Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: Rules That Still Hold
Every year someone declares title tags dead because Google sometimes rewrites them. Google rewrites them when yours is unhelpful. Writing a good one is still the highest-leverage minute you can spend on a page.
Titles
- Front-load the thing people search for. "Emergency HVAC Repair in Wilmington, NC" not "Wilmington's Premier Choice for All Your Heating Needs."
- Keep it around 55 to 60 characters so it does not truncate on mobile results.
- One brand mention at the end, separated by a pipe or a dash, and only if the brand adds trust.
- Make every title on the site unique. Duplicate titles across service or location pages are a signal that the pages are duplicates too.
- Match the page, not the wish. A title promising something the page does not deliver produces clicks and immediate exits, which helps nobody.
Meta descriptions
These are not a ranking factor and they are an advertising slot. Around 150 characters, written as a sentence that gives the searcher a reason to pick your result over the four around it: what you do, where, and a distinguishing detail like same-day service, free estimates, or a specific specialty. Include the query terms so they bold in the results.
The pages worth doing first
Do not start with the homepage. Start with the pages that already receive impressions but a below-average click-through rate in Search Console. Those pages are ranking well enough to be seen and losing the click, which means the title and description are the entire problem and the fix takes a minute.
What to skip
Meta keywords have been ignored for over a decade. Stuffing city names into a title makes it read like spam and gets it rewritten. And do not let an SEO plugin auto-generate titles for your important pages; templated titles are for the long tail, not for the ten pages that make you money.
Check your work in the wild
Search for your own page and read the result as a stranger would, next to the competitors. That is the actual test, and it takes ten seconds per page.
