When someone searches for what you do, the first thing they see of your website is a blue headline and a couple of lines of grey text. The headline comes from your title tag and the text underneath, sometimes, from your meta description. Neither is glamorous, but they decide whether a person clicks on you or on the business above or below you.
Plenty of small business sites get this badly wrong. The homepage is titled “Home”, half the service pages share the same wording, and the descriptions are blank. It’s one of the cheaper SEO jobs to put right, and you don’t need a developer for most of it.
What title tags and meta descriptions do
The title tag is the page’s name as far as search engines are concerned. It usually appears as the clickable headline in the results. The meta description is a short summary of the page that sits in the page’s code.
They do slightly different jobs. The title tag helps Google understand what the page is about and is the main thing a searcher reads. The meta description is only ever a candidate for the snippet. Google’s own documentation says it mainly builds snippets from the page content, and may use your description when it gives people a more accurate picture of the page (Google’s guide to snippets). So you write it for humans, but you shouldn’t expect it to show every time.
Writing a title tag that gets clicked
Google’s advice on titles is refreshingly plain: make them descriptive and concise, give each page its own, and avoid long, stuffed titles (Google’s guide to title links). There is no magic character count, because results are cut off to fit the width of the device. As a rule of thumb, aim for around 60 characters so the important words come first and nothing vital gets chopped.
A decent pattern is the service, the place and your business name:
Boiler Repairs in Cheltenham | Smith Heating
That tells the searcher what you do and where, and it contains the words they probably typed. Compare it with “Home | Smith Heating Ltd”, which tells nobody anything.
Some practical points:
- Put the main phrase near the front. What a customer would actually type, such as “emergency plumber Gloucester” or “wedding photographer Bristol”, belongs at the start rather than after your company name.
- Make every title different. If your Cheltenham and Gloucester pages differ by only one word, Google struggles to tell them apart, and it may rewrite them. Its documentation lists near-identical “micro-boilerplate” titles as one reason it swaps in its own wording.
- Write it so it makes sense to a person. “Plumber Cheltenham, plumbers Cheltenham, Cheltenham plumbing” reads like spam and looks like spam.
- Say something true that sets you apart, if there’s room. Twenty-four hour call-outs, free quotes or family-run since 1998 can all earn a click, provided they’re accurate.
Writing a meta description people read
Treat the description as a very short advert for the page. You’re answering one question: why should I click this result rather than the others?
Google doesn’t set a hard limit on length, but descriptions get truncated, so a sentence or two of roughly 150 to 160 characters keeps the point visible. Say what the page offers, who it’s for and what to do next.
For a roofer in Stroud, something like this would work: “Roof repairs, flat roofs and chimney work across Stroud and the Cotswolds. Free written quotes and a clear price before we start. Call for a survey.”
It’s specific, it names the area, and it ends with a nudge. Compare that with “Welcome to our website, where we offer a wide range of high quality services”, which could describe any firm in the country and gives nobody a reason to click.
Don’t stuff it with keyword lists. Google specifically advises against that, and says long strings of keywords are less likely to be shown as a snippet.
Does any of this help you rank?
Partly. A clear title that matches what people search for is a genuine relevance signal, and it’s worth getting right. A meta description is a different matter: Google’s documentation talks about it in terms of snippets, not rankings, so don’t expect a rewrite to push you up the page.
What both do influence is click-through. If two businesses sit side by side in the results and one has a sharp, specific headline and summary, that one gets more visitors for the same position. Over a year that is a meaningful number of extra enquiries, and you haven’t paid for a single extra click.
When Google rewrites your title
You may search for your own business one day and find the headline isn’t what you wrote. Google can and does rewrite titles when they look half-empty, out of date, inaccurate or stuffed, or when several pages share almost the same one. It will often borrow from your main page heading instead.
You can’t force it to stop, but you can make a rewrite less likely. Keep the title in line with the main heading on the page, keep it concise, and don’t let the same wording repeat across the site. Changes can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to appear after Google recrawls the page.
How to find and fix yours
Search Google for site:yourwebsite.co.uk and look at how your pages appear. You’ll quickly spot the ones with a bare “Home”, a title cut off mid-word, or a snippet that reads like random scraps of the page.
Then work in order of importance. Start with the homepage, then your main service pages and any location pages, rather than every blog post. Google Search Console shows which pages get impressions but few clicks, and those are the first ones to rewrite. On WordPress, plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math give you boxes for both fields. Most other website builders have an SEO section in the page settings.
Titles matter most on the pages meant to bring in work, so it’s worth pairing this with a look at your service pages. If you’re redoing a lot of them at once, take care not to throw away wording that already ranks, as covered in our post on redesigning your website without losing Google rankings.
Where to go from here
None of this takes long. An afternoon with a list of your ten most important pages, a spreadsheet and a cup of tea will usually do it. If you’d rather have someone who does this every week look over your site, our SEO consultancy and technical SEO work covers titles, descriptions and the rest of the on-page basics, and you’re welcome to get in touch for an honest view of where your site stands.
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