4 websites - meta titles and descriptions

[dsinger]

I manage four separate websites/brands that all focus on the same topics and have the same achitecture.  I am trying to improve each site's meta title and description, page by page, that I inherited from another before me.  My question is, how different should each title/description be from one another for the same page type?  Do the search engines consider this heavily in their decision process of who to show on SERPs?

Am i able to simply swap out the brand name in the metas and call it done or should each meta be unique? if unique, how unique?

As you can imagine, since each page is essentially the same with the same overall content and layout targeting the same keywords, it is very difficult to rewrite metas four unique ways.

I greatly appreciate any advice on how you would approach this project.

[paints-n-design]

The title should be pretty unique and is a huge ranking factor. It should fit to the content and (imo) to the h1 tag.

The content of the description isn't used for ranking, but makes the differnce between click or no click.
What I also saw: it is better to have no Meta Description (if the content is good enaugh) as often the same Description.
I saw many many pages ranking bad, wich fast get a bit better when I made the descriptions unique. So it may be a ranking faktor how unique the page is. Wich means everything - content, pics, titles, descriptions ... I am running a lot of tests wich take a look on that

[Linda-Vassily]

If you have four different sites with basically the same content, meta descriptions are not your main problem. Google does not use what is in that field for ranking purposes; the purpose of writing good, unique descriptions is to entice people to click on them. Your big problem is that four extremely similar sites means Google will see them as duplicate content and one at most will end up ranking.