Write a title for each important page instead of leaving it to the theme: what the page offers, where, and the business name last, within roughly sixty characters, so the search result headline says something.

A search result that says Home

Search for a local business and look at the headline of its result. Often it says Home, followed by the company name.

Click through to another page and the browser tab says About Us, or Services, or the same company name it said on the first page.

On some sites the home page title still carries the tagline WordPress suggests at installation: Just another WordPress site.

Nobody wrote these. The theme assembled them from the page names in the menu and the site settings, and nobody went back to change them.

Where the title appears

The first matters most. The title is usually the largest piece of text a searcher reads about your page before deciding whether to click, and Home tells them nothing at all.

How themes write titles

WordPress builds each page's title from the page's name and the site title. A page called Services becomes Services, then a separator, then the company name.

The home page gets the site title and the tagline, which is how an unchanged tagline ends up in search results.

Some older themes go further and use the site name alone on every page. That is the worst case: every result from the site looks identical.

Other systems do much the same. And page names are written for menus, where they have to be short, not for search results, where they have to say what the page is.

What a good title says

Three things, in this order: what the page offers, where, and who you are.

For a service page, that might be furnace repair, then the city, then the company name. For the home page, the main trade, the area and the name.

Lead with the words a customer would search for, since the start of the title is what they read first and the end is what gets cut.

And give every important page its own title. Five pages with the same title look like the same page, to searchers and to search engines.

Length

Search results show roughly the first fifty to sixty characters of a title, measured by width rather than by count, so a title full of wide letters fits fewer.

Anything longer is cut off. That is acceptable when the cut falls on the company name at the end, and a problem when it falls in the middle of the service.

Short is not the goal, though. A title of one word wastes the space as surely as one of twenty.

Every important page, not every page

To see what you have, type site: and then your domain into Google. Each result's headline is one of your titles, usually as the theme wrote it.

Start with the pages people arrive at from search: the home page, each service, each location, and the contact and about pages.

Blog posts can usually keep their headline as their title, provided it says what the post is about. Privacy policies and thank-you pages can keep whatever the theme gave them.

For most small business sites that is a few dozen titles at most, and an afternoon's careful work.

A worked example

A septic service company with three trucks in a rural valley had a page for each service: pumping, inspections, repairs, new systems and maintenance plans.

The theme titled them Pumping, Inspections and so on, each followed by the company name. The home page title was the company name and the default tagline, untouched since the site was built.

Search Console showed the service pages appearing for searches such as septic pumping with the names of nearby towns, and rarely being clicked. In the results they read like a list of headings, not offers of a service.

Each page was given its own title: the service in full, such as septic tank pumping, then the valley's name, then the company name. The tagline was replaced with a line about the area served.

Nothing else on the pages changed. The content had been sound all along; only the line searchers read first had been left to the theme.

Setting titles on your site

On a WordPress site, an SEO plugin adds a title field to each page, and a pattern for the pages you leave alone. Check that the theme is not overriding it.

Shopify and most other platforms have a search listing section on each page and product, where the title can be written separately from the page's heading.

Change the title without touching the page's address. A new title leaves links, bookmarks and the page's place in search where they were.

Search engines pick up new titles as they revisit each page. In Search Console, inspecting a page's address lets you ask Google to look at it again sooner.

When Google writes its own

Google does not always show the title as written. It sometimes substitutes its own headline, usually when the title is missing, vague, stuffed with keywords or repeated across many pages.

A clear, accurate, distinct title is the one most likely to appear as you wrote it. Which is another reason to write one.

The counter-case

Titles are not a cure-all.

A business found mostly by name, with a short site, gains less from rewriting them than one competing for searches by trade and town.

A title cannot rescue a thin page, or make a page relevant to a search it does not answer. Stuffing it with every keyword is the opposite mistake, and Google tends to rewrite those too.

For any page you want found, though, write its title yourself rather than leaving it to the theme.

This week

  1. Search Google for site: and your domain.
  2. List the title shown for each page.
  3. Replace the default tagline in your settings.
  4. Write a title for each important page.
  5. Put the service and place first.
  6. Keep each within about sixty characters.
  7. Check the results again in a few weeks.

Step four is the one the theme cannot do for you. It knows what each page is called in the menu, not what a customer would search for to find it.

Giving each page one job before giving it a title is covered in two results per site and the rest of the page.

Frequently asked questions

What is a title tag?

The line of code that names a page. Search engines usually show it as the headline of the result, and browsers show it in the tab and in bookmarks.

Why do my titles say Home or About Us?

Because the theme builds them from the page names in your menu and the site title. Menu names are written to be short, not to describe the page.

What should a page title include?

What the page offers, where, for a local business, and the business name, usually last. Each important page needs its own, written for a person scanning results.

How long should a title be?

Short enough to show in full, roughly fifty to sixty characters, since results cut longer titles by width. Put the important words first and the name last.

Does Google always use my title?

Not always. It sometimes shows its own headline when a title is missing, vague, stuffed or repeated across pages. A clear, accurate title is the likeliest to appear as written.

Which pages need a written title?

The home page, each service and location page, and the contact and about pages. Blog posts can usually keep their headline as the title.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Search results that just say Home?

Send us your web address. We will list every title the theme wrote and draft better ones for your key pages.

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