Every page on your site has a title and a description that most people never see and every search result depends on. They are two lines of text. They are also the only part of your website that competes directly with nine other businesses on the same screen.
Most small business sites get them wrong in the same three ways.
What each one does
The title tells search engines what the page is about and appears as the clickable headline in results. It carries real weight in ranking and it is the biggest single influence on whether someone clicks.
The description does not affect ranking. It affects clicks, which is nearly as good. Google rewrites it maybe half the time, usually when your description does not match what the searcher asked. Write it anyway. A rewritten description you influenced beats one assembled from a random paragraph.
The three common mistakes
1. The same title on every page. Often the business name, repeated forty times. Every page competes for the same thing and none of them say what they are. Every page needs its own.
2. The title is the company name first. “Strataveo | Website Design in Panama City” puts the least useful words where the eye lands. Nobody searches for you by name unless they already know you, and if they know you they will find you regardless. Lead with what the page is.
3. Nothing about where. For a local business, the town is often the difference between appearing and not. It belongs in titles of service and location pages.
What to write
Titles. Around 50 to 60 characters before results start getting truncated. Structure that works for most local pages:
Primary service in Town | Business Name
So: Kitchen Remodeling in Marianna, FL | Smith Builders
For a blog post, the topic is the title. For a location page, the service and the place. For the homepage, what you do and where, not a slogan.
Descriptions. Around 150 characters. Say what the page contains and give a reason to click. The best ones answer the question implied by the search, or promise a specific answer:
What kitchen remodels cost in Jackson County, what drives the number, and what to ask before you sign. Written by builders, not a national chain.
That is not clever writing. It is specific writing, which does better.
Patterns that lose clicks
- “Home | Business Name” on your most important page.
- “Untitled” or “New Page” which is more common than you would believe.
- Keyword strings. “Plumber Plumbing Emergency Plumber Panama City Plumbing Services” reads as spam to a human and gets rewritten by Google anyway.
- Descriptions that are the first paragraph of the page. They usually start mid thought and say nothing.
- The same description on every page, which tells a searcher nothing about which result to pick.
- Titles written for a search engine. Read it out loud. If you would not say it, do not write it.
Where it shows up besides search
Your title is also the browser tab, the text of a bookmark, and often what appears when someone shares the link in a message. A page titled “Home” is unfindable in a stack of twenty tabs and unhelpful when someone sends it to a colleague.
That alone is worth the twenty minutes.
Book case, sentence case, and consistency
Pick one and apply it everywhere. Mixed casing across a site looks careless in a results page where your pages appear together.
Whatever you pick, the separator should be consistent too. A pipe, a dash, whichever. Just not three different ones across a site.
An hour of work, in order
- List your ten most important pages. Homepage, main services, main location pages, contact.
- For each, write a title in the pattern above. Keep it under about 60 characters.
- Write a description that says what is on the page and gives a reason to click.
- Search your business name and look at how your results actually read. Fix the ugliest one first.
- Check for duplicates. Two pages with the same title means one of them is not doing its job.
Do the ten pages that matter and stop. The other forty can wait, and some of them should probably not exist.
