for each post type, start by selecting the post type you want from the Configuration section.
Then you can easily:
- ADD a Pattern by selecting the pattern you want and then clicking on it to insert;
- REMOVE a pattern using the DELETE key or by double-clicking on it.
When displayed, every pattern will be replaced by the real value that’s associated with it.
So, for example, the Pattern {{title}} will be replaced by the post’s title.
Now You Know
Duplicate meta descriptions and titles can harm your site’s SEO and make it appear less professional.
By using Squirrly SEO, you can automate the process of adding meta information to your pages and customize it to ensure that no two pages have the same meta information.
With features like Squirrly SEO’s Snippet Tool and Advanced Patterns, you can create unique meta titles and descriptions for each page on your site and prevent duplicate meta information between posts.
So, if you’re looking for an easy and effective way to fix duplicate meta descriptions and titles on your site, Squirrly SEO is a great tool to consider.
With its combination of automation and customization solutions, you can ensure that your site’s meta information is unique, relevant, and optimized for search engines.
