Writing title tags that earn clicks
The title tag is the single most important piece of on-page metadata. It's the clickable headline in search results, the label on a browser tab, and the default text when somebody bookmarks or shares the page.
What it is
The title tag sits in the head of the document and isn't visible on the page itself. It's distinct from the H1 heading, though the two often say similar things.
Search engines treat it as a strong statement of what the page is about, and frequently, though not always, use it verbatim as the result headline.
Why length matters
Google truncates result headlines at roughly 600 pixels, which works out at about 60 characters for most text. Beyond that the title is cut with an ellipsis and your closing words are lost.
Titles under about 30 characters are usually a wasted opportunity: there is room to say more about what the page offers, and a bare business name rarely matches what somebody typed into a search box.
ppclift flags any title outside 30 to 60 characters, and treats a missing title as a far more serious fault than a badly sized one.
When search engines rewrite your title
Google doesn't always show the title you wrote. When a title is missing, very long, stuffed with keywords or identical across many pages, it often builds its own headline from the page's main heading, from link text pointing at the page, or from other prominent text. The result is rarely as good as a title written on purpose.
The best defence is a title that already does the job: specific to the page, an accurate summary of what is on it, and short enough to show in full. Rewrites are far less common for pages whose title and main heading agree with each other, which is one more reason to write the two together rather than letting a theme fill in either one.
A pattern for each kind of page
Most local business sites have a handful of page types, and each suits a simple pattern. The home page names the main service and the area: 'Plumber in Ballarat and District | Watson Plumbing'. A service page leads with the service: 'Hot Water System Repairs and Replacement | Watson Plumbing'. A location page leads with the place: 'Plumber in Sebastopol, Same-Day Callouts | Watson Plumbing'.
Contact and about pages matter less for search but still deserve their own titles, because they appear in results for the business name. 'Contact Watson Plumbing, Ballarat' is better than a theme default. Whatever the pattern, keep the business name at the end and the words a customer would type at the start, where they are least likely to be cut off.
Checking titles across a whole site
Looking at one page at a time misses the most common title problem, which is duplication. A site crawler, such as the free version of a desktop SEO spider or the audit inside many SEO plugins, lists every page with its title in one table. Sorting that table by title shows duplicates immediately, and sorting by length shows which titles will be cut off in results.
Google Search Console adds the other half of the picture. Its performance report shows, for each page, how often it appeared in results and how often it was clicked. A page with plenty of impressions but a click-through rate well below its neighbours is often one whose title doesn't match what people were searching for, and it is the best place to start rewriting.
When you change a title, change only the title, and note the date. Rankings and clicks move for many reasons, so compare a few weeks before and after rather than reading anything into the first few days. Small improvements in click-through on a site's most visited pages often add up to more extra visits than a new page would bring.
Titles are also worth checking after any redesign or platform change, because templates are where titles go wrong in bulk. A new theme can quietly replace every hand-written title with the page name followed by the site name, or drop the location from every service page at once. A quick crawl the week after launch catches it before rankings do.
How to fix it
- Give every page its own title. Duplicate titles across a site make it impossible for a search engine to tell the pages apart.
- Lead with the specific thing the page is about, and put the business name at the end.
- Include the location if you serve a local area. 'Emergency Plumber Ballarat' beats 'Home' by a wide margin.
- Write for a person deciding whether to click, not for a keyword counter.
What good looks like
<!-- Weak -->
<title>Home</title>
<!-- Better: specific, local, and within length -->
<title>Emergency Plumber in Ballarat | Watson Plumbing</title>Common mistakes
- Using the same title on every page, most often just the business name.
- Stuffing in keywords until the title reads like a list rather than a sentence.
- Leaving a content management system default such as 'Home' or 'Untitled' in place.
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