“Home | Business Name”. “Services | Business Name”. “Contact Us | Business Name”. These are the titles WordPress themes generate by default, and on a lot of the sites we audit nobody has changed them. They’re the clickable headline people see in Google, and they say nothing about what you do or where you do it.
Fixing them is one of the cheapest SEO jobs there is. It takes an hour or two for a typical site, and it affects both whether you rank and whether people click.
What each one does
The title tag is the headline in search results and the text on the browser tab. It’s one of the clearest signals you give Google about what a page covers.
The meta description is the summary that often appears under the headline. It isn’t a ranking factor on its own, but it’s your sales pitch in the results, and a good one earns clicks a vague one doesn’t.
Length, and what the numbers really mean
Google says there’s no limit on how long a title element can be. It simply truncates long ones to fit the screen, and the same is true of meta descriptions. The cut-off is based on pixel width, not a character count, so a title full of capital Ws gets clipped sooner than one full of lower case letters.
As a working rule, we aim for titles of about 50 to 60 characters with the important words first, and descriptions of about 140 to 160 characters. Shorter is fine. Longer isn’t penalised, but anything past the cut-off won’t be seen, so never put the phone number at the end of a 200-character description.
Formulas that work
For a service page: Service + place | Business name
For the homepage: Business name | What you do + where
For an article: The question or topic, phrased the way a person would say it, with the business name on the end if there’s room.
This is how that plays out on the sort of pages we rewrite every week. The businesses are made up.
- Homepage. Before: “Home | Smith Plumbing”. After: “Smith Plumbing | Plumber in Ballina & Lennox Head”
- Service page. Before: “Hot Water | Smith Plumbing”. After: “Hot Water System Repairs & Replacement Ballina | Smith Plumbing”
- Allied health service. Before: “Treatments”. After: “Physio for Back Pain in Lismore | Riverside Physio”
- About page. Before: “About Us”. After: “About Smith Plumbing | Local Ballina Plumbers Since 2009”
- Article. Before: “Blog Post 14”. After: “How Long Does a Switchboard Upgrade Take? | Smith Electrical”
The longer service title will be clipped on some phones. That’s acceptable because the part that shows (“Hot Water System Repairs & Replacement Ballina”) is the part that matters.
Why Google rewrites your title
Google builds its title links automatically, and it doesn’t always use your title tag. It can draw on your H1, other prominent headings, and even the anchor text of links pointing at the page. Its documentation lists the usual triggers, and they line up neatly with mistakes we see:
- Half-empty titles, such as one that’s only “| Business Name”.
- Out-of-date titles, like “Summer specials 2023” on a page you updated last month.
- Titles that don’t match what the page is about.
- Boilerplate, where many pages share almost the same title.
- No clear main heading on the page, or several equally large ones.
The fix is usually to make your title tag and your H1 agree. If the title says “Hot water system repairs Ballina” and the H1 says “Welcome”, Google may go looking for something else. After a change, allow a few days to a few weeks for it to show, because Google has to recrawl the page first.
Descriptions get rewritten far more often, because Google tailors the snippet to each search. You can’t stop that, but an accurate, specific description gets used more often than one stuffed with keywords.
Writing descriptions people click
A good description tells the searcher what’s on the page, who it’s for and why this result beats the one below it. Some examples:
Service: “Blocked drains cleared across Ballina, Lennox Head and Alstonville. We camera-inspect every drain so you can see the problem, and offer same-day call-outs when we can.”
Health practice: “Physiotherapy in Lismore for back pain, sports injuries and post-surgery rehab. Book online, no referral needed, HICAPS available.” Only list what’s true. If you’re a registered health practitioner, your descriptions count as advertising, so check them against the AHPRA advertising rules for websites.
Article: “What a switchboard upgrade involves, how long it takes and what changes the price, explained by a Northern Rivers electrician.”
Leave out “Welcome to our website”, strings of keywords, the same description on every page, and claims you can’t back up, like “the best in the region”.
Setting them in Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the plugin we reach for most often on our WordPress and Elementor builds. There are two places to work.
Site-wide defaults. In the WordPress dashboard, go to Yoast SEO > Settings > Content types. Each content type (Pages, Posts and so on) has an SEO title and meta description template built from Yoast’s snippet variables, such as %%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%. That’s a sensible default for pages, and it catches anything you forget. Treat it as a safety net, not the finished job.
Page by page. Open the page in the WordPress editor, or in Elementor, where Yoast adds its own panel. In the Yoast box, write the SEO title and meta description under the Google preview, and watch the preview and length bars as you type. Then update the page. Do this for the homepage, every service and location page, the contact page and your best articles.
A few weeks later, check the results in Search Console. Compare clicks and click-through rate for those pages over the weeks before and after the change. Our Search Console guide shows how to compare date ranges.
An hour that pays for itself
List the ten pages that matter most. Write a new title and description for each in a plain document first, read them side by side to make sure none repeat, then paste them into Yoast. If you haven’t settled which phrases each page should target, do that first with our guide to keyword research without paid tools.
Start with your homepage and your three busiest service pages, since those titles show up most in search. Rather not write forty of them yourself? Our SEO team can rewrite the lot as part of a tidy-up; just send us your web address.