How do I write a good title tag?
Short answer
Say what the page offers in the words a customer would search. Put the main service first, the place second and your business name last. Keep it short enough to be shown whole, roughly 50 to 60 characters, and make every title on the site different. Google may still display its own version.
To write a good title tag, say what the page offers in the words a customer would search, put the main service first, name the place if the page is about a place, and make it different from every other title on your site. The title tag is the line of HTML that names a page. It appears in the browser tab and is usually the clickable headline in Google’s results. It’s one of the plainer signals a page gives Google about its subject, and it’s the first thing a searcher reads about you.
A pattern that works for service pages
Main service, then place, then business name. These examples are hypothetical.
| Page | Weak title | Better title |
|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Home | Plumber in Escondido, CA | Business Name |
| Service page | Our Services | Water Heater Repair in Escondido | Business Name |
| City page | Vista | AC Repair in Vista, CA | Business Name |
| Answer page | Blog Post 14 | How Often Should a Furnace Be Serviced? |
The words at the front are read first by someone scanning a results page, and they are the least likely to be cut off. Your business name goes last because people searching for a service don’t know it yet, and people searching for your name will find you anyway.
How long it should be
Short enough to be shown whole, which is roughly 50 to 60 characters. That’s guidance, not a rule. Google cuts titles by the width they take up on screen and not by counting characters, so a title full of wide letters is cut sooner than one full of narrow ones, and the space differs between phones and computers. A longer title isn’t a fault in itself. It’s shortened in the display, so put anything the searcher must see near the front.
Google may show a different title
Google builds what it calls the title link from several sources, including your title tag, the main heading on the page and the text other pages use when they link to it. The headline it displays isn’t always the title you wrote.
In practice, the titles most often replaced are very long ones, ones stuffed with keywords, ones repeated across many pages, and ones that don’t describe the page. You can’t force your version to be used. An accurate, concise title that agrees with the main heading is the best way to have it left alone. To see what Google is showing, search site: followed by your domain and read the headlines.
Mistakes to avoid
Start with the same title on many pages. If ten pages are all titled with your business name, Google has little to tell them apart. Pages competing for one search is its own problem, called keyword cannibalization.
A keyword list such as “Plumber, Plumbing, Plumbers, Drain Cleaning San Diego” reads as spam to a person, and it’s the kind of title Google tends to rewrite. A string of cities fails as well. One page can’t be about eight places, so name the one the page is about.
Leave out claims the page doesn’t support: “Cheapest” or “#1” in a title sets up a visit that ends quickly. And check that nobody left the default in place, because website builders often fill in “Home” or the menu name of the page.
Where the title fits with the rest of the page
The title is one part of a set. The main heading on the page (the H1) should say the same thing in similar words, and the content has to deliver what the title promised. A title can only target a search you have chosen on purpose, which is the job of keyword research.
The line of text under the title in the results is a separate tag with a different job, and whether meta descriptions affect rankings is a separate question too.
I treat titles as testable. I change the title on one page and leave the rest alone, then measure the position and the click rate again about two weeks later as part of on-page SEO.