Title tags and meta descriptions: writing to earn the click

Two tags, two readers

On a Google results page, every website is represented by two lines: a clickable blue headline (the title tag) and a gray text underneath (the meta description). These two tags do not have the same reader or the same job. The title tag is read by the algorithm: it is a real ranking signal. The meta description is read by humans: it does not rank, but it decides whether people click on you or on your neighbor. Neglecting them means paying for SEO without cashing in the clicks.

The title tag: 30 to 60 useful characters

Beyond roughly 60 characters, Google truncates. Below 30, you are wasting the most valuable real estate in your SEO. The structure that works for a small business:

What you do + specialty or location | Your brand

Three rules: the main keyword at the beginning (the weight decreases toward the right), a title tag unique to each page (two pages with the same title cannibalize each other), and the brand at the end, separated by a vertical bar. Careful: Google reserves the right to rewrite a title it considers poor. A rewritten title in the results is a symptom, not a fatality: yours was too long, too vague or disconnected from the page's content.

The meta description: your free ad

120 to 160 characters to make people want to click. The formula that converts: what you do, who it is for, and the proof. A concrete number ("since 1987", "within 48 hours", "200 projects a year") beats any adjective. End with a reason to act when it feels natural ("Free quote", "Reply within 24 hours"). A page without a meta description is not penalized in rankings, but Google then picks a random snippet from the page, rarely the most persuasive one.

Before/after examples

A craftsman's title tag, before:

Home - Menuiserie Durand

After:

Custom carpenter and joiner in Annecy | Menuiserie Durand

Meta description, before:

Welcome to our website. We offer quality services
and a team that listens to your needs.

After:

Custom windows, staircases and fittings in Annecy since
1994. Clean workshop, installed by our own teams. Quote within 48 hours.

The "after" version is not poetry: it states the trade, the location, the proof and the next step. That is all we ask of it.

Why does Google rewrite your titles?

Since 2021, Google generates the displayed title itself whenever it decides yours serves the query badly. It then draws on your H1, on the page text, or on the anchor text of links pointing to the page. Seeing "its" title instead of yours is frustrating, but it is mostly free information: Google is telling you your tag failed.

The most common triggers:

• The title is too long and gets cut. Google often prefers rebuilding a short version over showing a truncated sentence.
• The brand appears twice, or a fixed fragment repeats on every page without adding anything ("Home - ", "Official site of - ").
• The title is a keyword list with no readable sentence in it.
• The title does not say what the page says. If your H1 is more precise than your title, Google will take the H1, and it will be right.

The move is not to fight but to read the signal: compare your tag against what actually shows in the results, then rewrite yours closer to what Google picked. Once the title matches the content and sits under 60 characters, the rewriting stops in the vast majority of cases.

How do you handle 200 pages in less than a month?

Nobody rewrites two hundred tags by hand, and nobody needs to: the value is heavily concentrated. Three passes are enough.

1. Pages that already get impressions and few clicks. Open the Search Console performance report, sort by impressions, look at click-through rate. A page seen ten thousand times and clicked two hundred times will pay back more in an hour of rewriting than ten new pages. That is your top twenty rows, no more.
2. The duplicates. Export every tag, sort alphabetically, and identical titles jump out. They almost always come from a CMS template, so they get fixed at the template, not page by page.
3. Everything else, by template. For a catalogue or a directory, a well-designed formula beats sloppy manual writing: {product} {distinguishing attribute} | {brand}. Just check the formula never exceeds 60 characters on the longest values in your database.

The discipline that makes this stick: add title and description length to your pre-publication check. Thirty seconds per page at creation, against a catch-up campaign every two years.

What about social networks and AI?

Titles and descriptions do not only serve Google. LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Slack build their link previews from the og:title and og:description tags when they exist, and fall back to the title and meta description otherwise. So you can write a punchier version for sharing without touching the one aimed at search.

On the answer-engine side, the meta description plays a quiet but real role: it is often the first summary an AI reads of your page, before analysing the body at all. An accurate, specific description without marketing emphasis stands a better chance of being picked up in a generated answer than an empty hook. The same work serves both audiences.

Common mistakes

• The same title tag everywhere, often "Home | Brand" generated by the CMS. Every page has its own topic, so its own title.
• The keyword list ("Plumber Nice, plumbing Nice, emergency plumbing"): a low-quality signal, almost guaranteed to be rewritten by Google.
• Promising what the page does not deliver. A click earned with a broken promise leaves right away, and that behavior shows.
• Forgetting the internal pages. The homepage gets all the care, the service pages are abandoned. Yet those are the pages that rank for specific queries, the ones closest to a purchase.

Our free audit checks the length and presence of title tags and meta descriptions on the homepage and the internal pages analyzed, and flags the pages where space is being wasted.