Why isn't Google showing my homepage meta description?

[venaosurfschool]

Hi,

I have just put my website online (www.venaosurfschool.com). Google search is not showing my home page meta description. Instead, it is showing the items of my navigation menu (pasted below).

"Venao Surf School · Home; Our Surf Courses. Private Coaching - Adult · Private Coaching - Kids · Surf Progression Training. About Us."

Could you please help?

Thank you,

Yasmine

[Shay]

Hi @venaosurfschool 

This is a great question! That description is called a "Meta Description" and if there is not one already set then Google will crawl the first few lines on the home page to fill that space in. 

In your store admin if you go to Online Store > Preferences you can edit your site description for search engines to pull. It's important to note that Google re-crawls websites in its own time, and while you can request it to crawl your online site again, it won't be right away. 

If you haven't yet, I recommend submitting your sitemap to Google or asking Google to recrawl your website. 

[venaosurfschool]

Hi Shay,

Thank you for your answer. I have already done the steps that you mentioned in your answer (I did set a meta description in my preferences and I also did submit my sitemap to google). Hence not sure what else I need to do or if there is an issue somewhere. 

Thank you,

Yasmine

[Shay]

Awesome, I am glad to hear you were able to take those steps. In that case you will want to use the link I shared to request Google re-crawl the site.

[venaosurfschool]

Thank you Shay. My website has been live for couple of days and I submitted the site map to Google couple of hours ago. Please correct me if I am wrong but according to the information that I found online, it seems that it can take up to few weeks for google to do the indexation. Hence maybe I should wait few weeks and if the issue is not fixed, re-crawl the site as you suggest?

[Shay]

Yes, if you just submitted the sitemap to Google I would give it a few weeks to update and then request a recrawl. Great work!