Title tags and meta descriptions: writing the ones that get the click

For every search, Google shows a blue link and two lines of grey text. That is your entire advert. Everything the page contains, everything the design does, waits behind those few words, and most sites leave them to whatever the platform generated. “Home”, “Services”, “Untitled”. Then they wonder why a page shown thousands of times gets clicked by almost nobody.

What each one does

The title tag is the blue link. It is the strongest on-page signal of what the page is about, and the first thing a person reads. It should say, specifically, what this page offers, in the words the searcher used.

The meta description is the grey text. It does not affect ranking directly. It affects whether people click, which does. It is a sentence or two that says what they will get and why from you.

Google rewrites both when it thinks it can do better, more often for descriptions. Writing good ones makes that less likely.

Lengths that survive

Titles get cut at around sixty characters, really at a pixel width, so wide letters cost more. Front-load the specific part. Descriptions get cut at around a hundred and fifty five on mobile. Write to those, not to the maximum.

A way of writing them, two minutes per page

For the title: what the page is, for whom or where, then the brand if there is room.

• Not: “Services”
• But: “Emergency boiler repair in Leeds, same-day callout, Norval Heating”

For the description: what they get, one reason to choose you, and what happens next.

• Not: “We are a leading provider of high-quality heating solutions.”
• But: “Engineer at your door within four hours, fixed price quoted before work starts. Call or book online, seven days.”

Every page gets its own. Duplicate titles across pages tell Google the pages are interchangeable, and Search Console will list them as a problem.

Where the biggest wins are

Search Console’s Performance report, filtered to pages with many impressions and a low click rate. Those pages are being shown and ignored. Rewrite their title and description, wait a few weeks, and watch the click rate. This is the highest-return hour in SEO because the page already ranks; you are just changing the advert.

Mistakes that lose the click

• The brand first. “Norval Heating: Services”. The specific part gets cut off, and people scan for the specific part.
• Keyword lists. “Boiler repair, boiler service, boiler installation, boilers Leeds”. Google may rewrite it, and people do not click lists.
• Vague promises. “Solutions”, “leading”, “high-quality”, “your trusted partner”. Words that could be on any site are read as being on no site.
• A description that repeats the title. Wasted space. The description should add the reason and the next step.
• Clickbait that the page does not deliver. People come back to the results within seconds, and Google notices that too.

Where to set them

Every platform has a place. On WordPress it is usually the SEO plugin’s box under the editor, or the excerpt on a post. On a custom site it is a field in the content system. If your site has no place to set them, that is a build problem worth fixing, because leaving them to defaults costs clicks on every page, every day.

Our scanner reads the title and description from any page and reports their length, and whether they exist at all. It is worth running on your three most important pages before you do anything else in SEO.