Are there any benefits to having unique meta descriptions and meta keywords per article/post/page on blog?

Question

My company's website is running on WordPress. I've been asked to find an easy way to add custom meta description & keywords to the site. Of course, found an extension that easily allows this on the posts and pages. The end result - which seems to be acceptable - is a custom description meta tag and a custom keywords meta tag in addition to the site-wide description and keyword tags that are customizable within WordPress globally. I did a good bit of research and it seems like it's not detrimental to have an extra keyword or description tag but I was hoping someone else had experience with this or is potentially familiar with the benefits of doing this.

It's worth noting that the extra tags are not generated unless you populate the custom keywords and description per page. Thank you.

Answer 1

You seem to have a few things going on. I do not know WP so I will not give specific advice in that regard.

However, you do not want multiple copies of either meta-tag on any page. Only one will be used. It is likely that only the first one will be used.

The keywords meta-tag is totally ignored by all search engines except Yandex. I would advise not using it at all. Do not waste your time on this meta-tag.

As for the description meta-tag, it must be unique per page at least. This is because search engines, particularly Google, will want to use it for the SERP snippet. The SERP snippet, along with the SERP link, is an important part of search performance. It dramatically effects click-through rates (CTR) which is a major metric that significantly effects how your sites pages are found and how they rank. In fact, the description meta-tag is a part of the blended results and if it is not unique and generic across all pages, your pages will not rank as well for the various search queries that it should. This is an extremely important part of your on-page strategy. Do not ignore it.