Title tags and meta descriptions that earn the click
Why Google rewrites titles, a simple pattern for writing better ones, how to handle meta descriptions and templates, and how to test changes in Search Console.
Your title and description are often the first thing a searcher reads about you, before they’ve seen a single page of your site. Google rewrites titles and builds its own snippets when the ones you wrote don’t fit the page or the query. Write them so they don’t need rewriting, then test every change against click-through rate in Search Console.
Why Google rewrites titles
Google calls the clickable headline in a result a title link. It usually comes from your <title> element, but Google can also draw on the page’s main heading, other prominent text and the anchor text of links pointing at the page. When your title doesn’t describe the page well, Google picks something else. These are the reasons we see most often:
- Too long. Long titles get cut off, or replaced with shorter text from the page.
- Stuffed with keywords. Repeating the same phrase three ways reads as spam to people and to Google.
- Boilerplate. “Home”, “Services” or one phrase reused across a whole section says nothing about the page.
- Out of step with the page. An old year, a discontinued offer, or a promise the page doesn’t keep.
- Duplicated across pages. If ten location pages share one title, Google has to find other text to tell them apart.
Here is a result that ticks several of those boxes at once.
Search result preview
example.co.uk › services
Accountants London | Accountants | Tax Accountants London | Accountancy Services | Example Ltd
Welcome to Example Ltd. We are a leading firm of accountants offering a wide range of services. Click here to find out more about what we do and contact us today.
A title pattern that works
Most good titles follow the same order: topic, then what’s different, then brand. The topic is what the searcher typed, in their words. The differentiator is the reason to choose you: a location, a pricing model, an audience, a format, or a date that will stay accurate. The brand goes last and stays short, except on your home page.
Put the important words first, because titles are truncated by pixel width, not by a fixed number of characters. On desktop, roughly 600 pixels fit, and wide letters such as W and M use far more of that than narrow ones like i and l. That’s why 50–60 characters is a useful guide rather than a rule.
Every indexable page needs its own title. Unique titles help searchers tell your pages apart, and they force you to decide what each page is for. If two pages seem to need the same title, they may be serving one intent, which is an early sign of keyword cannibalisation.
Weak titles vs strong titles
Weak titles
- Home | Example Ltd
- Accountants London | Accountants | Tax Accountants
- Our Services | Example Ltd
- Tax return guide 2022 | Example
Strong titles
- Example: accountants for small businesses in Leeds
- Tax accountants for sole traders in London | Example
- Bookkeeping, VAT and payroll for small firms | Example
- How to file a tax return, step by step | Example
Meta descriptions: no ranking effect, real click effect
Google has said for years that it doesn’t use the meta description for ranking. It still matters, because it’s one of the sources for the snippet under your title. Google builds most snippets from the page content itself, choosing text that matches the query, and uses your meta description when it describes the page better than the rest of the text. The same page can show different snippets for different searches.
So write the description for the page’s main query: what the page covers, who it’s for, and one concrete detail such as a fixed fee, a service area or what’s included. Keep each one unique. There’s no length limit, but Google truncates snippets to fit the screen, so 120–155 characters is a sensible working range. If Google keeps ignoring your description, look at your opening paragraph: a clear answer near the top of the page often becomes the snippet. To keep a passage out of snippets altogether, wrap it in an element with the data-nosnippet attribute.
Search result preview
example.co.uk › services › small-business-accounts
Small business accountants in Leeds: fixed fees | Example
Year-end accounts, VAT returns and payroll for small limited companies, on a fixed monthly fee agreed upfront. See what each plan includes.
Templates for large sites
On a shop with thousands of products, or a business with hundreds of location pages, writing every title by hand isn’t realistic. Google’s documentation says programmatic descriptions are appropriate for large, database-driven sites, as long as the output reads naturally and varies from page to page. Build templates from your data fields, for example {Product} in {Colour}, sizes {Range} | {Brand}, and add a few rules:
- a fallback for empty fields, so you never publish “in , sizes”;
- a length rule that drops the least important part when a title runs long;
- handwritten titles for the pages that matter most commercially;
- a regular spot check of what the templates actually produce.
Template logic usually lives in the CMS or the codebase, which is where our technical SEO team works alongside your developers.
How to test changes
Search Console is the simplest testing tool you have. In the Performance report, filter by page and note clicks, impressions, CTR and average position for a set period. Change titles on a few pages at a time, ideally a group of similar pages, and keep a dated log of what changed. Google needs to recrawl the pages first, which its documentation says can take from a few days to a few weeks. Then compare periods of the same length before and after.
Read CTR alongside position. CTR rises and falls with position, so a better CTR at a worse position isn’t a like-for-like win. Seasonality can mislead you too, so compare against a similar group of pages you left unchanged. If the new titles hold up, roll the pattern out across the template. It’s the same discipline we set out in our SEO priorities for 2025: measure honestly and change one thing at a time. If you’d like help writing titles and descriptions at scale, it’s part of our content strategy work.
Before you publish a title and description
- A unique title on every indexable page
- The main topic in the first few words
- One clear differentiator: location, price, audience or format
- A short brand name at the end
- A title that matches the H1 and what the page covers
- No dates or offers that will go stale unnoticed
- A description that summarises the page with one concrete detail
- Every change logged with a date, so you can compare CTR
Want a second opinion on how your pages look in search? Request a free SEO audit and we’ll point out the titles Google is most likely to rewrite.