The meta description is a small snippet of text up to about 150 characters in length. The job of the meta description is to describe what the page is content is all about.
When it comes to looking at local SEO, the meta description should have a mention of the local areas that you cover.
The meta description usually has action words. For example you may be selling a certain product and in the meta description you would add an action word to go to the sales page.
The meta description should also be very similar to the start of the text on the page (the first heading and first words in the first paragraph on the page).
The meta description is used to describe what the page is all about. It provides a summary of the content of your page. The meta description is partly used by Google for the search engine results page (The SERP) when viewing results after someone has searched for something.
By optimising the meta description you can affect the way in which Google will display the results.
Many people ask where are the results that Google shows on a search result are taken from?
Generally speaking, the results are a combination of the meta description and what Google thinks is relevant to that person's search phrase. So by getting your meta description to match what the page is about Google will have a much higher chance of using your meta description rather than just some random text taken from the page.