What should the page titles on my website say?
Each page title should say what the page offers, where, and who you are, in about 60 characters. For a contractor that is usually the service, the town and the business name, like "Gravel Driveway Installation in Helena, MT | Smith Excavating". Every page needs its own title.
What a page title is
The page title is the blue line people click in Google's results. It also shows on the browser tab. It is different from the big headline on the page, and most site builders let you set it separately.
It is the first thing a searcher reads about you, and on most small business sites nobody ever wrote it on purpose.
The formula
Service, then town, then business name.
- Septic System Installation in Hamilton, MT | Smith Excavating
- Furnace Repair in Pueblo, CO | Ridgeline Heating
- Roof Leak Repair in Fort Wayne, IN | Summit Roofing
Those businesses are made up. The pattern is what matters.
The searcher typed a service and a place. A title that repeats both back tells them they found the right page.
Three mistakes we fixed this month
One page had a title 107 characters long. Google showed about the first half and cut the rest, so the business name never appeared. We trimmed it to 53.
Another site's main services page was titled "Our Services" plus the company name. Nobody searches for "our services". It now leads with the kind of work and the area.
A third firm kept showing up in searches that named its city, more than 200 times in three months, and its home page title never mentioned the city. Those searchers saw a result that did not look local and clicked someone else.
Rules that keep you out of trouble
- Give every page its own title. Ten pages with the same title look like one page to Google.
- Keep it to about 60 characters. Count them.
- Use the words your customers use. They search "driveway repair" long before "aggregate resurfacing".
- Name one town per title. A list of nine towns reads like spam and gets cut off anyway.
- Skip the slogans. "Quality you can trust" could be anybody.
How to change it
Every site builder has a field for it in the page's settings, usually called SEO title or page title. Change it, save and publish.
Then give it time. Google has to visit the page again before the new title shows up, which can take a few days to a few weeks. You can speed that up by requesting indexing in Google Search Console.
Write the description while you are there
Right below the title field is one for the description. That is the gray text under the blue line in Google. Write one or two plain sentences that say what you do, where, and how to reach you, and keep it near 150 characters so it does not get cut off.